I’ve been blogging on the topic for awhile now – see posts collected under the label “nation-state”. It looks like my first post on the topic went up on October 4, 2014, Where's the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie. My most recent one (except for this) went up yesterday, Reading The Human Swarm 8: What about the USA? After I’d posted that I read an article in the NYTimes, In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New. The title didn’t say anything about the nation-state, but that’s where it went. Why? Because the nation-state is about identity. And so I appended some passages from that article to my post about The Human Swarm.
Now, that’s the first time I can remember reading something in the NYTimes that pointed out, quite explicitly and distinctly, both that the nation-state is a relatively recent socio-political invention, AND that somehow moving beyond the nation-state is the political problem of the day:
The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.
I have no particular reason to believe that that is the first time the idea has been broached in that paper – though there always is a first time – which is why I emphasized “remember”. But the topic certainly hasn’t been a regular feature in the opinion section. It should be.
Now, that article goes on to say:
Mr. Trump’s order [targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses] raises anew a question that has faced Jews throughout the 200-year era of national identity: whether such identities offer them security or only peril. It is an echo of late 19th-century debates, when some urged embracing national identity and forming a state, while others argued for casting it off and integrating into multicultural democracies instead.
The wider democratic world asked itself this same question in the wake of World War II. It declared old-style national identity a curse and pluralistic democracy the only path to peace, but the argument has raged off and on ever since — as it has, in parallel, for Jews.
That last paragraph suggests that the issue of national identity has been explicitly on the table since the end of the Second World War.
Just how explicit? I’m not at all sure. What I think is that, regardless of what has been said and done – the establishment of the United Nations, all the various treaties, trade agreements and so forth – that the nation-state state has in fact been tacitly assumed as the fundamental framework of political organization.
It’s like the geocentric model of the solar system. You add new cycles and epicycles to make the whole thing work, but don’t really abandon your central conception. As a last desperate gesture to keep the whole thing tottering along Tycho Brahe suggests a drastic modification: keep the earth in the center as always, so the sun revolves around the earth, but then let all the other planets revolve around the sun. Geocentrism is saved while the mathematics is a bit simplified. It didn’t work.
So, I argue, it has been in our geopolitical thought and action. The United Nations, globalization, all of it, it’s all a Tychoesque Rube Goldberg attempt to keep the old nation-state pumping. It’s not working.
What’s next?
P.S. You might want to take a look at the collection of Thomas Naylor essays Charlie Keil and I have put together, Thomas Naylor's Paths to Peace: Small Is Necessary (Local Paths to Peace Today, Vol. 2). We offer no answers, only things to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment