How can we bring countries closer together?

[Islamosocialist]

I have some experience with countries that love each other very much.

Bosniaks and Turks are very close. For example, when we play each other's teams in football, we often wave both flags.

And this is despite that we are some distance apart, different races, speak completely different languages, and so on.

But we're just... close. We love each other.

This commercial is a good expression of that, even though it's regional.

It's a Turkish soap opera male star with a woman. She's speaking Turkish at first, but then she stops fantasizing and snaps back into our language. Then she sees her star at the same supermarket this commercial is for. Oh, yay! He eventually asks her out for coffee, and you'll see what happens. Then, the Turkish female star of the soap opera appears. And she accompanies the two on their coffee date, and you see the reaction of the local waiter:

youtube.com/watch?v=7Pn3jWYw6Jc&NR=1

Cute things like this, I think it's important. It lessens the... divisions that the right wing uses to its advantage.

This commercial is two completely different nationalities sharing a single moment, as equals.

How can we accomplish more like that? Imagine a commercial in America with Bollywood stars? Or stars of Czech or Russian theatre?

It's cool. We need more of it!

[thefinalmarch]

What you are saying about "bringing countries closer together" sounds really vague to me. However, if you talking about eradicating national divisions altogether, then I'm all for it. Nationality doesn't exist as an actual social relation in the real world insofar as it exists purely as a perception in the mind. Nations can never be objectively defined and they are, in their modern forms, mere conceptions of the capitalist classes designed to foster class collaboration and pacify the working class.

To eradicate national divisions and the very conceptions of "nations" themselves, we should take a lesson from psychology. The hypothesis which has been proven time and time again is that, in order to remove prejudice and dislike between two conflicting groups, they must be placed in situations in which there is increased inter-group contact, and where they are mutually interdependent -i.e., where they are dependent on each other to achieve their superordinate goals. "A superordinate goal is a goal that cannot be achieved by any one group alone and overrides other existing goals which each group might have" (Sherif, 1966).

Incidentally, Marxism inadvertently caught on to this idea a good century before the Robber's Cave experiment (which first scientifically demonstrated mutual interdependence) took place (1956). The general consensus among Marxists seems to be that, in order to achieve a united working class (i.e. which is not divided along ethnic lines), workers of all "nations" and "races" must struggle together against the capitalist classes to further their objective class interests. The idea is that this shows workers of different "ethnicities" that workers' interests are one and the same across the globe. This indeed gives us an example of situations wherein multiple groups achieve sustained contact and are mutually dependent.

[MarxSchmarx]

There is an off-again on-again attempt of mainstream labor unions in the global north to internationalize, especially outside of traditional regions. I guess because of the costs involved it doesn't stay sustained and remains stil l a pet project of certain union leaders, but there certainly needs to be some bottom up (as opposed to top down, as in the case of celebrities or sports figures) people to people interaction focusing on building workers solidarity across borders. I guess for all their faults sites like Revleft do force users to adopt an international perspective; it's a tricky thing to generalize to those not converted to internatioalism but building those kinds of insittutions is a good idea.

[RedSonRising]

Cultural fraternization seems like an enjoyable and valuable experience to try and spread, but it should never be so tied to nationalist senses of identity that the universally working-class ideas of revolutionary class struggle are distorted or made subordinate.

Pan-Africanism, Latin American Integration, etc. have all proved useful cultural affirmations of identity for oppressed peoples who have a confused and oppressed sense of who they are, and have aided the birth of socialist social movements worldwide. When people rejoice in their bonding over values and lifestyles, it's a good thing, and it's not inherently counterrevolutionary to attach oneself to a political culture beyond that of someone who strives for working-class democracy- as long as it never supplants the material necessity for the abolition of the class system first and foremost.