North Korea and Iran: Lady Gaga Nation-States?

This week is the first time I have been legitimately stumped by a blog question. If Lady Gaga was a nation-state, what would the international system look like? Perhaps the difficulty of this question lies in its abstract nature. It leaves quasi-pragmatists like myself at a loss. So in keeping with the true form of a pragmatist, I am going to apply this notion to reality and audaciously suggest that Lady Gaga states actually exist in the world order today.

If we define a Lady Gaga nation-state as a government that deliberately flaunts conventions to provoke reaction, we could consider North Korea and Iran as manifestations of this distinct way of relating to the international community. Out of protest against certain “Western” practices and ideals, both Iran and North Korea refuse to fully participate in the accepted global order. Their outrageous behavior transforms them into larger-than-life icons for their respective ideologies. In many ways, this gets at the complicated issue of identity. Does it really matter how you define your identity, if other persons or entities don’t recognize this? Take the microcosm of Lady Gaga in popular culture. Lady Gaga views herself as a calculated activist for the GBLT community and thus deliberately produces material that grabs attention and flaunts convention. While Lady Gaga has a substantial fan base, many Americans see her material as outrageous and automatically dismiss it. Many people don’t even recognize her as a GLBT activist. While she may hold popular power, no one in the government would ask her to come to the negotiation table. Now, apply this to the macrocosm of world politics. If you simplify the identity of North Korea and Iran, you essentially get this same identity struggle. While North Korea and Iran view themselves internally as championing resistance to the Western capitalistic status quo, what do we view them as? Crazy. Unpredictable. Not worth consulting.

It is interesting, however, to examine how North Korea and Iran still hold so much weight in an international system that they refuse to fully participate in. Just like the popular power Lady Gaga holds with her following of “Little Monsters,” Iran and North Korea still have their bargaining chips, most importantly nuclear weapons. When this type of power enters the equation, the struggle between internal identity and external identity becomes largely inconsequential. Nevertheless, it makes for a tantalizing debate when a Lady Gaga metaphor is invoked!