EXCERPT Thinking about the philosophy of the tourist means thinking about an alternative line of political thought. If people were able to obtain universality not by affiliating with a particular state and internalising its values, but through a different circuit, what kind of path would they need to take? What new possibilities might the tourist—who is anonymous, true to their animalistic desires, makes neither friends nor enemies, and drifts between states—open up for the public realm? As I made clear in the previous chapter, these questions are fundamentally unanswerable so long as we take as our premise the linear history of the spirit that posits a progression from family to national citizen and finally to world citizen. Because according to that line of thinking, being a member of a nation is equivalent to being political and thinking about the state is equivalent to thinking about politics. But today we are faced with a reality that we must cast doubt upon this equation itself. The twenty-first-century world is significantly different in structure from the world in the era of Kant and Hegel. Although both eras are based on the nation state and on states gathering together to create an international society, the way in which this gathering and creation take place is completely different. We can no longer say that thinking about the state is equivalent to thinking about politics. In the contemporary world we are seeing the expansion of a realm of politics unmediated by the state and a politics uncontrollable by the state, on both macro and micro levels. Hence we need a new line of political thought. In chapter 1 I raised the example of contemporary terrorism as a realm of politics uncontrollable by the state. Why, then, do such realms develop in the first place? …