A Question of Nationality

‘I’m a quarter French, half Dutch on my mother’s side. I was born in Algeria, but didn’t stay there for long...'?

I’ve always thought it odd when people use fractions to describe their national identity. How do you know what should count and for what amount? How far back should you go into your past? And is it possible to take something as fluid and rich as your identity and reduce it to something so precise?

Dig beneath the surface of our talk of 'nationality' and 'national identity' and various puzzles emerge.

How should we weigh more objective, legalistic markers of nationality (passports and citizenship status) with subjective feelings of identity (your attachment or sense of belonging to a country)? To what extent is our nationality something we inherit or grow into throughout our life? Is our nationality in our genes, and if so, how does that affect how we should think about race and ethnicity?

What is nationality?

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What makes someone French? Is it just about having French citizenship, with all the rights and responsibilities this entails? Or must one be initiated into a common French family through shared rituals (e. g. singing the French anthem, celebrating Bastille Day), values (e. g. liberty, equality, and fraternity), and behaviours (e. g. speaking French, eating French food, absorbing French culture)?

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Our ideas about nationality pull us in different directions. We think of it both as something inherited, and something acquired, something we are and something we do. This means we talk about in very different ways. In the USA, it is commonplace for politicians to denounce their opponents as ‘un-American’. They don’t mean to suggest that their adversaries lack American citizenship, but rather that the way they act is out of step with America’s customs, values, and traditions. Being ‘American’ is about what you do and how you think, not what you are. By contrast, someone who has lived in Japan most of their life, who is culturally Japanese to a fault, may be considered ‘not really Japanese’ if they look ethnically Ukrainian- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68078061 . Being ‘Japanese’ seems to be more what you are and what you look like, not what you do.

Some countries avoid this linguistic ambivalence. The German word for ‘nationality’, for example, doesn’t carry the same complicated web of associations that it does in English. To say someone is of German nationality means only that they have German citizenship. Are we better off using this approach to resolve the tensions in our concept of nationality? Or is there necessarily more to nationality than citizenship?

If we equate nationality with citizenship alone, only the government can specify conditions for it. This gives outsize influence both to a particular group of people (those in power) and a particular view of nationality (a legalistic one). What's more, ‘nations’ have historically been defined more broadly than 'States'. The former is a complex category, rather than a merely political one. Wikipedia offers the following definition of a nation:? ?

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‘A community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or territory. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those features.’

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The definition is expansive, yet it captures many of the features highlighted when people speak of someone not being ‘really Chinese’ or ‘truly Brazilian’. A nation is a unifying idea. Without features that make us the same, how are we to distinguish between those who are and aren’t Brazilian? Others must be excluded, so every country polices ideas of nationality to a greater or lesser extent, accentuating the aspects they consider most important.

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Is nationality genetic?

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Most people agree that our nationality is at least partly inherited from our parents. But how does this inheritance happen? Is it through nurture, as our parents pass on the nation’s culture and customs? Or is it through nature, passed on through their genes? It’s not uncommon to hear people say things like ‘I have Scottish blood’. If we take the idea literally, this means that there is distinctively Scottish DNA, transmitted from our ancestors. Let’s consider the implications of this. ?

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We first acquire our genetic material shortly after fertilisation in the womb. So, can you have a Finnish foetus? An Ethiopian embryo? This is quite odd. Can a foetus be Finnish if it has no Finnish citizenship, has never seen Finland, has never spoken the language, indeed has never even known of Finland’s existence? To say so discounts the role of socialisation in acquiring your nationality. We might say: is a person created fully Finnish, or must they become a Finn?

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Suppose we accept for the sake of argument that our genes can be ‘Greek’. What characteristics would be passed on that are distinctively of that nation? Are there particular personality or character traits of Greek people? Or perhaps Greeks share certain physical traits? Both answers face problems. Saying the former runs the risk of reductive stereotyping and downplaying the role of the environment in shaping personality. Saying the latter may be uncontroversial in some cases (e. g. the Dutch are the tallest people in the world and height is partly genetically transmissible) but more problematically may lead to a charge of racism. If we think that Greeks look a certain way, it’s not a great leap to say that ‘Greek’ genes carry a particular skin colour or ethnicity.

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What is the relationship between nationality and ethnicity?

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Imagine the following scenario: an ethnically Chinese couple in Beijing give up their baby for adoption to a white Swedish couple in Stockholm. The baby is raised to speak Swedish, goes to Swedish schools, and learns about Swedish culture and traditions. When they get older, they are offered the change to explore their heritage but have little interest in doing so or in finding out about their biological parents in China. Would you say that they are predominantly Chinese or Swedish?

