The Myth of the Nation-State Two linked articles I've been wanting to post from, www.policyinnovations.org/
The whole idea of Nation States is shrouded in mystery. Who exactly was it that told us it is a necessary organizing principle that allows people to pool their resources for the common good and mobilize against common threats? In today's world, the threat many times comes from a people's own government. The day is coming when people in their local groups and cross-border associations will be increasingly eager and able to govern themselves, thank you! To do this successfully, however, they will have to recognize that although they may be looking out for local interests, that they are also individuals in a global community where the actions of one can and do affect the ALL. Also, the current problems of today, including pollution, climate change and energy security, are so grave that they will force cooperation between different 'camps.'
Please be sure to check out the other resources given at each article....I believe we will be seeing more talk on these much needed discussions....Michelle The Myth of the Nation-StateBy Devin T. Stewart
September 2, 2008
This fall, thousands of college students will be taught a myth presented as fact. It is a myth that has helped fuel wars and may hinder finding solutions to the world's biggest problems. Though the origin of this myth is cloudy, science has proven its falsity, and a globalized world has rendered it anachronistic. I am talking about the nation-state.
The nation-state myth conflates two ideas, one that is concrete, the state, and one that is fuzzy, the nation. The utility of the state is clear. It is a necessary organizing principle that allows people to pool their resources for the common good and mobilize against common threats, whether they are floods or invading armies. The state is also the final arbiter of law. State power is even on the rise, partly as a backlash to globalization and as a result of growing wealth from energy markets.
But the nation-state as a basis for statecraft obscures the nature of humanity's greatest threats. Pollution, terrorism, pandemics, and climate change are global phenomena. They do not respect national sovereignty, and, therefore, they necessitate global cooperation.
The origin of the nation-state idea is unclear. Most agree that it offered a way to consolidate and legitimize a state's rule over a group of people, whether defined by a common language, culture, or ethnicity. The problem is that the contours of a cultural community rarely coincide with a political entity.
Nor does the ideal of national unity account for internal diversity and conflict. Identities within nations are fluid, even from minute to minute. About 15 years ago, I spent a summer in France's Loire Valley. As many travelers to France will attest, people in the French countryside believe that they, not Parisians, constitute the "true" France.
This division of core and periphery is common in many countries. But I also noticed that a person's identity would change during the course of a conversation. "We French" would give way to "We Gauls," "We Latins," "We Bretons," "We Franks," or "We Europeans" depending on the topic. This ever-changing identity was startling, but, on second thought, it made sense: after all, Charles de Gaulle famously said that it is difficult to govern a country with 246 types of cheese.
China is often thought to be governed by the Han majority. But this group is linguistically, culturally, and even genetically diverse. As the author Ian Buruma recently mused, it is not clear what people mean by "China." Taiwan is an independent state but is officially part of China. Chinese culture and language has spread all over the world. "China" is much more than just a nation-state, Buruma concludes. Taiwanese scholar Lee Hsiao-feng has recently argued that the concept "Chinese" is a meaningless word that was fabricated to justify rule over minorities.
It is difficult to imagine a nation that is confined to one state or a state that contains one nation. Some argue that Japan is an example of a nation-state. In countless heated discussions, I have reminded many Japanese that the Japanese people actually comprise Ainu, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Ryuku. Their response is always: "Yes, but we want to believe that there is a Japanese people." They even have a field of study devoted to examining what it means to be Japanese.
Like religion, the nation-state myth requires a leap of faith. Japanese scholar Yoshihisa Hagiwara argues that since it is not grounded in fact, the nation-state myth is bound to dissolve, giving way to an understanding that we are merely individuals who are part of a global community. He laments that the Japanese are especially fond of the idea of "Japaneseness," making it possible that Japan may become the "last hero" of a dying ethos.
Expressions of this notion appear in popular culture. A recent credit card commercial depicts a father and son traveling to Norway to trace their family's origins. After bonding over local beer, food, sweaters, and swimming, they discover their family is actually from Sweden.
If I were to take that trip, I might have gone to Ireland to discover that my Irish ancestors were originally from Scotland. But where were the Scots from? Just across another sea, perhaps. The origin myth continues ad infinitum until we reach humanity's common ancestor, or an actual myth—a black egg in China, a spear in the ocean in Japan, or the interaction of fire and ice in France.
If policymakers are to address today's problems, they must think more broadly. One place to start may be to reexamine the concept of the nation-state, which students around the world are taught is the basic unit of international relations. Beyond the core Realist theories of balance of power, an introduction to ethics in international affairs—moral philosophy, human rights, and the role of nonstate actors—should be mainstreamed in international relations curricula.
As the philosopher Peter Singer showed in his book One World, a united front against the biggest problems facing the world will require a fundamental shift in attitude—away from parochialism and toward a redefinition of self-interest. Enlightened self-interest can be state-based, but interests would be redefined to encompass universal principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If these interests are to gain universal recognition, we will need to shed the nation-state myth once and for all.
