Beyond a postnationalist imaginary: grounding an alternative ethic (1).

Warburg, James Paul

In an understandable disillusion with the limitations of the national liberation movements, particularly as the movements harden into advocating conventional nation-state politics, critics are beginning to put their faith in the new possibilities of postnationalism. This form of subjectivity can be defined as a discursive 'attachment' to others who have been lifted out of the modern boundaries of national identification. (2) In this definition, postnationalism is a subjectivity abstracted from and therefore only residually beholden to imagined past forms of national identification such as ethnicity, felt common history or bounded territory. (3) It is the late-modern subjectivity of the mobile person in a world of traversed spaces. Some theorists go so far as to suggest that it is possible to discern the beginnings of a 'postnational imaginary'. These postmodern theorists find it in the messy configurations of modern migrant consciousness, transnational religious revivals of tradition, and movements of postmodern diasporic hybridity. It is treated as an incipient development: both good and bad in the short term, but with positive, almost utopian, possibilities in the long term as the nation-state ceases to enthral and enrage. For example, Arjun Appadurai writes that 'These elements for those who wish to hasten the demise of the nation-state, for all their contradictions, require both nurture and critique. In this way, transnational social forms may generate not only postnational yearnings, but also actually existing postnational movements, organizations, and spaces'. (4)

For all the sympathy we may spontaneously have with such a view, (5) this article argues as its core proposition that without a thorough-going exploration of the principles of solidarity and community, advocating postnationalism amounts to little more than a postmodern passion for mobile openness on the one hand, or an ideologically insensitive support for 'banal' official nationalism and global capitalism on the other. (6) The second part of that proposition is counterintuitive, but it refers to the way in which nation-states at the centre of the global order, such as the United States, increasingly present themselves as postnational. Even as they maintain a modern defence of the national projection of globalizing power, the leading proponents of global capitalism no longer proclaim 'my country, right or wrong'. Instead, they invoke variants on the postnational language of 'my country as exemplary of the new openness to global mobility'. In doing so they mask the iniquitous nature of structural conditions that frame such words. Postcolonial advocates of postnationalism fail to see that they walk in the shadow of these quite differently motivated advocates of global mobility.

That is my core argument expressed most bluntly, but it should not be taken to mean that I think postnationalism is damnable. What I will be criticizing is the tendency to look uncritically to postnationalism--much as some nineteenth-century philosophers looked to nationalism--as the way out of the problems of an earlier social formation. In this case it is the problems that we have created through the excesses of modernity, but it does not mean that a postmodern politics provides the answer. One such postmodern excess is the increasingly intensified and contradictory use of modern rationalized violence, projected in the name of either abstract peace or 'traditional' integrity. From above, it comes in the form of NATO bombers over Iraq or Kosovo. From below it is clothed in the language of re-traditionalization: including the modernist millenarianism of Saddam Hussein and the violent nationalism of the UCK, better known to English speakers by their acronym the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.

It is clear that we need to develop new institutionalized forms of polity and community that go beyond the modern national state, but designating the way of the future as 'postnationalism' does little to achieve that purpose. Neither does emphasizing the virtues of deterritorialized mobility. This article takes as its central task the need for a critical exploration of the limits of postnationalism. It concludes by arguing that we need to put back into the centre of politics deliberations over the principles that frame how we are to live with each other. Unless this is given priority, current debates over postnationalism and cosmopolitanism, globalism and localism, are bound to end up repeating, in late-modern or postmodern terms, the dead-end modernist arguments over the relative merits of nationalism and internationalism.

Liberation Movements and the Politics of Modern Nationalism

Nationalist-inspired movements have inspired the best and worst of outcomes. At their best, national liberation movements have involved sustained and glorious passions of solidarity and commitment. However, without principles that go beyond 'liberation from oppression', as worthy as that aim may be, these movements have all too often involved desperate violence of the kind that rarely translates into sustainable, ethically driven polity-communities. In many cases, the best that we can hope for is the restoration of legitimate authority. (7) Whether it be the Fretilin East Timorese struggling against Indonesian imperialism, the KLA in Kosovo or the Irish Republican Army, the prospects for current movements only look a little brighter if you believe that instituting the procedures of liberal democracy is a laudable end in itself.

Even considered more narrowly, there have been few exceptions to the counterproductive retaliatory violence of liberatory nationalism. Examples such as Gandhi's salt march soon got lost in the prison-house of modern nationalism. The most recent positive instance is the Zapatista movement, whose moment of express violence was confined to a battle with the Mexican Army in early 1994. Relevant to our argument that positive (and non-violent) forms of postnationalism do not necessarily derive from deterritorialization and mobility, the uprising in Chiapas was initiated on 1 January 1994, the first day of the North American Free Trade Zone Agreement (NAFTA). The people of Chiapas were fighting to stabilize their relationship to place against a national government that had just signed a treaty to transnationalize their borders in the context of the intensified mobility of global capitalism. For all of the postmodern romanticism about the Zapatistas, the underlying strength of the movement is not its connections across cyberspace, but its attempt to bring together an on-the-ground commitment to place and embodied ways of life with a web-based means of communicating its politics to the outside world. (8)

In this sense, the counterposition to postnationalism is not to argue for an uncritical political defence of territorial place or integral community. One example of counterproductive attachment to territorialized place will suffice, the Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that for a time the western media lionized as freedom fighters. From the moment that a group of masked men carrying Kalashnikovs first proclaimed the need for an armed response to Slobodan Milosevic, the possibility of the Rugova non-violent alternative was closed off. Their response may have been understandable. The KLA proclamation came in the village of Llaushe just before Christmas 1997 as 20,000 Albanians met at the funeral of a school teacher who had been killed by Serb police. (9) However, the form of the response counterproductively hardened the actions of the ruling national government. Arjun Appadurai gets to the heart of the matter when he says that:

