Tag Archives: europe

Intentional Conversations for a Reimagined Future

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I’ve just had the privilege of spending two days immersed in the ‘Art of Hosting’ in the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft in Bristol. I’ve encountered AOH a few times, but it was beautiful to spend time in such an environment. Yet again, I find my self changed, challenged, stretched and inspired by love and relationship.
The weekend began with us checking in together with a simple, yet profound two-part question: why here? why now?

For me the answer to the first part was connected to the land itself. There are some places that are calling for new conversations. Stokes Croft is such a place and I felt a deep connection with it. The land itself was prepared and ready. Some places resist such conversations, and I don’t think we could have had the conversations we were having in the middle of Westminster, at least, not yet.

Why now? And here I link slightly back to my last blog. I believe we are on a cusp. We are at a moment in time when many things we have felt ‘certain’ about are proving to be very shaky and things are crumbling and breaking around us. We are in a post-capitalist, post-post modern, post-christendom, post-nation state moment. But the imaginings of what else is possible are still in dream form. And so, for me, now is the time for conversations, not only for the sake of talking (although really talking to one another is in-itself wholly worthwhile!), but with intentional actions emerging. I absolutely loved the resonance in the room as I shared this. Forty people from a bunch of European nations, of whom I had only met one before, all sensing the same thing…………

Charles Eisenstein writes in his latest book, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible”:

“When any of us meet someone who rejects dominant norms and values, we feel a little less crazy for doing the same. Any act of rebellion or non-participation, even on a very small-scale, is therefore a political act.” (Taken from his website charleseisenstein.net).

AOH is a profound experience because it holds a space open in which and from which these political acts can emerge.

For me, and I think increasingly for many, the nation-state project, at least in Europe, is failing or waning. As William T Cavanaugh writes in Theopolitical Imagination: “Nation States are only held together by our imaginations”! But our imaginations have become tired of them. They do not hold the substance of the beautiful world our hearts know is possible! The evidence of this shift is seen with the conversations/tensions happening in Scotland, Spain, Greece and Ukraine. Nation states have become unmanageable, dislocated from reality, unrelational and unsustainable. I believe we will see the rise of regional governments and city states and I am excited to call for transformative conversations to emerge around new possibilities.

 

Independence?

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imgresAs a family, we were down in Sussex over the weekend spending time with our best friends. Whilst there, I read a newspaper in which a local baptist minister was giving his reasons for standing as a UKIP candidate in the next elections. His reasons were really two fold. Firstly, he feels that UKIP will will help restore the UK to being a ‘Christian Nation’ and secondly he feels that the UK needs to be protected from a ‘bleak and intolerant Europe’.

Quite honestly, I am baffled! On his first point, my agreement lies entirely with Rowan Williams, who this week stated that the UK is post-christian. That is not to state that the UK does not have many christian principles under-girding its laws and organisational structures, it surely does. But that doesn’t make this a Christian Nation. The UK is, at best, a nation in which the majority of people (still) claim to have have some sort of christian faith, having been influenced by christian values. But to state that the nation is therefore “christian” is confusing to say the least. I mean, how “christian” is the UK? The UK invests heavily in weapons of war and breaks international law to engage in combat with other nation states. It protects the super rich and punishes the poor with a combination of tax and welfare cuts. It partakes in the global oligarchy that is the G8 and wields it power to extend its own interests internationally. It upholds global capitalism, as though it were this form of economics that will save the world, and in doing so is fully complicit in the global slave trade which upholds it. The church, like Jesus is to be the pedagogue of the oppressed, not those who make life more comfortable for ourselves, shutting our eyes to injustice whilst some moral principles feel safeguarded.

On his second point, I struggle hugely with the whole issue of independence, because whatever we may want to believe, we actually need each other. We need reconciliation, not division. We need love, not suspicion. We need gift not greed and we need collaboration not competition. How this is organised institutionally and structurally can be debated well, but to me the entire concept of independence stinks. I need you and you need me. The UK needs France, Germany, Romania, Sweden et al. and they need the UK. Where there are barriers and walls of division, we break them down, we do not create more for the sake of self protectionism – I cannot think of anything less christian!  We are not made for independence, but for interdependence, for community and for relationship.

The Myth of the Nation State

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Here begins a mini series, which will take a few blogs to get to where I want to go, but please bear with me, as I give some background to where my thoughts are currently!

I had until fairly recently misunderstood what is meant by a myth. I thought it to be a story which lacks truth. This can be the case but is only one of its meanings. It can also describe “a traditional/legendary story which may or may not have a factual basis and is used to explain some part of life.” Or it can refer to “an unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social norm.”

If we are going to reimagine the future, we must become more aware of some of the myths we believe to be true and question their basis for having shaped our thinking. I have recently been reading a book entitled ‘Theopolitical Imagination’ by a chap called William T Cavanaugh. It is deeply challenging. Cavanaugh argues that all politics is a practice of our imagination. The state itself, he argues doesn’t actually exist. It exists only in our imaginations. What actually exists are things like buildings, tax forms, border patrols and aeroplanes. “What mobilises these into a project called ‘nation-state’ is a disciplined imagination of a community occupying a particular space with a common conception of time, a common history and a common destiny of salvation from peril’. Our belief in this myth is so strong that a young man (or woman) from a rural village can become convinced that he/she must travel to another part of the world to kill people he/she knows nothing about. (Think on that for a minute or two). We have become reliant on the state for our provision and protection.

The nation state, as we know it, is relatively young, having only found its place in history within the last four hundred years. Cavanaugh argues that the myth was born out of the context of the ‘religious wars’ in Europe (in the sixteenth and seventieth centuries) to ‘save us’ from the ill effects of religion and enable us to live peacefully. The hope being that the borders and flags to which we would give our allegiance would save us from the divisions that plague us. Yet this has not been the case. The borders and flags in fact deepened our sense of the ‘other’ and created barriers where previously there had been less. Cavanaugh would argue that it was the ‘spirit of empire’ that used religion as an excuse for the wars, that was the real culprit. Mitchell would argue, however, that it was a complicit agreement between Church and Imperial powers that lead to the vast blood shed in the 30 years war that in turn gave way to the enlightenment and the creation of the nation state. What’s the point? The point is that the nation state is not our saviour. It is built on exactly the same foundations of empire and employs the same currencies – money, law and violence.

If you don’t believe me, then witness the economic threat of Westminster towards Scotland, or see how much clout the banks and huge corporations play in their lobbying power of government and ability to run the show. Or think about those who are held in the state of exception in our eleven detention centres around the UK alone (plenty of examples in other countries) where law is put aside to maintain the status quo, revealing the true foundation of ‘the law’. Or have you noticed how we now talk of those who die in war as being ‘martyrs’? I am not saying that we shouldn’t remember the lives of those who were given so appallingly in war, but let us also clearly see the undergirding message that strengthens the myth of the nation state. “War brings peace”. ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’…. it is sweet and right to die for one’s country…….

The nation-state project is both waning and failing. But the myth which perpetuates it is incredibly strong and acts as a huge barrier to our imagination of anything different. Peace will not come through a remodelled version of empire. True nationhood will not be recovered whilst configured as states. But there is a hope rising of something different, of new ways of being. Sometimes we have to tear down some mindsets in order to think in new ways……