Berlin Visions, Jamming, 25/02/2017

In our entire time in Berlin last week, I don’t think the GF and I went more than a few meters into West Germany. Our hostel was in the east, the Holocaust Memorial and Brandenburg Gate are in the east, all the clubs where we partied were in the east, my old friend Grey’s apartment is in the east.

The early morning hours of Berlin.

Well east. Almost the definitive east. It may have been because we visited him at 11.00 on a Sunday night, but we got off the U-Bahn on a street of near-total darkness and utter quiet. Streetlights were spare, and every building was more shadow than stone.

And this was still in the centre of Berlin, only a few subway stops from Alexanderplatz.

We were visiting Grey’s house by surprise. I knew he lived in Berlin, but I thought he’d already be in Singapore for his art show before we arrived. Biennale was flying him across the world for this exhibition, so he had connections. But not much money, since his apartment building’s stairwell was covered with splotches of white spackle over the faded blue concrete.

I feel as if Grey likes it that way. If he had Hurst-level money, I don’t think he’d know what to do with it. You can’t take as many drugs as that money could buy and live longer than a year. Unless you’re David Bowie.

One of my most pleasant experiences in Berlin was visiting the Cold War museum at Checkpoint Charlie. It was the most blatantly touristic think I think I did in the whole country, but it was a marvellous laugh.

A grizzled hipster democrat in the Kaltkrieg Museum.

What I enjoy most about it was that the entire site was an enormous middle finger to the politics of the police state. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the climax of the collapse of brutal police states that dominated the societies of eastern Europe for half a century. There’s a cartoonishly artificial photo stand where actors dressed as Soviet soldiers will pose for pictures with you. The block features a McDonald’s, whose exit doors feature small signs at eye level reading, “You Are Now Leaving the American Sector.”

Let the victory of democracy over communist police states ring with hipster re-enactment actors and immaculate fast food bakeries.

I had an idea for a film while dancing in a techno bar. A comedy that turns into an action movie that turns into a love story.

A Jewish-American girl with a German father goes to Berlin to study chemistry on a scholarship. During a term’s break, she meets an incredibly good looking Arab-German at a club, and they decide to travel together around the EU for the week.

In Slovakia, they run into a gangster who’s a good friend of the guy – he smuggled him and his entire family into Dresden from Syria in the back of a truck, and has since risen to a mid-level position in a Russian-run human trafficking circuit. But our touring couple has seen too much and now has to go on the run.

Our very authentic first meal in Berlin – döner kebabs and salad at a
Turkish-owned shop.

The old human trafficking friend is put in charge of killing them both, but he actually likes them and doesn’t want to have to hurt his friend over a mistake. So when they all find each other again in Amsterdam, he gets himself arrested and takes the rap for everything. So our American and Syrian live happily ever for the next few years anyway.

The last scenes of the film would be a silent walk the couple takes through the exit maze of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, then a shabbas meal when she invites him to join her at a local Chabad House.

Have I mentioned the Holocaust Memorial? I didn’t take any pictures because I felt like my camera phone skills couldn’t do the place justice. But it is harrowing.

Since Germany – for obvious reasons – had no right to any artifacts of the victims themselves, they recreated the experience of the Holocaust through reconstructions of victims’ letters and displays of representative families from throughout Europe.

In one room, victims’ letters are blown up to the size of floor panels, backlit displays that you must stare into to read as you walk over them. These dim floor panels are the only light sources in the room.

Darkness is everywhere. An adjacent room is a lit only by the appearance of names projected on a wall-sized screen. Each name has a brief story of a few sentences in German and English, read out loud from a recording that plays from speakers at the corners.

The narration describes who each person was and what happened to them in the war. The Memorial says in a descriptive panel that it will record these brief accounts for every recorded victim of the Holocaust. Listening to the entire finished product would take more than six months.

You leave the coat check and gift shop and emerge into a graveyard. We were there at night, among the last visitors at the end of Sunday. It had been raining all day, a dark mist drifting over the city from the Baltic Sea. Air chilled you, a still, unmoving prickling against the skin. The black stones dripped with water from the rain falling all day.

