Getting Beyond Nation-States—Bad Ways, Good Ways

I like love of country quite a bit, but nationalisms not so much.

I affirm the value of natural boundaries like watersheds, but not political boundaries marked on maps by governments seeking their own advantage.

I think nation-states are tentative and auxiliary locations to identify with, not absolute, primary locations to soak with blood in order to defend them.

I want the “we” of nation-states to mature into the “all of us together” identity that shows we recognize ourselves within Earth’s community of life with ALL species.

For these reasons, I wish that those managing global corporations would use their magnificent opportunity to shape Earth Community. Alas! They’re muffing it. Badly. So now we get “corporatocracies” in which governments of nation-states serve the worldview of global multinationals for domination of all that lives, and the commodification of everything.

Those who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated economic unit…. What they are demanding in essence is the right to transcend the nation-state, and in the process, transform it.

— Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinationa Corporations (1974)

Much wiser than those managing the global corporations are the immigrant advocates whom Lane Van Ham writes about in A Common Humanity (U of Arizona Press, 2011). These advocates also transcend the nation-state with their language, rituals, and direct actions, but they do so to solidify that we are “a common humanity.”