Going Beyond the Nation-State

Discussion

Richard Hames:

"The nation‑state colonises identity by convincing us that being Australian, Thai, Brazilian, Kenyan or French is the primary filter through which we must interpret the world. Or else! This is reinforced on a daily basis: in constitutional rituals, media narratives, sporting spectacles, war memorials, and even schoolbooks. Yet in practice most of us live with layered, intersecting allegiances. A young woman in Lagos might feel more solidarity with other coders around the world than with the political elite governing Nigeria. A Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar may feel deep belonging to a people who have no recognised state at all. A farmer in the Mekong delta may feel their truest loyalty is to the river whose cycles their community has followed for generations. The more we name and honour those other forms of belonging, the weaker the emotional monopoly of the passport becomes. That does not require abolishing national identity. It requires relativising it – admitting it into a larger ecology of attachments.

Here grassroots activism has a crucial role to play: not as softly sentimental community work, but as the practice through which people remember that they are members of watersheds, food webs, languages, crafts, faiths and cultures long ignored by the sterility of official geopolitics. When residents assemble to protect a neighbourhood from predatory development, when Indigenous nations defend ancestral lands against extractive projects sanctioned in distant capitals, when youth movements take their cues from the atmosphere rather than the electoral cycle, they are not merely petitioning power. They are asserting alternative identities that no state can finally contain.

If identity begins to unhook from the state, the next logical step is for decision‑making to follow. The Westphalian imaginary insists that serious choices must be taken at the top, preferably in the capital city, by people who belong to a recognised political class. Local authorities, communities and associations are treated as subordinate – useful when they conform, disposable when they do not.

Reality no longer matches that script. Cities decide how people move, how buildings perform, how waste is handled, what gets planted, paved or preserved. Regions determine land use, water allocation, energy mix. Indigenous and local communities often manage forests, fisheries and soils with a subtlety and zeal no central ministry can match. Translocal networks share practical knowledge faster than any intergovernmental committee.

These are not simply “implementation arms” of national policy. Increasingly they are sources of original initiative. When mayors set their own emissions targets, when regions design cross‑border river compacts, when communities invent their own monitoring systems for pollution or biodiversity, they are relocating the locus of authority.

That relocation needs to be made explicit and durable. One way is through what some have begun to call State‑Determined Contributions set at sub‑national levels: city and regional commitments, anchored in their own fiscal and legal capacity, not as derivatives of national plans but as drivers in their own right. Another is through what I have started calling People‑Determined Contributions: citizens, cooperatives, neighbourhoods and movements specifying the changes they need and are undertaking – in energy, diet, mobility, care, education – and insisting that these count, politically and financially, rather than being invisible volunteerism propping up a failing order.

Neither move abolishes the state. But both diminish its monopoly on agenda‑setting."

(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/beyond-the-mausoleum)