Row on row of smooth black stone whose only features were the tracks of the rain. They were ten feet tall, blocking almost all light from the street lamps and nearby buildings. Just enough light to tease its existence, not enough to see.

On the train to Berlin from Amsterdam, we saw countless flat fields. Some were planted with solar panels or windmill generators. Most were featureless, their grass almost grey as well as green. We couldn’t help but imagine how many mass graves were under those fields.

Men, women, and children, naked and huddling together in the rain, yanked apart, crying. Hearing bang after bang getting closer and closer until nothing. Blood pools in the dirt like water, bodies crush together under falling clumps of dirt. That was the filthy work of the Holocaust, the endless drudgery of bullet after bullet.

With nothing but cement, the attentive visitor to the Holocaust Memorial will learn something of what it means to be one of the anonymous dead. Motionless under the soil of Europe.

Hating Democracy I: In Our House, Research Time, 18/10/2016

Reading Jacques Rancière is a lot of fun. He’s efficient – writing short, dense books. But he’s also fun to read – those books steer clear of over-technical jargon and they get straight to the point. There's nothing ambiguous about Rancière’s writing. You see it, it confronts you, and you deal with it.

Because it’s nothing if not confrontational. You don’t write a book called Hatred of Democracy and expect to avoid upsetting people.

Who hates democracy here? Certainly not Rancière, though he does hate a lot of what gets called democracy. Though he doesn’t name the individuals, the introduction to Hatred of Democracy expresses nothing but bile toward the racist nationalism and enforced secularism that's near-universal to his country France.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, recently said that
she would ban all conspicuous religious symbols in all public places, if
she becomes President. In the name of France's liberal secularism.

When he wrote about that, my first instinct was to think of Marine Le Pen and Bernard Henri-Lévy as examples of each. 

It made sense to me at first glance. Maybe that’s because, while Rancière was writing in 2006, I was reading in 2016 so could see more obviously (and unfortunately) how Le Pen’s socialist nationalism* and Henri-Lévy’s secular liberalism dance together.

* Where have I heard of a formula like that before? It sounds weirdly familiar.

It's a peculiarly European problem. Even more peculiar than European – a Western European problem and very much a French problem as well. That singular kind of opposition to freedom in the name of democracy. Perhaps it’s Dutch too. 

A devotion to liberal secularism and tolerance turns you against freedom. 

You can split democracy in two ways, you see. One side, you focus on democratic institutions – parliaments, courts, political parties, bureaucracies, welfare services, public utilities, police, and so on. Call that, just for the sake of the argument we’ll be having over the next few posts, civic democracy.

Now look at the other side of what we call democracy in this split. This is the freedom to do whatever you want with your life as long as you don't hurt anyone. I often joke with my friends and co-workers, when they float the idea of doing something harmless that they haven’t before – “Of course! Why wouldn’t you? We live in a democracy. You can do whatever you want!”

Maybe just call that liberty. 

The problem is that you can very easily confuse civic democracy with liberty. As if conformity to the institutions of your country was the same as being free to live as you wish, as long as those institutions were governed by democratic norms like representation, management transparency, and the freedom to criticize them.

Patriotic French citizens demonstrate for their religious freedoms.

But institutions don't free you. At least not entirely. They can certainly provide you with benefits you need to secure your material freedom – like subsidized or not-for-profit utilities, welfare payments, or the protection of your civic freedoms. 

Institutions demand something of you that constrains your freedom – loyalty. Conformity. Since the institutions of a state are closely entwined with a country’s culture, conformity takes on a powerful moral imperative as well as a political command to be loyal.

Look at the example of France. Racist nationalism has grown there (and throughout Europe) in response to large waves of Muslim migrants. Public suspicion of migrants and Islam’s association with terrorism drives the alienation of that minority community. And that alienation tends to swing more members to embrace the fanaticism of terrorism in Islam’s name. The cycle continues.

The response is all too often to push Muslim migrants to conform to secular French life. The freedom of secularism becomes a freedom of fealty, turning away from how you want to live. 

