What Activism is For!

From Planet 172

by Jan Morris

In this essay, adapted from an address to the Brecon and Radnor branch of Plaid Cymru, Jan Morris explains why she rejects nationalism in favour of a more generous, inclusive concept of patriotism.

I’ve been a member of Plaid Cymru for 40 years or so, but I am not a whole-hearted nationalist. I dislike the very word “nationalist”, as a matter of fact. I dislike its ungenerous feel. In my mind, as in many others’, it goes with wars around the world, and prejudices, and historic quarrels best forgotten. I was very pleased when Plaid Cymru dropped the word from its own English title, and called itself, as it always had in Welsh of course, simply the Party of Wales. I’m proud to be called a bloody Welsh patriot, but not a “bloody Welsh Nat”.

I’d go further though, and say that I am sick to death of the nation-state itself. I think it’s a dying concept anyway, as around the world in fits and starts the peoples are coalescing inevitably into greater political unions or at least federations. The Earth is becoming just too small for hundreds of nation-states, and the idea of nationality, to my mind, is already fading fast. You can play football for Wales, I’m assured, if just one of your grandparents happened to have been born within this country’s frontiers! Just think. Here comes a likely lad wanting to play for Wales. Born in Oswestry, it says here on his application form. Oswestry? Oh buzz off, lad, you can’t play for Wales. Anyway, look at all this, mother from Finland, grandparents from Mongolia, Chile, Malaysia? Oh, I’m sorry, son. But hang about now, what’s this here, your mother’s father was born in Llanelli? Croeso, boy, here’s your jersey!

You can change your nationality at the drop of a hat, or the scratch of a notary’s pen — one minute you’re a Dutchman born and bred, the next minute you’re a full-blown Australian! You can be French without speaking a word of French. If you can find the right crooked broker you can probably become a Tahitian, or an Uzbekistani, without going near the place. Nationality, after all is an invented condition, riddled with absurdities. I know people in the north-eastern corner of Italy who have themselves been, within their own life-times, officially Austrian, Italian, German, Yugoslav and Slovenian.

So it’s my view that when it comes to nationality, you are what you want to be. For the moment at least you have to carry a passport issued by some authority or other, but that’s just a matter of form. It’s what you feel that really counts. I’m told that in the early years of the Israeli State anybody who turned up there and said “I am a Jew”, was a Jew. I can’t think it’s still true, but my opinion is that if you feel you’re a Jew, or an Arab, or a Japanese, or an American, then in a deeper sense you are one. If I were the dictator of a Welsh republic, I would decree that anybody who claimed to be Welsh, who shared Welsh values, and would accept Welsh ways, was Welsh. Come on in, boy, here’s your jersey.