A version of this essay was originally published by Project Syndicate.
For a full discussion of this topic with responses from Nikolas Gvosdev and David Andelman, please visit Carnegie Ethics Online.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Please read our usage policy. Related Resources:How Cooperation (Eventually) Trumps Conflict (Videos)
The New MAD World (Commentary)
Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods (Audio)
Civilized Talk (Commentary)
The Globalization of Ethics (Commentary)
Source: www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/000080------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Globalization of Language Will Muzzle the Nation-StateBy Michael Bell
September 10, 2008
In "Ending the Nation-State Myth," Devin Stewart recently argued that the nation-state is past its sell-by date. I wholeheartedly agree. Here I offer some insight into the reasons for its existence, and the coming reasons for its nonexistence.
Human beings have a hard-wired drive to associate with each other in groups, which intensified during the evolution of Homo sapiens from primate ancestors. The need to belong operated originally at the kin-group level, or the tribe or village. And as the size and complexity of human settlements increased, this innate sense of belonging attached itself to the larger units that developed—cities initially, and entire polities later on ("we Roman citizens," as Cicero noted).
The sense of belonging is flexible in a human: As Stewart points out, you can be both French and from the Loire Valley. In modern cultures, group membership also forms a key part of self-identity.
But while evolution equipped humans to cooperate with each other in groups, it also provided for competition between groups; in fact, the two processes are inseparable as a social adaptation. Humans are naturally xenophobic—people belonging to different groups tend to compete, often through bloodshed, and this tendency scaled up with the formation of bigger groupings.
Language was not necessarily one of the original cognitive innovations that accompanied the emergence of the group, but when it arrived it certainly sharpened the differences between competing groups. Indeed, much of the power of the nation-state resides in the linguistic concepts that define it: National culture is embedded in its own particular language. The attachment of the French to their language, noted by David Singh Grewal in "Speaking Fairly" (Policy Innovations, June 2008), is based on the fear that their treasured culture will disappear along with their language.
For the nation-state to acquire and exercise power over its citizens, a means of communication between state and people was necessary, and this was lacking in medieval Europe, where elites spoke French or Latin and the peasantry spoke vernaculars. Education and proselytizing required laborious copying of manuscripts and was restricted to a small proportion of the population. To a large extent, the church acted as moral arbiter and educator of the masses.
The nation-state, therefore, didn't really coalesce until the invention of printing allowed monarchs or governments to educate their citizens in what Benedict Anderson calls national print-languages (Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983). The nation-state, in its modern form, can therefore be said to have emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is reasonable to interpret the nation-state during its heyday as steering the group-centered loyalty of its citizens for its own purposes, initially benign for the most part but culminating with the genocides of the 20th century which have given nationalism a bad name.
So what will stop it? Globalization, of course. There can be debate over the degree of fairness of globalization, but there can't be any dispute that it is happening. The most important globalization of all is language, driven by technology—radio, satellites, mass travel, and above all the Internet.
As Grewal points out, it is just an accident of history that English is the likely global language of the future. The process has now probably gone too far to be reversed and will even accelerate as machine translation is perfected. It is likely that one day we will all have Babel fish in our ears or cognitive language implants, allowing perfect, immediate communication between any two human beings on the planet. At that point, nation-states will have lost their main mental weapon and even their raison d'être. Without a national print language, there is no nation.
People worry about a flattened global culture, with Chinglish elbowing out literary expression; but that won't happen. Just as the gentleman from Loire sings valley folk songs one moment and "La Marseillaise" the next, so will the global citizen of the future celebrate his local village and culture ever more fiercely. The Internet will play a major part in this: Never was there such a medium for forming groups. Facebook, Friends Reunited, HiPiHi, and thousands of similar networking sites will offer unlimited opportunities for people to satisfy their need to belong.
David Grewal points out the possible unfairness of asymmetric linguistic situations, although the Babel fish or its equivalent would appear to remedy this: If it becomes cost free to translate from Chinese to English, the reverse will also true. So in what culture (language) will children be educated? The answer may be many. The global citizen with her English-based environmental and economic agendas could be at the same time an expert in fourteenth century French poetry and a veterinarian in Cambodia.
And the nation-state? Many of its competencies will be taken on by global bodies or organizations, a process that can already be seen at work in trade, finance, and political governance. At the other extreme, people in their local groups and cross-border associations will be increasingly eager and able to govern themselves, courtesy of the Internet.
It won't happen tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow, but eventually the nation-state will just wither away, more or less gracefully, reduced to the status of a municipal council, worrying over what color to paint the streetlamps.
Michael Bell heads the research blog Groups R Us.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Please read our usage policy. Related Resources:Speaking Fairly (Commentary)
Reversing Babel (Commentary)
Networks Power Globalization (Briefings)
Civilized Talk (Commentary)
The Open Education Revolution (Innovations)
The Myth of the Nation-State (Commentary)
Source: www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/000084
