The death of the nation-state

[Baashi]

Pat Buchanan's take on the subject in the wake of Montenegro's independence.

 

The highlight of the column is:

 

"The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations -- many of which had never before existed -- seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.

 

The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.

 

Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished.

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The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire, and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."

 

 

Read on

 

What are the key contributing factors that are pulling our poor and war-ridden country apart? Who benefits Somalia's dismemberment?

[Animal Farm]

Baashi, you ask a loaded question – I think the media, warlords, corrupt corporations and diasporic issues such as identity and memory are the cause of Somalia’s failure to function.

 

Media>> Ever since the radio was invented politicians have been using this medium to advance their political ideologies, and along came the web. Warlords use it to promote their agendas, and their relatives or tribal affiliates promote their ideology through these mediums. The people who appropriate these forms of medias use extreme, settle, and somewhat polite sensationalism to deliver the news, and that is why the affects of biased journalism must be critically examined.

 

Who benefits?>> The question of who benefits is one that is complex, because there are many hidden entities that benefit directly and indirectly. The obvious answer is warlords and corrupt corporation who exploit our natural resources. Many corporations dump toxic substances in our waters and other states also steal our fish.

 

Many people often argue that the young generation will save Somalia – however, the young generation is facing an identity crisis – that is why I’m less optimistic about such predictions.

 

Identity>> We need to study the experience of Somalis in various countries, meaning we need to examine the re-appropriation of our culture, our adopted identities through cultural performances in the public sphere (how we do behave in public, do we inject our culture into our habitat). We also need to examine other influencing factors such as time, space, memory, nationhood and assimilative methods.

 

We now see those in Somalia as the other. Have you noticed everyone who goes back home takes a camera and documents life there. The fact that we take a camera shows us that we see them as the other. Susan Sontag an acclaimed essayist and contemporary theorist of photography once said that the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. The young generation views Somalia as a vacation spot, although it is the unlikeliest of all places. I’m also at fault for promoting images that promote other peoples realities as fantasies for privileged consumers. We ran photodocumentary pieces in pace magazine, however, as Martha Rosler once suggested documentary photography is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, and into imagery. The images are without narratives, because we cannot actually comprehend the details in the images, we see them as the other. What I mean to say is that the images reinforce those social realities depicted in the images, depoliticizing them and forever establishing the predicament of the other as the imagined status-qou.

 

Even more, the young generation is unmotivated because the older generation neglects to inform the young through education and positive propaganda that would eventually entice post-conflict reconstruction initiatives among the young. At the same time, the young generation is now part of the global soul, privileged immigrants, and in essence postcolonial nomads. The irony of all this is that we have returned to our primitive culture subconsciously – we have become border crossing nomads – as one Russian writer once wrote – ‘the Somali does not see the world as states and borders, rather he sees it where there is life and where there is death.’ Do they see themselves as having a permanent home – because we have been away for a longtime and we are used to life on this site of the world, and we have too many expectation and we are a generation that is unapologetic and unforgiving of the past.

 

At the same time the old generation is unwilling to accept the horrors of the past, they neglect the relevance of history when it comes to postconflict reconciliation – they remember, but they’re not willing to discuss, they are practicing a mass amnesia. They also practice long distance nationalism or rather regionalism in their daily lives.

 

The sad side of all this is that when the young generation returns, the nation will not be what we imagine it to be, the way it used to be. And many of them will see Somalia as a vacation stop, a museum of horror to visit – a sick sort of fetish to indulge in almost. But if they return, Somalia will be a multilingual country with divided blocks, where every block is characteristically different and separated from the other, the English area, French, Dutch, Italian and so forth. Not to mention the UN says that the Somali language is in danger of disappearing from practice. The only positive thing to say is that we might in fact be ahead of our time, we are assimilating into the global culture, however as time passes we are creating new historical experiences that are forever embedded into us, which has nothing to do with Somalia in terms of culture, identity and memory.