Who owns a country?

Today’s guest blogger is Cecil Foster, author of Genuine Multiculturalism: The Tragedy and Comedy of Diversity.

Who owns a country? This is one of the burning questions that confront us daily as modern individuals and even as nations and states. It is a question that is never far below the surface in any discussion, among others, about Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia, Sri Lanka, England, Germany, or as we are witnessing these days via the media, Crimea, Ukraine and Russia.

It is a question that immediately raises perceptions of ethnic conflicts, especially wherever there is the dominant presumption that distinct nations and nationalisms exist with their historic and authentic cultures or ways of life. It is a question that makes us face up to the reality that nationalism is invariably racism or xenoracism legitimized under supposed exclusive national rights to sovereignty and self-determination. In this spirit, it is the question whose answer emphatically implies that all humankind are not equal and that my nation and its members and cultural practices have been, are and will always be superior to any other nation and members. Following this path we cannot help but see the world as a tragic place of interminable conflicts. This is a world of genocides, slavery, ethnic accommodations and imposed charters of values.

But there is another path to which the same question gestures. Here the assumption is that a country is owned by citizens as abstract individuals identified by an agreed bundle of civil right. Here we can move away from the claims of nationalism and nationalist homelands. This liberal individual, prototypical of the modern immigrant, can find happiness in any country where all members play by the same rules and have the same chances among themselves of winning and losing.  It is where all members equally have human dignity.

We can begin a discussion in which we see countries as institutions or aggregations in the service of making life better for all who claim allegiance regardless of any presumed natural differences. Under this scenario citizenship is an identity that is not based on a supposed natural connection to a specific piece of geography, bloodline, history and cultural authenticity, but rather to nothing more than a desire. This is the desire by individuals, those who in their diversity might naturally be as different as night is from day, who want to live together in peace and harmony from this day forward. It is the concerted attempt to willfully produce through human interaction what has for the longest of times been imagined as perpetual peace or mythologically as a place where individuals as virtuous as the lion can lie down with those with virtues of the lamb. This would be a world where—even if there are indeed the essences and distinct virtues that fire nationalism—such natural differences and claims of superiority would not matter socially. Citizenship born socially of the wish to live in fraternal love would trump all nationalism. Nature and nationalism would be banished from the state in which exists only socially created equals or citizens. So far such a situation has only occurred in the minds of dreamers, so that if we start with the situation that human existence is naturally tragic, such an idealistic place of social love and fraternal recognition can only be a comedy. It has long been the dream of humanity to turn the tragedy of the living the human condition into comedic fairytale endings of “and they all lived happily ever after.”

The second path is the ideal for what I call Genuine Multiculturalism. And it is why I disagree with all those statesmen and women the world over who have attempted weakly to institutionalize pluralism within a dominant nationalism and described their efforts as multiculturalism. Almost all of them have now thrown up their hands in despair—whether in Germany, England, France, Quebec and even the Rest of Canada—and declared that multiculturalism has failed, or that it is proving unworkable. The problem is that none of these examples attempts Genuine Multiculturalism, for multiculturalism is incompatible with nationalism the same way that democracy is incompatible with conformity. Multiculturalism has to be grounded in liberal democracy as social justice—where individuals who are members of the society make collective decisions about a collective and united future. For multiculturalism to work the nation must disappear.  I argue that, in accordance with the Christian mythology that is the basis for social justice in modern western societies, in practice the nation and nationalism must die to be resurrected as a state without a dominant nationalism and at most with a mechanistic patriotic fervour.

Genuine Multiculturalism then is founded on the idealistic freedom that fired the revolutions that produced the Modern era. It is the fulfillment of what the revolutionaries yearned for when they took up arms under the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. We still want to be free of being forced to conform to another person’s nationalism and we all want to be treated as of equal value and worth. We do not want to live in situations where routine claims to be of a given nationalism result in privileges over those of another nation. We want to be free to leave the group or nation into which we were born and to move to another place where we can live with others of other nations, places of birth and natural languages.  And we all in our many different natural ways want to institutionally belong to the same state of existence or country, presumably where lions we can lie with lambs. We want to be always recognized as belonging to that specific state or country. Citizenship implies this reality, for citizenship symbolizes we are members of a culture founded on freedom, that all citizens are equal and that citizenship is the identity marker of our fraternal recognition. Comedy is the make believe—and even hypocrisy—of accepting we are all equal and share the same sense of ownership and belonging even when our senses and intuition tell us we are all so different.

Genuine Multiculturalism in practice might still be a dream. But so is the case of Genuine Democracy. Collectively as human beings we have not given up on attaining true democracy.  We are modern primarily because we tell ourselves we are liberal democrats. Indeed as we strive to perfect our versions of democracy we would not be deterred by claims of ethnicity, nationalism or preferential rights based on ascribed status and identities. But can true democracy exist alongside cultural and ethnic conformity, where genuine multiculturalism does not exist? I believe not. And for this reason alone I anticipate that humanity in general will not stop trying to achieve the conditions that would allow all human beings to live in peace and harmony. There is still that desire for that fairytale ending where we can all live happily ever after.

So who, then, should own a country? Genuine Multiculturalism says as equals the people, in all their diversity and differences, and definitely not the nation.

Cecil Foster is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. Along with Genuine Multiculturalism, he has written works such as Independence, and Blackness and Modernity, which was awarded the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Prize. 

To learn more about Genuine Multiculturalism, click here.
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