Michel Valentin
Foreign Language and Literature
University of Montana
There exist such things as a floating debt and consequently a floating loan. There are also such soft amenities in the hardness of a computer as a floating point arithmetic, a floating character, or even a floating head.
But there is no such thing as a floating state, yet.
When we look back to when history was still history, our common sense of time and place, of normalcy, is puzzled by instances of countries without kings or queens or even kings and queens without kingdoms and queendoms. As if the head had been separated from its natural body. It is the Renaissance which invented this image of the state as a body, with its head corresponding to the king. And what started as an image ended with a cliche that sticks with us.
The French king Louis XVI used to say: "L'état c'est moi" (I am the State). After the French Revolution, things started to feel a little bit quizzical, a little bit fuzzy, but not for long. The king Louis XVI (as well as the queen Marie-Antoinette) and the state lost their heads. To make a long story short, this fact alone (i.e., the decapitation) revealed that the king had no clothes, no divine investiture. The transcendental signifier was finally back on earth and floating, no longer attached to a God-given signified. As if in the history of political ideas, and their founding myths, Moses had come down from the mountain and handed over a blank slate, a tabula rasa. During the Revolution, French provinces (body parts) too had the tendency to float, or at least to acquire their own volition. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be understood as a cryptic message with its warning of this state of floating body parts which can be grafted anew, changed around or put in a different sequence, and may lead to a renewal of things, a new man/woman. Well, things did not turn the way they expected to and the cryptic dimension turned into creeping gothic.
In the same way the Revolution gave birth to Napoleon, whom the English used to call Boney and Ogre, who turned into the "super-head" of this hypertrophied state, the empire state. Utopia fell flat on its nose.
In the last 40 years quite an array of duce, fuhrer, caudillo, men of iron or steel, or tinsel, at the helm of the nation-state, lost their lives or seats of power during the exercise of their function, as if destiny had to drag them kicking from the hot seat. Some were as alive as an Egyptian mummy of the IVth dynasty; others were live wires capable of the most abominable tyranny, of the most incredible murders without even the bat of an eye. There were emperors, neo-colonial parodies of time long gone-by, general-presidents, colonel-statesmen, mountebanks in political theory, tragic-comic charlatans in the strange art of conducting humans, more or less charismatic heads of states. But all were served by a small army of petty crooks, would-be magnates, accompanied by an array of petty civil servants practicing mental and pedagogical orthopedics. All convinced (or at least giving the impression) that they were accelerating the progress of civilization (which had to be Western, of course), or on the contrary, going back towards a more "pristine state of things," protecting basic values (whatever that means), extending the surface of their nation-state, defending democracy (bourgeois or popular accordingly), saving the revolution, protecting and serving the people, etc. Others were elected on the basis of the defense of the citizen's pocketbook's integrity, its consuming power, with the paradoxical and comic effect of fattening beyond belief the pocketbook of a chosen happy few (big spenders).
Of late, one has witnessed, with a certain satisfaction, a proliferation of evicted or defeated presidents for life (even an iron lady), a crumbling down of walls and empires, old and new certitudes erected as barriers against the others. But still the crushing majority of states cling to the notion of nation, based on the seemingly archetypal notion of the territory, the land.
During the Revolution, a few controversial and revered talking heads, in turn, lost their ability to warn about the fact that since the king had no clothes, the seat of power was by definition empty and therefore the wheel of the state dangerously up for grabs. And during the 19th century, people were made to believe that they wanted and needed such things as salesmen (this updated form of the father as absolute king--from founding-fathers to leaders--who often ended up as re-born kings if not worse) and borders, limits, territories, flags, ensigns. This prosthetic dimension came to signify the most beautiful of Greco-Judeo civilization's accomplishments: the nation-state--its very incarnation. In fact, it was even exported to what now constitutes the South by the colonizing powers of the affluent North.
And the notion of nation became totally identical with the one of territory and its logical set of implements: more or less "natural borders" (which often used the concept of linguistic borders as a pretext), vital space, manifest destiny, an army of civil servants, compulsory military conscription, passports and I.D.s, wide range surveillance of the citizenry, total (even though more or less veiled) collusion with the private, capitalist dimension of the state, etc. These replaced the regal, feudal, and religious paraphernalia.
With the idea of territory, of the natural and sedentary right of a people of a nation to a land which it must make its own, came the most violent and destructive wars ever. The German romantics did their share to mythologize this sacred part of the nation-state, the land (Herder especially). By the end of the 19th century, the French and the English had colonized half the planet. After the Second world war, many newly independent countries tried to expand the surface of their national territory at all costs since the borders which had been drawn by the colonial cartographers did not respect the ethnic or linguistic reality of the colonized land. But following the dire example of the Occidental powers, they often used this reason to hide an imperialist motive.
