Culture, nation-state, nationality, country: these are not synonyms.
Culture is far more granular and layered than nationality. Nationality is something that stops at borders.
And let's get something very clear here. State and country are not synonyms. A state is a power structure. A country is a region.
I don't identify with the state. The state is not my identity. The state is a bureaucratic structure. A polity made by people. The institutions of the state are just constructs. The peoples of the region are not those constructs.
The political affairs of humans come and go. The lines we draw on maps do not exist in the dirt on the land that those maps describe. Even check points erected according to those maps will crumble if not maintained.
Saying I don't identify with those structures is not saying "I hate this country". I don't hate this country. I don't hate the people or the cultures of this country.
I was born and raised on an archipelago known as the British Isles. Because of the political baggage that comes with the term "British", people in Ireland contest that name. I personally like to refer to the archipelago as "these islands". One day it may not be a political statement to say "British". But for many it still is. One day we may be able to say British in the way Norwegians and Swedes can say Scandinavian. I would like that. I hope it comes soon. But it hasn’t come yet.
I am not, by the way, saying nobody feels British. Nor am I saying that by not feeling British I am "above" anything. I am saying that identity is not something we can just assume falls into the borders we ourselves have drawn.
I feel Scottish and European, and I want one day to be able to put a name to These Islands without assumptions being made. But those identities for me are not the governments or institutions of government.
Although I am Scottish, I speak English. This is an example of why it is nonsense to imagine culture stops at borders. Nor is culture homogenous within borders.
I grew up north of the Highland Boundary fault in a place that had not long previously had Gaelic as its majority language. When I grew up there, only very few old people still knew any Gaelic. And yet local church services had been held in Gaelic until the 1930s. But in my day, only a few decades later, that was all forgotten.
My parents, though, were not raised there. My Dad came from Blantyre, my mother from Galashiels. The varieties of dialect they brought to my childhood included words and syntax I didn't hear elsewhere locally when I was growing up. And the dialect of Galashiels is very different from the dialect of Blantyre.
The local traditions of those places differ, too, as did the employment opportunities in my parents' youths.
All of this stuff overlaps, layers, mingles. And I love it.
I am not blind to culture. Culture enriches our lives. When I speak to people from Galashiels I want to hear the accent and vocabulary. Just as when I visit my wife's home in Staffordshire. And when I talk to my Syrian musician friend, I want to hear about his culture, folk tunes, his words for things, his way of seeing the world. Why would I want to be blind to that? It's fascinating!
When I visit the part of Staffordshire my wife grew up in, many of the older people have ways of saying things that the younger people don't. Because culture is ever changing. I knew my wife's grandparents, now long dead, and their irregular plural of house, houzen. You don't hear people say that now. And that too is fascinating. Why would I want to be blind to that? I don't! I'm glad I heard houzen spoken, but I'm also intrigued that it has gone the way of other -en plurals in English. Why now? Why did it hang on so long there? But also what was it that finally made it follow the trend and vanish?
Why would I want to be blind to all that? The change is as interesting as the existence of the outlier in the first place!
What I don't do is to imagine those things extend all the way to nation-state borders and stop dead at them.
I know I've used the term border a lot in a thread about immigration. And the danger is that people will therefore make assumptions about what that means about the policies I "want". That would be to miss the point.
The point is that these things are of different orders. Policy and culture are like apples and chalk.
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