The damage that identities have done [has resulted in] the end of human community. - Said (2000) The transnational state is the realization of a utopian dream. Like all paradise constructions, it treads on a proclaimed emotional and cultural superiority, an imagined unity, and a supposed natural (or divinely anointed) status. The maintenance of that social location is waged through penalties upon those who fail to recognize the cultural pretensions of a dominant group (generally in power

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... violence, not democratic initiative) and the social authority based thereon. The transnational iteration relies on the national frameworks, nuanced so that they appear to be inclusive and representational, but the same fragility underlays the transnational scope: while ostensibly emancipatory, on close inspection the division of myth only rehashes the hierarchy and inequality of the capitalist neoliberal nation-state, with modified and hyphenated or hybridized elements. The inner problem is twofold: (1) a community linked to geography and/ or culture is inherently presumptuous. Cultural communities do not generally begin or end with any relation to the territorial prescriptions assigned to them by political bodies, migrations occur constantly, and the cultural orientation of each individual should be understood as external to and not defined by external controls; (2) the cultural associations that supposedly bind the residents of the space to one another into a stable social unit are too malleable and circumstantial to maintain the exigencies articulated by the nation and its transnational subordinates.