The anachronism of foreignness

Foreignness is a meaningless concept. It’s time that we accept that and dump the term into the dustbin of history.

We live in global society in which the notion of nationality has evolved far faster than our global political and legal institutions have. To say that one belongs to country X or country Y has become a dangerously simplistic representation of reality.

During the buildup to the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup, Japan’s Emperor Akihito publicly acknowledged the Korean ancestry of the Japanese royal family, saying he felt a certain “kinship” with Korea because of this shared heritage. I believe that this was a watershed moment in Japanese history. Emperor Akihito’s discussion of his Korean ancestry signaled just how remarkably far Japan has come from its jingoistic past.

But several of Japan’s leading newspapers thought it prudent not to report the story. Why? Does the Emperor’s admission of “foreign” heritage make him a foreigner? Of course not. Now that we all know that we are all originally East Africans, being “from” somewhere simply indicates how long ago you or your parents or their parents or their ancestors moved there. And given that Emperor Akihito traces the eastward move from Korea back to over 1300 years ago, I think we can all safely call him Japanese. So why didn’t the Yomiuri Shimbun emblazon the Emperor’s remarks on its front page?

Fast-forward eight years, and right now at the Olympics in Vancouver, what is ostensibly a competition among the world’s nations can no longer really be characterized as such. According to a recent New York Times article, figure skaters these days often compete under the flags of nations with which they have no real affiliation. And it isn’t insignificant that the Olympics are being held in one of the most cosmopolitan nations in the world: for example, half of the population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, was born outside of Canada.

It’s perhaps wise to stop here and not to wade any further into the murky waters of definitions of nationhood. They are poisoned by centuries of strife. So instead of looking backward, we should look forward, get over notions of “my-country-your-country,” and accept our nationalities for what they are: legal affiliations that symbolize our personal investments in certain parts of the world. Nothing more.

This is not to say we must abandon our homelands. Patriotism is an absolutely laudable and vital trait—essential, I believe, to life itself. To deny people’s attachment to their homelands is to deny them their fundamental human rights, and to dismiss the shared identity or heritage of a group of people is an act of hate. The allegiance of, say, an American to his or her country is a noble duty.

But that does not mean that we must be exclusively patriotic—that does not mean we cannot begin to think of the nations of our world as smaller subunits of a greater whole, like the states that compose this great union or those of Europe.

Europe is beautiful in a lot of ways, but it is especially beautiful in its union. It isn’t as if unions don’t come with problems. Europe’s scramble to save Greece—and thereby itself—from economic disaster shows that any marriage has its struggles. Still, borders from Amsterdam to Athens are wide open, and a single Europe, even with its internal squabbles, seems stronger than the sum of its parts. Why can’t our world eventually be that way?

Yes, of course, there are obvious answers. For one, to offer a grave understatement, not all countries in this world agree on some pretty fundamental issues, like whether men and women are equal, how wealth should be distributed, and what place science has in society. But there were fundamental issues that tore the United States apart, too, just 150 years ago, and America made it through.

Magnifying, then, the scope of the anachronism of foreignness from a single nation to the entire world has profound and sweeping implications.

A convenient example is right here on campus even if it is negligible on the global scale. According to a Spectator report from last semester, one reason Columbia cannot extend need-blind admission to non-Canadian or non-Mexican internationals is that doing so would threaten the University’s AAA credit rating. This isn’t Columbia’s fault—our entire global financial system is predicated on notions of national distinctions. But they don’t really make sense. Why, for example, should an Indian national who has been educated in an American school fall outside of Columbia’s generous financial aid policies simply because of the word on the cover of her passport?

She shouldn’t. And her situation demonstrates just how anachronistic a concept foreignness is.

In our new millennium, “foreign” simply makes no sense. Let’s face that fact.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College sophomore. He is the former Spectator editorial page editor. He is also a senior editor of the Columbia East Asia Review and the secretary of the Bahá’í Club of Columbia University. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Mondays.