Inescapable Obsolete States, Research Time, 09/01/2017

So after reading through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, I started looking around for other books that would examine perspectives like his. Conceptions of global citizenship and multinational civic engagement and identity building.

My own country Canada's policy of welcome to all immigrant groups
is part of a program of multiculturalism that's integrated our major
cities and helped build one of the first post-national countries.

I’ve had some limited success so far. I’ve snagged a couple of things by Pheng Cheah which are on my list to get to pretty soon. And I also found an interesting little book by a philosophically inclined journalist named Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen is a title dripping in irony. When I read Appiah’s abstract arguments in favour of embracing cosmopolitan, multicultural, multinational aspects of our identities, I found an optimistic, hopeful vision of humanity’s potential for coexistence and friendship.

Appiah’s philosophy and his life are conceptual and living arguments for embracing our multiplicity. We too often today use strictly defined terms – ex. Muslim, English-speaker, Quebecer, Burmese, Russian – to stake borders around our identities. We make a single or very few of these definitions primary to our identities, and see the world as a collision of these strictly-defined identities and allegiances.

But if we embrace the differences within our own identities and societies, we’ll make ourselves more open to building relationships with people whose cultures have very different thematic concepts and traditions.

It sounds like a paradox, but focussing on our own differences makes it easier to build kinship across cultural and national lines. We explore our many different vectors of cultural creation.

Philosophical journalist Atossa Abrahamian

Sounds fantastic. But Abrahamian’s empirical, journalistic perspective brings a dark angle to the embrace of cosmopolitan identities.

Reading The Cosmopolites, Abrahamian identifies a core source of cosmopolitanism’s corruption – economies and cultural connections have become profoundly global, but massive material power still rests with national, territorially-defined states.

For one, it’s largely the very rich who actually embrace global citizenship in practical terms. Small countries with limited economic possibilities have taken up selling their citizenships.

Several Caribbean island states like St Kitts and Antigua are the major players in this market. If you can afford to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in property or other support to these countries, they’ll offer you citizenship.

And it’s not just the Caribbean. Abrahamian informed me that, for example, former Thai PM and semi-evil billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra regularly travels on his Montenegro* passport.

* And Montenegro itself has been wrapped up in some freaky old-school imperialist shenanigans from its recent creation as a state until today.

But the weirdest kind of citizenship shenanigans is a practice I didn’t know much about until now. I had known already that many Arab countries have large populations of long-resident non-citizens. That many who were born in Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates had no path to citizenship because their families were foreign-descended.

Activist and writer Iyad el-Baghdadi

This was the situation of my old friend A from university. He and his family were of Indian descent, coming from Chennai. When he was born, they lived in Kuwait. Because they weren’t descended from old stock Kuwaitis, he was disallowed citizenship in the country where he was born.

But I didn’t know that many of these non-citizens were genuinely stateless. They had no citizenship at all. The reporting of Iyad el-Baghdadi – a human rights activist and reporter from the United Arab Emirates – first alerted me to the problem. From him, I learned that the UAE is on a path to a population of 96% non-citizens.

And Abrahamian has produced a report on the strangest solution to this citizenship problem. Kuwait and the UAE, in separate deals, negotiated with the Comoros Islands to buy hundreds of thousands of Comoro citizenships for its stateless citizens.

We’ve come a long way from the philosophies of the founding period of the nation-state. The modern state as a public ideology – a philosophy become dogma – the state is the expression of the nation. It’s an agent of social unity – the state unifies a diverse people, but is also the institutionalization of the universal national essence. It’s the voice of a people and simultaneously creates that voice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the founding
philosophers of the modern concept of nation
as reaching its highest and most proper form as
a state government of free citizens.

Yet today, we see states and governments who treat citizenship as a commodity to be bartered for. Just another thing to be bought and sold.

Should we mourn for the ideal of the nation-state? Its commitment to forging a people in unity together. Or do we admit that it was always kind of a sham?

That a few sophisticated, idealistic, and maybe a little naive thinkers made an inspiration out of an institution that was always about control of populations. That the lofty philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel only ended up giving institutions of exclusion and racialization multifaceted dimensions and a bunch more propaganda material?

That all the talk about the unity of a state and its nation meant nothing when those very nations were building colonial empires, folding wildly different cultures inside their states.

