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.

Here Is Humanity! I: There Will Always Be Shit, A History Boy, 09/09/2016

Check the introduction to this series here: Humanity Is Gone! – Here Is Humanity!

• • •

One of the things I really enjoyed about that book of Etienne Balibar essays on nationalism is the flashback. We, the People of Europe? was published in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and many of its essays spoke to the issues that dominated politics of the time.

What dominated those politics was George W Bush and his impending invasion of Iraq. I was part of the opposition, and I made my voice heard as loud as I could. I was part of my city’s local media – I attended and covered protests, I interviewed people about their stances. 

The protests against Bush's invasion of Iraq that I covered
in Newfoundland were never quite this big, of course.
But they had a good, healthy size.

One of my courses in the same year that book was published even had a major paper project where we analyzed the Iraq invasion vote in the Security Council from the geopolitical perspective of our choice of permanent member. It became my first essay writing award as a student – declared the best undergraduate paper in all the humanities and social science disciplines of my 12,000-strong student body.*

* And I won again two years later for an essay about Michel Foucault’s concept of power. You can’t say I didn’t get a lot of encouragement to find a career in the academy.

The Iraq invasion and the Bush years were when I became politically mature. How I thought about W’s government and the unfolding disaster of that war was the starting point for a lot of my views about politics, war, activism, and ethics today. And I think that’s true for a lot of people my age.

The storm of conflicting ideas that flew around in that turbulent time** informs the philosophical standpoint of Utopias. It’s examining the paradoxes of buoyant idealism co-existing with stark pessimism.

** Like the turbulence has ever stopped. It was the time when turbulence began. It only felt turbulent at the time, because we were leaving the 1990s, when all the conflicts the Bush years brought to the forefront had a low enough intensity that we could ignore them.

In the book’s last essay, Balibar is trying to squeeze what utopian energy he can from the depressing situation of neoconservatism’s triumph. When he gave the talk that became that essay, the United States was barrelling toward the invasion of Iraq. One of the pro-war voices that Balibar singles out for critique is Robert Kagan, one of the leading neoconservative intellectuals.

Robert Kagan, today of the Brookings Institute, who
believes in the inevitability of war and the eternal
necessity of military power for peace.

Kagan offers a sobering challenge to any idealist of world peace who sees a model to be followed in the project of the European Union. In his essay “Power and Weakness,” Kagan basically calls bullshit on the idealism of international law, and pretty much any political program aimed at establishing perpetual world peace under the rule of law.

You can read the whole essay without having to look for pirated versions – it’s still available for free. And the argument is essentially that European state leaders have only focussed on international diplomacy and rule of law as the best route to peace because they can no longer bomb their enemies into submission.

The world, in Kagan’s view, will always be a violent place where everyone can potentially descend into horrifying war with everyone else. And I’m not disputing this claim – he has plenty of evidence on his side. 

The world is a place where massive military power, or a good relationship with it, will always be necessary to survive. Even while being such a massive military power invites violence on you, makes you a target.

Europe used to be a massive military power. Several, in fact. Kagan uses the term machtpolitik, foreign relations based on force and the threat of force. But centuries of state-vs-state military violence since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 created the modern Western state? Eventually, it led to a point of mutually assured destruction.

And the destruction happened. It was called the first two world wars. European military force was so decimated by decades of total war that they could no longer really function as global military powers anymore. European economic power – especially as the EU – was the basis of its global power after their military implosion.

European politics has been associated with international
law for so long that we forget that a militarist philosophy
remained strong in Western European nations for a long
time after the Second World War. Kagan discusses in
"Power and Weakness" how the peaceful European
continent of the early 2000s was the product of
militarists like France's Charles de Gaulle essentially
getting neutered by the shadows of American
military might.

That's nothing to sneeze at – we’ve seen many examples of Europe’s economic power. Both for good, as in the global growth of European companies with social democratic models of worker relations and innovation like Siemens and IKEA. But also for ill, as in the European Central Bank’s punitive destruction of the Greek economy.

Yet for Kagan, none of this is enough, because it’s still possible for any truly great power to carpet-bomb all the major countries of Europe to rubble and blood without serious resistance. For Kagan, the definition of great power is solely in military terms, for this exact reason. 

So when you bring those premises to your political thinking, of course you won’t seen any alternative to the massive state violence of a military with global reach. It’s not as if those militaries can’t get a lot of stuff done. Not that you’d really want to do any of what a massive military can do when it really gets moving on a mission.

For Kagan, taken as the voice of the model neoconservative military hawk, European leaders could choose a path of diplomacy and international rule of law for their global politics because they had a patron. They had a protector. They had a country who was willing to front the military budget and the lives of its soldiers.

The USA had their back. The American military would do the dirty work so European leaders and people could afford to be peaceniks. Is that the only way peace can be possible? . . . . To Be Continued

Humanity Is Gone – Here Is Humanity! Composing, 08/09/2016

Etienne Balibar's political philosophy is dense with ideas, and more inventive than he seems to get credit for in some of the discussions that I’ve seen of his work online. Granted, online discussions about political philosophy either get incoherent and horrifying really fast, or else devolve into dogmatic idiocy (read the comment thread) even faster.

From a protest for migrants' rights at the fences of the Calais
border fence of France and Britain, December 2014. News
of a reinforced British border wall has inflamed a lot of
public opinion, both for and against. Looking at the racism
that's consumed Europe in the last few years, it looks as
though there's no hope that any non-white person can
live a peaceful life in Europe anymore.

Thats the tendency anyway.

I hope when I talk about it, I at least seem reasonably intelligent, because a lot of this blog is discussing research for a book that I’m not yet sure how I’m going to publish. Most philosophy books are published through academic presses, given very high prices, and marketed only to university libraries.

That was the case with Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, despite my ambition to craft more accessible prose. That book suffers a little from a tension of style – I wrote it as my doctoral dissertation, but published it to reach a mass market. So its argument is very sequential, but filled with borderline necessary secondary literature citations to have proven my ability to do intense research.

I'm taking a very different approach to Utopias. I described its style to my friend The Mac once as influenced by Walter Benjamin – drawing concepts from primary philosophical, historical, anthropological, and fictional sources to a complex examination of what it really means to change society.

That theme is where Etienne Balibar and I have much in common. The particular purpose of the essays in We, The People of Europe? is examining different aspects of the crossroads European politics and culture faced at the turn of the 21st century. It spoke to the problems and struggles of its time.

Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and European identity. The problem of refugees, migrants, and the Europeans rejected from Europe like Russians and Serbs. How to understand and adapt to the legacies of the Cold War. The possibilities of a pan-European social movement. All these are the specific philosophical issues facing Europe at the time. 

Nigel Farage, the face of modern British nationalism,
whose campaign helped push British people into voting
for leaving the European Union to keep foreign people out.

As I've written elsewhere, it can be a very depressing experience reading this book. At the time, all the worst tendencies of Europe’s development as a Union – nationalism, the erosion of the social democratic contract, the exclusion of migrants – were all in a very nascent form.

It was possible, when Balibar was writing this book, to stop these destructive movements and build a new model of democracy that can overcome the institutional violence of the nation-state. That’s markedly less likely now.

But Balibar and I share a common conception of what politics can do, when it’s acting at its greatest intensity of power. Throughout these essays, Balibar talks about how Europe of the 21st century needs a social movement that can constitute a new European identity.

This isn't an identity in the sense of a nationhood for all of Europe. I mean a new way for European people to think about who and what they are – a social movement that can constitute a wholly new model of subjectivity. It would transform every aspect of European people’s personalities. Just as the bourgeois revolution did in that continent, as the ongoing democratic revolutions of the United States did for Americans. 

I wrote at the end of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, long before I had even read Balibar, that the environmentalist movement could only succeed wholly when its society could develop a new way for people to conceive of who and what they were. 

When humanity figured out how to live in the world as an ecological subjectivity, we would think more systematically, better understand how our individual perspective, our ego, fit into the larger systems and processes that we were part of. And how this self-conception and knowledge framework would be just as instinctual and natural to everyday thinking as our ordinary egotism is today.

Lord Alfred Dubs, a child refugee to Britain from the
war-torn lands of continental Europe, has become one
of the few voices of conscience and justice, speaking of
the ethical necessity of providing sanctuary to those
fleeing war across Africa and the Middle East.

I looked at the global ecological crisis and saw that this radical regeneration of human subjectivity was required for the task. Balibar looked at the social conflicts of nascent nationalism and the resurgence of racism that, within two decades, would set Europe into turmoil again. Radical regeneration of human subjectivity is the solution here too.

There are no easy answers. What kind of solidarity could arise that could remain authentic from the UK to Finland to Poland to Germany to Greece to Portugal – and even to Russia? Given the current scale of the migration and refugee crisis, we need to bring Turkey, Libya, and Syria into that fold as well.

No community of solidarity exists across all these cultures and polities. The new subjectivity has to emerge from such a community. But just because the community doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. 

Communities are constituted through common life, and the most intense cultural departures are constituted through common struggles. Forging democratic civilization in Europe today means redefining community and sovereignty itself. 

Over the next few posts, I want to explore some of what will be needed for that new vision of humanity to emerge and overcome the horrors we’re inflicting on ourselves.

In Soviet Russia Victory Wins You! Research Time, 02/09/2016

One thing that strikes me about reading Balibar’s essays on nationalism is how prescient they are about modern politics in Europe. I’ve spent the past week waxing on (and waxing off) about his insights into the still-embryonic European nationalist movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But I find the historical insight that strikes me most is how well he understands that there’s more to the end of the Cold War than anyone in any influential position in the West understood at the time.

