America: a new paradigm for nations?

What exactly is nationality? Is it more a matter of culture or of genetics, or a complex interplay of both? It is surely true that most nationalities in the world can be identified genetically. But is an Englishman an Englishman or a German a German merely by virtue of their genes, however identifiable they may be? If that is the case, then we would have to make a massive exception for the obvious case of the United States, a nation which was in many respects founded upon cultural and genetic diversity, and maintains that diversity to this day.

The US provides a paradigm for the future evolution of countries. In our modern world, which is increasingly being characterised by fluid movements of peoples from country to country, and in which allegiance to the country of one’s birth is drifting ever so slowly away, we have the first stage of a likely future world, one in which movement from place to place is so free that the word “country” is likely to take on a different meaning entirely, much in the same way that nowadays, people hardly think of themselves as being destined to be limited to their local area for the rest of their lives. The spirit of the US, built as it was on immigration—after all, how could it be any other way?—is the only one in the world which is unchanged by new waves of immigrants. Other countries may like to think of themselves as being perfectly adaptable to this change, yet there are always those, even the not particularly conservative, who lament the loss of national identity. But it would be un-American to lament the changes brought about by immigrants in America, given that immigration is so central to its being. Furthermore, as disaffected as immigrants to the US might be with the country, as much as they might say that the American dream is just two arbitrarily chosen words stuck together, it is not the country itself that they are disaffected with, but rather the contingent realities of government and economics.

Perhaps the best definition of nationality is “a sense of kindred spirit with one’s fellow countrymen, and a sense of shared roots and heritage that joins you together with them”. America was born in some sense out of a rebellion against this, yet it would be strange to say that to be an American is not to have a nationality. After all, if nationality is partly a kindred spirit with one’s countrymen, then the shared spirit here is that of rebellion against the old nationalities and the old world order. The US is the only country to have been born out of this spirit, and to anticipate the mass migrations of modern and future times. Ironically, it may be the case that, in a thousand years’ time, the world’s races and nationalities will be so mixed that it would be extremely difficult to work out nationality genetically, and the only recognisable nationality would be American, given that its people are united by the great American dream, a term which, although it admits of misinterpretation, is nevertheless a timeless ideal that surely will last longer than the defining characteristics of other countries, which comprise mainly of quirks and eccentricities, rather than philosophies that inform successive generations and successive waves of immigrants.