National Identity

Hello all! Depressing news from London. I really hope most people are home safe by now. I can't really imagine how difficult a commute home would be after a day like today.

After posting to a dialogue on Jeff's blog, I have some thoughts that I'd like to share here:

National identity is somewhat strange. Most Americans are proud of their national identity in a way that many Europeans are not. Thoughtful Germans certainly cannot be proud of their nation's history, and there is a great deal of guilt about their history in the national identity now. I imagine many Asian national identities are tricky, too. But even the concept of defining oneself as part of a nation is tricky -- what, really, do Americans or Japanese or Englishmen have in common with each other?

America is really the first country in the world to try to establish an identity based on a piece of paper, the Constitution. Our national boundaries have changed over our history, we have absorbed and purchased and fought wars to enlarge our territory, but we have never changed our Constitution. Our ethnic identity is continually in flux, yet the national identity is still based on the original document. We have not had to change our form of government once it was established. I doubt few countries have ever had as long a history under one form of government, except perhaps England, which has preserved a constitutional monarchy for a very long time indeed.

England, in a fashion, established the concept of representative democracy, the parliamentary system, and led the way toward human rights, but the U.S. has carried the idea of nation-building based on a Constitution farther in practical terms, having contributed heavily to Germany and Japan's current constitutions and now embarking on trying to establish that model in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Constitution is important because it limits the government's power. We see elections all the time in other countries that are essentially meaningless because the real power is behind the scenes, unwritten, or unaccountable. Iran is an example, as was Iraq, and as is China. The Constitutions that were adopted by Japan and Germany after World War II have been successful because I think "the people" bought in to the ideas of the Constitution just as much as Americans did.

But what about now? Are we really defined by our constitutions as much as our passions? I am reading a book by Nick Hornby called Fever Pitch, which details very specifically how he lives or dies by the fortunes of his favorite "football" team, Arsenal. He says he feels more allegiance to that team than to his country. Also, the teams have different characters, and their fans have different characters, so England is as diverse in terms of sentiments about race, politics, and everything else as any other country of many millions of people, and this diversity is reflected in the fan base of the different teams. Americans are similarly divided and distracted by differences of opinion and character.

Americans very much believe that the "We, the people" in the first words of our Constitution means us today. But I wonder if we really value that citizenship the way we should. The English people suffered a terrible loss today because of the policies of their government, because they are America's main ally, and because they support the war in Iraq.

It's ironic that the bombing will probably take a lot of the "heat" off of Bush, Blair, and other G-8 leaders to confront poverty in Africa. I think the G-8 leaders are more willing than ever to promote nation-building in Africa, and in fact, the Live-8 concerts were effective. Still, it's difficult to argue for such generosity and important strategic spending in non-military areas when there is an obvious threat to "national security," which is a phrase I am really growing to resent.

Our "threat level" is orange in the U.S., if you'd like to know. We the people have no idea what that's supposed to mean, nor will it really affect most of our lives. I wonder if many of us feel connected enough to the rest of the world to really care about what happened in London or Tokyo for that matter. I think that indifference is a bad thing, and it keeps us closed off to important discussions about what our role in the world should be. I hope we can have some growth in our understanding in the immediate future. I also hope we can get a better understanding of what it means to be American, and what our leadership role in the world is. Individual Americans have to be a part of our political process for our democracy to work. We also should be ambassadors in the rest of the world. We can't sit by and let really barbaric acts force us into a fearful corner. Still, it is painful to watch the price of freedom build up to such a point.

I've found myself wondering throughout the day how the bombings affected Nick Hornby, as if I know him. I hope he's alright, as most Londoners in the world are. It's good to be able to put some kind of a face on the tragedy today, beyond the mass media. I hope it's valuable to try to understand what his point of view on the events might be. I'm not sure where these musings are going any more, only that I want to see the American people be more American in their response to the London bombings than they have been in the past. We should react with outrage, of course, but also insist on being committed to limited government throughout the world. Sort of a weird thing to commit your life to, isn't it?