Opinion: ‘I was here first’

Online Poster

Online Poster

By David Johnson

Aside from hearing it while competing for the best seat at a basketball game, this phrase is often expressed when disputing national borders. For example, we’ve all heard about the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. Shouldn’t the legitimacy of nations such as the United States, Australia and South Africa be questioned because their prosperity disenfranchised indigenous peoples? Shouldn’t American Indians, Aborigines and black Africans have had historic rule of the land of their birth?

Similarly, Palestinians explain that they lived in Israel before the Jews immigrated in the early 1900s and therefore should forever retain the right to rule. To this, Israeli Jews often reply that Israel is the homeland from which Jews were exiled thousands of years ago; they were there even before the Arabs.

These arguments are ultimately empty, however, because ethnic nationalism – the classification of an ethnically pure and geographically constrained populace – is indefensible when taken to its ultimate conclusion. After all, if we were required to live in the land of our ancestors, my body would have to be carefully sectioned into assorted limbs residing in scattered locations throughout Eastern and Central Europe, the British Isles and the Mediterranean, with a tiny sliver heading down to the state of Georgia, where the Cherokee tribe once lived.

The United States, a melting pot of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, contradicts ethnic nationalism by definition. Not coincidentally, other ethnically diverse nations, such as Australia and Israel, find themselves aligned with U.S. foreign policy and in direct opposition to much of the world, where the “nation-state” still means one dominant ethnic group controlling its “home” territory for its own benefit (a group of nations including many of those Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld labeled “Old Europe”).

By viewing present international conflicts along these lines, we see that we might soon face the demise of the “old world order.” On one hand, we have advocates of the sanctity of national sovereignty, led by nations such as France who argue, “What right do we have to depose Saddam Hussein and establish a government in Iraq? That is solely the business of the Iraqi people.” That the French have no qualms about militarily intervening in the Cote d’Ivoire suggests they might soon understand their untenable position.

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On the other hand, we have the United States, led by the Bush administration, along with Australia and the United Kingdom, who violated the national sovereignty of Iraq to depose Saddam. These nations deemed that his rule was illegitimate and threatening. Taken a step further, we could say that the stance of the Coalition was that Saddam’s government had no special right, simply by virtue of being Iraqi, to govern Iraq in a tyrannical manner. Unintentionally or not, President Bush established himself as a catalyst of the demise of the old world order.

Globalization, with free trade and less restrictive population migration, is inevitable. The consequences will be an end to the pattern of decolonization that dominated the last century, during which empires broke into smaller sovereign nation-states with indigenous people ruling the land of their “birthright.” The millions of people like me, with diverse backgrounds, will force the day when any person may live anywhere with rights equal to everyone else in that nation (or at least not be excluded based on lineage).

Because a government can no longer be considered legitimate merely by being native to the land it rules, it is necessary to establish new criteria for judging the legitimacy of a sovereign power. Such a task is beyond the scope of a lowly Daily Illini columnist, but I have an idea to get started. Nations must be judged by how well and how equally they treat all citizens, and how free these citizens are to move about as they please. Most importantly, ethnicity cannot constitute a basis for exclusion from citizenship. Otherwise, a Jewish-German-Polish-Russian-Irish-Lithuanian-Cherokee-American like me would be out of luck.

David Johnson is a senior in business. His column runs Thursdays. He can be reached at [email protected]