Tag Archives: Future of the nation-state

Citizenship as Fob Key

One of the key conceptual difficulties faced by those grappling with the resurgence of nationalism today is to hold fast to the recognition that this return of the nation state occurs in an already globalized world. In other words, this isn’t our grandparents’ nationalism we are confronting but something quite new, and forgetting that fact leads to all kinds of intellectual mistakes, most notably imagining that the ghosts of the likes of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini have risen from the grave like Halloween ghouls.

The question we should be asking is what does nationalism in an era of globalization actually look like? And perhaps to answer this question it’s better to zoom in rather than zoom out- to focus on the individual rather than the geopolitical. The question then becomes- what does it mean to live in a globalized world where the state and membership in the group it represents, rather than “withering away” is becoming not merely more important, but something no individual can effectively function without?

A good bit of this outline can be found in Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s excellent book Cosmopolites: the coming of the global citizen. Yet, despite the title, what Abrahamian depicts there is less some emergent citizen of the world, than a new global regime where citizenship has been transformed from a sense of belonging and moral commitment into a means of access to rights, benefits, protections, and perhaps above all the freedom of movement that come with the correct passport- all of which are provided by the state. In other words citizenship has become a commodity of great value, which, like everything else nowadays can be bought, sold, and most disturbingly, repossessed.

Cosmopolites is especially focused on the plight of the Bidoons a stateless people found throughout the Gulf most notably in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Given the extensive benefits that come with being a citizen of those states, the governments of such countries have been loathe to extend equal status to their Bidoon populations, even when individuals can trace their roots in the area into the deep past.

Ironically, statelessness itself gives rise to protections, namely governments are unable to expel stateless people unless some other country is willing to take them in. It was under these conditions that a sophisticated racket arose which involved the purchasing in bulk of citizenship for the Bidoon on a far off island nation near Madagascar, which doubtless none of the Bidoon residents in the UAE or Kuwait had ever heard of- Comoros.

It’s the kind of brilliant scheme that would make a great plot for a Coen Brothers film. Strip unrecognized populations of any claims they could make as de facto citizens by using your oil money to buy them such status in an impoverished country with little else to sell. A failing state to which they could be deported should they become either economically superfluous or an actual political and social nuisance.

The story of the Bidoon is one where the recipient didn’t so much buy citizenship as were forced to accept the “gift” of what was not merely a useless passport but one that put them at risk of being kicked out of the only country they had ever known along with all they had built within it. Yet the experience of the Bidoon is only one version of the booming market that comprises the passport trade. As Abrahamian documents it, passports can be bought from countries located on all corners of the globe and at wildly variable rates (though no of which are easily accessible to the middle class let alone the world’s poor). Dominica sells its passports for a “paltry” $200,000 dollars, while a high end Austria passport will set you back millions of Euros.

Why do the global rich shell out for such papers? Abrahamian sums it up nicely this way:

People with “good” passports don’t think about them much. But people with “bad” passports think about them a great deal  To the wealthy, this is particularly insulting: A bad passport is like a phantom limb that won’t stop tingling no matter how much money, power, or success they’ve accumulated- a constant reminder that the playing field is never truly level, and that the life for your average Canadian billionaire will be easier than that for a billionaire from Botswana or Peru. (73)

In today’s world, a Swiss passport is among the most valuable possessions on earth giving its holder the right to travel in nearly 90 percent of the world’s countries, live in one of its most prosperous and stable states, not to mention the fringe benefit of living close to one’s cash, with Switzerland being one of the top 3 tax havens on the planet.

Notice that I’ve said nothing yet about citizenship beyond the instrumental. It’s all about where one can live, travel or store wealth. Surely, we associate citizenship with something beyond that: not merely the right, but the obligation, to take political responsibility for the decisions of the community one belongs to through acts such as voting, protest, or holding political office. Citizenship entails some commitment on the part of the individual to the past, present and future of the community in which she lives. It is the seat of rights, but also gives rise to obligations, sacrifices in the name of the greater good, which may even demand that an individual risk her life in the name of its defense.

We might be confused into thinking that citizenship in this latter sense as a bundle of rights and obligations that tie an individual to a particular community has always existed. We would be mistaken. Citizenship as a way of relating to the world is, in its modern incarnation, is no older than the French Revolution. Other than that, it’s existed here and there in fleeting moments of freedom- most famously in the city states of the ancient Greeks- only to be supplanted by notions of empire or religious kinship.

