There are no nation states
Posted on August 14, 2014 by Heather Marsh
Nation has always been a fuzzy term. Even in times when distance, mountains and rivers posed insurmountable barriers to assimilation, when nations were divided by language, dress, laws and beliefs, both the customs and the populations of these nations were constantly evolving.
States have no resemblance to nations. States are created by the highly militarized partitioning of societies into economic markets and property ownership completely regardless of who the people in those states are or how the creation of the state divides and restricts our nations.
While nations are living and fluid and variable depending on context and perspective, states are an attempt to freeze one official historical viewpoint for all time. States preserve culture to prevent it from living, keep it steeped in formaldehyde unable to breathe and grow. Nations as defined by states are inviolable, to suggest change is sacrilegious, to question perspective or boundaries is deemed intolerable.
The reality of layered and overlapping nations, of intersections, of cooperation and flexibility is denied by the rigid borders and uniformity of states. Traditions of fluid property custodianship, sharing and merging are rejected for one tradition of rigid ownership clamped down and made law for every region on earth. Ethnic and societal realities of no fixed lines between groupings are ignored for false categorizing. While nations are gathered for community, cooperation and sharing, states are imposed for segregating, competing and allocating.
Nations create Us, states create the Other.
While nations reveled in their diversity, states decree a homogenized sameness, a world where everyone wears the same grey suits, international law assures uniform belief systems worldwide, the trade economy is the one god all must serve to survive. Like agricultural crops, people are raised in the manner most efficient for industry, the same worldwide. Nations are people, states are corporations.
States insist partitions between identical blocks of people are necessary for safety. States seek to divide and categorize. Diverse nations already do live together and overlap peacefully everywhere. Nations have fought over resources many times in the past. The problems associated with trade economy are applicable whether ownership is international, national, regional or private and will only be addressed by addressing trade economy. It is no less awful for people to be killed by a foreign corporation pillaging resources than by competing local nations. States did not bring peace to these problems, they brought totalitarian rule by global resource mafia. People in different nations sometimes oppose each others values to the point they wish to shun each other. International boycotts such as the BDS campaign against Israel prove this solution does not require states and indeed, states only boycott for economic interest, not human rights.
Nations are ideas and traditions which exist across borders and generations and they cannot be killed. States are tied to the property they control and they die without militaries and coercive laws to keep them in power. States attempt to present themselves as prefab nations, as if control of property and written laws and constitutions can be applied to populations and everyone in a geographical region will suddenly become bonded with national identity. Everywhere in the world nations such as the Kurds, Kachin, Catalan and many others refuse assimilation and states such as the five eyes prove they will never be anything but corporations.
Kill the states. Let the nations breathe.
