To Live and Die for the Network State – Tablet Magazine
The reality is that the level of tribal affiliation requisite to birth a nation-state violates the universalism of contemporary liberalism, which refuses to countenance any form of identity that isn t purely self-constructed and elective. To severely paraphrase Carl Schmitt, the fundamental task of politics is making the friend-enemy distinction that defines your group in opposition to the Other. That s a distinction no longer considered legitimate, even where it s feasible as in the case of the State of Israel, which is why it catches so much shit from sanctimonious Western countries, many of them ethnostates themselves. It s also why, as with salons, this new nation-state business feels like a secular version of a Jewish concept Zionism but without the Judaism.
In his collection of letters On the French Stage, German poet Heinrich Heine recounted a visit he paid to the Cathedral of Amiens in 1837. His accompanying friend asked Heine why nobody built such marvels anymore, and Heine replied:
Dear Alphonse, in those days men had convictions, whereas we moderns only have opinions, and something more is needed than an opinion to build a Gothic cathedral.
Something more is also needed to build a state, whether of the network or regular variety. Our opinions alone, no matter how lit the resulting Twitter threads, simply aren t equal to the task. Something must stir inside us that says: Here I will die so that my children may one day live. That s what has motivated every generation of Israeli as it has marched off to a perpetual war of survival; it s what motivates the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians against the Russian invasion now. Without that, any aspiring state is just a gated community for the working wealthy, much like the ones for old retirees in South Florida. San Francisco and Manhattan are already functionally that: Can modernity produce any new politics, or will our Enlightenment-era nation-state simply die a slow, sclerotic death?
Antonio Garcia Martinez.