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 right 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 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 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.