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British
(british): 1. An Identity, to Be Defined
Mark Rimmer
is in the throes of party planning. Anyone who has
organized a wedding understands the balance he is
trying to create -- between
celebration and ceremony. He wants people to enjoy
themselves, so he's
thinking of having Asian dancers or steel drums. But
he's keeping the menu
simple, perhaps "a cup of tea and a bun."
Most of all, Rimmer says, he wants everyone who attends
what will be Britain's first-ever public citizenship
ceremony to regard it as a "dignified, important
event."
Rimmer is expecting
quite a crowd on Feb. 2. The north London Borough
of
Brent, where he is director of registrars, is one
of Europe's most diverse
communities. More than 100 different languages are
spoken there. Fifty-two
percent of the population of 250,000 is Asian or black;
10 percent were born
in Ireland. About 3,500 people apply to become British
citizens each year,
which, Rimmer calculates, will soon mean holding two
or three ceremonies a week for groups of about 30
immigrants to pledge "loyalty to the United
Kingdom," and promise "to uphold its democratic
values" and fulfill their
"duties and obligations as . . . British citizen[s]."
In a year or so, Britons-in-waiting will also have
to pass a citizenship test -- which should
help spell out just what those duties and obligations
are.
All of which
is much like the process I went through to take American
citizenship. But it represents an entirely new approach
to becoming British,
which until now has been a matter of submitting paperwork
and swearing a quick oath of allegiance to the Queen
and her heirs in the local solicitor's
office. No pomp. Very little circumstance.
The new rituals,
as well as compulsory citizenship classes in school,
have
been prompted by Britain's burgeoning populations
of wannabes and has-beens - immigrants who are naturalizing
in unprecedented numbers, and citizens like me who
live all or part of the year overseas and may or may
not move back. With such a mobile citizenry, people
have begun asking, what does it mean to be British?
Or Dutch? Or French, for that matter?
Questions of
national identity -- the founding conundrums of the
great
immigrant-receiving countries of the New World --
are unsettling the Old
World order, inspiring outbreaks of soul-searching
and prompting governments to define just what it means
to belong. The Dutch, for example, have been asking
themselves whether it is intolerant, and therefore
un-Dutch, to expect newcomers to give up religious
customs (requiring women to dress a certain way, for
example) that seem to the Dutch inherently intolerant.
Just last week, the French government adopted a bill
intended to formalize a five- to 15-year integration
process designed to make sure that immigrants become
French enough to earn the right to call themselves
French.
Britain, meanwhile,
is trying to find a definition of British that reflects
the reality of its itinerant population. According
to the National Office of
Statistics, about half a million people arrive each
year to live in Britain
for 12 months or more. Annually, about 120,000 become
citizens. In addition, more than 300,000 people --
155,000 of whom are citizens -- leave to live abroad,
and many others choose to spend months at a stretch
overseas. About half a million Britons own property
in France, lured away by warmer climes and bargain
prices, and bringing back not only wine and cheese
but a taste for doing things differently. These numbers
may not sound large, but they represent a cultural
mixing of the kind Britain has never experienced,
though it is the lifeblood of such countries as Canada,
Australia and the United States.
In some ways,
however, the New World melting pots provide an unsatisfactory
mold for the Old World. While newcomers can make a
nation of immigrants "more, not less, American,"
as President George W. Bush once put it, it's difficult
to make that case for countries that grew out of common
ground, common history and even common genes. Britain
has no constitution, no founding values around which
to group its populace. It's hard to imagine a Museum
of British Rights on London's Pall Mall along the
lines of the National Constitution Center that opened
last summer on Philadelphia's Independence Mall. (If
you visit Runnymede, the site where the principle
of "freedom under law" was established in
1215 by the signing of the Magna Carta, you'll find
that the memorial was erected by the American Bar
Association; nearby is a second memorial in honor
of a more modern champion of liberty -- American President
John F. Kennedy.)
The British
seem decidedly unsure these days of who they are and
what they
want to become. That uncertainty has launched a new
industry of national
navel-gazing among academics as well as a flurry of
pronouncements by
politicians attempting to capture the essence of Britain
and Britishness.
Former Conservative prime minister John Major was
roundly ridiculed for his
misty-eyed vision of "warm beer, invincible green
suburbs, [and] dog
lovers." But it was no less absurd than current
Labor leader Tony Blair's
euphonic but ultimately meaningless little jingle,
"Cool Britannia."
