Blood and Belonging Read Free Page B

Where you belong is where you are safe; and where you are safe is where you belong. If nationalism is persuasive because it warrants violence, it is also persuasive because it offers protection from violence. The warlord is his people’s protector; if he kills, he does so in defense of the noblest cause: the protection of the innocent.
    But belonging also means being recognized and being understood. As Isaiah Berlin has written in Two Concepts of Liberty, when I am among my own people, “they understand me, as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me a sense of being somebody in the world.” To belong is to understand the tacit codes of the people you live with; it is to know that you will be understood without having to explain yourself. People, in short, “speak your language.” This is why, incidentally, the protection and defense of a nation’s language is such a deeply emotional nationalist cause, for it is language, more than land and history, that provides the essential form of belonging, whichis to be understood. One can, of course, be understood in languages and in countries other than one’s own; one can find belonging even in exile. But the nationalist claim is that full belonging, the warm sensation that people understand not merely what you say but what you mean, can come only when you are among your own people in your native land.
    COSMOPOLITANISM AND PRIVILEGE
    Anyone whose father was born in Russia, whose mother was born in England, whose education was in America, and whose working life has been spent in Canada, Great Britain, and France, cannot be expected to be much of an ethnic nationalist. If anyone has a claim to being a cosmopolitan, it must be me. I wish I spoke more languages than I do, I wish I had lived in more nations than I have, and I wish that more people understood that expatriation is not exile: it is merely the belonging of those who choose their home rather than inherit it.
    For many years, I believed that the tide was running in favor of cosmopolitans like me. There seemed so many of us, for one thing. There were at least a dozen world cities— gigantic, multi-ethnic melting pots that provided a home for expatriates, exiles, migrants, and transients of all kinds. For the urban professional populations of these major cities, a post-national state of mind was simply taken for granted. People in these places did not bother about the passports of the people they worked or lived with; they did not care about the country-of-origin label on the goods they bought; they simply assumed that in constructing their own way of life they would borrow from the customs of every nation they happened to admire. Cosmopolitans made a positive ethic outof cultural borrowing: in culture, exogamy was better than endogamy, and promiscuity was better than provincialism.
    There was nothing new in itself about this cosmopolitan ethic. We have lived with a global economy since 1700, and many of the world’s major cities have been global entrepôts for centuries. A global market has been limiting the sovereignty and freedom of maneuver of nation-states at least since Adam Smith first constructed a theory of the phenomenon at the outset of the age of nationalism in 1776. A global market in ideas and cultural forms has existed at least since the Enlightenment republic of letters. Rootless cosmopolitans have existed as a social type in the big imperial cities for centuries.
    Two features, however, distinguish the big-city cosmopolitanism of our era from what has gone before. First of all is its social and racial diffusion. Twentieth-century democracy and unprecedented postwar prosperity have extended the privileges of cosmopolitanism from a small white moneyed male elite to a substantial minority of the population of the nation-states of the developed world. Suddenly, there are a lot of us about, and our sense of sharing a post-nationalist consciousness has been