The Women’s March on Washington produced posters that featured the American flag used as a hijab. The images sought to wrap together faith and flag and freedom of religion, to challenge the rhetoric and sadly now (still contested) laws that seek to exclude people on the basis of religion from the US concept of citizenship. To remind people that citizenship looks different. To find the common ground in the identity of citizen. Because the laws of the country are still the primary force shaping our lives. We might be lulled into mass-consumerism by the forces of late capitalism, and the corporations might have more influence on the shape of those laws than the average citizen, but it is our state that sets the framework for opening hours, monetary policy that drives cash or credit.
The King of Norway gave a speech last year. He said it wasn’t always “easy to say where we come from, to which nationality we belong.” That “home is where the heart is. That cannot always be placed within country borders.”
Because, the current formulation of the nation state is predicated on “power over” rather than “power with”. And implicit in “power over” is the idea of the subjugated. In countries from empire the “power over” of racism: closing borders in the name of security; detaining refugees and asylum seekers in the name of fairness and order. For women, the “power over” of patriarchy: policing their protests in the digital rapes of the Arab Spring; voting 380-3 to make domestic violence legal in Russia; continuing to make abortion illegal in Queensland. For gay people, the “power over” of homophobia: formal laws sentencing them to death for love in too many nation states around the world; informal laws condemning them to death when their mental health shatters after the gay couldn’t be prayed away. For trans people, the “power over” of transphobia: policing body functions in North Carolina, denying people the ability to use the bathroom that feels right.
Our definition of the national interest will continue with the fiction that our borders are immutable. But these national borders are not found in the landscape. You can not look at the crust of the earth and find a sedimentary distinction between Country A and Country B. The cartographies of nationhood are an entirely human construction. A colonial economic and political marking of lines (think Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, think Bangladesh-Pakistan-India, think Palestine-Israel-Lebanon, think Russia and the Baltic States, think Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander countries and Australia, think West Papua and Indonesia). They misalign cultural groupings that are stronger sometimes than nation (think Basque; and while you are at it, think the north and south of Italy).
I get that we want to belong. The idea of belonging comes from the beginning of time when sludge turned to bug, and precursor humans sought each other as a means of collective survival. But, in this age of climate change and technological transformation, we need a new sense of belonging, one that is not predicated on the nation state.
Stardust Becoming 