What is National Identity?

This column below made me question and think about national identity. I think national identity is based on a people's history, their language and means of expression, their culture and customs, their beliefs and values, their shared memories and traditions. It is shaped by their land, their surroundings, the people's contributions over generations. As a friend said in a discussion, decisions we make today will shape our national identity and culture as it will be generations from now.

In relation to Canada, I believe our national identity is very real because we do have hundreds of years of history, common expression, shared values, customs and traditions. But the problem here is that in recent decades many of our elites (political, media, education) have chosen to reject our living heritage and to place limits on what they would even consider as being part of our national identity, rejecting anything linked to our colonial and early dominion history. And that's the root of our crisis of identity. If you reject the very source of our shared identity, no wonder you cannot find it. If you reject all the shared memories, the songs, the heroes, the expressions, you then have to re-create out of thin air a "new identity". But a new artificial heritage of this sort will not work precisely because it is not "heritage", it has no roots, it is not shared by people in their own memories and hearts. For a country like Canada, we need to re-discover our actual living heritage in order to know our actual national identity. Without doing this, we will continue to feel like something is missing and continue to experience our collective amnesia. We should not be afraid of our heritage simply because it is connected to another.

Some of the online comments from people around the world about the column linked below also add to my reflection, because some suggest that Lapland cannot really have a national identity because it is not a state. That is nonsense. The Sami people (the Lapps) are a nation, an ethnic group with a clear identity, language and culture. But they do not have a state and are citizens of several countries (Norway, Swedan, Finland and Russia).

Somehow people have confused "nation" and "state" because of the late modern notion of nation-states. But a nation-state is a state based on a specific nation, it does not mean that "nation = state", as if only states are nations. A nation is an ethnic group of people, connected by history, culture, language, blood ties and more. A state is a legal group of people, connected by common loyalty, usually history, citizenship commitments, daily interaction and more. If the state is a nation-state, then there is an overlap.

But in a situation like Canada, our national identity is more complex. We do have one, but it is more an "adopted" one that citizens need to choose to adopt and commit themselves toward building up in this Confederation. Not only are we not a traditional nation-state, we are also a Confederation which changes the dynamic even more because there are two layers of identity formally. And Canada could be described as a nation of nations, having within the greater whole sub-groups which can rightly be called nations as well. But we are knitted together and our national is truly rich and strong when we acknowledge how these all fit together into something greater than its constituent parts.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7780108.stm

World famous. Within your own borders
A POINT OF VIEW [from BBC.co.uk]

Forget proud traditions and cultural exports - a nation's identity is bolstered if Americans know about it. Just ask the Canadians, says Clive James.

In my homeland, Australia, the question of national identity is once again in the news as the assembled brains of the entire country wonder whether the new film about Australia, called Australia, will finally establish the national identity of our neglected island in the eyes of the world.
Let me start out by saying that I have always found this supposedly nagging question of Australia's national identity to be a mare's nest. Everyone in the world knows that Nicole Kidman, the leading lady of the film Australia, comes from Australia, so how much more national identity does one nation need? But I'll get to that later because I want to start out with another question: the national identity of Lapland.
Lapland's national identity in the eyes of the world has taken a hammering when a Lapland theme park in the New Forest closed down in response to universal lack of enthusiasm.
Ticket buyers were promised snow, cabins, elves and appropriate animals. The snow was sparse, the cabins closely resembled the kind of bolt-together huts you get on a building site, some of the elves behaved in a non-elf-like manner, and at least one of the appropriate animals was made of plastic.
I won't go into further detail because the newspapers were full of it, but let's just say that, except from people who had been optimistic enough to actually buy tickets, a great laugh went up.
The great laugh told you two things. The first thing is that the British enjoy a bungle. They have come to see a bungle as part of their national identity: a tilting train that tilts too much or doesn't tilt at all, a Millennium Dome with not much in it, a Heathrow terminal that separates passengers from their luggage on a long-term basis, a Lapland theme park with snow-deficiency syndrome. How very British. One might even say that the nicest aspect of the British national identity is that the British can laugh at themselves.
But the other thing that the great laugh told you was that Lapland really does have an identity problem, because apart from its status as the official domicile of Santa Claus, it would have had very few things notably Laplandish to offer for a 30 quid ticket even if the theme park had been a big budget number.
Cabins and reindeer, is that it? The expectations of Lapp culture are low. Not even a British stand-up comedian would expect to get away with the suggestion that Lapland is where the Lapp dancers come from, because everyone knows that almost nothing comes from Lapland.

