The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports) by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Author:Atossa Araxia Abrahamian [Abrahamian, Atossa Araxia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990976370
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2015-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

We Are the World

“In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

In 1863, the Atlantic Monthly published a short story dramatizing the life of a fictional American Army lieutenant named Philip Nolan. Nolan renounces his citizenship in a fit of anger during a trial for treason; the judge sentences him to spend the rest of his days at sea, floating from ship to ship, without any news from nor mention of his homeland.

Nolan leaves defiantly, but over time, he misses America more than he misses his family, his friends, or even the touch of dry land. On his deathbed, Nolan lets an officer into his room—a “shrine to patriotism”—and asks for news of his country, which the officer recounts to him as he lies dying.

Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” is a cautionary tale: Be true to your country, or endure a lifetime of pain and exile. Defection from the motherland is presented as a supreme moral failing. Statelessness as tragedy—a fate worse than death.

But less than a century after Hale’s story was published, the narrative of the man without a country was rewritten, this time in real life. To this day, the reasons why individuals renounce their citizenship speak volumes about the times in which they live.

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