Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a former editor at the left-of-centre US magazine The Nation and also worked at Al Jazeera America. She is now an independent journalist and author living in New York who, as her website puts it, ‘writes about the cracks in the nation-state system’.
Given her focus on the nation state and its problems, it’s worth recalling in an Irish context the 1996 White Paper on Irish Foreign Policy entitled Challenges and Opportunities Abroad, which noted that the nation state ‘is likely to remain the essential building block of the international order for some time to come’. Nearly 30 years later, this is still true. Although I don’t think Abrahamian set out to do so, she makes a very good case for why the nation state still matters.
The White Paper noted the instability of an international order made up of competing nation states, and the evolving nature of transnational challenges to security, highlighting a growing trend to pool sovereignty, the European Union being the most significant example. For her part, Abrahamian seems largely uninterested in multilateralism but perhaps this reflects the fact that global governance is currently at a very low ebb.
My experience is that the strongest critics of restrictive migration policies are nonetheless coy about declaring themselves to be in favour of open borders. In this regard Abrahamian is refreshingly honest, nailing her colours to the mast when she writes that, ‘More than anything, I believe that people should be allowed to live where they want to live, whether it’s in their ancestral village or in a megacity halfway around the world. I think national and international policies should make either option economically feasible.’
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This is utopian. A recent New York Times/Ipsos poll showed that 55 per cent of Americans either strongly or somewhat support mass deportations from the United States. What this means is that such hardline views are no longer confined to president Trump’s base.
[ First group of migrants deported from US arrive in Costa RicaOpens in new window ]
One of the most interesting chapters focuses on international shipping. According to her telling, this industry – for aspects of which she clearly has considerable affection – is absolutely rife with hacks and dodges to avoid regulations inter alia to do with environmental protection and proper pay and conditions for ship workers. But if regulation is essential in this context, why would regulation not also be relevant in regard to the movement of people? This evident inconsistency strikes me as undermining her overly idealistic position on open borders.
There is plenty in the book about special economic zones and other ‘hacks’ to get around pesky national regulations – eg, the way very rich people stash works of art in some anonymous Geneva warehouse. She writes that the rich ‘come to Geneva for a certain discretion’ and that ‘they especially like special places where normal people can’t go’.
Shannon gets a mention as a ‘cornerstone of the zone world’ and she notes that the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) held a training session there (in 1980) ‘that as industry lore would have it, inspired China’s delegates to go back to their country and establish Shenzen’. The rest is history.
As a diplomat based in Lisbon back in the day, I played an ultimately unsuccessful role in trying to introduce Shannon-style duty free shops to Morocco. I always wondered if Morocco’s former colonial master France hadn’t stepped in at the time to nix our best efforts.
We Irish like to talk about fighting above our weight, but arguably Luxembourg leaves us in the ha’penny place. Abrahamian writes that ‘the tiny nation of Luxembourg has enriched itself significantly over the past century by greasing the wheels of global finance’ and is now ‘using its place on earth to help send capitalism into deep space’. Luxembourg has a long track record of attracting ‘banks, telecommunications companies and consulting companies’ and ‘by courting asteroid miners and space cowboys before anyone else took them seriously’ the country has now turned its know-how to commercialising outer space.
Tellingly, she says that ‘in a global economy that ruthlessly pits nations against one another, a country like Luxembourg is left to exploit the most valuable resource it has: its national sovereignty. This also explains why stateless peoples – such as Palestinians, Kurds – are at such a huge disadvantage’.
The Hidden Globe is a challenging but rewarding read, not least in a world where the new US administration seems hell-bent on pursuing ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ in regard to places such as Panama and Greenland, adopting a very aggressive stance towards many of its own allies – eg with EU trade practices branded ‘an atrocity’.
Michael Sanfey is a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI Florence
