Michael Brendan Dougherty writes this morning about a Benedictine nun’s death at the hands of a drunk driver. Not just any drunk: an undocumented Mexican immigrant. The nun’s sisters-in-Christ are calling for forgiveness. Meanwhile and not surprisingly, conservative commentators want to throw the book at the driver, and argue that he should have been deported long ago.
The situation reminds me of William Cavanaugh’s seminal paper Killing for the Telephone Company. It’s a long piece, but well worth reading if you’re at all interested in political science.
Cavanaugh traces the development of the state from feudal protection racket to faceless bureaucratic partner of the global markets. He is particularly interested in the development of the nation-state:
This brings us to the term “nation-state”, which designates an even more recent development in the history of political organization. As the hyphen implies, the nation-state is the result of the fusion of the idea of the nation— a unitary system of shared cultural attributes—with the political apparatus of the state. Nations are most commonly united by some combination of shared ethnicity, language, or history, but nationality is not simply “natural” or “objective”, as ethnicity, language, and history are all themselves the result of contingent historical construction. The construction of a national sense is a matter of “common feeling and an organized claim”. Historically, this claim is first organized by the state. It is only after the state and its claims to territorial sovereignty are established that nationalism arises to unify culturally what had been gathered inside state borders. National claims tend to construct historical myths of origin stretching back into antiquity, but Carlton Hayes and Hans Kohn established in the 1930s and 1940s the majority opinion that nationalism first appears in the eighteenth century. The nation-state first arises in the eighteenth century, and becomes prevalent only in the nineteenth century and following.
The short version is that the “nation” part of the equation is constructed at the expense of local, even tribal identities, while the “state” is built at first to advance royal economic interests and later to protect and defend “the free market.” None of this is natural, in the sense of being inevitable, none of it is free from the taint of the interests of power and money, and all of it eats away at “civil society,” private associations such as the church, unions, trade guilds, and yes, bowling leagues.
The even shorter version is that politics and economics are jealous gods, and want us to be connected to one another exclusively by the marketplace or the state.
This has a bunch of implications. First of all, the American identity, like pretty much all national identities, is not the expression of a particular ethnicity, but the construct of a particular political entity, in this case the United States. Bias against illegal immigrants is a logical progression in the development of that national identity:
nationalism is not simply a claim of ethnic similarity, but a claim that certain similarities should count as the definition of political community. For this reason, nationalism needs rigid boundaries in a way that pre-modern ethnicity does not: ‘Nationalism demands internal homogeneity throughout the putative nation, rather than gradual continua of cultural variation or pockets of subcultural distinction.’ Most distinctively, nationalists generally assert that national identities are more important than other personal or group identities (such as gender, family, or ethnicity) and link individuals directly to the nation as a whole. In stark contrast to this, most ethnic identities flow from family membership, kinship or membership in other intermediate groups.
You become an American by renouncing your ethnic identity, in other words, and by assimilating into American society, as defined by the political entity of the United States. Illegal immigrants are seen as refusing to participate in this national identity — they don’t “play by the rules,” they don’t speak the language, they take jobs from good hard-working Americans — and therefore they need to be removed from the nation.
It hardly needs to be said that the political construction of an American identity is, well, political, with all that entails. Of course it’s going to serve certain interests and not others (more on that in a minute). What’s a bit more interesting is what I think Cavanaugh would have to say about the Benedictines’ response to their sister’s death: it is predicated on a radically different assumption of common identity that resists the national narrative laid out by the anti-immigrant activists. If we are connected primarily by being children of God, not by national identity, it becomes easier to offer the mercy and justice the sisters call for, because there’s no outsider here to separate ourselves from.
As for those “certain interests:” there’s always been a tension in the modern nation-state. On the one hand, it exists to regulate the interactions of its citizens, whether by providing policing against crime or in civil litigation to arbitrate economic disputes. But on the other, it serves as “a repository for sacred values” (our servicemen and women fight and die to protect the “American way of life”). This leads Alaisdar MacIntyre to declare that fighting for a nation-state “is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”
It’s worth asking the latest wave of Know-Nothings if they’re prepared to do that. Even better, somebody should ask them if just how committed they are to the ideal of the free market. Because the other tension in the nation-state as it has developed is the twin definition of citizenship: on the one hand, citizens are free to participate in the political realm. On the other, they’re free to participate in the economic realm, which is to say, the market. Increasingly in the post-war era, it’s that last definition that has taken precedence, leaving us with a global marketplace populated by members of many different nations and ethnicities. As Cavanaugh points out, the less government you have, the less able you are to keep all of those identities separate.
All of which comes down to one thing: the people who are defending American borders most vociferously are ironically furthering the aims of a system that produces that which they most hate and fear. It’s the American way of life, as it has been built, that brings illegals into its national borders and then spits them out of its society. You don’t have to be a believer to understand how insane all of this is, but it sure helps.