Reality’s hypocrisy doesn’t mean we can simply write off the philosophies of nationhood and the nation-state. The philosophies provided the foundational concepts for how we as people understand our political institutions – their purposes and ideals.

Building a genuinely post-national world means building an institutional, activist, and conceptual toolbox for a model of politics that globalizes democracy. Building the concepts of the new means understanding the concepts of what you want to overcome.

Cosmopolitanism (the philosophy and the book) is a start. But as Abrahamian’s research shows, it isn’t nearly enough.

Here Is Humanity! III: What's a Cosmopolitan? Research Time, 14/09/2016

Probably the last post in this series. 

- Here’s the beginning, about the idealism that underpins any dedication to politics.

- And the first proper part, about the challenge idealism faces from cynical, realistic (and accurate) conceptions of violent human nature.

- And the previous part, where I defend the dream of the European Union as humanity’s largest ever experiment to change human nature.

• • •

A book like We, The People of Europe? is profoundly optimistic. Etienne Balibar believes in the power of humanity to change its morals and ethics – our entire character. He argues that our political institutions can be important tools in this process. 

Because our institutions can facilitate human action on a massive scale, they can train us in new habits. New kinds of socializing, which produce new kinds of society and new frameworks of human nature. 

The symbology works so well. The dream is dying.

These huge-scale institutional experiments are incredibly expensive. Their problems and failures can cause disaster. In the EU’s case, there are two failings bringing this utopian institution down. 

One got all the press last year, as the European Central Bank forced the Greek government and people to accept an austerity plan that plunged many thousands into poverty. All the maintain the monetary integrity of the Euro currency and other financial securities of the EU. 

The other problem I wrote about yesterday. The migrant crisis from the Syrian civil war has fuelled a resurgence of violent nationalism that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. 

Racist politics, even the national socialist model promoted by Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, are coming to dominate Europe along the vectors of many different member countries – France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Holland, and Poland.* Even the famously liberal Sweden faces the rise of a radical nationalist party.

* Respectively: The National Front, UKIP and Brexit, Pegida, Jobbik and the ruling Fidesz party, the Party for Freedom, and the Law and Justice party.

The European Union was supposed to have inspired a cosmopolitan sensibility in Europe, where national divisions were forgotten in favour of a common diverse humanity. That’s the idealism behind freedom of movement – making it just as easy for a Pole to get a job in Britain or Italy as in Poland. 

Everyone would interact with everyone else so regularly that national origin would become just as unimportant as in Canada’s multicultural cities. What were once cruel stereotypes become jokes and gags, while we welcome everyone for the variety their heritage brings to our lives. 

But it calcified into a dull bureaucracy before that vision had an opportunity to settle in to the cultures of all Europe. And the shock of the migrant crisis ruined that dream’s last chances. 

I have quite a few friends in Britain who I connect with regularly on Twitter. They’re all humanities researchers and Doctor Who fans, so we have a pretty progressive bent. I remember when the Brexit vote went down, many lamented the result. One shattered reaction was partly a joke, but also profound moment – a little death of a romantic dream.

Balibar's book We, the People of Europe offered an
insightful critique of the problems that would tear the EU
apart within only a couple of decades. He left it up to us
to figure out the solutions in detail. But his work was
still important and necessary to fight nationalism.
Know your enemy.

She could never go find work in France and meet some boy who’d be the love of her life. Lands that had been at war for centuries had become, for one young woman, a place to dream of love. Yes, it was romantic and naive, but it was also a beautiful vision. It spoke to the real possibility of a cosmopolitan community.

But – if I can get back to my own ongoing research for this book of philosophy – Balibar’s own essays don’t offer much vision as to what this cosmopolitan new European would be. Only that the everyday cosmopolitan is the cultural counter-force to the nationalism he could see when it was a small spark instead of the convulsive danger it’s become.

One part of understanding what a cosmopolitan person could be led me to choose Cosmopolitanism as the next book in my research. It’s been on my shelf for literally years, so I finally decided to get around to it. 

Since one of my former colleagues at McMaster used to work with Appiah at Princeton, my professional connection gives the book a curious atmosphere to me. Also the fact that this former colleague told me that Appiah prefers being called Anthony to Kwame.

When I read through that book, I’m also thinking about how Appiah’s ideas appear in comparison to my last two years of life in such a genuinely cosmopolitan city as Toronto. Daily life here offers a fertile ground for philosophical thinking about what a post-national identity would be. 

Thinking never stops.