The world still works on the obsolete assumption of the nation-state: most countries are supposed to correspond more or less to a common ethnicity, the so-called “nation”, and this nation is politically organized as a state. On paper, this looks great: a group of people who share a common background, usually also a language, and supposedly have values in common, are more likely to agree together about the way their society should be organized.
But the underlying concept of an ethnicity-based nation is still that people belonging to the same nation have more than “values”1 in common, they share the same gene pool. Needless to say, considering that sharing genetic features with one another creates a natural bond between people is the essence of racism. This idea implies that not sharing such features makes people less compatible, hence introduces reluctance and suspicion (at least) against people from a visibly different background. Given what we know nowadays about genetics and all, this kind of idea is laughably wrong: genetic diversity is surprisingly rich, and people often have genetic origins that they don’t suspect, sometimes far from the ancestry they believe that they have.2
So the concept of nation is based on a false assumption, but it is still what rules the world. Even in democratic countries, perhaps even more, people often believe that there is something unique and almost sacred in their own nationality. In progressive circles, the racist roots of the idea of nation are replaced with a shared history and shared democratic values, a special national culture, that is, a more tolerant and more modern vision of a nation. Very often people confuse their national culture with the idea of the nation. They also confuse the symbols of their country with the country itself: people who consider the flag or the anthem as sacred are mistaken; this happens because it’s easier to focus on a few simple symbols rather than to understand a vast and vague common culture, in the same way that it’s easier to look at physical traits for defining people than to try to understand the nuances of somebody’s personality. As usual, we crave logic and order so much that we tend to accept any “explanation”, no matter how wrong it is.
Even the principle of self-determination, which is rightfully the basis of our current world order,3 is not clear about how to define the group of people who should self-determine together. Implicitly, it still relies on the notion that there would be some kind of natural way to group people together. Practically, it is simply assumed that any previously defined frontiers can be used to separate the “countries”, no matter how arbitrarily or illegitimately they had been established. Time appears to legitimate anything: almost everywhere in the world, there have been some ruthless colonizers committing horrible crimes against indigenous peoples4 at some point. A few generations later, the descendants of the colonizers are considered as legitimate in the territory, and often they are even the landlords. When some of the indigenous people survive, they often become mixed with the colonizers or their descendants. The idea that anybody could have any kind of “natural” claim on any territory or could pretend to have pure blood of any kind is ridiculous; it is actually childish, like a kid imagining that they themselves are secretly the true prince or princess of some fairytale adventures.
The point is,5 countries are defined arbitrarily. Borders have solidified over time based on geographical obstacles and the chaotic evolution of history. Wherever people end up, they form a society and this society usually evolves into a complex organization with its own culture, language and norms. So of course there can be strong cultural ties between people “from the same place”, this is why one of the first questions people are asked in order to define themselves is where they are from. The places where you lived are supposed to represent your identity, but only to the extent that you likely absorbed the local culture of those places while living there. And this culture obviously changes all the time, it is affected by everything: events, technology, migrations, trends, songs, discoveries, struggles, politics… It’s alive, and this is why a lot of people are not comfortable because they feel secure only by defining themselves through some fixed image of who they are, including their nationality: they need to feel that it’s something enshrined forever, a foundation of their identity. In their mind it must stay the same, even though it obviously has changed a lot through history and will keep evolving.6 This is the difference between a rigid notion of identity based on genetic and/or territorial closeness, and a more subtle kind of identity made of live culture; the former is like an inert label slapped on people arbitrarily, the latter is an abstract living thing, hard to define precisely.
People travel more easily, they move farther and more often. People communicate more. Mutual understanding improves. People used to live in tribes fearful of each other; later they lived in villages, constantly having to be ready to defend themselves against attackers; they built huge castles and forts, spending a lot of their energy and time just to protect themselves against the next invader… who might be the people from the next city, just a few miles away. Basically our ancestors had to fear and protect themselves against the attacks of their neighbours: threatened at first by virtually anybody, by the next tribe, then by the next village or the next city, and finally only by the next country. Threats came progressively from greater distances not only because of technology, but because there was more trust between neighbours, and these “trust circles” kept slowly growing broader. Nowadays the vast majority of us don’t need to spend our time and energy defending against the next country, let alone our neighbours.7 This is why we enjoy speedy progress at every level on a global scale: when people don’t have to constantly worry about protecting themselves and their loved ones against various threats, they have more time and mental energy to spend on other things, for instance games, education, science, medicine, technology…
Nowadays everything in the world is based primarily on countries, but this is not going to last forever. One can already observe the multiple ways in which small steps of unification are taking place: there are more and more norms and processes which are uniformized, common legal frameworks are put in place, multilateral trade agreements facilitate multinational business even more, joint defense pacts… These are the foundations of a world order where countries are very slowly becoming less relevant politically. Of course, all of this is still very much country-dependent so far: what we currently have is a byzantine assemblage of international organizations devoted to cooperation, with unclear goals and opaque leadership, most practically still governed indirectly by games of power between countries.
