The politics of invasion and alliance

Abstract

What should the political priority and relation be between cultural membership, economic concerns and being a citizen of a state? I argue that individualism, economism, and nationalism all harbour the danger of hierarchising these goals with the consequential invasion or even exclusion of one another. I describe both ethnic and state nationalists as using identity to monopolise political concerns. But state or cultural identity is also colonised or marginalised by either individualist or economistic politics. As alternative to invasion politics, I firstly propose that humans should be seen as negotiating with their embedding communities a plurality of identities that reflect a variety of transcendental ways of being human. These identities should then be acknowledged as equal ingredients in the empowerment and make-up of a blossoming human life. The variety of identities should therefore be developed in alliance with each other instead of being the victim of a strategy of mutual invasion or exclusion.