NM's blog

Stefan Zweig , reflecting on his deep anti-nationalist, cosmopolitan, and pan-European ideals: “I regard the national idea as dangerous. I know and love individual human beings, I love languages and their diverse spirits. But in states I see only contingent forms. What am I, for example? German, if we are attached to Germany; Austrian, if the Entente forces us to be independent; Czechoslovak, because my father is a German from Bohemia and we might perhaps be annexed tomorrow; Jewish, if the Jews become a national minority. Like me, millions of people do not know what they are.” Context of the Quote Zweig wrote this during the turbulent geopolitical shifts in Central Europe following World War I and leading up to World War II. As an Austrian-born Jewish writer who wrote in German, his legal identity kept changing at the whim of shifting borders, treaties, and annexations. This quote beautifully encapsulates his lifelong philosophy: he refused to align his identity with arbitrary politic...

"The women were demanding an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, minors, pregnant women, and survivors of torture, rape and trafficking, a practice that is sanctioned in no European country apart from the UK; in the US, it was introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act and signed into law under President Obama. The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern nation-state has been the chief means by which modernity has contained and denied the violence of its own civility: ‘The possibility of feats of extravagant and unrestrained violence at and beyond the border [have historically] contrasted with the constraints of rational management of violence within the borders of nation-states.’ To put it simply, violence at the border serves a purpose, and so does the shock it provokes. It obscures the violence of the internal social arrangements of modern nations, which fight to preserve the privilege of the f...