Some personal reflections on…. national identity

I sometimes wonder whether other people spend as much time as I do thinking about national identity. I suppose there are people out there so secure in their sense of national identity that it never gives them a moment’s pause. I’m not one of them.

This very complicated issue essentially boils down to a simple question: where does a sense of national identity actually come from?

Let’s start with the obvious. It could derive from the place where you live and the people (and culture) that surround you. Or it could derive from your birthplace, or your parents’ birthplace. Right away though, I’ve run into a problem. I have at least three answers to these questions, each, on average, 2,500 miles apart.

When people pose the apparently innocuous question ‘where are you from?’ they could — depending on who’s asking and a host of other factors including, it has to be said, skin colour — be asking anything from ‘where did you travel from today’ to ‘where are your people from’, or as it was put to me once in India, ‘where is your native place?’ Thanks to family history websites and DNA tests, we probably know more about our immediate forebears than any generation in history. But in terms of ‘national’ or ‘ethnic’ identity, the bigger the picture, the less clear it can sometimes appear. If I were to take, for example, the birth places of my eight great-grandparents as a guide to my own personal national identity, I would have to pick from: Scotland, India, Malta, Tunisia, England, Spain and Gibraltar.

That’s not to say that our family, or ethnic, backgrounds don’t play an important part in our own sense of national identity, they clearly do (I couldn’t, for example, make a claim to Hungarian identity just because I felt like it) but neither do they provide a simple answer.

What if we take a more legalistic view — which passport do I use? Well, in my 40 years on planet earth, I’ve been entitled to traverse it on at least three different passports (a classic ‘citizen of nowhere’ in Theresa May’s infamous phrase). However, the one in front of me right now says ‘British’ (and yes, it’s one of the new, dark blue ones). So that’s it then, I’m British right?

I suppose part of my problem stems precisely from this apparently simple formulation. For a start, being ‘British’, as opposed to English, has always been an imperial formulation, and even in 2022 encompasses a broad range of ‘national’ identities, not just the four ‘home’ nations that make up the United Kingdom, but the 13 populated British Overseas Territories, including Gibraltar where my father’s family come from. That leaves (*quick calculation*) 17 different national identities within the current conception of British citizenship, not to mention those British citizens living in the UK who feel an affinity for — or may even have dual citizenship of — another nation, often another part of the former British Empire, which, it’s sometimes easy to forget, only began to disintegrate a generation ago.

A lot has been written about ‘Britishness’ (and indeed ‘Englishness’) and I don’t intend to dive into this debate but to offer some personal reflections. For the reasons I’ve already stated, my ‘Britishness’ always sat fairly easily alongside other identities. This was especially true when Britain was a member of the European Union (EU). I could be Gibraltarian, British, and European. The ‘B-word’ was such a shock for people like me because it felt like a piece of my personal identity had been ripped away from me against my will. For several years afterwards I would look around at my fellow citizens on the London Underground and wonder whether they were responsible. Brexit was, I came to believe, a specifically English phenomenon, and I had never felt particularly English.

Since 2016 then, I’ve had plenty of time to mull over these questions of identity. Like countless other ‘Remainers’ I attempted to salvage something of my European identity, first by throwing myself into the campaign for a referendum on the Brexit deal, and then, when that proved hopeless, by re-discovering my family’s roots in another EU nation, in my case, Malta, which granted me citizenship in 2021.

I became ‘European’ again. But we’re talking about a fairly big club, encompassing 27 different countries, 447 million people, 24 ‘official’ languages and 150 regional and minority ones. Like ‘Britishness’, which at one time described one in four people on the planet, plenty of work has been done on the existence or otherwise of a pan-European identity, but even its most vocal advocates would agree that (golf’s Ryder Cup aside) the majority of people in the EU still cheer most wholeheartedly for their own particular piece of it.

All nations are, to use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, ‘imagined communities’. Imagined in the sense that ‘members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members’. Anyone who has walked down Main Street in Gibraltar may beg to differ. Members of very small nations have, by Anderson’s definition, less to imagine. They do know many of their fellow members by sight, and kinships ties remain strong. But it is debatable whether Gibraltar’s example would be easily replicable elsewhere, a community which could easily fit inside a football stadium, living in an area eight times the size of London’s Battersea Park.

Which brings me to my current home, a small corner of the former imperial capital called Brentford. London has been my home now for 17 years, and Brentford for ten of those. Viewed from afar, it’s easy to caricature London as one big, loud, sprawling, mulitcultural melting pot of 8 million people. If it were a country, it would be on a par, at least in population terms, with Switzerland, Israel or Sierra Leone. And yet, when I take my dog for a walk around the streets of Brentford, or drop my children off at school in the morning, I see the same faces again and again. Community does exist, even in a global mega-city. It can be centred around a school, a workplace, even a football club. Unless you’re lucky enough to live in Gibraltar or in a micro-state like Nauru, it’s a good bet that your immediate family, and your wider community, mean more to you in real terms than a nation of millions.

If this sounds a bit hopeless in the case of Britain specifically — four nations, and a patchwork of different communities divided in almost every way it is possible to be divided — I still think there’s a case to be made for an inclusive, positive, civic nationalism. Perhaps that’s an essay for another day.

George Orwell famously described England as ‘a family with the wrong members in control’. That is even truer today than when he wrote it in 1941, but he went on to say that like any family ‘it closes its ranks’ at the approach of an enemy. In 1941, the enemy was obvious. Perhaps in 2022 it will take another common threat (Putin?) to unite the British people again.