i have a passport therefore i am a citizen

[jean-christophe helary]

> Your life until the point you went to Japan was shaped by being 
> French. I remember annoying Fred Pfeil at a Marxist Literary Group 
> conference a year or two ago when I gave him a hard time over his 
> t-shirt that read "I used to be a white American but I gave it up for 
> the good of humanity." But like it or not, he's still a white 
> American - his life has been shaped by being one, he's taken for one 
> by cops as he walks down the street and by clerks when he enters a 
> store. It's not something you can just opt out of. Of course you can 
> act politically to challenge race and racism, but you can't step out 
> of the system with a declaration. Similarly with nationality; my 

the system works only because it is based on declarations and because people who declare have the physical power to implement their declarations. obviously this man did not do more than wear a tshirt, which is a pretty weak way of making a declaration. i suppose declaring that he was giving up his american citizenship in the formal way made necessary by the state whould have had a much greater reach. as for my life being shaped by being french, i actually happen to have much more meaningful identities than the 'french' one. which is only the way the state calls me. and if the state calls me french one day it can just as well call me non-french the next day. being a national is not an absolute fact but a legal declaration by the state (there is a paper on french nationality in le monde diplomatique this month on how the administration cancels people's citizenship until they can prove thay are french).


> example of a passport was a metonymical way of saying that we're all 
> part of a system of nation-states that regulates participation and 
> movement across borders. As a foreigner in Japan, you're treated very 
> differently from Japanese citizens - and unless I'm falling prey to 
> cliche, Japan is one of the less welcoming places in the world for 
> foreigners. So migrants underscore the limits of the national system 
> - an extreme version being the refugees penned up in the Australian 
> desert at Woomera. Similarly for the metonymy of taxes - I was 
> referring to the whole set of laws and compulsions that apply to 
> everyone living within national borders. That may be "technical," but 
> it's how nation-states work, no?

i understand the metonimy. if nation states work like this, how do you resist them ? by being a migrant, by declaring you give up your nationality (not to take another one instead) etc. how many stateless people do you think can the un handle before it becomes an real international political issue ? fighting for 'global' citizenship starts by formaly declare that you give up your own localized citizenship.

jc helary