ABSTRACT
There is a long and honourable tradition of scholars and even the occasional politician raising their eyes above their home turf. Gladstone once remarked that ‘each train that passes a frontier weaves the web of the human federation’ (Koskenniemi 2001: 223). And there is an undeniably cosmopolitan flavour to the approach being advocated here. It might be thought to be ‘cosmopolitanism lite’, the kind of easy-going cultural worldliness that disavows national or ethnic identity and which seems to come easily to the Western elite. Just as the English language is happily acknowledged by its native speakers as a grab-bag of other linguistic influences over the centuries, so it is easy from a position of comfort to repudiate identity politics as, in effect, primitive. The possessor of dual passports has a certain ‘belt and braces’ level of security as well as the complacent sense of representing the future. The step from two to many passports seems much smaller than the step from one to two, which in turn is very much smaller than the step from none to one. Of course, it would all look and feel very different if global power relations were otherwise: following the above analogy, as if the English language, accumulating the cast-offs of the speech of its overlords, were the language of slaves. Having no nation may not be the same as needing no nation.
