Brexit Follow-up

Brexit Follow-up

A friend pointed out to me that my seeking French nationality as an “insurance policy”, for purely practical purposes, as I put it in my last post, could be construed as an insult to the French and their nationality. I have to concur that it could be construed that way although that is not at all what I intended. My friend also stated that gaining nationality where you lived enabled you to play a full part in the life of where you lived and I agree totally with the importance of that.  I have always felt that I wanted to make a positive contribution wherever I lived. The point on reasons for nationality stuck with me and made me try to work out what nationality is really all about or should be about. It is necessary for practical purposes; being stateless can cause all number of practical problems. However what is or should nationality be all about?

The first point that occurred to me is that, from a historical perspective, for the vast majority of people their nationality is almost certainly recent. My historian friend Steve would be only too happy to recount to anyone interested the extent to which national borders have changed over the last two centuries, even in Europe let alone the rest of the world. Every time a border changes so does the nationality of the people in the changed areas. Thus any idea that one's nationality necessarily connects one to the nation's long-term history goes out the window. So do political parties that seek to impose some kind of racial “purety”; it can't exist other than in a negligible minority of cases. Over the past few centuries nearly all of us have become mongrels, even if we weren't before.

There are nonetheless easily discernible differences in different regions of the world, often associated with specific countries, but are these differences necessarily national? There are geographical and climactic differences but these are a continuum and take no account of national borders. There are historical differences that do often relate to specific nations but not necessarily nations as currently constituted; in any case, few of these have much to do with nationality today. Neither does religion recognise national borders; even states with a national religion include many inhabitants with another religion. And there are cultural differences of course but all of these that I can think of either relate to legal and administrative differences (practical matters) or are regional rather than national. In matters other than schooling and language (both administrative) a Frenchman who has long lived in the south of France is most probably more culturally similar to near Italian or Spanish neighbours than he is to a Frenchman who has long lived in the Dunkirk region.

What is left? Only emotion, I think, and duty. People may be emotionally attached to the country of their nationality (or to one of them) but this may be for any number of disparate reasons and anyway isn't necessarily the case. Duty has two aspects. There is a duty to abide by the laws of a country (and if you want to change them, to do so by legal means) and there is also a duty to defend the country, one way or another, in time of war. This last point is, I hope, and most probably, hypothetical in the case of European countries.

I have one further point: is nationality desirable? Mitterand said that nationalism means war and nationalism can only be associated with nationality. So I come to the conclusion that nationality has no intrinsic characteristics and may not even be desirable but is necessary for practical purposes. In other words I can't think of any intrinsic reason for having or choosing to have a nationality other than for practical purposes. Some people may be insulted if another chooses to obtain their nationality for purely practical purposes but I think they would have a lot of difficulty explaining why they feel that way, other than as a purely personal emotional response.

Religion

As I am engaged on explaining (justifying?) myself I thought I might as well have a go at my thoughts on religion at the same time. I am not a believer in God (any God) so religion rarely impinges on my thoughts. However I often find myself not neutral but definitely antagonistic to others' religious beliefs and I sometimes try to work out why. The first point is that I won't accept anybody else's right to tell me what is morally right or wrong; that explains an innate antagonism towards Catholicism, even though I can see value in some of its doctrines. If that, in my cultural context, would make me a protestant, then I have objections there too. I think Calvinism, as I understand it, encapsulates them. Calvinism proposes that there is no enjoyment or satisfaction to be had in life except in positively pleasing its version of God. Hence the saying that every Scot who enjoys himself in some other way (Scotland being a hotspot for Calvinism) knows that he is going to have pay dearly for his pleasure afterwards; bring on the guilt! A S Neill, a significant influence on my thoughts, would call this attitude “anti-life” and I would agree, which explains my antagonism to much of protestantism. I would also dismiss out of hand claims or compulsory practices by any religion that are based on evidence supported only by superstition or some script written around two millennia ago. And I abhor anyone who wants to kill others on the basis of their religion. I accept that many people with specific religious beliefs do a lot of good in the world, also that many of the same do (in my view) a lot of harm. Other than that I have no problem with religion.

Maybe I'm just being self-indulgent here.