Is there such a thing as a relaxed nation -- one that isn't, you know, obsessed with its borders and sense of identity?
We can easily see how absurd it all is when we read about the hikers recently released from prison in Iran, where they were held in cruelly restricted confinement for more than two years because they had inadvertently strayed across the border, out of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The inhuman nature of Iran's response -- the trumped up charges of espionage against the two young men, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, and their companion, Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned for over a year -- were gleefully obvious to the American media... because they were Americans, and Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.
However, the hikers, upon their release last week, strayed across another border as well, and in so doing belied the concept of good nations and bad ones.
"In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay," Bauer said when the two young men arrived in New York. "They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world, and the conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.
"We do not believe that such human rights violations on the part of our government justify what has been done to us," he added. "Not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments, including the government of Iran, to act in kind."
And Shourd, in an interview with Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now," noted that "no one can spend over a year, let alone over two years, of their lives unjustly detained, imprisoned and cut off from the world, without feeling connected to other prisoners around the world... We will never, ever be able to forget that other people are still sitting in the position that we were in."
And some of those people -- an extraordinary number, in fact -- are sitting in American prisons and detention centers, as the trio stated publicly a number of times, in so doing violating the simplistic patriotism of, among others, Elliott Abrams, icon of the Reagan era Iran-Contra scandal. Such statements by the freed Americans left "a very bad taste" in Abrams' mouth. "Who exactly are the 'political prisoners' in America?" he blogged on the Council of Foreign Relations website. "Can we have some names?"
Considering that America's world leadership includes leading the world in prison population, that numerous reports have detailed widespread abuse of prisoners and border detainees, and more to the point, that our covert war-on-terror torture and indiscriminate detention operations have generated a tsunami of global publicity, Abrams' revelation of self-imposed ignorance is almost shocking.
Here's one name: Abdul Razak al Janko, a Syrian national who was imprisoned by both the Taliban and the Americans. Though he had tried to flee from the Taliban, he wound up being held at Guantanamo for seven years; he was finally released when a Bush-appointed federal judge said his continued detention "defies common sense."
According to a lawsuit Janko filed last year against numerous government officials, he was subjected at Gitmo to severe beatings, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, intimidation with police dogs, threats to inflict intense physical pain (such as removal of his fingernails), extreme degradation (he claims that U.S. soldiers urinated on him when he first arrived at Gitmo), years of solitary confinement, and much more.
This is the degenerated nature of American world leadership, and of course it is not shocking at all that someone like Abrams, who has fused his own identity with that of the nation, would not "know" -- regardless how much data he's been exposed to -- that such hellish things are actually occurring on this side of the righteous divide.
The nation-state, as far as I'm concerned, is an obsolete fiction. The division of the world into 194 random fragments, mostly born of war and exploitation, locked in a state of perpetual mistrust and ever-shifting tensions toward one another, is more problem than solution in the 21st century. Nation-states are a convenience of war. An easily exploited, "us vs. them" exclusivity is basic to their identity, which explains the amount of energy that nations expend patrolling and defining their borders, as though these were in some way real.
On a planet united not merely by technology and a global economy, but also by climate change and an array of problems that can only be addressed effectively with worldwide cooperation, humanity needs to claim allegiance both to the whole planet and to the well-being of every individual on it. Neither of these allegiances are the priority of nation-states, as Iran and the United States both demonstrate.
This is a plea not for "world government" so much as a melting of the distrust between governments and peoples, and the flowering not of prisons but of an unprecedented spirit of openness.
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Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
© 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
I think the future will be a mixture and balance of local and global politics, and be based on the globalization of human rights. This means the sovereignty of the nation states will have to bow down to the sovereignty of the individual.
The real issue it that the US government has abandoned its responsibility to represent the interest of the people and is in fact a paid (through campaign financing) employee of business interests. Until this situating is reversed (through strict campaign financing rules) globalization will continue to evolve but not in the interests of the people.
Globalization and “world government” is not an option. They are inevitable and in fact already here in many aspects. Imagine any single country attempting independently to set their own standards for (say) cell phones, TV, air travel, etc. It cannot be done.
We need to accept the inevitable and discuss the form it will take. Unfortunately, all such discussions are currently being led by corporations and business interests behind closed doors. The results are that companies (mostly American) are seeing record profits.
The result was an unmitigated disaster that now threatens the very foundations of European democracy.
Currently, E.U. states with most liberal past asylum polices now have the most stringent policies ( Netherlands is a perfect example).
Relaxation of border policies is feasible only between states who are compatible politically, culturally and economically. All three!
European Union is a great example of that. Rejection of culturally incompatible Turkey was a rational step.
Border relaxation between Canada and U.S. makes perfect sense.
U.S. and Mexico-- not so much ( economic compatibility problem).
As for the rants against "the nation state", they are inconsequential when juxtaposed to the reality of mankind: empires and multinational states always proved to be ephemeral entities, bereft of the cohesion needed to survive in the long term. This is historically true and continues to hold true in the present -- see Yugoslavia, Sudan, Kurdistan, Cyprus, Lebanon... Multiculturalism failed miserably and even developed, peaceful multi-ethnic states (Belgium, Canada, UK) are not immune to centrifugal forces which may at some point break them up. While the concept of "nation state" may become obsolete at some point in the distant future (one never knows), that future is NOT now.
See: http://revolutionofreason.com and http://www.youtube.com/RobertLBlackburn
Big ideas can change the world in unprecedented ways. But only if they translate into unprecedented real institutions, or provide an unprecedented sort of guidance for the less-than-noble actions of real people.
What should we have instead of nation-states (or more often, nation-wannabe states)?