We need to recognise the prejudice of ‘Nation-Statism’ and grasp its implications. This is the first step towards a renewed internationalism – which is not just between, but beyond nation-states – that is not only necessary, but urgent.
The state of the world today is inextricably linked with the States in this world. We live in times of extreme wealth and poverty, gross privilege and inequality, enduring forms of discrimination, political and financial manipulation, and many are subjected to poverty, hunger, injustice and continued violence simply because it is profitable for a few. This status-quo is never justified (even at the level of rhetoric, even by the most regressive voices) within nation-states, yet it is de rigueur and accepted at a global level. Why? Why should all humanity and conscience weaken at the national border-control?
Why should people learn to have concentric circles of affiliation and empathy that start from the self outwards (self, family, community, region, nation, and beyond) and become weaker as they widen? As I have argued in Imagining Economics Otherwise: encounters with identity/difference (2008: 186-216), this concentric notion of identity is neither natural not inevitable, though much ink and ideology goes into making it seem so. Global instances of solidarity, struggle and resistance can show us that it is possible to conceive of identity as translational, so that we situate our understanding of self contingently and in relation to equally worthy others who need not be related to us by genetics or geography.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has these opening words in the Preamble: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. Why should every child not begin education with this document?
Most of us understand very early on how we are supposed to belong to, and behave on, this planet, throughout our lives; many of the markers that structure our life and work in time and space – such as continents, free markets, democracy – are laden with power and open to interrogation.
Critiques of meta-geography tell us how geography serves political technology: the concept of ‘territory’ as “exclusive ownership of the earth’s surface” has a specific and complex historical lineage (Stuart Elden, 2013), the conventional myth of ‘continents’ is Eurocentric as it arbitrarily gives Europe the status of a continent when it is neither geographically separate from Asia nor is Asia internally culturally coherent by comparison (Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, 1997). Add to which, the legal spaces and practices, demarcated thus, have a ‘compounded opacity’ because they are seen as objective, timeless, and prepolitical when they really are deeply embedded with political, social and economic life (Nicholas Blomley 1994: xiii). Mapping is political. Borders demarcate, and simultaneously construct, regimes of power.
Moreover, classifying land and people into nations and continents was a historical process fraught with prejudice and power. The violent upheavals of imperialism, colonialism, and decolonisation shaped much of the geography of the modern world. People were conquered/civilised/colonised in the name of economic rationality and assumed moral superiority, they were forcibly moved around the globe to enhance profit and production, and populations were studied and structured into labels that then became self-identificational for the colonised.
The myth of the nation-state as a ‘natural’ entity continuously handed down from history and geography is problematic and detrimental. Viewing the world as a billiard ball model of comparable unitary nation-states (as results from the application of atomistic natural science models to space and society) each responsible for their own populations alone, distorts the global spatial and social relations. Nations and states do not meaningfully overlap in many cases – there are more nations than states, some examples of nation-states are empires, others are supra-national, and their polities overlap (Sylvia Walby 2003). The now-dominant Westphalian model of the nation-states is merely one specific historical way of structuring the world. And it relies upon an unholy nexus of Geography-Economics-Law that has forced truly urgent political questions into the margins. Right from the way in which these powerful disciplines construct their knowledge categories to the way in which they operate as holistic systematising schemas – they subject the individual to the dominating forces of land, capital, rule.
When people are assigned into units called the nation-states as their primary identity, it is the latitude or longitude of their birth, which, more often than not, determines their life chances. And this nation-statist paradigm actively inculcates indifference, apathy or hostility against those who are different and Other. The contemporary regimes of border-control across the world restrict the movement of people across borders while facilitating the unrestricted movement of capital globally. While the entire basis of ‘free markets’ rests upon the theoretical premise of free (and equilibrating) movement of factors of production (labour and capital), it is capital that is free to move, not labour. If markets can be free and capital has no identity, then why can’t people be free to move and belong without restrictions? As a matter of fact, some are. The privileged few who are reasonably free to exercise their right to live anywhere on the globe, are the expatriates, in sharp contrast to the much-resented migrants. It may be appealing to think this in terms of the sweeping free markets that have eroded the power of the nation-states, actually, it is the nation-states that have enabled the markets to expand their reach into every sector of society.
