There are few events as good as the men’s Rugby World Cup at making you think about the slipperiness of modern nationality.
Consider the Japanese team. The Land of the Rising Sun is famous for its rather restrictive immigration policy, the country having chosen ‘ethnic continuity’ over economic orthodoxy – which is to say largely keeping Japan for the Japanese.
We can argue about the morality of this another time. But one implication is surely that you’d expect the Japanese team to look ethnically Japanese. I’m not going to describe this, as I’d rather not get a visit from the Met as they try to avoid jihadis parading around London, but even people silly on this subject will know what I mean.
And Japan’s squad does look as you’d expect, with a handful of exceptions. One is Warner Dearns. He stands out, partly because he’s 2 metres tall, but mostly because he’s a white gingerish bloke from New Zealand.
I don’t wish to pick on Dearns, who moved to Japan when he was 14 and seems amused by how much he sticks out in his adopted country. He qualifies for the side because rugby union’s player eligibility rules for internationals are pretty generous – I’d guess as a ploy to expand the game’s appeal in countries without much of a grassroots.
It’s also of a piece with modern notions of nationality. It is common to say that somebody who migrates to a country can claim its nationality, and not just in the sense of taking citizenship. In fact, given reactions to things like the Windrush scandal, in some sense the paperwork is besides the point.
The export of sport as international entertainment has also contributed to the idea that affiliations can be taken up and dropped at will. There are plenty of Manchester City fans who not only haven’t been to the capital of England’s North, but likely haven’t even been to Europe, watching the games via streaming from cities in India and China.
Setting aside the grumbling about commercialism in sport, such things seem pretty harmless. But there also seems to be an intellectual inconsistency about it from at least some of those who practice it.
Currently it’s fashionable for British people to seek some foreign connection in their ancestry. It’s not that unusual for people to express disappointment when research into the family tree turns up nothing but Englishmen pottering back and forth across the green and pleasant land1.
Indeed, it’s something of a status flex to finding something ‘exotic’ in your background. I suspect this taps into an elite preference for cosmopolitanism over monoculturalism, and a sense that the English are a tad backwards and basic.
People are nonetheless entitled to such preferences, and no doubt it makes for a better episode of Who Do You Think You Are? But it’s a privilege to be able to brag about how foreign you are, and one mostly (entirely?) reserved for white people.
Consider that Joe Biden clip where he mugs off a BBC journalist asking questions with a humorous: “The BBC? I’m Irish.”
The American president is Irish, in a sense, although that sense is pretty distinct from what it means to be an Irish person actually living in Ireland today. And it’s part of American culture and political strategy to emphasise your heritage in a way that isn’t true of Britain.
But ask yourself, could Barack Obama have pulled a similar trick? Obviously not2.
For one thing, there’s no political or cultural capital in the largely English heritage of Obama’s mum’s side. And as for his father’s side, Obama could never say “I’m Kenyan” so breezily, because the black side of his family was used by opponents to claim he wasn’t born on US soil, and therefore couldn’t be president.
A similar point can be made in Britain: emphasising that you are foreign is a luxury that belongs to a set class of people. There is no jeopardy in a white person from Streatham claiming to be ‘Portuguese’ in a London accent. You are not going to face racist abuse, you look like the ethnic majority to strangers, and you face no risk of being deported by mistake.
The further irony is that this notion of belonging to a nationality because of your parents is the first half of the phrase ‘blood and soil’ that most of us are revolted by when white nationalists say it. In effect it claims that nationality is something you can inherit, rather than something that is contingent on living in a certain culture.
Biden may have grown up with some cultural baggage from the old country, but his milieu is decidely American. By comparison with any random person who has grown up in Ireland he is barely Irish at all.
That’ll sound rude, and contrary to the vogue for self-definition, but it’s at least inclusive in another sense. It means the black child of two Nigerian parents growing up in Ireland can claim to be authentically Irish. Unless you want ethnonationalism or to do away with nationality entirely, this cultural view of nationality is surely the only one that makes any sense.
Unless, of course, you need to recruit a few locks into your short-statured rugby team.
My own dad’s side are largely mariners from Portsmouth, it seems, but the same principle applies.
I’m obliged to mention Obama’s visit to Moneygall, the Irish home of one of his ancestors. “My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall O'bamas,” the president said. “I've come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”