The natural direction of the world is towards more exchange, more mixing between people, more merging between countries, in the same way that countries have often been formed by merging smaller independent territories. People used to feel that the inhabitants of the next village are aliens, now many feel a sense of familiarity across a large country, sometimes across a continent or even broader. Sure it’s not yet a universal feeling, far from it, but it’s very unlikely to change course. Ultimately, people should be able to feel this closeness with anybody else on Earth. Imagine…
Additionally it’s becoming so obvious that most problems that our societies have are global as well, and must be addressed globally. The environmental challenges in particular are not going to be solved at the level of one country, it will require a level of universal cooperation that was never seen before.8 As usual, probably this will not start before a major disaster happens unfortunately, finally triggering the realization that there must be a radical change of paradigm.9 And it will certainly be very hard, because a huge part of the world is definitely not ready at all.10
People who are still insecure about their identity and nationality, who cling to a concept of their country as something eternally the same, robust and strong, may have an unpleasant wake-up call. And they might project their fears on whatever arbitrary target they can find.11 I think that a big job of progressive people in the next few decades will be to reassure these scared people: yes, the world changes very fast and we need to accept this; no, our cultures don’t have to disappear because the world changes; in fact, a culture, even a national sense of identity, may become stronger when it’s finally accepted as something alive, something which does not depend on hard borders or a strong army, something which moves freely everywhere and fruitfully combines with other cultures.12
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By the way the vague concept of “common values” is often just a politically correct way to mean same background, actually implying same race or similar. ↩︎
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Racism turns out to be a very credulous idea: it’s the idea that differences visible to the naked eye, typically skin colour, are the most representative traits of who people are and are intrinsically linked to people’s other features, like intelligence. This might have sounded plausible in the past, but this is now absurd: there is no more reason that skin colour would matter more than say blood type, for instance. So pretending that there is any kind of “ethnic purity” in people sharing visible features is as ridiculous as trying to organize society based on people’s blood type. Once again, this is the result of the natural human tendency to literally make sense out of nothing: in order to feel more secure, we pretend that we know something about how the world works based on what we naively see, and we prefer a wrong understanding than no understanding at all. ↩︎
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People often forget that as well, or don’t pay attention. Even if the right to self-determination is still not always fully respected, the world would be a lot worse off without it. This is the reason most of us can live in peace, people! ↩︎
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The question of who is truly indigenous to a territory is itself often as impossible to answer as whether the chicken or the egg came first. ↩︎
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To be honest, I often forget what the point is when I write. Hence the title of the blog, innit? ↩︎
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By the way, this is is why the more people are attached to a fixed image of their country, the more they are attached to a traditional version of history which presents their country in a good light. They cannot admit that historians would reveal negative facts which contradict their fairytale (hi)story. ↩︎
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That doesn’t stop some people to keep believing imaginary threats, and as a result to “preventively” have guns to defend themselves, in turn causing the danger that they meant to prevent. This is a psychological issue and sadly a self-fulfilling fear: if you imagine that random people have weapons and are dangerous, it’s a matter of time before somebody gets hurt… and it’s more likely than not to be by mistake. ↩︎
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We are way too slow at tacking the environmental issues precisely because countries are still too strong: as long as our leaders are thinking in terms of the world as an international competition between countries, and are primarily motivated by staying in power in their own country, they keep following their usual individualistic strategy… This is very likely going to blow in our collective faces, tragically. ↩︎
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For the record, the last change of paradigm of such magnitude was World War II. This is what triggered the process of setting up many of the modern tools of international cooperation: it was finally realized that there must be some serious effort made to ensure minimal peace. It’s a whole other topic, but it was essentially the end of the rule of the strong, even if only imperfectly. Making genocide an international crime and ending colonization as a normal practice were huge steps towards rejecting the violence imposed by a country. ↩︎
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I mean especially the Western countries, which are used to their dominance and level of comfort. People in Third World countries are probably the most ready, because they don’t have a choice and most of them already know it. ↩︎
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Traditionally migrants are an easy target; it’s depressing how predictable these types of reaction are. ↩︎
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The Irish culture comes to mind, of course: this tiny country exported its culture and pride all around the world, and nowadays this culture is embraced by practically everyone on Earth. There is an interesting comparison to draw with its previous colonizer, the UK, which not only had to withdraw its colonies, chose to divorce from the EU in an unfriendly way, and faces threats of disunion at home. Obviously not everything is rosy in Ireland and not everything is bleak in the UK, but think about this: nobody would have bet a penny on this kind of outcome in the past, when poor Irish migrants were rejected everywhere and the UK was so powerful and admired. ↩︎