The same process of territorialization is at work right now everywhere in the "developing nations," from Malaysia and the Philippines to the Sahara and South America. In the Sahara, for instance, the last nomads (Touaregs) are being hunted down and forced to settle in the name of the legacy of the 19th century nation-state, as implemented by the nations of the Mahgreb. The free-roaming dimension of these last nomads is pinioned to an identity, onto a land to which they must stick. One says in French that the soil of one's native country does not stick to the soles of the immigrant's shoes. Why should it? The world belongs to everyone, that is to say, no one. Never before and this paradoxically at a time when the technical conditions of traveling been so restricted by such things as raison d'état, passports, visas, money, etc. At the end of the Middle Ages, Marco Polo journeyed from Italy to China and back with practically nothing; and certainly no papers. No borders (at least as we know them today) barred his way.
The ship of the state seems to be going nowhere; it has been deserted. One of the apparent reasons, perhaps, is that this ship was not allowed to drift. She was too securely and tightly anchored and moored onto what used to pass as the banks of reason and rationality, to a concrete and seemingly stable reality, although expandable, that is to say a territory. And now the winds and currents of change are threatening to relegate her to a useless liner-museum cast away in the sands, unless she snaps her moorings.
There are no floating states to this date. There were and are governments in exile, in absentia, even, in some cases, disputing legitimacy over the same territory. But there is not a state without a territory, without soil as anchoring, i.e., a floating state. Well, not yet; but for the first time in history, such a possibility has emerged, and the concept of a territoriless state does not belong to politics' fiction, in the same way that Hollywood, science fiction, and technology have accustomed us to the idea of living parts, grafted here and there, if not even removable heads, as if we did not have the same need for stability (which was more or less artificially entertained in the 19th and 20th centuries) for a fixed soil. We do not need roots plunging vertically in a substratum any longer. We have become hydroponic and have developed rhizome-like roots. Although we still do need the state, if for no other reason than to protect us from "ourselves" from the absolute reign of private profit. The territorialized nation-state is a culturally homogeneous, finite piece of land which can be put in a one-to-one correspondence with itself (hence the spread of historical monuments across a nation, which facilitates this ideological operation on the topographic level) and with which the citizen can identify. Today the monuments are touristic and spread world wide. The circular concept of territory of the nation-state seems to correspond topologically to the egocentric obsession and predicament of the subject-ego-citizen as product of the modern, Western evolution of political ideas. It re-inforced the anthropomorphic, self-centered impression that the person (as Cartesian ego or its avatars) cannot get away from this actual point where the ego remains immovably the focus of his (and now her) world, out of which nothing can be experienced. The Dadaists, and the painter M.C. Escher (Hand with Reflecting Globe, 1935) beautifully illustrated what can be called the plight of the Occidental subject who cannot escape his/her own circle of sensations and ideas, as if his/her consciousness was shaped as a spherical mirror. In fact, the medieval topography of the world was a circular map whose center was Jerusalem. And Western cosmogony, until Galileo and Kepler, used to represent the cosmos as a series of ego-concentric spheres.
However viable the state of Kuwait may have been, it had still inherited the colonial borders fathered by a too obvious array of Western interests. It was in for a bad end, from the beginning, so to speak. Now, in fact, history ironically gave this nation the opportunity to make history in a new ground-breaking way.
The nation of Kuwait is now free of the bondage and tutelage of a territory.
The state of Kuwait can now reach this desired state (as level) which belongs to what the French sociologist and media theorist Jean Baudrillard called the third level of simulation.
Kuwait could exist as a floating state, with its flag based, for instance, on board a ship in international waters, or on a few leased office buildings, somewhere, linked by telecom networks to the world. Its citizens would be permanent immigrants or alien visitors in other countries, which would not be too much of a problem, given the personal wealth of Kuwaiti citizens. They could buy their permanent residency or the new floating state could buy it for them. The new Kuwaiti state would invest in other countries and would pay a lump sum to the social services of each nation-state concerned for the welfare and education of its host Kuwaiti citizens. It could even sponsor or buy institutions such as hospitals and universities and manage or co-manage them. In case, forgetting its traditions, the new floating state developed a Reaganomics approach to the role of the state in the welfare and education of its citizens, the responsibility of the social cost corresponding to each Kuwaiti citizen could even be unloaded onto the private citizen him/herself, who would then sign a contract with his/her host country. But this would be self-defeating, since the new floating state would then, very likely, lose all its citizens who would probably prefer the nationality of a less stingy and cruel nation-state. The limit to the different possibilities is but the limit of the imagination and good-will inherent to the cultivated mediocrity, mercantile indifference, and petit-bourgeois complacency of the institutions and the citizenry of the nation-states. In fact, the revenues of the state of Kuwait would not be affected by the permanent loss of the territory of Kuwait itself, since the revenues gained from the sale of oil represented, in 1989, only 3% of Kuwait's financial assets. Most of its revenues come from assets or from the movements of capital in the world. Its citizens would be prototype citizens of the new world order, this global village, speaking two or three languages. And since the first tenet of what constitutes a people is its language, the new territoriless state of Kuwait would have to broad/tele-cast miscellaneous programs in Arabic to its citizens. Such a thing should not constitute a problem, given the access capital gives to state-of-the-art tele-video systems. In fact this would push the state of Kuwait to the forefront of the pedagogy and technology of cultural, artistic, and informational programs in Arabic.
