Nationality and Social Identity

And why my social identity didn't suffer a crisis when I renounced my British citizenship in order to become a Japanese citizen.

I had a very interesting conversation on this topic recently, which encompassed such things as "I could never give up my nationality - it's my identity", the nature of the "monkeysphere" (AKA Dunbar's Number), and whether somebody that hails from a European country can ever really be "Japanese." This got me thinking about things in a way I hadn't really crystalised before, so I decided to get them down while they were fresh.

To me, my identity has always been defined by my moral compass, the decisions and mistakes I've made, who I choose as my friends/enemies, how I behave when I think nobody's looking etc. Knowing that changing the colour of my passport would have no effect on these things was how I was able to do so so easily. However it came to light that in addition to this "private" identity there is also a "social" identity which it seems is far more important to a great many people, or at least that's their impression. This all supposedly ties very much in with this concept of nationality, that the colour of their passport in a very real sense defines who they are.

Well, that may work for regular folk who never leave their home towns their whole lives, or not for any significant period of time anyway. After all, social identity is really a combination of upbringing, socialisation, cultural history, customs, language etc. and where these remain reasonably constant (insofar as a country's society doesn't naturally change over the course of a lifetime), making one's nationality representative of the culmination of all these things is a very convenient shortcut or abbreviation that makes sense to most people.

However the cracks in this shortcut start to show when people become mobile and relocate to other lands where the customs are strange. At first, it's often comforting to cling to that national identity, as exclusion from the host country's ways can be unsettling. After some acclimatisation though, when people start to adopt the language and norms of the host country, their nationality by itself no longer really does their social identity justice. For a while, it's easy enough to say "sure, I'm a citizen of country X, but I'm also partially socialised in country Y".

Add a few more years onto the stay, and a couple of quick visits back to country X though, and people start to discover that not only are they forgetting the social norms of country X, but country X is also forgetting them and moving on without them. This can often be a painful realisation. When it gets to this stage, one cannot honestly define one's identity as being a citizen of country X, because although it may be true on paper, it it's no longer an accurate reflection of what defines the person. At such times it's necessary to take a step back and try to separate the concept of nationality from upbringing, cultural history, language, customs etc. Thinking of one's social identity as being a hybrid of a dominant upbringing in country X with the later aquisition of rudimentary socialisation in country Y, paints a far more accurate picture than simply saying "I am a country X person".

So for me personally, at the time I decided to take Japanese citizenship, I was a British citizen with a British upbringing, native English skills, advanced Japanese skills, and a hybrid socialisation in both countries (I'd estimate 65% British, 35% Japanese). After getting citizenship, I was then a Japanese citizen with a British upbringing, native English skills, advanced Japanese skills, and a hybrid socialisation in both countries (I'd estimate 62% British, 38% Japanese - 18 months had passed in the interim...). My social identity hadn't changed, because there was nothing to warrant it changing.

It's just another reminder of the tendency in man's eternal struggle to exert less and less effort, to give catch-all terms greater significance than the concepts they're supposed to define, and often in ways that compromise understanding of said concepts.

/Random thoughts