Etienne Balibar seems to have been the only one in the
West who never got played by Vladimir Putin.

I’m reading this book at a time when Russian petty imperialism is in a new resurgence. They’ve literally invaded a core ally of the European Union, and wouldn’t have been long for joining NATO either. They invaded and conquered the Crimean peninsula, having already occupied several borderlands in countries like Georgia that used to be folded inside the Soviet Union. 

All this in response to these former Soviet border countries installing more liberal democratic governments – Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine – who aligned more with the European Union and United States. 

They’ve encouraged nationalist movements to destabilize democratic governments in their traditional sphere of influence as well. Russian nationalists in Donetsk have split Ukraine with a civil war. Transnistria has been a semi-recognized non-entity state on the eastern slivers of Moldova, with Russian support. And Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage Russian nationalism in the Baltic region.

This is not how a defeated power acts. Balibar is one of the few, writing in one essay shortly after Putin took over the Russian Presidency, to describe that change as a takeover by the political police – the mean who once led the KGB, in other words. 

Despite all Putin’s shenanigans – interventions, destabilizations, stirring up nationalist movements in newly or soon-to-be democratic regimes in his neighbourhood – pretty much every mainstream commentator and political actor with any real influence was totally surprised by Russian meddling in Ukraine. And every Western leader was powerless to stop Putin’s support of Bashar Assad in Syria.

All the people whose job it was to know enough never to be surprised were completely surprised. It’s the most intense expression of the immense failure the end of the Cold War really was.

Since I was a small child watching the Soviet Union fall on cable news, I’ve been told that the West won the Cold War. And that’s certainly how everyone acted. Balibar, along with many left-leaning critics today, describe the modern European Union as having pushed all the Europe into the global marketplace, where globalized corporations and their leaders can enjoy those regions’ wealth.

Not really how to lead a transition to democracy.

The European Union is thankfully far more than this, and has far more potential than this crude co-optation. But the critics aren’t wrong either. 

This was exactly the wrong way to treat the end of the Cold War. The European Eastern bloc and almost all of Europe’s former Soviet states transitioned to democracy, and Western leaders thought this meant total capitulation to everything about the Western way of life.

Balibar rightly argues that this democratic transition should have been a period to build a new vision of Europe and a new model of Western democracy together. A time when we could have learned from the ideals of socialist Eastern Europe before their corruption by dictatorships. And when the East could have learned from the more experience democracies of the West.

Instead, to the victors go the power. That’s how it went. And I believed for a long time that this was the right order of things. But it certainly didn’t work out.

The mass privatizations – more like mass looting – of the Russian state ended up creating one of the most horribly unjust societies. A mega-elite of oligarchical billionaires owned almost all the wealth in Russia, and the other hundred million or so Russians were left adrift. Putin’s nationalism at least gave them the promise of being part of a feared nation again.

To them, the end of the Cold War wasn't any victory for democracy, but a national humiliation. Russians could never have built anything from being forced into the economic system of the countries they considered enemies for decades.

Our apparent victory blinded the thought leaders and political leaders of pretty much all the West into a massive blunder of overreach and condescension. Who knows what promising philosophical, political, and ethical creativity could have come out of a meeting of the minds and moralities of two Europes after the Cold War's end? 

We’ll never really know. Maybe one day, I’ll imagine and write a book about it.

Dictating Freedom Epilogue: Thought In History, Composing, 01/09/2016

For all the links to the Dictating Freedom series, check these out.

1) Histories of Racism

2) The Apprentice Citizen

3) What So Special About These Shapes?

4) Taking Our Borders for Granted

5) The Image of the Nation

• • •

Call this a concluding note on philosophical method.

I’ll be honest. I actually always found it quite difficult understanding what precisely is going on in Rousseau’s conception of general will when I first read his political philosophy more than a decade ago. Professors have been similarly perplexed. We always read it by looking at the text alone, trying to parse its meaning with close reading.

Balibar is the first I’ve read to have worked out a clear explanation of what’s going on. He did so because he rooted it in the material concerns Rousseau and European intelligentsia were dealing with at the time – a political alternative to the absolute rule of monarchies and the people’s subjection to them, which would enable a freer society.

Knowledge has to be bent and fit into weird and congested
spaces if you want to fit it inside a classroom.

My own first philosophy book was conceived like this. By the time I was ready to write this kind of work, I knew I had to root my thinking in the concerns of my time. That paramount concern was the global destruction of so many of the ecologies that kept humanity alive. 

So Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity was an attempt to help develop the concepts that humanity would have to live by if we were to have a future. And Utopias continues that trend by being an explicitly political philosophical work about the relationship of our social and ethical ideals with our political institutions.

Yet so much of the academy shies away from that kind of engagement. Not completely, of course – it isn’t as if no one writes political theory or no one writes about social issues. But the norms drive academics into insularity instead of engagement.