Even though a headscarf doesn't hurt anybody and the moralities of those who choose to wear it are far more diverse than the garment’s opponents believe. And the secularism of the French constitution is rooted in its cultural Catholicism to begin with.

The French case, which Rancière writes about, is a very clear example of a common mistake people make about politics – taking civic democracy to be material liberty. As though loyalty to democratically governed institutions was the same as freedom.

This is just one of many ways you can call yourself a democrat while hating freedom. . . . To Be Continued

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! II: To Blur Is and Should in Reality, Composing, 13/09/2016

The core concept of my Utopias book is the relationship between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. That relationship is always one of becoming, whether it’s a real process or it never gets out of our imaginations.

Thinking about Robert Kagan’s essay last week, I realized that it made a very stark contrast with my own stance (and Etienne Balibar’s, and Antonio Negri’s, and many others) on what politics and activism is for.

Done well, or done badly, an activist for any cause is trying to change the world. I think a proper utopia will be centred around a particular range of values. I’m not about to grant that a radical white supremacist is a utopian in the sense I’m exploring, for example. That ideology is fundamentally cruel and destructive – it frees no one.

From an anniversary ceremony marking the 70th year
of the United Nations' existence. This was another
institution whose fundamental philosophical goal was
forging a new, more peaceful, self-conception for
humanity. The ceremony was held in San Francisco,
an important site, given its status as the capitol of a
fictional Federation with a similar nature.

So in that sense, Utopias explores how we figure out how to free the world.

Contrast Kagan and Balibar now. Balibar – even though he’s radical in many ways – ultimately keeps his faith in the European Union, for example.* It’s a space that allows us to create a new concept of power, a new social identity.

* Faith in the European Union was much easier to hold in 2003, when Balibar was compiling this book of his essays, We, the People of Europe?.

The EU’s core goal was to move European people away from defining themselves as members of a nation. Do you understand how radical and crazy that idea is? European politics and institutions literally invented the modern concept of nation. They exported this idea as the organizing principle of our entire international institutional and legal structure.

The concept of the nation even pervades the basic language of politics. Down to the word ‘international.’ A little exaggerated, but this is a truth. It’s the United Nations, after all – not the United Cultures, United Lands, United Societies, United Humanity, or even United Peoples.

That’s how radical it is to build a massive bureaucratic institution whose long-term cultural goal is pressing European societies to stop thinking of themselves as nations. 

Pursuing that kind of change is an enormous risk. You’re developing whole new political and legal institutions that have never really been tried before. The comprehensiveness and physical scale of European Union institutions and reach had no precedent in human history. 

Something that risky is always in danger of collapsing for some unforeseen reason or some terrible crisis. I feel like the European Union had become such a huge and powerful economic force that, popularly, we didn’t really believe it could fail. But it’s only a few decades old, and the Brexit vote just happened a few months ago.

It may take several tries to get an institution like the EU to work. And from a perspective like Robert Kagan’s, it’s ridiculous to try. 

Geert Wilders, one of the most ridiculous-looking
examples of the sneering face of European nationalism's
last primal horrifying scream. I like to mock them as
much as I can, to remind me that Nazis are human.

Kagan made a fundamental challenge to the viability of the European Union and the standard European approach to global politics as institutional and legal. Europeans can only pursue their experiments in international institutions and build their foreign policy around international law, because they were weak. Most importantly, they were weak and had a protector.

Kagan saw a world where, in international relations, states and militaries were the ultimate power. Your city may be a global economic hub, but it won’t be for much longer after our army pounds it to rubble and kills millions of your people. 

Accepting that brutality makes the foreign policy school of realism deserve its name. It’s a political philosophy that’s literally throwing up your hands and damning the world to hell. It accepts that there is nothing anyone can do to make the world more peaceful or just. 

If you want to build peaceful institutions in your own corner of the world, you need an ally with a massive army to protect you from the other massive armies that will inevitably destroy you. And at least temporarily, that may be necessary.

Because the experiments don’t always work. If anything has broken the EU, for example, it’s that the migrant crisis came too soon. Europe was in the middle of dealing with a reactionary nationalist insurrection – the last screams of the old national order. Leaders like Jorg Haider, Pim Fortuyn, Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban, Geert Wilders, and Beata Szydlo. 