Now reverse the situation. Suppose the baby was instead adopted by Chinese parents in Beijing, but was born to a white Swedish couple in Stockholm, would you say that they are predominantly Chinese or Swedish?

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When confronted with both these cases, many answer with apparently inconsistent answers. The baby with Chinese biological parents can be Swedish, they say, but the baby with Swedish biological parents cannot become Chinese. Can this be right? On its surface the two cases are the same, so what could explain the difference?

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The assumption here, though it isn’t usually directly spelled out, is that to be Chinese necessarily means being of a particular race or ethnicity but being Swedish doesn’t. We could say the same of countries with majority black populations, thinking that a black child of Nigerian parents can become Swedish, but a white child of Swedish parents cannot become Nigerian? Why is this?

Perhaps the apparent inconsistency can be explained by considering the nation’s history. Does it have a track record of hosting people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds? Take the USA, founded on the ideal of being ‘a nation of immigrants.’ In America, identity is often hyphenated; an acknowledgement of the cultural heritage of those who came as well as their newfound identification with the promise of America (e. g. Irish- American, African-American, Asian-American etc). The idea, generously interpreted, is that being American is not about where you are from or the colour of your skin but about your values and where you are headed. By contrast, some nations are either defined by common ancestry (e.g. Israel) or never settle enough immigrants to expand the nation’s racial diversity (e.g. North Korea). Considering the nation’s past record of diversity helps to explain why we don’t hesitate to talk about ‘white South Africans’ yet find talk of ‘white Nigerians’ discordant.

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Another way to make sense of the inconsistency is to consider why some are reticent to describe white people as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Nigerian’. On the one hand, this reticence may come from the host nation of the adopted child. Given the dark history of white colonialist adventurism in many places in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, locals may be reluctant to describe a possible descendant of the colonial oppressors as one of their own. The implicit message may be: we have our independence now, so we get to define our own identity and you are not a part of it. White Westerners might hesitate to describe a white person as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Kenyan’, say, out of respect for this history of imposition and subjugation. Ascribing these nationalities to a white person smacks of cultural appropriation.

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On the other hand, the reticence of white Westerners to describe white people as ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Chinese’ may come not from a place of deference but assumptions of national (and by extension racial) superiority. On this view, white people may be reluctant to describe themselves as having African or Asian nationality because of the implicit (and racist) assumption that doing so lowers their status. To describe someone who was born in Nigeria or China as ‘English’ or ‘Canadian’, by contrast, is fine as they are effectively being promoted through acceptance by the more powerful country.

The belief in national and racial superiority isn’t just held by white people, as many non-white people may view gaining nationality in a white Western country (i.e. European or North American) as a step up in the world. Is this the best explanation for the inconsistency? And if so, how might such views of superiority change in a world where China is the richest and most powerful country (as is forecast in coming decades)?

?Is nationality a fiction?

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By now, we have explored a few puzzles about nationality, so we can see that the idea of it is not without problems. Perhaps there is a deeper reason for all of this. Maybe nationality is just a fiction, albeit a powerful one. ?

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Consider some typical examples of what is ‘real’: mugs, lampshades, trees. To be ‘real’ commonly refers to what exists independently of how we think of it. Trees and mugs are made of physical stuff, so we can specify precisely what they are. ‘Nations’ aren’t physical things, so they have no ‘essence’ independent of what we project or construct. They exist mostly in our collective imagination, so contradictions and inconsistencies that arise in talking about it are purely of our own making. In his book ‘Sapiens’, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes, ?

"Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor."

Is a nation just a metaphor? We should not interpret this too broadly. Markers of nationality- like citizenship- have real world consequences. A nation’s territory and borders exist outside of us. Symbols of the nation- like flags and anthems- can be seen, felt, and heard. Yet these are not the ‘nation’ itself. They are only visible signs of something essentially invisible: a metaphor or, perhaps more accurately, a story of what binds a loosely connected group of people together.

If we think of a nation in this way, we might consider someone’s ‘nationality’ as something imaginary, or something that can alter at different points. We can describe someone’s hair colour, where they are born and where they lived, but to describe their ‘nationality’ is to go beyond, into the realm of the imagination, where percentages don't make sense. And yet, despite all this we still feel that our nationality is real and not mere make believe. If it is indeed a fiction, it is a curiously compelling one, so might Harari have missed out something important in his story?

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If you want to explore these ideas further, check out these books:

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Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala

The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari