(Photo: Public art installation called "Agora" by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Michigan Avenue and Roosevelt Road in Chicago, Illinois. Atelier Teee/Flickr) We need new collective symbols for the construction of new ways of being together, finally divorced from ethnic or national representation. Some thoughts about post-national polis with the opportunity of the Polis 21 event in Athens, Belgrade and Zagreb. by Jilly Traganou The crisis of the nation “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation. This ... is to suggest that the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and in identifying it to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for post-national social forms.“ 1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization What is this crisis that Arjun Appadurai refers to, and where can it be seen? On the one hand, we are dealing with a crisis in the macroscaleThe nation-states are becoming increasingly unable to deal on their own with problems that are global in scale: environmental degradation, financial crisis, rise of global corporate powers, pandemics are a few of such conditions that nations alone cannot cope with. On the other hand, we deal with problems in the microscale. Increased and unregulated immigration, for instance, especially as it is experienced in Europe today, is causing pressure for internal change. It is often met with the resistance or xenophobia of the local citizens. Nevertheless, national identities have never been clear-cut. They are often layered, disputed, or hide in them repressed elements. Processes of national unification, and standardization, that suppress internal difference, have been at work during the periods of nation-building, which for most countries in Europe took place in the 18th and 19th century, and are now naturalized and difficult to discern. Nation-states, especially those modeled on ethnic basis, such as Greece for instance, have been narrated as homogeneous, pure, and unique. What ties their citizens is the belief in a common ancestry and terriroriality. Within this view of nationhood as continuous, and insular, “otherness” is reluctantly accepted, since “ideal” citizens are primarily those who partake in the national culture through relationships that are based on continuity of blood and soil. This idea of modern Greece’s descent from antiquity has prevailed throughout the country’s recent history and is a major hindrance to the function of a constitutional regime based on citizens’ equality. Minority identities, such as those of non–ethnic Greek and non–Greek Orthodox populations, continue to be marginalized and excluded from the national narrative. The same, but through a much more violently erupting process, has been at work with the ethnicization of former Yugoslavia into distinct nation-states. Through this process, Serbs and Croats, among other former Yugoslavs, rediscovered their ethnic and religious differences, and set up to purify and distinguish their identities and territories from those whom they started perceiving as contaminating “others.” Coming back to Appadurai’s assertion: What are the post-national forms that Appadurai claims in this excerpt, and why are they necessitated today? As the ethnoscapes of today’s Europe are in constant flux, today almost every European country is experiencing a crisis of identity. Greece is definitely one such example, with 10% of its citizens being of non-Greek descent, and with many more living in resident status or illegally. This situation has led to various forms of conflict that range from cultural tension to incidents of hostility and violence between “insiders”— Greek citizens—and “outsiders” —the “newcomers.” A question that is being often asked is the following: Will these non-Europeans or in this case non- Greeks change and become nationalized, or will the national identities of the host-nations open up and accommodate the otherness of their newcomers? But this may be a faulty question, and an unnecessary struggle. Obtaining access to nationality should not be the criterion of access to this most precious good that is made scarce and difficult to access today: that of citizenship. An approach that by-passes the national question may be a more appropriate way of addressing these conditions. Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal defines postnational citizenship as a regime that ‘confers upon every person the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical or cultural ties to that community’. If national identity derives from belonging to a “people,” then, according to Curtin, the “postnational idea is premised precisely on the separation of politics and culture, of nationality and citizenship”. It presupposes that national (or cultural) plurality can coexist alongside political unity. Thus the postnational polis lies beyond the ethnic or national definition of its citizens. The internal efforts that would help post-nationalize the polis from within, and overcome the national paradigm, should be undertaken by not only intellectuals or law-makers, but also by artists, designers, and urbanists alike, all those agents who partake in the creation of the local culture. Cultura l Agency and Post-national Polis Today, we witness a proliferation of initiatives that operate in the level of the civil society. Many immigrant associations, and non-profit organizations that work on these issues indeed function as domestic postnational spaces that operate beyond national constraints. It is not surprising that artists, architects and designers have also tapped into this implosion of civil society practices, and use methods and tactics that aim at engaging with the condition of the stranger. Such as for instance initiatives by Design for Humanity, that often fluctuate between philanthropy and activism. In my opinion we need a clearer political situatedness of these initiatives. For that, I would refer to what geographer Ash Amin has called as “Engagement with the Stranger.” Amin suggests that we need to “recognize the coming Europe of plural and hybrid cultures…and seek to develop an imaginary of becoming European through engagement with the stranger in ways that imply no threat to tradition and cultural autonomy.” This proposition necessitates rethinking the distinction between self and other, but also looking for conditions of strangeness within the confines of a given culture, and in this way revising the certainties that constitute the identities of individuals, groups and places. There are plenty of instances of internal strangeness that one can discern in cultural symbols in countries like Greece, Serbia or Croatia. In fact, like in most places of the world, it would be hard to define almost any national symbol as outcome of singularity or purity, not unlike the examples of African textiles (such as kente) provided by Anthony Appiah in his discussion of African culture through the perspective of cosmopolitanism, which present cultural products that have been historically seen as unique to a local culture as outcomes instead of encounters with strangers. I will give just one such example of an established national symbol that has been repeatedly deconstructed by scholars in ethnography and fashion studies alike, but which Greek populations still perceive as singularly Greek. It is nothing else than the national costume of the Greeks, the fustanella, which in fact as scholarship shows long before it came to symbolize Greek independence from the ottoman Turks, was common dress for Albanian men. There is nothing surprising about it, if one accepts that the history of Greece, like of many other countries in the world, is the story of endless movement of people: invasions. Migrations, resettlement. Needless to say that such a view has not been highlighted in textbooks versions of Greekness that have emphasized instead the purity of the breed. What would be the symbols of Greece as a postnational entity? One that does not derive anymore from the stock references of Greek antiquity and the Byzantine period, nor via ethnic references to its newcomers? Here I see a lot of space for artists, and designers to re-negotiate and reinvent the new symbols of the polis, but also to propagate the needto re-consider those newcomers as members of the polis. Talking about the case of Greece, we witness today a rise of acts which I would like to call territorial activism, works that bridge the realm of localized action with geo-politics, and for that being inherently transnational. Projects such as Egnatia by Osservatorio Nomade, a subset of Stalker, which stimulated engagement with Kurdish populations in Greece; or the participatory work initiated by the Network of Nomadic Architecture in the area of Gazochori in Athens, where large percentages of Muslim residents reside; or the Spatial Imaginary and Multiple Belonging project by Lydia Matthews, Eleni Tzirtzilaki and Jilly Traganou that took place in Athens in June 2008 involving immigrant women. All these projects not only pinpoint ethnic and social subjectivities that have been marginalized, but at the same time try to empower their constituencies with means of self-representation and connectivity with citizens and residents. For projects of this nature to be effective and have a continuity, it is necessary that those involved are mindful of what Chantal Mouffe has called conflictual or agonistic participation. Often projects of this type foster a celebratory dimension that is reminiscent of the type of art that Nicolas Bourriaud has described as emblematic of today’s “relational aesthetics”. These artistic practices are made of the same material as the processes of social exchange. Many of these works often try to evoke a shared sense of festivity and conviviality. These elements of joy, relaxation or pleasure that are associated with the acts of celebration, and which are the means of conduct adopted by these art works, are often being accompanied by elements of conflict, resentment or misunderstanding. These moments of crisis are often the results of the unequal power relations between those involved—and particularly between the organizersartists and members of immigrant or other marginal groups that participate in them. Having witnessed such instances of conflict, I find it particularly critical to capture and work precisely with these sentiments of resentment that emerge out of such nteractions rather than to let them fall into oblivion, or let the processes of social interaction take a delusional sense of consensus. These are precisely the elements to be tackled upon in order to give to these acts continuity and have effects that last beyond the conviviality of their shared moments of joy. With this, it will become clear that conflict lies at the heart of relations among the different social actors that are involved in these processes. I would therefore suggest that for the postnational polis, there is a need for both new symbols of representation, and for collective processes of action that reveal and activate the agonistic dynamics of its constituency, both their commonalities and their differences.