‘No country has the right to dominate global affairs, control the destiny of others, or keep advantages in development all to itself.’
Xi Jinping (October 2021)
If you were listening to BBC Radio 4 just before 9 am on Sunday, you'd have heard a charming piece about swallows, which started with, ‘They have no borders’. In contrast to humanity, for whom migration and international travel face so many restrictions, birds in the wild can indeed enjoy total freedom.
Carving the world into nation states has become an obsession for the human race over the last few millennia, but whether it will serve any purpose in the next remains to be seen. Communication, technology and international trade are combining to break down the barriers between nations, and language differences are being rapidly resolved by Artificial Intelligence. As populations merge and blend, this convergence is becoming increasingly challenging for those reactionists who seek to close borders.
In these circumstances, we are fortunate indeed to have sport to help us find the difficult balance between national identity and human convergence; football is one of the best in this respect, where we see teams comprised of so many different ethnicities representing so many different countries. The Euros have been particularly effective in this regard, reflecting the significant level of migration which has already blended into European populations.
Over the next few weeks this will be followed by the Paris Olympics, which will also enable us to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that real celebration of the modern era in 1924, the ‘Chariots of Fire’ Olympics.
Just as regional identity is something to celebrate within countries, so also is national identity something to celebrate in a global context. But this doesn't mean turning countries into fortresses, and the logic for allowing national distinctions to develop into international tension and conflict is growing weaker and weaker as humanity converges.
One of the first people to argue against creating still further national divisions was Lawrence of Arabia, who fell out with the then British Government for arguing against the creation of still more national borders across the Middle East. Based on his extensive experience with the nomadic character of Arab people, he tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade the British and French Governments not to subdivide Arabia.
Would it have reduced the cycle of violence that Arab countries have suffered over the past one hundred years? It may well have — but as we commented on 24th December 2018, 20th century wars can also be traced right back to the fall of the Roman Empire, and through the emasculation of Constantinople by Venice in the early 13th century.
But with weaponry now so existential in character, we can no longer afford this resort to violence and violent threats as a result of national fear and greed. We have to learn how to make national differences move towards the character of regional differences, not just for sport but also for the constraint of illegality.
As we proposed shortly after the Hamas atrocities in Israel in October '23, intervention by a United Nations police force could potentially have saved a very large number of lives over the last nine months. The Russian invasion of Ukraine might have been more difficult to ‘regionalise’: but the United Nations should still provide a forum for getting these issues of international borders resolved.
But it's the future relationship between China and the United States which will be central to developing a more mature approach to global relationships. As ever, the Chinese take on this is quite inscrutable: but their reaction to what they interpret as hostile comments at the recent NATO conference showed that they are trying to find that balance.
At the same time, however, they are continuing to develop a stranglehold in key areas of international trade. A recent commentary in The Times warned of the accelerating control in the key area of electric vehicle production, and the huge increase in American and European import tariffs demonstrates their concern about the significance of this imbalance.
Of course China has not seen the same degree of ethnic blending as either the United States or Europe; so how will China approach the need for global convergence? If it seeks to underpin its approach with national dominance, the prospects are not encouraging.
The sheer scale of their population is also a major factor in the significance of Chinese influence, unlike Russia whose population is barely 10% that of China. Only India has a comparable population, and their view towards global convergence is similarly obscure.
The concept of global convergence does not, it has to be said, attract nearly as much interest as many of our domestic issues in the United Kingdom — this was even apparent in the short survey in which we sought listeners’ views before the General Election. However, its significance will rise steadily as we go forwards, and we should encourage the United Nations to foster debate with both national governments and their populations.
At a lighter level, however, my attention was caught last week by an edition of ‘Rhysearch’ on BBC Radio 4 entitled, ‘Can You Be Proud of Your Country?’. As with all the best comedy shows, it does accentuate and to some degree exaggerate the failures of nationalism. but it also rests on the increasingly relevant realisation that we are one human family.
As anthropologists have shown, our roots were established from a single point in Africa less than half a million years ago — a mere blink of an eye in the history of our planet. Splintering into extinction would be a sad outcome for mortal intelligence: we need to show that we recognise this risk by working together for the future as one human family.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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