Yet we’d be wrong if we thought that such non-citizenship based political and social orders lacked any notion of what we’d recognize as “rights”. It’s just that those rights, conferred on subjects, did not entail actual control of or responsibility for the fate of society itself on the part of the common individual. At least in the case of religiously based social orders, belonging was tightly connected to the obligation of the rich to care for the poor. Think medieval Europe with its numerous public charities and hospitals, a classless bonding of which we still have echoes at Christmas time and which is alive and well in modern day Islam.

Abrahamian herself seems to share some affinity with the kinds of post-citizenship that emerged in the ancient world after the decline of the Greek city-states thanks to the Cynic Diogenes and later the Stoics. In the face of universal empire these pre-Christian thinkers imagined a type of citizenship freed from the notion of place- kosmopolites- “citizens of the universe.” What our circumstance calls for is a similar conceptual leap- for citizenship defined as rights to be decoupled from the nation-state to cover the entire world. Part of me wishes she was right, but it’s hard for me to see any signs that we’re moving towards a such a borderless world rather than moving to a place where the whole purpose of the state has become to act as a sort of monstrous gated community and fortress. Citizenship has become something like the mother of all fob keys, a means of entry, exit, identification and ownership.

A a fob key citizenship is pretty weird, above all because its possession, more often than not, is a product of pure dumb luck. Those, like myself, lucky enough to be born in a country whose inhabitants are gifted with globally valuable keys have been granted them as a mere matter of where they were born. Yet it’s not something I could sell, and it would even be hard for me to separate myself from it were I to try.

It’s certainly a theory with a lot of holes, but perhaps a good deal of current nativist insecurity over immigration can be seen as a fear of fob key inflation. They want to keep the benefits of being an American all to themselves, a kind of selfishness that blinds them to evil. I’m thinking of obscene proposals coming out of the Trump administration such as taking Green Cards away from people who have accessed public benefits, denying foreign soldiers who have risked their lives in US wars the visas they were promised for doing so, and above all, refusing those fleeing violence abroad the right of refuge they are entitled to under international law. We’ve done even worse than that: we’ve locked their children in cages.

Still, citizenship and its passports are just the meta-fob key for a society that’s come to resemble the opening scene of the 1960’s comedy “Get Smart” where its locked steel door after locked steel door all the way down. After the citizen-fob, you find the universal privatization of geography: high security areas, corporate spaces, gated communities, segregated housing, restricted zoning, and ever more importantly algorithmic sorting.

The amazing thing is just how quickly the whole panoply of instruments we use to identify ourselves in relation to some social organizations (passport/nationality, driver’s ID/state resident, bank card/account holder etc) are being moved to the body itself.

Bio-metrics is a booming business whose whole point is to strictly limit access to some space or good. The end result of which is that a world that was supposed to be becoming “flat” and global is instead taking on a kind of customized typology based on a hierarchy of access to the whole. And worse, the same technological revolution that enables global travel and communication is being put into the service of any ever more surveilled and managed space.

You don’t need to turn to William Gibson to see just how dystopian a future we could be moving toward. China has turned a whole region- Xinjiang- into a giant panopticon where its Muslim, Uyghur population is under a state of constant surveillance and oppression made possible by cell phones, CCTV cameras and AI.

We’re probably less likely to reach a similar destination by a move to dictatorship (fingers crossed) than by worshiping at the altars of safety and convenience. People are already inserting microchips under their skin so they can get through security checks quicker,  Amazon GO already allows customers to pay using their “face”. Even shackles have gone digital.

Probably the smallest identifying trait a person has is their DNA. It’s also more specific to an individual than any other bio-metric. You or your algorithm might confuse my face with someone else’s, but, given the right tools, you’re unlikely to confuse my genes- even if I had a twin.

The big threat from genetics in this context is that it becomes a fob key that doesn’t just limit the movement of individuals, but itself is turned into a sort of unscalable wall. Those with the “right” genes considered part of “us” and therefore eligible for our loyalty, protection or beneficence. At first glance this sounds like a revival of ethnic-nationalism, or even more darkly, the kinds of mania about people of the same “blood” we saw with the Nazis. Yet I think the kind of tech-enable social sorting would more likely give rise to something else- not as evil, but just as dismal.

What DNA screening allows you to do is construct the ultimate dynastic society- tribes constructed out of codons. It’s a perfect fit for the unequal society we now live in where for most of us everything’s a wall and nothings a door. If that’s where were headed, I’ll side with Diogenes and stay in my tub.

The lessons the left should (and shouldn’t) take from the victory of Macron

Anna Berezovskaya, Abduction of Europa (2015)

In 2016 populism burst upon liberal democracies like a whirlwind. Yet, since Trump’s election in November of last year the storm appears to have passed. There was the defeat of the far right presidential candidate Norbert Hofer in Austria (of all places) in December of last year followed by the loss of the boldly pompadoured (which seems to be a thing now on the right) Geert Wilders in parliamentary elections in the Netherlands a few months back, followed by the seeming victory of the Kutcher faction over the Bannon faction in the Trump administration, and now, the loss of Le Pen in France. Whew- glad that’s over.

Of course, it’s not over, for it leaves us with the same unaddressed problems that gave rise to popular discontent in the first place. The one and only danger of the populist fever peaking too soon is that it will feed the very complacency among elites that gave us this wave of destructive popular anger in the first place. The fever will just come back, and perhaps next time, in a form much worse should manage to sweep 2016’s craziness under the rug.

As of yet this wave of anger, despite its ugliness or the views of its more vicious fans, hasn’t been so much fascists as populists. This distinction, as distinctions often are, is important. John B. Judis, one of the first to see the populist wave coming in his book The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics.

I’ll get to fascism in a moment, for now, let me note that the distrust of elites driving the populist explosion makes perfect sense given the almost two decades of failure of the power elite from  9-11, to the Iraq war, to the 2008 financial crisis, to the Euro crisis, to the implosion of Syria and the refugee crisis. These acute crises are combined with more structural ones, such as the fact that elites have either twiddled their thumbs, turned the other way, or themselves enabled the erosion of the middle class and the flat-lining of that class’ income growth despite economic gains, in developed countries since the 1970’s. At the same time the political system has grown increasingly sycophantic and corrupt.

As Mark Leibovich pointed out in his book This Town, elites in Washington enact the play of hyper-partisanship even as both Republicans and Democrats engage in an incestious government-coporate revolving door. A problem that since the Global Financial Crisis became even worse to the extent that the former head of the IMF compared what happened in the US to a Third World coup. 

Trump twisted his way into the White House on the claim that “he alone” was able to overturn this system. Instead, what his election seems to mean is that the US is now fully and completely free to join other countries such as China where the distinction between the interest of the rich and the common weal do not exist. Wealthy classes in China and elsewhere understand the new American way of politics very well.

Macron who Trump-like staged his own coup against the declining French political parties was himself an investment banker and his candidacy was as much a desperate by the French elites as a move towards real and democratic reforms.

The fact that Trump’s populism has proven as artificial as the man’s skin tone, along with the fact that other populists, most especially the dangerous figure of Marine Le Pen, have lost in recent elections presents the left with an unprecedented opportunity. But it’s an opportunity that can be seized only if the left can come to understand that not all, or even most, of the supporters of Trump or Le Pen are fascists- a prospect that would require massive and likely violent political resistance in order to ensure the survival of our political and social freedoms.

It’s here where Judis’ book becomes so helpful. In The Populist Explosion Judis identifies the defining feature of populism as anti-elitism. He explains that the early 21st century populism which grew out of the financial crisis hasn’t just come from the right, but also from the left. The left-wing Podemos in Spain is a populist party, as is Syriza in Greece. Both left-wing and right-wing share a disdain for elites they believe have failed us.

For Judis what distinguished right leaning from left leaning populism is that the former adds the category of an enemy minority – Muslims, Mexicans etc that elites supposedly coddle to the detriment of the larger population. (The first step right-wing populism takes towards becoming fascist.)

To step away from Judis for a moment, one of the ideas now becoming dangerously popular among liberals is that populists’ distrust of experts is equal to ignorance and a disdain for science and even rudimentary facts. What liberals don’t acknowledge is their own role in the growth of such mistrust. Elites have promoted the idea that economics is akin to science when it’s closer to astrology. The scientists perhaps best known to the public are those who have made careers out of attacking widely held beliefs by making claims beyond science’s purview.

The mainstream media, the bane of populists everywhere, has indeed been guilty of colossal failures- such as the run up to the war in Iraq, and continues to have a disturbing fetish for American bombs and power.  The last few years have revealed an intelligence apparatus not only frequently incompetent- having missed 9-11, and the Arab Spring to name just two recent failures, but a bureaucratic machine seemingly uninterested in preserving our constitutionally guaranteed rights. In conditions as they stand, mistrust of elites is no vice.

