ISTANBUL -- Thanks to our General Education program's ever-present wisdom, my first semester at AU I enrolled in a course entitled "Views from the Third World." The class provided freshmen with many important lessons about their new college home. It was a lecture, meaning that attendance, while taken, consisted merely of a sheet passed around the large hall, and more than once I saw the sorority sister in front of me place initials next to a wide variety of student names. ("Cheating happens in college too?" my freshman mind wondered. "How... expected.")
Still, I continued to come, sitting in the same lecture chair with the same broken pull-out desk week upon week. As the attendance dwindled, the class, paradoxically (or perhaps inevitably) became more interesting.
Our professor, while not a Communist, could quote whole sections from Marx's "Manifesto," and before long my New England, public-school-educated world vision was being constantly challenged. It was hardly a bad thing. Indeed, one could say this is college's whole purpose -- except the drinking, of course.
We discussed the rise of the corporate world -- how corporations are no longer just international but supranational, meaning they exist above nations, not simply between them. We read John Perkins' "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." We lamented the American Empire that formed during the Cold War and how the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had taken the places of tanks and tariffs. We talked about the ease of international travel, how the Internet has linked us all together and how knowledge, the 21st century's currency, no longer has boundaries.
That winter, in a ritual as old as higher education, I returned to my sleepy New England. My father and I trudged through the Christmas-time snow to a local coffee shop, and over eggs and coffee I embodied AU's most prevalent freshman trope: the insufferable know-it-all.
He listened patiently as I explained how globalization had changed the world. He swirled his coffee, still listening, as I expounded on the rise of world classes -- a global upper, middle and lower. And he remained attentive as I reached my climax:
"Get it?" I said, my eyes filled with the gleam only felt by college freshmen when they think (mistakenly) they've struck upon a wholly original idea. "If there's a supranational, a global, upper-class -- these corporations -- and a global middle class and lower class, then borders don't matter anymore. The world is run on economics, and economics now transcend borders. Borders are irrelevant - nations are now transitory."
"You're saying nations don't mean anything?" my father responded.
I rolled my eyes, secure in my expertise in globalization, economics and world cultures. (Earned after one semester, no less!) "You're being reductive, but yes," I said.
"I'll believe that when I stop having to pay taxes," he said.
My father was right, of course; parents usually are, though we college students loathe admitting it. Borders do still matter, as evidenced by the world map gracing this column.
See, I left the U.S. back in June as part of the State Department's Critical Language Scholarship program. When Ko�§ University in Istanbul accepted me for study this fall, they told me I needed an official student visa. One issued by the Turkish Embassy in D.C.
"Surely it shouldn't be that hard," I thought, as I headed to Ankara's branch of the Foreigner's Police. (Turkey has no separate immigration service.) "After all, we exist in a post-border world. Why would I have to go through one office, on one random spot on the globe, as opposed to any other office?"
The Turk inspecting my form didn't buy it. I was a U.S. citizen. I had to go through the Turkish Embassy assigned to U.S. citizens - in person, in the U.S. Lucky for me, the State Department paid for my flight home.
Why? Because despite all of my academic, freshman-year philosophizing to the contrary, borders do matter. Nations do exist. Classes can talk all they want about the rising world culture, the Internet's supranational characteristics, and how the world is flat, not to mention hot and crowded. No doubt many University College seminars and Honors Colloquia will. Incoming freshmen: consider yourselves warned.
However, these theories will not survive contact with reality. My passport does not list me as a "citizen of the world." It lists me as a citizen of the United States of America. This is my nation. For good or ill, this is my identity.
This is why studying abroad is so essential. Most people on Earth don't share my identity. They have their own. If this "global society" we all theorize about in our ivory towers is coming to pass, it behooves us to learn about some identities other than our own.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
