A Plea for Internationalism

by Todd May

“After all, we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity.” Michel Foucault

The war in Iraq has brought out the worst in many of us. To be sure, there have been examples of extraordinary bravery, perhaps none more so than the soldiers who refuse to fight, who recognize this war for what it is: a failed attempt to control the resources and the geopolitics of the Middle East. However, for most of the rest, even many who oppose the war, there has been a descent into the basest of jingoisms. We have confused humanitarianism with patriotism, and in doing so have displayed the crudest of attitudes toward peoples who live beyond our borders.

We might date the beginning of this round of blind patriotism to the attacks of September 11. However, nothing in those attacks forced us to take such a cavalier attitude toward the rest of the world. Much of the world offered the United States sympathy and support. The Bush administration, of course, openly scored this support. However, many who opposed this administration, and who continue to oppose it, are bound by the same assumptions of American superiority that animates the current administration.

Thus we are treated to the sad spectacle of the Democrats blaming the Iraqis for the failure to form a stable Iraq. We have done all we can, they argue, and it is now up to the Iraqis to pull themselves together. As though our devastation of the country and its infrastructure, alongside our unwillingness to understand the history and dynamics of Iraq, were simply an unfortunate oversight rather than a fundamental cause of the current chaos.

The problem, however, does not lie solely in our attitude toward Iraqis. One can see it in display in our attitudes toward illegal immigrants, Canadians, the French, the United Nations, refugees, Africans: the list goes on. The problem is simple, and it has a simple name, one that is given a positive value when it should have a negative one. The problem is patriotism.

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson wrote, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Indeed, this is a fitting coda for the Bush administration. But in fact we are, almost all of us, scoundrels. We take refuge in patriotism in order not to have to face the difficult problems that the United States has helped cause, and that we as humans are obliged to face. One thinks here immediately of global warming, a threat that patriotism can only make worse. In a globalized world, however, nearly every progressive politics is frustrated by the persistence of patriotism.

Why is it that I should feel I share something deep or important with Donald Trump that I don’t share with a Mexican father who crosses the border illegally in order to feed his family? What binds me to Dick Cheney more than to the Algerian refugee living in Montréal, the factory worker in Malaysia stitching Nike shoes, or the innocent Afghani rotting at Guantánamo? The right answer here, of course, is: nothing. In fact, I share less with the Trumps and Cheneys of the world. As the quote from the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, my solidarity lies with those who are governed rather than those who do the governing.

In a world where transnational corporations dictate the standards of living for much of the world, patriotism is anachronistic. It is a failure to grasp how the world works. Those who control most national entities are in league with transnational corporations: the former provide the rules and the latter the money. It is a neat arrangement. And what better way to keep people divided than to pit them against one another based on national differences? Of course, there is no conspiracy here. There is no table around which the world’s business and political leaders sit in order to decide to promote patriotism as a way of blocking international solidarity. (There are such tables, but they are sat around in order to decide other parts of our lives.) Nevertheless, patriotism is the friend of the wealth and power. And it is the scourge of the rest of us.

We must begin to see ourselves as actors on an international stage. This is not just the stage of global capitalism. It is also the stage of global oppression. The capitalist who moves the textile plant from the United States to eastern Asia in order to exploit cheap wages and poor labor laws violates not only my own well-being but that of the Asian worker who takes my job. Who is my enemy here? Not the Asian worker.

We must abandon the pretense of national superiority and embrace instead international solidarity. We must see as our brothers and sisters, not those who appear on television in order to tell us what to think, but those on the other side of the screen, or those who struggle to be able to buy a screen. In the only political sense that counts, we are all Iraqis, all illegal immigrants, all factory workers, all women forced under the veil, all Darfurians, all Americans. If we are to confront the environmental, economic, and political challenges that face us, recognizing this is perhaps our most urgent task.