Tenure and promotion committees look more kindly on publications in heavily paywalled, prestigious professional journals. Sometimes even more than books that are available for public purchase, and typically take far more work to research, develop, and produce.

As well, the style of academic writing turns off intelligent non-academics. It’s not news for me to say that overly-technical writing filled with discipline-specific jargon isn’t exactly casually accessible to readers. 

A magnifying glass and intense,
singular focus isn't always the best
way to see the world. No shit.

Over-saturation by citations doesn’t help matters either. It amounts to a kind of academic pissing contest – writing to demonstrate how much you’re read to the detriment of developing anything interesting or enlightening to say.

Specific to the discipline of philosophy, that problem of narrow focus on texts causes problems too. It’s a problem of relevance, for one. If you focus all your interpretive energy on a text itself, you’ll find yourself straining to show how any of this cognitive gymnastics has anything to do with the life of someone who isn’t directly invested in those texts themselves. 

But there’s another problem in that focus on texts alone, which I sketched at the start of this post. You can actually mystify yourself – you can get lost. 

A friend of mine once attended a conference of Immanuel Kant specialists and had an interesting, but not very productive, time. All the professors has written papers defending their particular technical interpretations against the critiques of all the others. 

Their interpretations had staked out intellectual territory for themselves, but offered nothing more enlightening than sessions of meticulous nitpicking. It’s apparently even worse in studies of ancient Greek philosophy. 

There, the cumulative weight of literally thousands of years of scholarship means that arguments over the particular meaning of a single sentence (or even a piece of a sentence, or even a single word!) will take years or decades to unfold.

The thoughts have lost their connection with the world where they take place. Unrestrained, they collapse in on themselves. 

Definitely not that Napoleon. That's Marlon Brando. It
wasn't a good movie.

When I was a young undergrad of about 18 or 19, a lot of my professors would tell us never to count real historical events in our analyses of philosophical works. They presumed that we’d reduce the complexity of the books and essays we were studying to simple reflections and commentaries on the events that surrounded them.

‘The Phenomenology of Spirit is all about Napoleon.’ Some of us would really think this way about what we were reading. I’d never see them in another philosophy class.

You can’t reduce a complex work of conceptual engineering to some historical event to which it responds. But you also can’t reduce a complex historical event to some simple, dogmatic definition. Philosophical writing is about pushing people to expand and develop their minds, so they can handle more and more complex ideas and methods of thought.

That thinking is powerful when it’s useful thinking – when it engages the problems of the world and history in all their real complexity.

Dictating Freedom V: The Image of the Nation, Research Time, 31/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . So much has been written over the centuries about what sovereignty is, what it implies, its legitimacy, its nature. Philosophical thought is a method of figuring out the nature of phenomena too complex to describe in simple terms. 

It’s a mistake to enter a philosophical debate with the preconception that your purpose is to settle it. As I hope yesterday’s post made clear, big, complex institutions are at their most dangerous when we’ve settled debate about their nature, function, and existence. When we’ve accepted their existence and taken them for granted. 

When they become so invisible to us that we look right through them, even as we can’t imagine a world without them. Like a glass window through which I see my neighbourhood.

A protestor raises a banner against immigration
restrictions. A little context here.

Think about how complicated real communities of people are, especially in our globalized world of easy planetary travel and frequent migration. But it’s always been the case that any economic centre becomes a culturally diverse, plural community. Once diversity sets in and you leave people alone to get on with life, it compounds as people create whole new identities and cultures.

Human communities tend toward creating more social and cultural complexity. So why do we all take for granted this idea that a peculiar patch of territory controlled by a government institution needs total ethnic-cultural unity, homogeneity, and conformity to be a stable political entity?

How did the nation-state become the default political institution for the entire world?* The answer is in the philosophy of the modern period – attempts to work out a way of thinking that would shut down the violence of Western Europe’s religious wars.

* You can’t just answer “colonialism.” Yes, that’s technically correct. But that only accounts for the spread of that political form. Not its genesis. Europe (mostly Britain) had conquered about half the Earth by the 1930s, and Westerners equated political freedom with having your own nation-state. So decolonization was the institution of 100 or so sovereign states where there were once imperial possessions. It had become the default already.

Etienne Balibar draws from Jean Bodin’s ideas – as he tried to find a common image of France that would prevent Catholics and Protestants from killing each other. His solution – to describe it in very simple terms – was a state whose law was officially secular, unifying all people as subjects to a common crown.

That was fine for monarchies, but things got complicated when Western culture began developing democracy as a political ideal. Democracy means that we can’t be subject to a crown, so can’t rely on that subjection to produce social unity and peace. How can a community of diverse people be free without conflict? 

The West's most important innovator in the
philosophy of what a nation is.

The idea that millions (and now billions) of people could live together in mutual love and respect wasn't really getting much traction at the time. It was the 1700s, and people weren’t really taking Spinoza mainstream yet. 