Too many people still believed in the nation to forget about defending its ethnic and territorial integrity from a wave of suffering people. 

Maybe if European society had managed to weather one more generation without disruption, they’d have helped enough people think without nationhood. 

Experiments are fragile, and they need to be protected. The most valuable experiments are the ones that are hardest to protect, political experiments. But if the experiment is successful, they won’t need protection anymore. No one would.

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 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 

Unity & Freedom I: Democracy Corrupt at Birth, Research Time, 16/08/2016

I sometimes think that states on the European model were built for empire, right from the start. That’s not just because Antonio Negri explained in Empire how imperialism is basically the same governance structures of the nation-state on a global scale. 

I mean, my uptake of Negri’s arguments are a big part of that. I first read Empire in 2007, so these ideas have been part of my political thinking for nearly a decade. But they were gestating through my academy years. Only recently did I decide to act on them, getting involved with critical activist voices.

We can't ignore it any longer.

Maybe the times decided for me, even if I was a little late.

Contrasting what I've read of Negri with what I've been reading of Etienne Balibar is interesting, though. I remember reading about how Balibar is considered a liberal counterweight to Negri’s ideas in this broad field of left-wing European academic political thinkers. 

Yet I find their premises and traditions quite similar. At least philosophically. Balibar just seems to have a little more faith in institutions like the European Union to revolutionize how people think of themselves ethically. That is, as communities, nations, ethnicities, identities.

I think the EU had that potential, even though by now it’s been thoroughly squandered. I’d rather we keep a strong memory of what was lost than believe that wrecked potential never existed in the first place. Otherwise, we’d lose all hope that we can do better.

If you read the link above, Yascha Mounk writes that the most powerful political movement in Western society right now is about stripping the liberal values from democracy. 

What he calls illiberal democracy keeps the institutional levers of democracy like elections while enforcing internal racial and class hierarchies, excluding immigrants, and stifling critical speech and political activism. I’d call it nationalism by ballot box.

There's a deeper structural problem that Mounk’s insightful and terrifying analysis doesn’t dig for, though. He takes for granted that the state is the natural home for liberal democracy. He doesn’t hit on Negri’s point: that the state relies on unquestioned authority to function, and so is structurally anti-democratic. 

Being a good citizen of a state means following orders, doing what you're told. The fundamental gesture of democracy – democracy’s birth in every such moment, really – is “Fuck you.”

They should never have let us listen to this in ninth
grade. Now we'll never do what they tell us. Except for
the ones who always do anyway.

One aspect of Balibar’s analysis in his essays on the (philosophical) nature of the EU focusses on the state as an exclusionary body. I discussed this a little bit yesterday. But the details are important. 

The European model of nation-state has a peculiar history, which only appeared like the universal model for government because European nation-states has powerful militaries that literally conquered the Earth a couple of hundred years ago. 

And that history makes European culture terrible at handling any kind of immigration – even in countries like Italy where immigration can only help the society and economy, thanks to their low birth rates.

Modern Europe's precursor actually was a unified identity: Christendom. Much of its identity forged through military conflicts with Muslim empires and ongoing persecution of Jewish and Roma minorities. As Christendom fractured among internal conflict, the nation-state emerged as the new institution of peace and unity.

However, this did nothing to bring peace to the region, since the nation-states had even narrower identities than the religious definition of European society. Nation-states had clearly defined borders, and those borders were for people with shared ethnic-linguistic identities. All others were excluded.

As long as states define themselves as nations, there will always be those left behind. Exclusion is necessary. And total. Just how total? . . . Hoo, boy. . . . To Be Continued

The Force of Becoming Majority, Research Time, 15/08/2016

An important part of Utopias will be my attempt to understand what makes a community – the social body that you want to exist according to a political, moral, and ethical ideal. A community is the thing you want to become a utopia.

As critical as I am of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal
Party, I am proud of the progress Canada has made
since its genesis as an Anglo-white supremacist
dominion of the British Empire to become a country
whose political ideals are omni-inclusion.

I’m a Canadian – my philosophical investigations and research come from that position in the post-imperialist era of the West. So the concept of nation and nationhood is inextricably bound up with our understanding of what a political community is. And that’s really unfortunate. As a wise Canadian once said, it’s just bogus and sad.

I think Canada is a very fortunate place for the new era – it seems to be the one country in the West (maybe even the world!) where the conception of the country has split from any traditional concept of nationhood. 

Generations of an open door to immigration has led to literally hundreds (if not thousands) of ethnicities becoming part of Canadian history and identity. My country is far from perfect, but I think we offer a model for how to build a new kind of civil state.

When I look at the situation in other countries of the West, I see that nationhood – that drive to define your countryman, exclude others (and Others) by any means – is violently reasserting itself. Last week, I picked up a book that I thought would be a useful theoretical exploration of nationhood, Etienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe.

So far, it’s been remarkably enlightening. The book’s essays were culled from publications and lectures throughout the early 2000s, given in Western Europe and the United States. Balibar’s thinking at this moment takes place at a critical juncture – the nationalist parties of Europe were rising to the point that audiences around the world were taking notice. But Europe didn’t yet face a situation that would let them triumph.

With the refugee crisis from the Syrian civil war, Europe’s nationalists have their moment. Their political ascent in Europe may be unstoppable now – and millions will likely suffer from their policies. 

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's Front National, one
charismatic leader who can put a charming face on the
racial exclusion and nationalism that can destroy the
last, gasping ideals of the European Union.

In the early 2000s, the European Union was seemingly an unstoppable political entity. It would bring together in peace all the nations of Europe, a region that had experienced war for literally centuries. It would require an entirely new concept to justify that political unity, since the concept of the nation had justified the most recent centuries of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The EU would become a mere bureaucracy without the participation of all its people in creating a new concept to underlie a political and social unity and community that would make a mockery of nationality. Balibar was writing in an era where, referring at least to Europe, that concept was still possible.

The concept of nation merges two social and political phenomena. One is the community itself, usually defined through ethnic commonality, cultural continuity, and a shared language. This ethnically-defined community expresses itself institutionally in the state, a bureaucracy of territorially-bound social control. 

The European tradition of liberal democracy that grew wrapped around the national concept offered a democratic universality. The rights and freedoms of people in a social community were developed and guaranteed through a citizenship contract with the state institution. 

State authority guaranteed your freedom. How democratic your society was depended on how open your institutional authorities were to changing the terms of the citizenship contract.

Etienne Balibar, author of We, The People of Europe, and
theorist of new possibilities for existence.

But this universality was only abstract. Practically, this still amounted to an exclusionary institution and morality. The universality of the rights of the citizens only applied materially to those citizens who could build their own national state. 

The minority could only access those rights by becoming-majority – collapsing their difference – or else carving out their own territorial enclave. But that would be yet another form of becoming-majority – what was once an imperilled minority now becomes an empowered majority enforcing its own social conformity on its own minorities.

Balibar discusses briefly the constitutional tizzy that came up in early republican constitutions in France, as they attempted to recognize the status of Corsica as a nation within France. It reminded me very much of Canada’s recent constitutional crises over the national status of Quebec. 

It amounts to a calamity – nationhood can admit no minority that is not at least in progress to become-majority. And the existing majority must also accept the becoming-majority of the minority. The fate of the Jews and Roma in Europe testify to this calamity in its strongest form.

So as I read and blog about Balibar’s examination of nationhood and the concept of nation, I’ll have this calamity at the forefront of my thoughts. As, I’m pretty sure, did Etienne himself.

The Organization of Freedom, Jamming, 27/06/2016

I had quite a long day at work yesterday, so as I write this up last night, I’m not planning to structure any effusively brilliant or tightly reasoned arguments. If you want one of those, check out my first few thoughts on Brexit that I published late Friday (and dated Saturday).

This weekend, I’ve mostly been thinking. A little Althusser reading, but a lot of thinking about Brexit and how it will affect my friends who live in Britain. The ones who are there for a little while, the ones who moved there permanently, and the ones who were born, raised, and live there.