And while every aspect of human life continues to be commodified, commercialised and monetised by the capitalist juggernaut, and economic violence is rampant, the proliferation of neither democracy nor technology will automatically create an internationalist conscience. The hyper-capitalist era of our times can coexist perfectly well with nation-statism. Indeed, both economic growth and economic crises can create stronger bonds of dependency (through ties of trade and investment) between nations qua nations, but these networks of capital and governmental or business interests can possibly even enable a greater silencing on humanitarian issues that populations face within the nation-states. Also, democracy within the nation-states is the government of the people, by the people, for the people. Yet, which people? The citizens of a nation-state. The logic of democratic arithmetic would seem to require governments to typically care about the welfare of the numerical majority within their national borders. The very structure of the system militates against global concern, concern for the domestic numerical minority, or those who are disenfranchised. Similarly, take a look at technology. There is now a global colossus of knowledge and communication ranging from the CIA Factbook to the ubiquitous Facebook. But has increased knowledge and technology brought us closer together or pushed us further apart? Thanks to many recent revelations, we know that at the level of nation-states, governments have actively pursued an agenda of surveillance against their own populations and other governments. And the general trend in ordinary people’s use of technology has been to personalise their perception of reality (through personalised maps, news feed, and social networks) and limit their ability to encounter newness.
The existing political, economic and technological systems work for, and benefit from, classifying people into nation-states in a way that systematically limits their geographical imagination and ability to empathise with distant others.
But, what makes us human is the premise of a shared common humanity. The best human virtues and values cannot be judged within national borders alone. If we care about human freedom and the fulfilment of human potential for everyone, we cannot abandon concern for our fellow beings, wherever they actually are, and wherever they are deemed to legally belong. As a French student protester (in the recent student protests against the deportation of classmates) said: “Everybody should have a chance. Everybody should have a job, work and have a family. When children try to achieve that, France refuses, and that is not my country”.
Moreover, the problems of humanity remain inescapably international – global production chains of commodities transfer value from the poor to the rich, the affluenza of the few is causally linked to immiserisation of many, waste and want are intertwined in the consumerist ideology that continually ensures that the haves waste and the have-nots want, and pollution, climate change, terrorism, piracy, corruption, tax evasion, trafficking do not adhere to national borders. In response, mere inter-national (between nations) solutions will not suffice, what we need is a renewed internationalism (beyond nations) that engenders a radical anti-imperial transnational cosmopolitan subjectivity. In other words, we belong to the world, the world belongs to us; humanity is our concern – the cosmopolis, our globe, our planet. I am because you are. ‘We’ should be the preferred pronoun of political debates. Recall the Gandhian Talisman: our actions should be judged by their impact on the poorest and weakest human being on this planet.
Contra a sterile oppositional debate, a radical cosmopolitanism, the way I see it, does not contrast with communitarianism. In fact, radical cosmopolitanism enables genuinely communitarian thinking by imagining the global communitarian identity affiliations in the context of specific political issues, and not as apriori given and defined identities which pre-exist the political struggle. A cosmopolitan subjectivity is not a privilege, it is an ethical necessity. And it needs to be consciously anti-imperial, compromising both imperialism and sovereignty. Sovereignty, which implies the supreme authority of the state over embodied lives, needs to be decoupled from states; sovereignty resides in humanity. Internationalist ethics require us to consider ways in which rights need not derive only from citizenship. Nation-states have, for too long, marked bodies, stifled empathy and creativity, enforced power, dehumanised people, and normalised prejudice, to the extent that the violence inflicted by the nation-state (for example, in the twentieth century) is unparalelled in the history of the world.
Such commitment to a renewed internationalism is reflected in proposals for a planetary parliament (Monbiot 2002). With egalitarian supra-national enfranchisement, there is likely to be much broader humanitarian concern. But, it is important to emphasise the ethical and political premise of our shared humanity as being crucial to such an internationalism. Appealing simply to the economic self-interest of certain constituencies for getting greater coordination between nations, without challenging nation-statism, is ultimately inadequate. Framing inter-nationalism simply as a self-serving co-ordinating response to the transborder challenge of global insecurity or resource scarcity is not enough. Economic arguments are notoriously slippery and ostensibly amoral. One must make the case for internationalism on more than just an economic ground. So, saying that it is the limited resources on this planet with a growing population that requires trans-national collaboration isn’t enough. It is not just about resources. The continuous technological innovation inherent in humankind/humanmind will make sure that every depletion is countered with another discovery – from fossil fuels to biofuels to fracking, from climate change to geoengineering, from earth to interplanetary colonisation. Action prompted by thinking about others only when it serves our own interests will never be truly internationalist in the long run, and it will perforce have an imperialist bias. Further, it will be hostage to changing circumstances and fluctuating economic interests.
An international solidarity is an ethical commitment to the fundamental and inalienable rights of others to be as free as oneself. Notwithstanding their global location. A worthy internationalism comes from thinking beyond the nation, even if from within nations; a consciousness of struggle and resistance against injustice, inequality, poverty, oppression and indignity that unites people as fellow human beings who may have been forced by history into divided lands, but who can, through force of conscience and conscious striving, always imagine otherwise.
PROPAGANDA OF THE REED 