Aliens fascinate us. Not the aliens that immigration officials worry about, but the ones that come from other planets. Whether it is movies such as the 2005 release Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, television such as the numerous Star Trek series, sci-fi novels, or comics, our entertainment media are filled with "others." These aliens can do more than amuse or scare us; they can teach us something. For instance, take E.T., the extraterrestrial being. Now there was one strange-looking character. He–she?–had a squat body, no legs to speak of, a large shriveled head, saucer eyes, and a telescopic neck. And the color! Yes, E.T. was definitely weird. Not only that; there was presumably a whole planet full of E.T.s--all looking alike, waddling along, with their necks going up and down.

Or did they all look alike? They might have to us, but probably not to one another. Perhaps their planet had different countries, ethnic groups, and races of E.T.s. Maybe they had different-length necks, were varied shades of greenish-brown, and squeaked and hummed with different tonal qualities. It could even be that darker-green E.T.s with longer necks from the country of Urghor felt superior to lighter-green, short-necked E.T.s from faraway and little-known Sytica across the red Barovian Sea. If E.T. were a Sytican, would the Urghorans have responded to the plaintive call, "E.T. phone home”?

We can also wonder whether E.T. could tell Earthlings apart. Was he aware that some of his human protectors were boys and some were girls and that a racial and ethnic cross section of Americans chased him with equal-opportunity abandon? Maybe we all looked pretty much the same to E.T. If he had been on a biological specimen-gathering expedition, would he have collected a Canadian, a Nigerian, and a Laotian, or would he have considered them duplicates?

The point of this whimsy is to get us thinking about our world--how we group ourselves, and how we distinguish our group from others. This sense of how you are connected politically to others is called political identity. What we humans mostly do is to ignore our many and manifest similarities and perceptually divide ourselves into Americans, Chinese, Irish, Poles, and a host of other national "we-groups." This juxtaposition of the traditional nationalist orientation and the alternative transnational orientation represents one of this book's main themes: that the world is at or is approaching a critical juncture where two roads diverge in the political wood. The two paths to the political future--traditional and alternative--were mapped out briefly in chapter 1.

This chapter and those that follow will explore the two roads, usually by comparing them in successive chapters. This chapter, for example, takes up nationalism, the traditional way we identify ourselves politically. Then, in chapter 5, we will turn to alternative, transnationalist orientations.