 This incapacity of many deterritorialized groups to think their way
 out of the imaginary of the nation-state is itself the cause of much
 global violence because many movements of emancipation and identity
 are forced, in their struggles against existing nation-states, to
 embrace the very imaginary they seek to escape. Postnational or
 non-national movements are forced by the very logic of actually
 existing nation-states to become antinational or antistate and thus
 to inspire the very state power that forces them to respond in the
 language of counternationalism. (10)

This is the second to last time in this article that I will agree politically with Appadurai, even if his descriptions of the world are brilliantly evocative. If we read the sentence that follows this insightful passage, the limitations of his proposed alternative become clear. 'This vicious circle', he says, 'can only be escaped when a language is found to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.' (11) In my view, escaping the vicious circle of reactionary re-embedding of liberatory hopes in the proceduralism of the modern rationalizing state has very little to do with finding a language with which to express postnational forms of allegiance. It certainly need not fetishize mobility or the end of strong attachments to place. For Appadurai, postnationalism involves a kind of post-territorial sensibility of multiple belonging. What the analysis misses out on are the structures and subjectivities of change and the necessity to re-embed different levels of belonging. Polities and communities alike are being swept up in a race to leave behind the modern nation-state and to accommodate what has been described as the processes of 'deterritorialization'. (12) If reactionary violence can be the outcome of the radical loss of community, then effectively advocating the end of sustained community will not lead us to a post-violent world. The disturbing irony of this aporia of understanding is that some postcolonial writers thus advocate a process of liberation from a form of polity-community--the modern nation-state--that is already being reconstituted by processes that are bigger than both the nation-state and the transnational groupings that appear to be going beyond it. One aspect of this is the contradiction that in the context of postmodern pressures towards 'deterritorialization', modern politicians are reflexively and instrumentally invoking tradition to consolidate both their personal power and the sovereignty of the modern nation-state while that kind of sovereignty is no longer the assumed basis of international politics

In the particular case of Kosovo, Milosevic needs to be understood as a modern politician with an ambiguous relation to the southern lands. On the one hand, he works in the shadow of the philosopher Clausewitz, who treated war as politics by other means to consolidate control of territory. In this case Milosevic was able to efficiently carry out the 'ethnic cleansing' in the space opened to him by the KLA on the ground, and the NATO war-machine in the air. On the other hand, he had come to believe in and understand the depth of attachment of 'his people' to the territory. This modernist approach, self-consciously drawing upon tradition, is brought to our attention by Noel Malcolm in his book, Kosovo. (13) Milosevic's impassioned April 1987 speech, spurred on by the crowd at Kosovo Polje, marked a turning point for a politician who previously had not shown any interest in Kosovo. Two months later, in June 1987, Milosevic made a speech to the Central Committee of the Serbia Communist Party warning of the dangers of 'darkest nationalism'. (14) With this as background, any critical commentator who knew anything about the region could have foretold that strategic bombing by NATO planes would at best 'win' the war only by shattering the country. And this is what happened. Deterritorializing Yugoslavia became as much a part of the problem as it might be relevant to a solution. To state the almost obvious, a positive politics depends upon how a territory is lived and governed. For all the technological abstraction of time and space, there is no escaping it: questions of territory will always be with us as long as we live in embodied relations with others, however superficial.

The Misplaced Faith in Postnationalism and Postmodern Cosmopolitanism

Whereas modern nationalism was, and continues to be, expressed at the political-institutional level through social movements of compatriots acting in concert to achieve a singular nation-state, one form of postnationalism is expressed as the subjectivity of mobile diasporas of individuals. If these individuals-in-mutual-exile seek 'communal' connection, it is not on the basis of an underlying attachment to territorial foundations. It is as a loosely configured imagined community that may or may not have continuing embodied ties. (15) Avant-garde cosmopolitanism has gone through a parallel shift from the modern to the postmodern. Whereas modern cosmopolitanism was projected problematically as a universalistic and singular world community, the advocates of postmodern cosmopolitanism acknowledge rightly the diverse historical and spatial contexts which they say still residually frame it. However, they go on to defend multiple attachments or displaced attachments without any obvious exploration of what is a good way of living. (16) In either of these moves--either to advocate postnationalism or postmodern cosmopolitanism--past forms of solidarity such as the modern nation tend to be reduced to cliches: for example, in Appadurai's words, 'As the ideological alibi of the territorial state, [the nation] is the last refuge of totalitarianism'. (17) Emergent trends are presented as a fait accompli: 'the nation-state has become obsolete'. (18) And solidaristic attachment and relatively bounded and embodied placement--both principles that I will be arguing for later in the article--come to be described as part of the problem. Appadurai writes: 'As I oscillate between the detachment of a postcolonial, diasporic, academic identity (taking advantage of the mood of exile and the space of displacement) and the ugly realities of being racialized, minoritized, and tribalized in my everyday encounters, theory encounters practice'. (19) I may be reading this incorrectly, but it appears to treat displacement and exile as a simple opportunity to detach (at least for the privileged), rather than as a vexed dialectic of abstracted insight and more concrete loss.

One can get a sense of the intellectual fear of boundedness, closure and attributed attachment from Iris Marion Young's claim that racism and ethnic chauvinism derive in part from the desire for community. Appeals to community in settings of xenophobia, she says, 'can validate the impulses that reproduce racist and ethnically chauvinist identification'. (20) Of course, in the narrow sense, she is right. It helps to make sense of Radovan Karadzic's Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia-Kosovo and the whole horror-house of official national-ethnic violence going back into the nineteenth century. Similarly, Julia Kristeva is half right when she describes the cult of origins as 'a hate reaction'--defensive hatred: 'so they withdraw into a sullen, warm private world, unnameable and biological, the impregnable "aloofness" of a weird primal paradise--family, ethnicity, nation, race'. (21) It has some limited application to the defensive ethnocentrisms of Pauline Hanson's One Nation in Australia when she presents the tightly bounded nation-state as a haven in a heartless world, and it has considerable relevance to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front when he talks of expelling all immigrants from France. However, it is only part of the story, and it certainly does not mean that the ideals of community and its various expressions--tribe, locale, nation, world--should be dismissed forthwith in favour of cosmopolitan cities of contiguous strangers. (22) Here I am not being critical of city life per se, with its rich possiblities of overlapping and multicultural life settings. I am railing against the one-sidedness of arguments such as expressed by Iris Marion Young when she says 'politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand each other in a subjective and immmediate sense, relating across time and space ...'. Her ideal becomes the metropolitan world of Manhattan-type situation-comedies, Seinfeld and Friends: 'Our political ideal is the unoppressive city ... City life is the "being-together" of strangers. Strangers encounter one another, either face to face or through the media, often remaining strangers and yet acknowledging their contiguity in living and the contributions each makes to the other'.

Bruce Robbins' introduction to Cosmopolitics reveals a parallel discomfort with bounded community and place, arguing instead for located cosmopolitanism characterized by 'multiple attachment and attachment at a distance':

 To embrace this style of residence on earth (Pablo Neruda's
 phrase) means repudiating the romantic localism of a certain
 portion of the left, which feels it must counter capitalist
 globalization with a strongly rooted and exclusivist sort of
 belonging ... The devastation covered over by the complacent
 talk of globalization is of course very real. But precisely
 because it is real, we cannot be content to set against it
 only the childish reassurance of belonging to 'a' place. (23)
 (emphasis added)

If attachment to place were actually being conceived as exclusivist by sections of the Left then there would be something to criticize, but such examples are so rare or so irrelevant to core debates that it suggests that something else is driving the critique. What Robbins does, despite his sophistication about 'actually existing cosmopolitanism', is engage in misplaced derision. He so concentrates on the indefinite article 'a', 'a place', that he firstly misses out of the actuality that 'place' is most often lived in practice as a layering of more and less extended relations of interchange and more and less abstract forms of association. It is how we tie those layers together that is the crucial political-ontological question. Secondly, he turns place into an empty form of spatial connection: 'We are connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including many that we have never travelled to, that we have perhaps only seen on television ...'. (24) As he later implicitly acknowledges, 'place' is not the same as specified geographical locale. (25)

It is not the romance of place per se that is deeply problematic, but the uncritical appropriation of it. The writers of books such as Rooted in the Land or People, Land and Community (26) are struggling to counter, even minimally, their mainstream counterparts in the 'community relations' bureaux of Nescafe, Macdonald's, Coca Cola and IBM. Transnational corporate advertising is now dominated by the global village motif, whether it be Buddhist monks in mountain settings using computers, or rural farmers in Tuscany taking flexible delivery of commodified global education. Television series depicting rural idylls--Ballykissangel (Ireland), Heartbeat (Yorkshire), Northern Exposure (Alaska) or SeaChange (Australia)--are indicative of a longing for simple stability that is thoroughly exploited by the global-local style advertising campaigns of the world's largest corporations. Their image campaigns link the global and the local by simultaneously romanticizing and emptying out the meaning of place. In short, much more than a few souls positing romantic alternatives to the metropolitan polity, it is instrumental management of a continuing and heart-felt desire for placement that has to be challenged, particularly when it is orchestrated by modernist barbarians like Milosevic or postmodern ones like Bill Clinton.

Criticisms of the Advocates of Postnationalism

There are many issues to take up, but there is only the space to mention two.

i. Postnationalist advocates miss out on the social and ethical ambiguity of national community by treating national attachment as either simply a bad thing or begrudgingly accepting this form of attachment as a necessary limitation that will wither away as it is deconstructed by a maturing cosmopolitanism.

In a sense, the advocates of postnationalism repeat the mistake of the theorists of nationalism when the latter make the common moral distinction between ethnic nationalism (bad) and civic nationalism (good). There is certainly an analytic distinction to be made here, but not an ethical one. In some hands it is turned into a blinkered politics extolling the virtues of the kind of nationalism the writer happens to hold. For example, Liah Greenfeld reveals her blind belief in Anglo-American versions of the ideology when she advocates 'individualistic-libertarian' nationalism (her term). By contrast, she says, 'Collectivist ideologies are inherently authoritarian'. (27) I would not bother to refer to this stupid claim except that it is positively taken up by an articulate advocate of postnationalism, Richard Kearney. (28) By contrast, writing years ago Tom Nairn sagely drew our attention to the ambiguity in all nationalisms: '... the substance of nationalism as such is always morally, politically, humanly ambiguous. This is why moralizing perspectives on the phenomenon always fail, whether they praise or berate it'. (29)

In short, even the most positive forms of nationalism are potentially problematic, but they are not essentially so. They are potentially problematic in the same way that personal expressions of embodied human interconnection, such as romantic love, have the potential for tragic consequences. Most murders are committed by significant others. Good and evil cannot so easily be separated. If this is right, the follow-up question needs to be: Where do we go from here? Presently, there exists an ethical hierarchy on a line from particularism to universalism--from ethnic to civic nationalism and on to postnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Should we conclude by dismissing nationalism out of hand and putting postnationalism in its place? Or should we instead focus our attention on principles for underpinning and maintaining complex ethical-social relations? I am arguing for the latter: the naming of the relationship is much less important than its form.

ii. Postnational advocates do not adequately incorporate into their positions an understanding of the paradox that postnationalism is now also the refuge of the instrumental state as it also attempts to find its place in a globalizing world.

