“And the world will be as one” – John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Nutopia

Abstract

In 1973, John Lennon was fighting deportation from the US by a Nixon administration that deplored his anti-government activities, when he and his wife Yoko Ono came up with the concept of Nutopia, an imaginary state with no borders or laws, to publicise his plight. So was Nutopia the last breath of the hippie dream, a final attempt to “get back to the garden” as Joni Mitchell put it, or rich cosmopolitans’ presumption that they should be free to move wherever they pleased? In this essay I will briefly review strains of utopian thought in the 1960s counterculture, examples of micronations from that period and Lennon, Ono and the Beatles’ own history of associations with micronations, islands and alternative communities, in life and art, to argue that for Lennon at any rate, they filled a deep seated need to belong, without necessarily recognizing corresponding obligations to his compatriots.