Asserting that "British identity is shaped by
poetry," the BBC recently
launched a competition to find a "Poem for Britain";
the winners were
announced earlier this month. The outpourings of 5,000
would-be Wordsworths represented what organizer Daisy
Goodwin called "a cultural examination of the
nation's self-perceptions." But it also reflected,
to paraphrase Wordsworth, the awkwardness of a nation
undetermined to what course of life it should adhere.
The winner,
titled "Harvest Time" and rooted safely
in a rural past, would
have done Major proud -- and resonates with the countryside
I loved when I
was growing up. The runner-up, in which Britain is
the writer of a
personal-style ISO ad seeking "a warmer cosmopolitan
image, to suit a
wide-ranging national brand," reflects Blair's
politically correct
modernity. And the third-placed entry is an in-your-face
expression of the
topic that many British people, such as the taxi driver
who recently drove
me to the airport, simply don't know how to talk about
-- multiculturalism.
In the poem, a fight inexplicably breaks out among
the parents at a Cornish elementary school, "a
discomfort of strangers" gathered together to
discuss their children's future: "Twelve Brummies,
eleven Cockneys, ten Taffies, nine Jocks, eight Micks,
seven Blacks, six Krauts, five Scousers, four
Frogs, three Pakis, two Chinks and a Cornishwoman."
The shouting subsides
after someone suggests a cup of tea, and "seventy
eightmums and dads" head home, apparently mellower
if not mollified.
A nice cuppa
hasn't been an adequate tonic to soothe Britain's
racial
tensions. Perhaps the British never offered it willingly
enough. Perhaps the
immigrants preferred chai. But part of the problem
is more fundamental:
Multiculturalism happened to Europe before many of
its member states had
developed a philosophy to accommodate it. The United
States told immigrants how to be American by requiring
them to learn about the country's history and government,
and about the values of liberty and justice enshrined
in its founding documents. Nothing of the kind has
ever been done for prospective Britons. It's as if
they were expected to wake up the morning after their
assignation with the solicitor and announce, "By
Jove, I'm British."
Hence the government's
effort to engender "common values and a sense
of belonging" by defining the rights and responsibilities
of citizenship.
Citizenship classes are now part of the curriculum
from elementary school
onward. That doesn't mean that every child comes away
with a clear
definition of Britishness: For my niece, "citizenship"
has meant learning
about the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
for my nephew, it
has meant working on the design of a building for
children in the community.
Moving the stymied
debate away from multiculturalism toward "being
a good citizen" has been a long-standing cause
for Navnit Dholakia, who is one of the first Britons
of South Asian descent to be appointed to the House
of Lords. The issue he feels all citizens should focus
on, he told me, is "what
you put into a country, not what you take out."
If that sounds Kennedyesque, it's not surprising.
Dholakia, formerly of Britain's Commission for Racial
Equality, sees citizenship as a means of extending
equal rights to "people disadvantaged through
belonging to groups discriminated against by British
society" -- the very concerns that America was
grappling with during the '60s.
And in one sense,
becoming a good "British" citizen should
be easy. Unlike
"Dutch" or "French, British is a catch-all
term. Jowlishly Churchillian
though the British bulldog may look, he is and always
has been a mongrel,
bred to create political unity out of the islands'
disparate indigenous
cultures. Immigrants have long recognized the benefits
of such a political
identity. You're much more likely to come across somebody
in Edinburgh or
Cardiff who calls himself Bangladeshi-British than
Bangladeshi-Scottish or
Bangladeshi-Welsh. Immigrants tend to cling to this
more elastic notion of
Britishness. It doesn't, after all, require eating
haggis or singing in the
Eisteddfod choir.
But that very
lack of cultural specificity also leaves Britishness
open to
interpretation, as I discovered when I did a quick
survey of British
travelers at London's Heathrow airport. Recent immigrants
tended to talk
about human rights, freedom of speech and justice.
Those who had lived here for generations made references
to Sunday lunch, country walks and other humdrum comforts
of home. Though the values expressed by the recent
immigrants are infinitely more important, there's
nothing specifically
British about them. Those citizens could just as easily
have been referring
to the Netherlands, France or, most of all, America,
where such values are
part of the national creed.
That leaves
Britain and other European countries facing their
own conundrum: To welcome their many immigrants, they
must put universal values before tradition. The United
States made this transition more than a century ago,
when its immigrant influx began. Is Europe ready to
do so now?
By Frances Stead
Sellers
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Author's e-mail:
francesmss@aol.com
Frances Stead
Sellers, a former Outlook deputy editor, is on leave
from The
Post as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow researching
the evolving
nature of national identity. She is a dual citizen
of Britain and the United
States.
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