As Judis explains it, populism was invented in the US in the 1890’s in the revolt of mid-western farmers against their economic strangulation by financial powers in the East. The drama even gave America what is perhaps its most outstanding fairy-tale- The Wizard of OZ.  

Since then, the US has had a whole series of populist movements and figures- most from the right. In the 1930’s there was Huey Long and Father Coughlin, in the 1960’s there was George Wallace, in the 1990’s Ross Perot (perhaps) and Pat Buchanan. Now we have Trump- the first populist to actually break his way into the White House- a fact that is surely a symptom of just how decayed our political system has become. Judis points out how, since the 1970’s this formerly uniquely American form of politics became a global affair. So here we are.

Judis, in my view rightly, is at pains to distinguish right-wing populism from its ugly cousin fascism. What made fascism of the 1930’s variety, which remains our template, distinct from populism and so incredibly dangerous was that it used the full powers of the state to hunt down and destroy its internal enemies- fascism was born in states that were in conditions of revolution and civil war. Fascism, also unlike populism, was characterized by an openly expansionist foreign policy that aimed to overturn the geopolitical order rather than merely withdraw from it. Populism isn’t fascism so much as it points ” to tears in the fabric of accepted political wisdom” as Judis so sharply puts it.

This is not to say that right-wing populism cannot morph into fascism, or that left-wing populism can’t evolve into communism (more on that another time) it is that a perhaps greater danger that the system can not be shocked into fundamental change at all- that we seem incapable of freeing ourselves from the ultimate logic of the economic and political artifice in which we are embedded- despite the fact that we are acutely aware of the depth of its unsustainable contradictions.

Judis was among the first to see 2016’s wave of populism coming, yet I think his much needed attempt at drawing a line of historical continuity between populism in the last two centuries and our own perhaps obscures what makes populism in its current manifestation unique. For that we can turn to another recent book on the subject, David Goodhart’s Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In that book Goodhart makes the case that what is perhaps today’s primary political cleavage is between those who have thrived in, benefited from, and identify with, globalization and those who define themselves in terms of place. He calls the former group “Anywheres” because they seem to have fully embraced global mobility in the search for success as individuals, which does not mean they have abandoned all collective identities such as culture or religion and especially family, only that they see their range of action encompassing the whole earth.

Somewheres by contrast are communitarian rather than individualistic in their identities. They remain deeply connected emotionally to their homeland, their culture, and sometimes, their ethnicity and derive their self worth primarily through this collective identity rather than their own personal accomplishments.

Obviously these are ideal types and all of us in the modern world have some of each about us. Yet Goodhart’s two types does seem to capture something essential about politics not just in the US or the UK but globally. We have these great global cities interconnected with one another and more diverse in their populations than ever before while at the same time possessing neglected hinterlands where the growth engendered by globalization largely does not flow.

It’s quite clear that the Anywheres have the moral high ground over the Somewheres when it comes to their embrace of diversity. What is much less clear is if Anywheres can actually be the basis of a functioning social democracy for they seem to lack the kinds of communitarian virtues a thriving democracy requires as they remain focused on their own material and social advancement. It might be the case that the type of political order that best fits a world of globally mobile self-seeking individuals happens to be something other than a democratic one.

The economists Dani Rodrik actually has a name for this- he calls it the globalization trilemma, which goes like this:

…countries cannot have national sovereignty, hyper-globalisation and democracy; they can only ever choose two out of the three.

Given the huge global economic disparities between regions and cultural differences and disputes we could have hyper-globalization with open markets and the free movement of peoples under either a system of empire and enlightened/liberal despotism or under a democracy that was truly global in scope. From where I sit the former seems much more likely than the latter.

For whereas the latter would require peoples embedded in democracies to willingly surrender their control over their own affairs to other people’s who did not share in their history- a transformation of politics that would probably require something like a global civil war- the former can emerge from mere inertia as the power of democratic and other states is slowly eroded away making global actors and individuals the de-facto if not dejure seat of sovereignty.

If the European Union is our best current, if geographically limited, experiment in what hyper-globalization might ultimately look like, then Macron’s defeat of Le Pen offers us a second chance to test whether such integration can also be made truly democratic in the way we currently have with nation-states. Should the EU not embrace democratic reforms in light of his victory and learn to create a new home for the Somewheres this chance might just be its last.