Those who have a tendency to be nostalgic for the power-apparatus of the state need not fear losing the contemplation of its display. The whole state would have its power satellized, metaphorically and literally. The iron fist of the state would consequently turn into multiple gloves of software and digit bits. Its logic would become as fluid as its flux of capital and its data stream of information, leaving behind the flow of oil as an old fossil. Like the ancient metaphor for the divinity, the state would then become this sphere where the center is nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
There would be no need for a police force, or even, for that matter, an army. The state would still have its networks of embassies and consulates and would still sit at the U.N. In fact its territoriless status certainly would not translate into weightlessness, but on the contrary, since it would not have anything at stake, its neutral, objective voice would accrue a corresponding measure of influence and would become preponderant in the arbitration of conflicts between nations beladen with the defense of their own sacred lands.
The state would then reach, under their last avatar, its ecstatic form, to borrow from Jean Baudrillard. It would float, like the poet in those Persian miniatures, on a flying carpet; the white wad of clouds cushioning the ride metamorphized by capital into the buffeted thick mattress of green bills; and the altitude of this postmodern cloud nine would be directly proportional to the results given by the telecast Dow Jones index. There would therefore be no need for state buildings, barracks, museums, hospitals, prisons, institutes, high-schools, etc., nor all the hard assets which are implied by the conquest, control, and maintenance of the territory which gives to the Occidental nation-state its peculiar identity, and which are, anyway, crumbling down everywhere, at least in those nation-states which followed the so-called free-market hardlines of Reaganomics.
The only state expenditures, besides the social-welfare contributions to the apparatus of the host-state, would be the maintenance and cost of operating a few ships; some giant ex-super tankers would do, like ones used in a James Bond movie.
The same case could be made about the devenir of the irrevocably intertwined and dualistic couple of the Israel-Palestine entity. One solution would be, perhaps, to consider Palestine and Israel as two de-territorialized states, sharing the same premises. This "new reality" could perhaps be more easily attained than one would think. Both the Palestine national sentiment and resistance and the Jewish cultural, religious, and historical experiences have been forever branded by internationalism, the dimension of the Diaspora, exile, oppression, death and martyrdom, a cross cultural, linguistic, and ethnic tension, that is to say a vast array of multinational experiences. In fact it gave them their specificity and fueled their will-power. Coming from two antagonistic perspectives, Israeli and Palestinian citizens are both world-citizens of an essentially de-territorialized state. One blindly adheres to (an already existent re-territorialization) on the basis of a 19th-century theory of the state, in order to protect its cultural, religious, and ethnic identity against another Hitler-type host territory. The other, dispossessed of the control of its own territory, is trying to displace this notion of territory-nation-state, to make it float, after having tried to destroy it and reclaim it back for itself.
The most difficult part, perhaps, would be to convince President Bush to let go, to call back the forces in the desert to inactive duty at home, since there would be nothing to take back, just empty acres of sand, to paraphrase and modify Voltaire's words when asked about the loss of colonial French Canada to the British colonial empire. Once well-informed of the plan, President Saddam Hussein would certainly let the citizens still in Kuwait go and turn this part of the world into his own version of what Paradise should look like, into his own territorialized nation-state, 19th-century style.
One would have to remind both Presidents, perhaps, of the unique experience of the American frontier, when the land was nobody's and therefore everybody's, and of the experience of the Bedouins who used to roam the free expanses of sand before oil was discovered.
In fact, wasn't that the whole idea behind the founding of the U.S., the concept of the "frontier"? Nomadology perhaps has to be re-invented. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two other French theoreticians, have expressed some thoughts about this subject (A Thousand Plateaus).
The sweet ship of the state is floating, drifting away towards new lands. Let's give her a chance. Let's have peace first. Let's not wait for the multinationals to render empty the concept of national land; let's de-territorialize the state: "Since the world drives to a delirious state of things, we must drive to a delirious point of view" (Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil).