Troy: The National Order of Things 3000 Years Ago

For reasons not to be elaborated upon here (full disclosure: they involved Eric Bana) I recently chose to use 3 hours of my precious holidays watching Troy again, after spending approx. 7 years on forgetting why I didn't like it. It's (very loosely!) ”inspired” by the Iliad, but I have no intentions of going into all the reasons why I think that was not a successful venture – let it suffice to say that when I studied “knowledge of ancient times” (aka “old-øvl”) in high school, when asked to let us watch Troy in class as “relevant to the subject” (we had been reading and analysing excerpts of the Iliad), our teacher actually preferred to let us watch Disney's “Herkules”, as that was deemed closer to its original source material. Yeah.* But before I digress even further, to what I want to treat you today is a lecture on nationalism and the National Order of Things, inspired by how it was allowed to seep into a film that is supposed to take place more than 3000 years ago, where the very concept of nation would not make any sense whatsoever. Spoiler warning: I am not impressed.

Society Against the State

In 1648 a bunch of guys sat down and decided that the best way to end wars of religion would be to create states. Sovereign states with sovereign rulers, and what happened inside those states was no one's business but the rulers'. People eventually stopped warring over religion, at least in Europe – they started warring “internationally” instead, as states became nations and saw in themselves something intrinsically unique to their respective nations that must be defended at all costs. Bloodshed ensued. Within the last 100 years the entire planet has been fitted into a neat pattern of nations, states, nation states, term it as you please, nice coloured spaces on the map, characterised by their internal affairs being nobody's business but their own. It is seen as a result of 'development', as something inevitable, as all societies must eventually progress towards having a State, and this is a Good Thing. While we're at last shedding some of the “my genocide is nobody's business but my own” thinking, and people are also beginning to get a grip of why “everybody must develop so as to be as civilised as us” may be deemed offensive, that a state should be inevitable is not so easily forgotten. Historians and other clever people sought out evidence in the sources of history to show why all peoples must eventually develop state structures in order to govern themselves, as not having a ruling power is equal to being Neanderthals, to paraphrase only slightly. Which brings me to what I want to present to you today. Is the State inevitable?

Global Citizen

About a month ago this picture popped up in my facebook newsfeed. It was posted by Occupy Wall St and reposted by a friend, and it went viral, as these things do. It is, as you can probably see, a draft for a passport for a global citizen, a citizen of the world rather than of any particular state or nation. Now, I do understand what they're trying to say, and I appreciate the effort, but the picture left me thinking. What is actually being said? And what would be the implications? Is it even possible to speak of global citizenship?