I don’t have a British name, I don’t really look “British”, and I don’t feel British.
My parents met in Italy and moved to the UK just before I was born. My mum is from Derbyshire, England, and my dad is from Napoli, Italy. Despite being half “British and Irish”, I inherited all of my fathers features. I have olive skin, dark eyes, dark hair, and I am aware that when people look at me, they definitely don’t think that I’m half British. I look very different from my younger sister, who has paler skin and long blonde hair. The running joke in the family is that somehow she looks Scottish and I look Italian.
I used to work in a bar in my hometown, and common small talk would include people trying to guess where I am from. I have heard it all – Spain, Turkey, Italy, Greece, even Egypt, but no one sees me and guesses British.
I don’t feel like I am from anywhere, and I don’t feel that I belong anywhere.
I don’t feel tied down to either country. I don’t feel like I am more Italian than British, or vice versa, I just feel like me. And I am certainly not proud to come from either country; in fact, I am ashamed. As I see it, look at Britain, run by bland war criminals, or Italy, run by fascists. Why on earth would I be proud to come from anywhere in the Western world? All we have done is colonise and destroy other countries for our own gain, and all we continue to do is send bombs to other countries, killing their children.
I have absolutely no nationalistic ties anywhere, and I certainly do not love “my King and my country,” – far from it. I believe that we have a greedy monarchy who’s been sucking billions out of British taxpayers’ pockets, and a country whose priorities lie in slaughtering civilians abroad rather than investing in public spending to improve the lives of people here. With one in four children in the UK living in absolute poverty, I see nothing to be proud of. The same goes for Italy, where Melloni has just made it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt, get surrogates, or even travel abroad to adopt. Cutting down peoples’ rights, and worsening the lives of your citizens is nothing I will ever feel pride for.
And whilst you may look at the people in America, clad in Trump merch as they spout abuse online, or Farage supporters in the UK who love to claim they aren’t racist (but definitely are), and think people are becoming more nationalistic, this is isn’t totally true. In 2013, 86% of British people said they were proud of Britain’s history. Now the figure has fallen to 64%. Furthermore, according to the National Centre of Social Research, just 49% now say they would rather be a citizen of Britain than of anywhere else, compared with 62% in 2013.
Globalisation and the decline in Nationalism
Globalisation, an increase in multiculturalism within our countries, and the growth of supra-national organisations such as the EU all point to a decline in nationalism. Even in the UK, if you ask someone who is fully English where they are from, they will most likely say the UK or Britain, instead of England. It sounds less racist and exclusionary, and in the 2021 census, “British” was listed first among the options for national identity, which led to more people identifying as British than English.
I see the decline in nationalism as a good thing. No one chooses where they are born, and all nation states do is pit people against each other in the international arena. It shouldn’t matter where you are from, where you live, where your parents are from etc. etc., because the great thing is we are all one and the same. Nationalism has been weaponized time and time again as a tool to divide people, and a decline in nationalism means one less tool “for elites to take advantage of, to shift attention away from domestic tensions, and weaponized victimhood identity, which can be reinvigorated by racialized othering at the international level,” as Zhang aptly puts in his book Postcolonial nationalism and the global right.
It is time to wave goodbye to nationalistic identities, and embrace our beautiful multicultural global community, rather than waging wars and dividing up others simply because of where they were born.