Instead, we get the man Balibar regards as the principal innovator of the concept of the nation – Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I’m going to try to explain his conception of the nation in the shortest and most direct form I can here. I want to explain the idea to my readers, but I always want to articulate it in very direct and simple forms myself.

Rousseau took a book to explain a concept whose meaning is still being debated today. Balibar took a few pages of an essay to articulate one particular interpretation. I’ll take a few paragraphs of a blog post to explain my take on Rousseau’s ideas after reading Balibar.

The traditional objection to democracy is that it inevitably falls into discord and chaos that facilities an even worse tyranny to return stability. These objections are still at the heart of notable anti-democratic philosophers today. So peace and freedom requires reconciling the difference between rulers and ruled.

A social movement for democratic government expresses in material action the desire for peace and freedom. That desire is what Rousseau calls the “general will.” This is distinct from the “will of all,” which is his term for the collection of all the conflicting, niggling particulars that every individual in a society wants. 

The general will in its pure expression can only ever be vague – “Peace! Freedom!” Quite general, actually. But it’s still a material desire. That material desire constitutes the unity of the nation. 

Representative institutions channel that desire. In the name of peace and freedom, parliaments and congresses permit the reconciliation of all those individual wills into a more concrete expression – the rule of law, of a state’s legislation and institutions. 

Pictured: The last sovereign of Western culture.

So the law of a state is no longer the expression of a single person’s will – that of the king. It’s the mediated expression of the general will of the people for peace and freedom. 

What prevents cultural pluralism from seeming legitimate in a single state is that mediation in the expression. Only those who can participate in building the parliament – representatives and voters – can materially express their will for peace and freedom in state institutions. If the law excludes someone from participation, they’re excluded from membership in the nation.

But the law is still legitimate because it was produced through institutions mediating the general will of all who participate. That expression can desire the exclusion of others who may want to participate, by whatever quality offends the people and the representatives enough that they’re excluded. So we've solved the problem of unity, but only worsened the problem of exclusion.

The solutions of the present become the problems of the future. . . . To Be Continued

Dictating Freedom IV: Taking Our Borders for Granted, Research Time, 30/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . When something is taken for granted – and I mean on a social, society-wide level – our experience of the phenomenon has a really interesting structure. How do you experience something that you never notice?

It's like asking what your experience of glass is. We rarely ever experience glass. We literally look through glass all the time. We experience it as an absent presence. I’m having a little trouble, as I write, explaining this idea in the abstract in anything other than a few token gestures. They might remind you of how a mediocre teacher would discuss Husserl or Heidegger’s phenomenology.

But I want to keep talking about the nation-state. Politically, states and their borders are the glass of our politics, according to this tortured metaphor.* We're so accustomed to states and borders as a part of our politics, that we can’t even really see them until their structure gets broken. 

* I feel like this post is a really intense example of the model of blogging as the nakedly public first draft. I’ve grasping really vainly for the appropriate expressions, and I feel like I’m only barely making myself understood. I like the title, though. It feels like something a Trumpist would write, but my actual ideas about borders would make a Trumpist’s head explode.

When the glass shatters, we’re horrified, and can’t pick up the pieces without bloodying our hands.**

** Okay, that’s actually a pretty good metaphor. Getting there was torture, though, and I’m sorry about that, readers. 

Borders are in crisis today, with global flows of migrants making a mockery of their territorial controls. Even so, the legal structures of sovereign borders and state citizenship control can and often do make those migrants’ lives into different styles of hell.

One of Balibar's essays lays out three simple causes of how our state-centric political structure have begun to destabilize. They’re very complex phenomena in their affects, of course, but we can describe them as currents and changes pretty clearly and quickly.

And we can spot them pretty clearly if we have any basic idea about how politics functions today. They’re truisms by now, more facts that we barely take note of because we take them so much for granted. We have trouble conceiving of politics without states – Do we now also find it so hard to conceive of politics without these transformations?

Multinationals are free from constraint. By this, I mean that they aren't dependent for their existence and thriving on the particular state where they began. Corporations used to be dwarfed by the power of states and their laws. But now, the most powerful of them have collected so much financial power and wealth that they can dictate terms even to the more powerful state governments on Earth.

The entire world is open for business. Writing these essays when he did – in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Balibar is trying to process a cataclysmic event that we in the West all passed over much too quickly. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the communist bloc of allied states. 

Popular culture, and even our long-experienced political leaders all took the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union as an univocal victory for the West. The conception of the event was much too simple – “The Cold War is over! We won! Yahoo!”

Fuck's sake. I used to think about the end of the Cold War this way. I saw it unfolding on cable news, lying on my mother’s carpet in the basement apartment where we lived when I was a kid. I was eight years old when the Soviet Union fell apart. And our popular understanding of the time – even of the most experienced politicians we had – was no more advanced than an eight-year-old’s.

We're learning now – maybe about a decade too late – that the end of the Cold War was a more complicated social phenomenon than this. One that deserved the kind of philosophical attention that Balibar gives it. 

One part of Balibar’s analyses describes the end of the Cold War in a way that I hadn’t really thought through before. With the end of the communist bloc, there was now no part of the world where the mega-corporations of the world couldn’t go. They were the last states that refused to bend to the command of a multinational.

Enlightenment by communication. After what might at first seem a dour conclusion, Balibar gives us a genuine sense of hope. Our communication networks have spread around the globe. They're faster and more powerful than any such network that's existed before. And literally billions can join them.

We can learn about and support each other’s struggles more easily now than we ever could. As dangerous as that can be, it also comes with potential for liberation. States no longer have such tight controls on what their people can learn. An information underground is much easier for everyone to access. 

That means we can organize for real democracy better than we ever have before. And it’s a truly global process. Our communication networks help demonstrate to each of us individually that the Earth is a single system politically, communicatively, and ecologically.

So what do we do with this knowledge? That’s the key question for global democracy in our century. What would a world without states and borders look like? . . . To Be Continued

Dictating Freedom II: The Apprentice Citizen, Research Time, 26/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . So in this post, I want to get more into the hypocrisy of citizenship. Because all of Etienne Balibar’s essays on nationalism include different angles and approaches on the same underlying idea – that a society can’t be genuinely democratic while its institutions still rely on border controls.

This is a pretty radical policy idea and philosophical concept. Because it kind of undermines the concept of sovereignty. You know, the concept on which all of existing international law depends. And the institutional setup of states themselves. 

Canadians of my generation grew up being told how
welcoming, open, and multicultural our country is. But
there are always complicated factors, like the existence
of territorial borders themselves.

No one ever said freedom would be easy, I guess. And when you take Balibar’s analyses seriously, it marks a pretty intense challenge to the institution of the state and our entire international legal framework. 

Take nothing for granted, nothing as obvious. That’s supposed to be the fundamental starting point of philosophical thinking.*

* Though I actually saw this attitude pretty rarely among philosophers working in the Academy when I was there. Regardless of sub-discipline or camp. But that’s a History Boy post for another day.

Balibar isn’t the first to discuss a fundamental anti-democracy in the imposition of borders and border controls. One of Canada’s most impactful historians, Harold Troper, has said the same. Even after Canada’s explicitly and purposely racist immigration policies were stripped away, the author of None Is Too Many still points out that our laws treat Canadian citizenship as a privilege to bestow on an elite few.

Some of my good friends are immigrants to Canada, and it’s quite a long and involved process. It involves evaluations of your potential economic productivity, assessments of your personal and political history, and even tests of your knowledge of Canadian history and law. 

The refugee application involves even more screening, assessment, evaluation. This for someone fleeing from the devastation of a war, persecution, or ecological catastrophe.

Application processes for citizenship function as a reward for behaviour. And Balibar makes a solid argument that such behaviour is a supplication. A prostration before the culture and values that the state laws articulate as the majority stance. 

You submit to state authorities and enter a state of tutelage. You become a student of your new country’s history and values. And your prize on graduation is the guarantee that you can live inside the borders of the country with a promise that the state will protect and not itself act against your rights. 

The next post in this series will go into more detail on
the ethical and political travesty of Canada's
Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Ultimately, it's
the most egregious and visible demonstration of the
anti-democratic nature of border control, a law that
empowers authorities to make blatant class
distinctions about who even has the right to apply
for permanent Canadian citizenship.

Until you’re awarded citizenship, your rights aren’t guaranteed. Canada, generally speaking, will still respect your rights in the abstract. Even though you won’t hold all the civil and legal protections of a citizen, the state won’t arbitrarily violate non-citizens.**

** Anymore. For the most part.

But the guarantee only comes (for a migrant) after this submission to state authority. The guarantee includes the right to stay on the territory inside the border for as long as you want. 

Even in largely (or at least officially) post-national countries like Canada, which has decoupled its identity from a specific cultural, religious, or ethnic heritage, this minimal assimilation remains. 

Now, assimilation is different from cultural change. All cultures and people change over time, whether or not you want to admit it. Assimilation is when a relation of dominance and submission drives a person’s or a community’s cultural change – when a minority becomes majoritarian, when difference collapses into conformity.

But for a democracy (an all-the-way-down, every-vector-of-human-existence democracy), the only conformity should be conformity to ideologies and moralities that encourage the proliferation of difference. Because democracy is freedom in its political context. And freedom is, in an ontological context, the proliferation of difference.

So when you look at the philosophical and ethical problems that immigration raises, here’s how they test your commitment to democracy. Ask yourself – Does my period of tutelage, my country’s apprentice citizenship, encourage the proliferation of difference? 

If it does, then you’re at least on a democratic track. Well, you’re on a democratic track within your borders. Because there are a lot of social and economic pressures that the institution of borders exacerbate, worsen, and turn into sites of violence and abjection. 

Canadian civic studies tests in our citizenship applications are the least of the indignities millions suffer in their migrations for a better life. . . . To Be Continued

Dictating Freedom I: Histories of Racism, Research Time, 25/08/2016

Contemporary Canada embraces immigration from all corners of the Earth. This is a part of the Canadian state, government, and wider culture that I love. 

Canada hasn’t always had such an open attitude to immigration from parts of Earth that aren’t Western Europe, as you can tell by examining many terrible injustices in our history. Canadians should never forget that Canada was specifically founded as a country for white people only.

I was certainly no Stephen Harper fan, but I was glad he
formally apologized for Canada's expulsion of Sikh
refugees in 1914. However, there are plenty of Canadians
who maintain that non-white immigration must be
stopped.

Chinese and Indian immigration to British Columbia sparked race riots in 1907 – white Canadians held parades demanding the refusal and expulsion of Asian migrants from the country, vandalizing Chinese-owned businesses. Canada had already installed a tax on Chinese immigrants, and had legislation since 1885 specifically aimed at discouraging Chinese people from moving to the country.

The most visible incident of Canadian racism against Asian immigrants was the refusal of the passengers on the vessel Komagata Maru in 1914. The ship, carrying nearly 400 Punjabi migrants, was refused permission to dock, and sat in Vancouver harbour for two months. On its return to India, 19 of its passengers were massacred by British troops, and the rest imprisoned.

Most infamously, Canadian authorities turned away the St Louis, a ship carrying 907 European Jewish refugees, who tried to settle in Nova Scotia in 1939. Hundreds of these rejected Jews later died in the death camp network. 

Both Canada’s Prime Minister at the time, William Mackenzie King, and Quebec’s most prominent politician Henri Bourassa, were well-known for their rabid hatred of Jews. The year 1910 saw an anti-Semitic pogrom in Quebec City, where rioters vandalized many Jewish-owned businesses.

So I’m rather glad things have changed.* So much so that I consider Canada to have become a leading edge in forging a new concept of nation and national community that breaks from the tradition of requiring or forging ethnic-cultural unity. We seem to be the country in the world closest to becoming post-national.

Colten Boushie, a young man murdered while
trying to get his flat tire fixed. This must never
be our Canada anymore.

* A great deal has not changed. Alt-right racist movements have taken hold in Canadian online culture, racist violence continues against indigenous Canadians, encouraged and abetted by police and elected officials. And Quebec continues to suffer hideous racist violence against Muslims and Jews.

Etienne Balibar wrote the essays that became the book We, The People of Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the European Union still appeared the true leading edge in overcoming nationalism. The optimism of this time lay in the EU’s supra-national institutional framework.

Here was a set of institutions that had the potential to forge a new cultural identity. A new image for people to identify themselves, which was designed explicitly as an antidote to the poisonous nationalism that fuelled Europe’s previous centuries of war. 

The identity of the European citizen (with a personal and community level ethnic heritage) would build a community of multicultural brotherhood. The identity of the federation citizen.

But Balibar identifies problems set in European institutions from the start. All the particular errors of institutions and governance that set the fall of the European dream in motion can fit into two broadly defined categories. 

Democratic deficits in the pan-European institutions. We’ve probably heard the most about this through the last few years of anti-EU activism from both the democratic and nationalist sides. The concerns and mandates of the EU’s democratic institutions like the European Parliament are too separate from the daily concerns of Europe’s people.

Nigel Farage has become the most effective nationalist
saboteur yet of the European Union.

Deeper than that in a policy context, the European Union’s parliament didn’t even have to be that visible in daily life to earn its legitimacy. Support for a united Europe depended on an implicit deal that many throughout the continent expect to be honoured. European union (as in, a union of Europe) legitimates itself as it produces guarantees.

Guarantees of economic and military security, yes. But also forums for democratic participation – the same civil forums that nation-states have historically provided when they dedicate themselves to democratic governance. Europe had to functionally supplant the democracy-facilitating role of nation-states for the whole continent at once.

Hypocrisy in European citizenship. I’m going to continue this in greater detail tomorrow, but I should introduce it here, having already given the Canadian historical context I come from.

As Balibar sees it, the EU made a serious mistake in letting its member states keep control over citizenship. The EU imported all of its member states’ citizens to become EU citizens at the federation’s supra-national level. But it imposed no demands on members to open their citizenship rules beyond their national definition.

Sorry, I should say, their ethnic-national definition. Because plenty of European member states have citizenship laws that still discriminate on ethnic grounds. Many Turkish-Germans are not citizens, for example, despite being third or even fourth generation Germans. 

From Gegen Die Wand, a wrenching drama film about
the experience of Turkish-Germans and Turkish
immigrants to Germany.

Probably the most horrifying example – Roma have virtually no citizenship rights in Hungary, Romania, and many other central European countries, marginalized to the point of cultural genocide since the actual genocide of the Holocaust. 

Canada has contributed to this, since the Harper government’s designation of all EU member states as “safe countries” instantly and permanently invalidated the refugee claims of thousands of Hungarian Roma. It destroyed their one chance at building a dignified life. 

So for all the idealistic talk and hopes of the European Union to build peace among this continent of peoples perpetually at war, it still left an underclass. Immigrants, migrants, and minorities. The exclusionary powers of the nation remained when dealing with these groups.

What hope is there for a European Union that could not end the entrenched racism of European culture and institutions? . . . To Be Continued 

Never Forget That Freedom Is Fragile, Jamming, 24/08/2016

There was one incident at Lunaza that sticks in my mind. There were a lot of wonderful events. Basking in the joy of a new arts and music community’s rebellious and joyful spirit. Talking for an hour or so with my old friend EP at our campsite. 

It is a bit of a strange thing to pop up in the middle of a
field in The Goulds. The local locals didn't much like it.
Photo by the GF.

But there was one incident that expresses not only a perennial problem with being a progressive artist in Newfoundland. It’s also a very local expression of a broader issue that’s dominating contemporary politics in the West. 

Here's a story that’s unique to a very particular place. About an hour or so before their security staff arrived, the field where Lunaza Festival took place was visited by nine teenagers on ATVs and a pickup truck. They knocked over one of the decorative obelisks and almost did the same to their port-a-potties.

Razziki the organizer and I both understood what these creatures were. Skeets. Newfoundlanders know what I mean. Every society has these purposely ignorant, small-minded, perpetually immature, racist, homophobic, bullying dicks. 

But it seems – at least from my perspective – that Newfoundland has a peculiar version of these creatures. The Newfoundland Skeet shares with all its compatriots around the world the same resentment and hostility toward weird and artistic people. Where the Skeet differs, is that he doesn’t seem content to leave them alone.

It doesn’t even seem to matter when an artistic community can make money for the city and the province. No, “Techno music’s all weird and faggoty!” and “What’s all this gay shit propped up on wooden sticks?” These are people who laugh when they break something that belongs to someone else.

Those fuckers on their ATVs don't have nearly the
class that Ricky and Julian have in their little fingers
as they stir the ice in their drinks.

Their attitude is an aggressive hatred of the strange, unusual, and creative, precisely because it’s strange and unusual when their own lives are dulling repetitions. Out on the quad, ride around the dirt roads, eat, sleep, drink, fuck, repeat. Building anything noticeably unique is a demonstration of the futility of their thoughtless lifestyles. 

They hate it, and lash out.

This is a struggle that I think plays out throughout human society in a lot of different contexts. Thinking back on my personal experience over the last few years, I feel as though this attitude has contributed to some of the weirdnesses I’ve noticed in the Toronto startup scene.

I’ve come across a lot of job descriptions that, frankly, seem to chase trends – always just a little too late to really capitalize on them. And when I talk with business leaders, asking them about their ideas, I see bandwagon attitudes fairly often. “Everyone’s really starting to do X, so we’ve got our own spin on it.”

The city’s startup culture has plenty of enthusiasm, but on the whole, seems more intent on following what’s already peaked in Silicon Valley rather than developing fresh ideas and business approaches that grow more organically in Toronto’s and Canada’s cultural contexts.*

* I’m satirizing this attitude with a character in the current film version of You Were My Friend. Madison’s boss at a crashing sharing economy business gives us a lot of laughs with his enthusiasm. Thanks to a timely Patreon donation, that ridiculous man now has the name of my first Patron. I’m glad he has a good sense of humour.

A fear of the strange, of the unusual, of what’s never been seen before.

I’m speaking in very broad strokes when I say this – No, maybe I should say, instead, that I’m focussing on only one aspect to think in very vague, speculative terms, about a disturbing common feature to a lot of events that seem quite different.

Border patrol agents in Arizona, charged with keeping
the foreign out of the country. Did I make a suggestion
there? When does such a suggestion stop being a drunken
speculation and become a philosophical insight?

What does a band of ATV-riding halfwits have to do with the entrepreneurial (self-styled) elite of Canada? They react very differently – one bullies, the other blinds themselves. But there’s a common feature in their aversion to real difference, the genuinely unfamiliar and unusual. 

One group bluntly knocks the weird stuff over. One group just turns away from the weird stuff and pursues familiarity even when the familiar starts to fail.

Consider one application of this idea – aversion to the new and strange as a foundation of many diverse human habits. Over the next few days, I’m going to dig into Etienne Balibar’s thoughts on nationalism and state institutions. 

I’m already seeing aversion to the new and strange as the ground of a lot of the most violent nationalisms of our time. Balibar’s analyses trace how the institutions we live in can encourage those dangerous feelings. 

Call this one a prologue.