The Best American Travel Writing 2018 by Cheryl Strayed

Author:Cheryl Strayed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

The history of nationhood is a history of boundaries marked on land. When, in the fourteenth century, peace arrived after bloodshed among the peoples of Mexico’s eastern altiplano, the first task of the Tlaxcaltecs was to set the borders of their territory. In 1813, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a German nationalist poet before there was a Germany to be nationalistic about, embraced the idea of a “Vaterland” of shared history: “Which is the German’s fatherland? / So tell me now at last the land!—/ As far’s the German’s accent rings / And hymns to God in heaven sings.”

Today, the old fatuities of the nation-state are showing signs of crisis. Formerly imperialist powers have withered into nationalism (as in Brexit) and separatism (Scotland, Catalonia). New powers, such as the Islamic State, have redefined nationhood by ideological acculturation. It is possible to imagine a future in which nationality is determined not so much by where you live as by what you log on to.

Estonia currently holds the presidency of the European Union Council—a bureaucratic role that mostly entails chairing meetings. (The presidency rotates every six months; in January, it will go to Bulgaria.) This meant that the autumn’s EU Digital Summit was held in Tallinn, a convergence of audience and expertise not lost on Estonia’s leaders. One September morning, a car pulled up in front of the Tallinn Creative Hub, a former power station, and Kersti Kaljulaid, the president of Estonia, stepped out. She is the country’s first female president, and its youngest. Tall and lanky, with chestnut hair in a pixie cut, she wore an asymmetrical dress of Estonian blue and machine gray. Kaljulaid took office last fall, after Estonia’s presidential election yielded no majority winner; parliamentary representatives of all parties plucked her out of deep government as a consensus candidate whom they could all support. She had previously been an EU auditor.

“I am president to a digital society,” she declared in her address. The leaders of Europe were arrayed in folding chairs, with Angela Merkel, in front, slumped wearily in a red leather jacket. “Simple people suffer in the hands of heavy bureaucracies,” Kaljulaid told them. “We must go for inclusiveness, not high end. And we must go for reliability, not complex.”

Kaljulaid urged the leaders to consider a transient population. Theresa May had told her people, after Brexit, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” With May in the audience, Kaljulaid staked out the opposite view. “Our citizens will be global soon,” she said. “We have to fly like bees from flower to flower to gather those taxes from citizens working in the morning in France, in the evening in the UK, living half a year in Estonia and then going to Australia.” Citizens had to remain connected, she said, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, began nodding vigorously and whispering to an associate. When Kaljulaid finished, Merkel came up to the podium.

“You’re so much further than we are,” she said. Later, the EU

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