It is salutary for the direct advocates of postnationalism such as Arjun Appadurai, and less explicit postnationalists such as Anthony Appiah (30) and Richard Rorty, (31) to remember that it is that very nation-state that they present as a post-melting-pot, postnational experiment, the United States of America, that has over the last decade been involved in more systematic violence projected outside its borders than any state since Hitler's Third Reich. In the war against Iraq, filmed as a war without significant casualties, thousands of anonymous soldiers were drowned in sand as NATO tanks with bulldozer shields filled in Iraqi-held trenches. In the 1999 war against Serbia, the aerial bombing, intended to limit the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, firstly, fuelled the Yugoslav militia's forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of Albanian Kosovars, and secondly, stabilized the situation around a reverse ethnic homogeneity. Twelve hundred civilians were killed by the bombs, the very people supposedly being protected. Although not intended as a totalising denunciation, these facts make a mockery of Appadurai's celebration of the 'sheer cultural vitality of this free-trade zone' called America. True, Appadurai does call for the further pursuit of liberty and cultural difference through legal protections, but the full force of his call to America takes the form of going with the flow of postmodern global capitalism:

 For the United States, to play a major role in the cultural
 politics of a postnational world has very complex domestic
 entailments ... It may mean a painful break from a
 fundamentally Fordist, manufacture-centred conception of
 the American economy, as we learn to be global information
 brokers, service providers, style doctors. It may mean
 embracing as part of our livelihood what we have so far
 confined to the world of Broadway, Hollywood, and Disneyland:
 the import of experiments, the production of fantasies, the
 export of styles, the hammering out of pluralities. It may mean
 distinguishing our attachment to America from our willingness to
 die for the United States ... America may yet construct another
 narrative of enduring existence, as narrative about the uses of
 loyalty after the end of the nation-state. (32)

While lots of good things have come out of the United States, this argument is bizarre. For too long US cultural exporters have been constructing narratives for others. Three glaring problems with this passage deserve attention. Firstly, as many other writers have argued, it is misguided to think that the movement from Fordism to what David Harvey calls 'flexible accumulation', (33) brings about a brave new world of equality-in-difference. One has only to look at the diaspora Chicano community of the eastern sea-board to see how immigrant cultures can be super-exploited in the information age. Secondly, although separating attachment to the United States (presumably good) from willingness to die for it (supposedly bad) may be laudable, depending upon what it means in practice, it no longer takes us very far into developing a positive form of postnationalism. In the presentation of the technologically sophisticated wars conducted by US-led NATO forces over Iraq and Kosovo, much was made of the fact that very few of 'our boys' died. From a position of technological military strength, willingness to kill from a distance has largely surpassed the old-fashioned willingness to die for one's nation as the basis of the call to arms.

The third point concerns embracing Hollywood and the style-doctors. For a long time now, Hollywood has joined in the postmodern game of presenting the United States as if it were already postnational and therefore able to stand in for the world at moments of crisis. Postnationalist films such as Independence Day (1996) and Armageddon (1997) have largely replaced the Cold War nationalism which had Rocky Bilboa wearing stars-and-stripes boxing shorts and stepping into the ring to defeat Ivan Drago, the best that Soviet science could create. (34) Hollywood's America now only fights wars over the thin red line of national territory as reruns of old conflicts. With some notable exceptions such as Wag the Dog (1997), the US war-machine is uncritically portrayed as projected globally, rather than nationally, self-serving in orientation. (35) However, if you read between the lines, the set speeches in these films still assume that the United States--as on the one hand postnational representative of a set of universalistic values, and on the other as the exemplary open-textured nation-state--sits at the helm of world politics. It is the kind of postnationalism that makes 'humanitarian' interventions into Iraq and Kosovo as easily thinkable as leaving to others the peacekeeping mission in East Timor. In Three Kings (2000), the greed of four US soldiers as they search for an Iraqi gold cache becomes the ironical condition for final salvation. By the end of the film, true American values surface, refugees are saved and life returns to post-war normality. In Independence Day (1996), Bill Pullman, President of the United States, speaks of the fourth of July as the rallying point for all mankind:

 Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join
 with others from around the world. And you will be launching the
 largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. 'Mankind'--that
 word should have new meaning for all of us. We can't be consumed
 by petty differences any more. We will be united in our common
 interest. Perhaps it's faith. Today is the fourth of July, and
 you will once more fight for our freedom. Not from tyranny,
 oppression or persecution, but from alienation. We're fighting
 for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the
 fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday,
 but as the day when the whole world declared in one voice: 'We
 will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without
 a fight, we are going to survive'. Today we celebrate our
 independence day! (emphasis added).

It is striking how comfortably Hollywood translates fighting for transnational peace back into the heritage of one nation: Pax Americana. When we get to the last line, 'Today we celebrate our independence day', the ambiguous designation 'our' has linked modern nationalism and postmodern cosmopolitanism in a comfortable pastiche that challenges nothing. Hollywood even makes it sound as if it is hard work. In The American President, the President of the United States, Michael Douglas, talks about the need to acknowledge the struggle:

 America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to
 want it bad, 'cause it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say
 'You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man who makes
 your blood boil, who's standing centre-stage and advocating at the
 top of his lungs that which you would spend a life-time opposing
 at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the
 free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be the flag. The
 symbol has also to be one of its citizens exercising his right to
 burn that flag in protest.

In one very particular way, the transnational nation is hard work. (36) It is different work from that of the modern imperial nation, for instance, nineteenth-century England. Rudyard Kipling's England projected itself as engaged in the 'white man's burden' to spread its civilization territorially, globally. The new global nations (37) are not really interested in extending global territoriality or painting the map the latest version of 'empire red'. The denizens of such countries, including those of Tony Blair's new Britian and Bill Clinton's United States, have too many competing and contradictory issues to consider: modern ideas of old-fashioned national interest; late-modern concerns about universalistic human rights; and postmodern aversions to the 'ultimate sacrifice' such as dying for a cause, or watching the body-bags return from a place of foreign military intervention. They are caught up in postnational hopes which under pressure quickly slip back into mis-remembered national ideals. Rather than get caught up in these complexities, I want now to turn to exploring the beginnings of an alternative.

Principles for an Alternative Approach to Solidarity and Community

This article opened with the argument that without a thoroughgoing exploration of the principles of solidarity and community, postnationalism amounts to little more than a postmodern yearning for openness on the one hand, and an ideological compatriot of globalism on the other. The postmodernist critics do assume a set of articles of provisional belief in their politics, but it is my argument here that these 'implicit principles' are grotesquely one dimensional. These implicit principles (it is not possible simply to call them principles) can be summarized as based upon the aesthetic virtue of the following interrelated ways of acting-in-the-world:

i. radicalized choosing This involves emphasizing the ethic of autonomy, where the individual chooses and re-chooses the constituents of life from amongst the pastiche of possibilities, past, present and future. It is usually associated with a critique of the search for roots or a place to belong. This is where postmodernism repeats, at a more radical level, the politics of modern liberalism;

ii. boundary crossing This involves an emphasis on 'the transnational [domestic] dimension of cultural translation--migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation'. (38) It is as if being on the margin is always better than stabilizing one's place, as if being related to territory is always a root cause of conflict. It is not the fault of the postmodernists that global capitalists extol the same virtue of the borderless world, but it should give them pause for reflection;

iii. fragmented subjectification This involves an emphasis on identity-as-hybridity, and a particular process of hybridity at that --hybridity-always-in-process;

iv. ambivalence of identity, authority, power, etc.;

v. difference and alterity (at its most radical it is anti-communitarian);

vi. cosmopolitanism, or at least postnationalism/multiculturalism;

vii. deconstruction as a method of viewing the world around. This is relevant to the themes of this essay. It involves deconstructing the 'totalisation' of national culture without putting anything in its place that might become a common culture.

I do not want to dismiss these articles of provisional belief entirely but rather to question them as one sided. The following discussion only goes a couple of faltering steps beyond earlier discussions in Arena Journal, (39) but it is intended nevertheless to contribute to what might be called a politics of ontological socialism. (40) Rather than arguing for nationalism or cosmopolitanism, transnationalism or internationalism, postnationalism or postmodern hybridity, it suggests that social relations should be based ethically and practically on positive principles of inter-relationship, principles which are positively contradictory. As principles-in-tension they can only be worked out thoroughly in reflexive practice, rather than be left exclusively in the hands of philosophers and critics to be passed down for occasional trials. Nevertheless, there is a place for discussion in the abstract. In this spirit, the principles will be presented here schematically, with no great claims being made for the terms of the schema, only for the indicative nature of the approach. The principles and their lived meaning, it is suggested, need to be argued about, negotiated, and worked through over various modes of practice, and over varying levels of space-time extension and social integration. Principles such as the importance of reciprocity in co-operation or an emphasis upon equality are thus treated not as discrete liberal rights but as interwoven into a tapestry of contingent rights founded in relation to deeper 'ways of being'. (41)

As a way of beginning, we can list a series of couplets grouped together under the nomination an ethics of care: reciprocity-cooperation; autonomy-freedom; equality-empathy; solidarity-authority; identity-difference. The phrase 'an ethics of care' is perhaps too restrictive, but it gets closer to providing a general description than any other I can think of among the terms in current usage. The present discussion is intended to give more structural specificity to the work done on an ethics of care by writers from Carol Gilligan to Joan Tronto. (42) The couplets presented here, alongside the others that could also be added to the list, put social relational (as opposed to universalistic procedural) concepts together, with the definitions of each concept drawing broadly from existing traditions of ethics, from socialism to liberalism, and from Confucianism to Christianity. These particular concepts are chosen precisely because they are embedded in existing debates and derive from social forms across human history. However, rather than being a pastiche of all that has been, historically, humanly, they are chosen as expressing most simply the ethical range of human inter-relations in practice. The couplets are in positive tension with each other, thus drawing upon, but attempting to go beyond, the way in which discrete principles are usually set negatively against each other within different discursive traditions. For example, as socialism and liberalism have battled it out for the ascendant moral ground, the intersection of the principles of equality and freedom has been left under-explored. More than that, the concepts within the couplets are intended to resonate against each other, mitigating the tendency to drag such concepts back to the level of procedures without ongoing reflection on their meaning. This is not to suggest that this manifold should not be translated into procedures and even into laws, but it is to stop accounting methods being used to measure the 'implementation' of each principle as a disembodied singularity.

Beyond these couplets, it is suggested that social relations should be conditionally founded upon, and therefore qualified by, our cultural embeddedness within nature. (43) Two ideals stand out here: firstly, treating nature as ecologically limited and therefore economically limiting; and secondly, treating nature as ontologically foundational and therefore potentially culturally limiting. Importantly, this last principle has the effect of decentering the primacy of 'the cultural' in the so-called culture/ nature divide, or 'the intellect' in the so-called mind/body divide. For present purposes it has the effect of questioning the easy mobility of one's social arrangements as valorized by the postmodern postnationalists.

In setting up this approach to ethics, a number of complications need to be noted. The first major complication, already hinted at, is that each of these principles is in productive tension with each of the others. The second complication, to be discussed in a moment, is that each principle needs not only to be discussed in relation to other principles, but across the range of human inter-relations, from embodied relations of the face-to-face community through to thoroughly mediated relations of abstracted sociality.

Beginning with the first point--namely, the importance of maintaining a productive tension between principles--it is imperative, for example, that the principle of equality go significantly deeper than the liberal notion of equality of opportunity. For too long that notion has been used as an excuse for increasing divisions of wealth around assumptions of national interest and comparative advantage: the current United Nations' Annual Human Development Report records that the wealth of the three richest people in the world is greater than the combined GNP of forty-eight of the world's poorest countries. It is clear that in the contemporary world, projecting the social-democratic ideal of distribution of wealth as it might be expressed at the level of procedural rights, does not take us much beyond nationally framed welfare liberalism. On the other hand, giving equality ontological depth should not mean turning that principle into an ontological absolute. Proclaiming equality for indigenous peoples in settings where they are dominated by integrative modernisms, in countries as diverse as Australia, the United States and Indonesia, should not, for example, involve overriding the identity-difference principle. When Australia's One Nation Party argues that Aboriginal peoples should be treated no differently from other Australians, the thrust, in effect, of that position is to argue against land rights. Those rights are based upon a different cultural relationship to place, defensible at the level of ontological foundations. It is by the identity-difference principle at the level of an ethic of care, in conjunction with claims about difference at the level of an ethic of ontological foundation, that we can defend the possibility of different forms of living, and therefore of layered forms of governance and law being constituted into all postcolonial settings. For example, the Inuit have been granted relatively autonomous governmental status in one of the Canadian territories without this involving completely separate nation-statehood. Terry Eagleton expresses this complication, with an elegant swipe at the postmodern position on the way through:

 Equality, then, is a deeply paradoxical notion. It means that
 everyone must non-particularly have their particularity attended
 to -- 'non-particularity' here meaning without privilege or
 exception or exclusion ... A genuine concept of equality thus
 deconstructs the notions of identity and non-identity, sameness
 and difference, the individual and the universal, in contrast to
 the more rigidly binary theorists of postmodernism who would line
 up difference on one side of the ontological fence and abstract
 universality on the other. (44)

Whereas the postnationalists tend to put ethical emphasis on difference at the expense of identity, and on freedom above equality, in the understanding of the present approach equality has to work across the philosophical tensions between particularity and universality. Moreover, the tensions have to be worked out in practice between people across the various levels of association--local community, region, nation, world--rather than through setting up a priori formulations which tend to privilege the particularized local or the global-universal. In advocating an alternative politics of layered community, including national community, we need not aim to annul these tensions, but instead aim to open them up to transparent and self-reflexive regimes of negotiation. Instead of arguing, even as some writers on the Left do, for the abstract market as a means of limiting the obligatory implications of reciprocal community (45)--and thus supposedly enhancing autonomy (46)--the principles of reciprocity and autonomy (expressed superficially in liberal terms as contractual obligation and liberty) have to be considered as pertaining to all realms of social life, including the market, the media and the state. In this the market, the media and the state are not treated as spheres of autonomous activity. The nature of the abstract market and the abstract state themselves need to be qualified fundamentally by practical and more embodied expressions of reciprocity across the various levels of extension, from the local to the global.

This brings us to the second complication: the need to consider how principles are lived across various levels of abstraction. 'Reciprocity', as one of the principles-in-tension to be negotiated in the broad canvas of human relations, readily lends itself to the discussion. (47) However, without some sense of the levels of abstraction across which reciprocity can be lived (and given the contemporary pressures of globalization), we too easily find ourselves taking the more comfortable path of institutionally abstracted forms of reciprocity and solidarity. We allow institutionalized exchange relations conducted by nation-states, corporations, aid agencies and the like to mediate our relations to others. It thus reduces the layered possibilities of public reciprocity to national tax redistribution regimes, regional balance-of-trade agreements and global aid programs. There is nothing wrong with these kinds of abstract reciprocity as such; quite the opposite. Nevertheless, we do need to keep in mind the proviso that the way in which abstract reciprocity is handled is often instrumental, self-serving and oriented to the extension of institutional power. This is not to dismiss it out of hand. Abstract and universalizing reciprocity, especially if based upon a modified version of the old marxist maxim, 'between each according to their means', would be integral to a manifold of levels of reciprocity. The problem comes when we rely exclusively on the institutions of the nation-state or quasi-governmental instrumentalities for managing this exchange.

The possibilities of abstract reciprocity range across the various levels of time-space extension, from local exchanges between acquaintances and strangers to global regimes of exchange, cooperation and support. The overriding issue is that in contemporary market-driven cultures, abstract rather than embodied reciprocity dominates the public sphere, while more concrete, embodied and particularized forms of reciprocity have retreated to the private realm of family and immediate friends. In the context of communications, the problem is that disembodied communication through the media and Internet are more likely to be the source of sentimental solidarity with far-flung national liberation movements than the much more demanding kinds of communication entailed in a relationship of embodied reciprocity.

The contrast being made here is not simply between instances of mediated and face-to-face communication, that is, communication as mere interaction. We are talking about the nature of the relationship in terms of how it is bound by deeper levels of integration. By contrast with abstract reciprocity, embodied reciprocity or reciprocity at the level of the face-to-face involves producing, exchanging and communicating with, and for, known others. It is where the act of co-operation is part of a long-term, relatively unmediated relationship of mutuality and interdependence. For obvious reasons, embodied reciprocity is more easily conducted the closer one gets to home, but in theory (and practice) it is possible across the reaches of social extension from the immediate locale to the other side of the globe. In the case of the current struggle in East Timor, for example, it means being more than part of a solidarity group which writes notes of support or puts pressure on politicians. Here it would ideally entail working with East Timorese people both in Australia and in East Timor across a range of activities, political, cultural and economic.

Expressed more generally, enriching the depth and range of such co-operative relations of reciprocity would, on the one hand, entail the individuals who participate choosing to make the activities of the interconnected activities of the interconnected face-to-face groups more central to their rounds of everyday life (under the qualified and qualifying principle of autonomy-freedom). On the other hand, it would involve setting up specific solidaristic relations for the interchange of goods and visitors with groups from other places, particular places in which people can be supported in working projects of participatory self-help. This kind of reciprocity, drawing lines of connection within the region or across the globe, all too obviously involves confronting the obscenity that the abstract state system does little to alleviate the deaths by malnutrition and bad water of one-tenth of the children born on this planet. By contrast, billions of dollars can too easily be spent on a war over Kosovo or Iraq when one's principles are based on the abstract notions of transnational sovereignty and 'humanitarian intervention'. The optimal aim would be to develop lines of co-operation based upon ongoing negotiation, reflexively conducted in awareness of the tensions between the principles of reciprocity, equality, solidarity and autonomy. Rather than facilitating autonomous hybrid individuals keeping in touch with others in moments of superficial reciprocity and solidarity, the kind of politics being advocated here embraces long-term solidarity with particular others, conducted as a way of life.

Conclusion

The twentieth century, more than any before it, has been marked by the horrors of mass wars over territory and cultural integrity. It is understandable then that the postmodern response is to put the burden of blame upon attempts to stabilize relations to place and community. It is just as understandable that the avant-garde late-modernist response is to call for new forms of universalism based on non-exclusionary cosmopolitan citizenship. The issues remain extraordinarily difficult. Arjun Appadurai modestly admits his own vagueness on what happens next in a postnational world. He writes:

 The ethical question that I am often faced with is, if the
 nation-state disappears, what mechanism will assure the
 protection of minorities, the minimal distribution of
 democratic rights, and the reasonable growth of civil
 society? My answer is that I do not know ... the road
 from various transnational movements to sustainable
 forms of transnational governance is hardly clear. (48)

This, he says, is a better answer than 'defining some nation-states as healthier than others', (49) and on that I agree with him. However, this is exactly what he ends up doing when he singles out postnational United State as potentially offering the light, the truth and the way: 'America may be alone ...'; 'there could be a special place for America in the new, postnational order'. (50) There must be another way. Advocating a discussion of the principles of community--reciprocity, autonomy, equality, solidarity, and ecology--and critically assessing how they are lived across extensions of space from the local to the global, is intended to take us beyond those responses, linking the particularities and differences of place and identity to the generalities and universalities of ethical debate.

(1.) With thanks to Alan Chun of the Academica Sinica, Taipei, for commissioning the first version of this article and generously providing the setting for its first public presentation; to the two respondents, Chen I-Chung and Chen Kuang-Hsing, who at the Academica Sinica conference critically discussed the paper at length; to James Goodman, who provided the venue for its second round of criticism and helped take it to a further stage of completion; and to Peter Christoff, Sigrid Baringhorst, Simon Cooper and Geoff Sharp, who, after all of that, still found plenty to challenge.

(2.) The concept 'lifted out' is used here to indicate that transcending the modernist meaning of exclusive territorial attachment can take forms other than just physically crossing national borders. It means that the definition incorporates quite different forms of postnationalism, including those that derive, on the one hand, from postcolonial diaspora cultures and, on the other hand, from dominant nation-state cultures as they redefine themselves in terms of (postmodern) multiculturalism and the imperative to globalize.

(3.) The emphasis here on 'subjectification' should not be taken to imply that postnationalism is constituted through other than quite material processes.

(4.) A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 177. For a variety of different takes on the same question see: M. Albrow, The Global Age: Society and State Beyond Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996; H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge, 1994; F. Buell, National Culture and the New Global System, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; P. Cochrane and D. Goodman, 'The Great Australian Journey: Cultural Logic and Nationalism in the Postmodern Era', in T. Bennett, P. Buckridge, D. Carter and Colin Mercer (eds), Celebrating the Nation: A Critical Study of Australia's Bicentenary, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1992; M. Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, London, Sage, 1995; R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1997.

(5.) The 'we' here refers to the 'intellectually trained', a grouping that partially through being trained in the art and technique of analytical dismemberment, becomes 'instinctively' ambivalent about the classically conceived closures of modern national community. Notwithstanding examples to the contrary, in the late twentieth century this ambivalence has often moved to acute discomfort. We have to be careful that our framing mode of enquiry does not lead us to treat ideologies of openness, freedom and autonomy as naturally good things.

(6.) The term 'banal nationalism', coined by Michael Billig (Banal Nationalism, London, Sage, 1995), or what I would call the 'new civic nationalism', describes a kind of nationalism that cannot see itself as such. It is the flagged patriotism of those whose who naturalize their attachments to constitution and country as civic loyalty rather than as intense embodied passion.

(7.) I. W. Zartman, (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, Boulder, Lynne Reinner, 1995.

(8.) See L. Reinke's chapter in James Goodman's anthology, Pluto Press, forthcoming.

(9.) G. Kitney and D. Lague, 'The Seeds of War', Age, 17 April 1999.

(10.) Appadurai, p. 166.

(11.) Appadurai, p. 166.

(12.) G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. The term is in fact not very satisfactory but it points to processes of the abstraction of space, part of the more general trend towards the abstraction of categories of social being including space, time and embodiment. This does not mean that the nation-state is about to disappear: it means that its 'classical' modern variant is under challenge.

(13.) N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, London, Macmillan, 1998.

(14.) T. Judah, 'Kosovo's Road to War', Survival, vol. 41, no. 2, 1999, pp. 5-18.

(15.) Appadurai, Chapter 8 'Patriotism and Its Futures'.

(16.) B. Robbins ('Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism', in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 3) represents a critical cosmopolitanism that largely avoids the valorization of mobility and detachment endemic in postmodern cosmopolitanisms, but in criticizing its critics he occasionally falls off the balancing beam. Cheah's introductory chapter 'The Cosmopolitical--Today' in the same volume turns the critique back on the postnationalists, convincingly arguing that cosmopolitanism need not be postnational.

(17.) Appadurai, p. 159.

(18.) The quote comes from Appadurai (p. 169), but the sentiment ranges widely from postmodernists to radical liberals. For examples of the latter group, see from the Left, J.-M. Guehenno, The End of the Nation-State, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995; and from the Right, K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, London, Harper Collins, 1996.

(19.) Appadurai, p. 170.

(20.) I. M. Young, 'The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference', in L. J. Nicholson, (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, Routledge, 1990.

(21.) J. Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 3.

(22.) Young, pp. 317, 318.

(23.) Robbins, p. 3.

(24.) Robbins, p. 3.

(25.) And even then, as Robbins writes in another essay in Cosmopolitics ('Comparative Cosmopolitanism', p. 253), 'Hidden away in the miniaturizing precision of "locality" with its associations of presence and uniqueness, empirical concreteness, complex experience, and accessible subjectivity, has been the nostalgia for a collective subject-in-action that is no longer so easy to localize'. It should be said that in many ways I like the approach taken by Robbins. In pointing to the (minor) slips and slides in his position I am more concerned about them as indicative of more general problems beyond the text. On the philosophical complexities of 'place', see E. S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998. On the levels of theoretical abstraction from which one can examine a particular local place, see E. Probyn, 'Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local', in Nicholson.

(26.) W. Vitek and W. Jackson (eds), Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996; H. Hannum (ed.), People, Land, and Community, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997.

(27.) L. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 11.

(28.) Kearney, p. 23.

(29.) T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, [1973], London, Verso, 2nd edn., 1981, pp. 348-9.

(30.) Appiah's argument for 'rooted cosmopolitanism' is based on the defence of the liberal freedom to have elective affinities. It is, in his words, a 'distinctively American tradition'. He writes: 'Those of us who are American not by birth but by election ... love this country precisely for that freedom of self-invention ...' ('Cosmopolitan Patriots', in Cheah and Robbins, p. 106).

(31.) For Rorty's postnationalist patriotism, see his Achieving Our Country, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998. As Michael Billig notes: 'Rorty directly associates himself with Dewey's vision of America: "I see America pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening up a prospect of illimitable democratic vistas" (Banal Nationalism, London, Sage, 1995, p. 170). Billig continues: 'In such writings it is possible to identify a tone suited to the new Pax Americana. The philosophy distances itself from the rhetoric of the Cold War ... [At the same time, the] American way--the way of non-ideological pragmatism--is recommended for all' (p. 172).

(32.) Appadurai, pp. 175-6.

(33.) See D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989; and also M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass., Basil Blackwell, 1996.

(34.) Rocky IV, 1985, a United Artists film, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

(35.) Criticism is reserved for those unethical individuals perverting the system who fail to live up to the abstract ideals of life, liberty and the American way. Usually these individuals and their cronies are exposed by the Harrison Ford or Denzel Washington hero.

(36.) The term 'postnational nation', may sound oxymoronic, but it is explicable in terms of a levels argument that treats modernism (which frames the experience of bounded national community) and postmodernism (which frames the experience of heterogeneous multicultural society) as contradictory formations overlaying each other and coexisting in the same 'world time'.

(37.) The term 'global nation' comes from J. Wiseman's book of the same name: Global Nation?, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

(38.) Bhabha, p. 172.

(39.) The editors of Arena Journal, including Geoff Sharp, John Hinkson and Simon Cooper, work with a framework of understanding, the constitutive abstraction approach, which puts the emphasis on the lived process of intersecting levels of abstraction. As one way of giving this approach more specificity, I have attempted in the past to distinguish different levels of epistemological abstraction (from empirical generalization through integrational analysis to categorical analysis) and different levels of ontological abstraction (from the face-to-face to the disembodied). It is not necessarily a way of working through the constitutive abstraction approach with which all the editors are comfortable. What I am attempting to do here is connected to my previous work, however it is not possible here to elaborate these cross-cutting connections. I'd prefer just to get the approach up and running to the extent that it becomes useful. Another version of this article that makes some of these connections will be published simultaneously in an anthology edited by James Goodman for Pluto Press.

(40.) Ontological socialism is defined as a form of social inter-relations that negotiates its practical expressions--cultural, political and economic--across the full range of what it has historically meant to be human from the level of procedural rights to the much more basic questions of co-existence as mortal embodied beings born of both nature and culture.

(41.) Here I am thinking of Rorty's, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. When Rorty says that ideally a new ethics should 'culminate in our no longer being able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings', my response is, maybe, but if we care to look at the ontological meaning of finitude and mortality in human inter-relationship (however historically contingent and variable this has been in practice) we are already in the realms of a foundational ethics that take us far deeper than liberal pragmatics.

(42.) J. C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York, Routledge, 1993. There are lots of departures from such writings in the present article, signalled by using 'ethics' in the plural.

(43.) It is 'foundational' in the sense that our various ethical houses cannot stand up in the long term without such a basis; not in the sense that foundations determine more than a couple of dimensions of the shape of the house let alone how it is made, or its aesthetics. It is 'conditionally foundational' in the sense that categorical imperatives are always cultural rather than based on human nature as immutable essence. Related to Max Weber's injunction that 'we must create our ideals from within our chests in the very age of subjectivist culture', it suggests that ethics must be reflexively negotiated rather than treated as being delivered from on high as absolutist edict.

(44.) T. Eagleton, 'Five Types of Identity and Difference' in D. Bennett (ed.), Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 50.

(45.) C. Offe and R. G. Heinze, Beyond Employment: Time, Work and the Informal Economy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992.

(46.) It was Geoff Sharp ('Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice', Arena 70, 1985, pp. 48-82) who first drew critical attention to the concept of the ideology of autonomy. Under the rubric of the 'ideology of autonomy', market relations in fact set up unacknowledged structures of authority (power) which limit the de facto freedoms of people in ways that close-knit communities could not sustain.

(47.) Within the Arena circle of writers it is Nonie Sharp who has done most to elaborate the concept of reciprocity--mostly in relation to tribal society. See her book The Stars of Tagai, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993. This paragraph and part of the next are a rewriting of an earlier article of mine: 'Reconstituting Work', Arena Journal, no. 10, 1998, pp. 85-111.

(48.) Appadurai, pp. 19-20.

(49.) Appadurai, pp. 19-20.

(50.) Appadurai, pp. 173, 174.