Politics...is always an art, and engages the imagination as art does...How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders.
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The state as such does not exist. What exists are buildings and aeroplanes and tax forms and border patrols. What mobilizes 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...The political imagination is simply the condition of possibility for the organization of bodies in a society.
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Modern politics was not discovered but imaged, invented...what we call 'religion', a fundamental interior disposition of the individual toward the transcendent, was also an invention of fairly recent origin. To identify politics and religion as acts of the imagination is to recognize their historical contingency, and thus give hope that things do not necessarily have to be the way they are.
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The borders which once seemed so solidly to define the territorial nation-state--borders which marked out a 'public square' for political debate, borders which sharply divided domestic policy from foreign policy and fellow-citizens from strangers--these borders have now begun to appear quite porous. Sovereignty is becoming best understood 'less as a territorially defined barrier than a bargaining resource for a politics characterized by complex transnational networks.'...globalization in fact marks the hyperextension of some of the most dangerous pathologies of the nation-state.
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No longer can we accept the positioning of Christian theology by secular political theologies in the name of a false and murderous civic peace. Christian theology must renounce all implications in the means of violence.
