Feb 222012
By: liz west
When I first moved to the US, many things struck me as curious. Amongst them:
- How come are there so many American flags flying from buildings?
- Why is burning a flag a big issue here?
- Why does the word ‘American’ appear so often in advertisements?
- Why do people refer to “Japanese Americans”, “African Americans”, “Italian Americans” etc, etc ?
- Why is the national anthem played at the start of many public meetings?
- Why do people put their hands on their hearts when it’s played?
Am I living in a land of wild patriotic fervour, I wondered. A close friend became an American citizen recently and invited us along to her naturalization ceremony. It helped me understand. For most of us, our nationality is an accident of birth. But when you consciously choose your citizenship, it becomes a much more meaningful state of being. A big thank you and many congratulations to Geri!
Well, most of us are citizens by birth, of course. But most of us, I’d say, are also civic rather than ethnic nationalists, meaning that whoever holds the ideals of Americans is an American, at least if they want to be. There is a loud minority that doesn’t agree with this, and treats American-ness as a pseudo-ethnicity. This attitude is usually tied up with prejudices about race, religion, and sometimes national origin; the “English-only” movement is mostly a stalking horse for this kind of bigotry.
As a civic nationalist myself, it wouldn’t matter to me if 99% of the American population were Chinese, provided they shared the American civic-nationalist values. (It would become hard for me to buy cheese, though!) By the same token, I call myself an Irish American or a German American depending on the circumstances, recognizing that important parts of who I am originates in those cultures (my mother immigrated from Germany, and though my father was born in Philadelphia, he lived in an Irish ghetto for the first 20+ years of his life), but that I don’t identify with those ethnicities as nationalities: in Ireland and Germany I am a foreigner.
Civic nationalism takes forms other than American ones, of course. In France, you are either a citoyen or not. If you are, officially nothing else matters (if you aren’t, the only thing that matters is whether you are francophone). The name Bangladesh means not the land of the Bengali people, but the land of the people who speak Bangla, the Bengali language: the vast majority of native Bengali speakers had ancestors within the last few centuries who spoke something else. (To be sure, the whole country exists because of Hindu/Muslim ethnic nationalism.) In Canada, people speak of the mosaic rather than the American melting pot.
The hand-on-heart gesture was devised as a civilian equivalent of the military salute; indeed, the gesture is called a salute. Symbolically speaking, the flag (which represents the country) is a sovereign, and it receives sovereign honors. This is also why the U.S. does not dip (partially lower and then raise) its flag as a gesture of deference: sovereigns do not bow to other sovereigns. (The U.S. Navy returns a dip for a proffered dip, but does not initiate them.)
As always, thanks so much for your reply, John. You’re right of course, that most Americans are not immigrants, but many are the children or grandchildren of immigrants and, as I think you are also pointing out, the large scale of immigration has impacted the culture.
What exactly are the values of “civic nationalists”? There was part of the video that I reluctantly edited out (for fear of it getting too long) where Obama said “we are a nation or culture united by, not by any one culture, ethnicity or ideology, but by the principles of opportunity, equality and liberty that are enshrined in our founding documents.” Are civic nationalist principles connected with that and if so, in what ways specifically?
I’m Italian-American and will always refer to myself as that.
Hi Vickie:
One of the interesting factoids about the Americas (north and south) is that EVERYONE, including the “native Americans” is an immigrant; the latter group just happened to precede the rest of us by about 15-to 30,000 years. And of course, all humans are immigrants. Your ancestry, in various proportions, is probably made up of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, and a few other ethnicities.
The thig about American citienship is its newness; the eighteenth century isn’t really all that long ago. Just as The Jews created a new country in 1948, so too did the various Europeans who formed the United States.
Americans have always been vague about their antecedents. Depending on the forum, we may classify ourselves as Italian-American, or German-American, but in times of real crisis – and the Second World War was the last such time – the ingathering of the people produced a single national group called American. Yes, we sinned against the American-born Japanese, stopped teaching Geman, and picked on Italin Americans for awhile, but in the end, we were all simply – Americans.
I think Marc has it quite right. The Obama quote you mentioned precisely expresses American civic-nationalist values, as do the familiar taglines from the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and from Superman: “truth, justice, and the American way”. Other civic nationalisms have their own catchphrases, like “peace, order, and good government” in Canada, and liberté, égalité, fraternité in France (sometimes said to reflect middle-class, lower-class, and upper-class values respectively).
There’s a nice short article on liberal (= civic) nationalism at Wikipedia, which says that the UKIP, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru are liberal nationalist parties, whereas the BNP is ethnic nationalist. Of course a civic nationalist regime can look very ethnic nationalist from the viewpoint of the peoples excluded from it: “white American” is not an ethnicity, but white Americans have behaved like ethnic nationalists when it comes to African Americans and Native Americans. It’s interesting to see Ukraine turning into a civic nationalist country to escape competing Ukrainian and Russian ethnic nationalisms.