Spot the Canadian
On the international scale of celebrity, Lapland scores low unless you are deeply interested in hearing the one and only real Santa perform in a Lapp accent, hoeh hoeh hoeh.
And very few Americans even know where Lapland is. Right there we get to the heart of this supposedly vital question about national identity. Small countries want the United States to have heard of them.
Britain counts as a big small country because it has a lot of people in it, but even the British are apt to waste time caring about whether the Americans have heard of them.
Not all their time, however, for which I bless their sanity. For smaller small countries - and I mean smaller by population - it can be a continuing obsession. The clearest case is Canada, which is large in area even by comparison with the US but is short of people.
Crucially, Canada is right next to the US, and speaks the same language. Everyone knows that Mexicans are Mexicans but few of us can tell a Canadian from an American unless the Canadian is speaking French. The Canadians are forever bothered by a sense of being dominated by their famous neighbour to the south.
The Canadians try to laugh, however. There was a Canadian best-selling book recently called Coping with Back Pain. It did so well that the Americans printed their own edition. But the Americans called it Conquering Back Pain because the US is a can-do nation that conquers, it doesn't cope.
A friend of mine who told me about this had already worked out her own jokes, which I gladly borrow. The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped. Get ready for She Stoops to Cope and Hail the Coping Hero Comes. But the nice thing about the Canadians is that they can come up with jokes like that at the drop of a Mountie's hat. They know they're stuck and they've learned to enjoy it.
Long-time commander of the Starship Enterprise, the Canadian-born William Shatner, one of the funniest men I ever met, is full of jokes about Canadian star-fleet admirals. Canada has been supplying stars to Hollywood for a century but everyone thinks they're American.
The best the Canadians can do is laugh about it and they always have. Finally the national sense of humour is a vital factor. National identity and a sense of humour: there are two themes trying to get together here.
I should say at this point that for all I know the Lapps are as funny as a circus on the subject of their minimal international standing. Perhaps they are even now rolling around in the snow, yelling with laughter at the reports of how the lavishly appointed Lapland New Forest theme park project went belly-up. But we don't know, because we never hear from them on the subject. This seems to me a wise attitude, for reasons I will discuss.

Land Down Under
But not, alas, until I have discussed the national identity of Australia. It's a duty that there's no getting out of. As an Australian who lives in Britain, I spend a lot of time fielding calls from the media in my homeland wanting to know what Britain is thinking. These calls have been coming in every few hours in recent weeks, because the film Australia will soon open here and perhaps I might have seen it at a press screening.
As it happens, I have seen it at a press screening, so I'm in a position to say that although I have no idea what the British will think when it goes on general release, I have an exact idea of what I think.
About the film's merits I prefer to be silent at this stage, except to say that it seemed quite long, in the same sense that the Thirty Years War probably seemed quite long to anyone who had been expecting it to be over sooner. But I have a definite opinion about what the film Australia will do for Australia's national identity. It will do nothing, because nothing needs to be done.
Unlike Lapland, Australia is world famous. Australian actors and film-makers and writers and arts people have been colonising the planet for years and all the jokes about Australia's deficiency of culture are old hat, like all the jokes about Australians knowing nothing about wine.
Australia killed the wine jokes by producing super-tankers full of wine that the whole world wanted to drink, and it killed the culture jokes by flooding the world with an outburst of quality remarkable for a country that looks big on the map but has fewer people in it than Mexico City.
Most important, Australia has even more great stuff at home than it sends abroad. Unfortunately it also has a whole army of commentators who are permanently anxious that the world hasn't heard of them. Well, there's a reason for that. It's because they are talking nonsense. There is no Australian national identity crisis and never has been.
Indeed Australia after World War II was a desirable destination for people from countries that really did have an identity crisis. Poland, for example. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have ruined your country from two different directions, that's an identity crisis.
Australia's only problem was that it felt itself to be a bit of a backwater, and that is obviously no longer true. But it isn't obvious to the people who draw a salary for saying Australia must do something to put itself on the map of the world.
Just such anxious minds are behind the notion that the film Australia will make all the world's tourists aware of Australia. They hope the film will work like the Paul Hogan commercial in which he threw another shrimp on the barbie. They think an epic film like Australia can act like an advertisement.
If these tireless promoters think that people will come to visit Australia after they have seen the film Australia, I can only say that those people will be very old when they arrive. But I also have to say, with reluctance, that the movie has plainly also been made in order to impress the Yanks. Australia, says the film Australia, is even bigger than Texas.
Any Americans who make the trans-Pacific trip on the strength of this movie are going to be disappointed not to find Hugh Jackman, who plays the drover, droving a herd of cattle down one of the main streets of Sydney.
They stand a better chance of bumping into Nicole Kidman, who is now once again living in her home town, and probably for two main reasons. One reason could be that she finds the relative obscurity a nice change after all the Hollywood hoo-hah: rarely, in Sydney, is she trailed by more than two car-loads of paparazzi at once.
Another reason could be that Australia has got its own sense of humour, which not even the Americans can take away, re-package, and sell back. Finally, it doesn't have to care about national identity. All that a nation needs is national pride, and it only needs that if it's a nation.
At which point it might be time to reveal that there is no such nation as Lapland. It's just an area, some of which is in Finland. But judging from the advertisements it puts on the web, Lapland is probably the best place to meet Santa in his grotto, with proper elves. Better, anyway, than in the New Forest, where the remains of the Lapland theme park are even now being loaded on to a skip. Hoeh hoeh hoeh.