European Union leaders have talked about the pain Britain will cause itself when it leaves. And they’ve demanded that Britain invoke Article 50 and negotiate its exit from the EU immediately. I don’t think there’s much of a veil behind their threats.

David Cameron will probably be remembered as the
biggest fuckup of a prime minister in the history of
modern Britain.

Here's what Martin Schulz, leader of the European Parliament, said in The Guardian just the other day after the referendum result. “Britain has just cut its ties with that market. That’ll have consequences, and I don’t believe other countries will be encouraged to follow that dangerous path.”

Look at Greece for an indication of what European Union leadership does to governments and member countries who refuse to follow orders. After the OXI vote, Greece received only an offer of even more punishing debt relief terms and austerity programs than the package people voted on in that referendum. 

People spoke in a democratic voting process, with a group of national leaders carrying the flag forward. They disagreed with the way the EU bureaucracy and leadership was doing things. For voicing that disagreement, they were punished severely.

Many of my friends in the UK who I’ve had a chance to speak with think that nothing too serious will ultimately occur. But I’m not hopeful for any mercy from an EU leadership that sees itself as having received an even bigger middle finger than the Greeks sent. 

The EU and its related institutions sent Greece into a hideous poverty from which its economy may not fully recover for generations. That was over a debt relief deal. There was talk of leaving the common currency, but not the common market or the union itself. Brexit was an open separation referendum which the independistes won.

I'm also revealing my inner Ian Levine, but the spectre of
economic ruin post-Brexit leaves me worried about
whether Britain's most important institutions will survive.
That includes the ones of immediate material importance
to people's physical well-being like the National Health
Service, and also its great cultural institutions like the
BBC. Most important to me about that is whether the
BBC will be able to keep producing Doctor Who.

What do you seriously think people so vindictive as to do that to Greece will do to Britain? I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit it with sanctions the intensity of what Saddam Hussein’s Iraq received through the 1990s.

Did you know that Britain imports just over a quarter of its food from continental Europe? Imagine if that were to stop all of a sudden. Wouldn’t want something to happen to those imports, now, would we?

The European Union is not an enlightened institution. It is run by petty, vindictive, almost power-mad politicians and technocrats. 

But it could have been an enlightened institution. The EU was supposed to be a trade federation that facilitates cultural exchanges around Europe as well as economic. It was supposed to get all Europeans working together on a common project. That common project was literally continental brotherhood.

Like a lot of institutions around the world today, it builds communication links between people from communities otherwise separate. It lets people work together, encounter each other, get to know each other. People who would never have interacted without those institutions. Who’d know each other only through stereotypes and news reports.

People who seem like aliens. The European Union was supposed to forge a single community out of the poly-linguistic massively multicultural collection of millions of people. It was supposed to keep those people from going to war with each other ever again – to stop literally nearly a thousand years of history and change Europe for the better forever.

Antonio Negri writes about the potential of human society
and institutions for freedom, democracy, and brotherhood
with an idealism and optimism that seems horribly out of
place in today's politics. But its being so strange is why
holding that idealism in our time is so important.

Those communication links that facilitate everyday interactivity all over the globe are the foundations of global democracy. Not the global acceptance of elections for government. That’s a foundation of a democratic state. Not democracy.

Democracy is the brotherhood of people themselves. That doesn’t need any boundaries. The fewer boundaries there are between people, and the more people actually interact with each other, the more democratic the world becomes. 

Any institution that builds regular, complex, frequently-travelled connections among disparate communities encourages democracy. Because that relationship of friendship – on a mass scale – constitutes the cultural spirit of democracy.

Those relationships make us more flexible, adaptable, powerful, and peaceful. We can solve our problems best when we all do so together. We’ll combine the maximum amount of intelligence around the globe to solve our problems, and build solutions where no one will be left behind because we won’t have any cause to leave anyone behind.

As Antonio Negri said, institutions that build a global community are best suited to achieve and maintain freedom. The most profound freedom, the freedom of being part of a community where everyone cares for everyone and does their best to help them.

Global democracy is global brotherhood. If we all understand that, we’ll live in a world at peace.