Nations and Culture

The USA has always been a nation of immigrants, where all are accepted with no single dominant culture or ethnicity (ha!) - or at least that’s what we like to tell ourselves.  But that fact has rarely been embraced by its citizens.  The early settlers of English ancestry were appalled at the surge of Irish immigration in the mid-eighteenth century.  And subsequent waves of immigrants were often met with disdain, prejudice or outright hostility.  Our current polarized view of Hispanic immigrants is not that dissimilar to our historical habit of resenting the latest arrivals.

I would be hard-pressed to describe an average American citizen. He or she could be any skin color, adhere to any religion or none at all, and have a wide variety of cultural traits.  There may be certain characteristics that visitors to our country would point out – our love of large vehicles, our obsessive commercialism, our customer-service orientation, our ambition and workaholism, our friendliness, our patriotic fervor and perhaps a few others.  But are those really cultural traits?  

 

European nations were more homogeneous than the USA in the past and seemed to have a common ethnicity, language, cuisine and culture.  Of course, there were regional differences – a native of Bavaria would never say that people from Berlin had the same culture! -  but the similarities seemed to outnumber the differences and there was a sense, whether exaggerated or not, of each nation having its own unique identity. 

 

But in the last 50 or 60 years this has changed.  The ethnic and cultural mix of most European nations has changed pretty significantly and is likely to change even more in coming years.  Some of that change is due to the flow of formerly-colonized people into the country – primarily in France and the UK, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands.  In other countries, such as Germany, the immigration is similar to the USA, sparked by war, famine, economic hardship and the search for opportunity in a more successful economy.

 

For nations that have long had relative homogeneity and a somewhat well-defined cultural identity, these changes are often unsettling and disorienting.  Is a person of recent Turkish descent who doesn’t drink beer or eat pork really a German, even if he or she has been born there?  What defines a German?  Will a person of recent Algerian or sub-Saharan African descent ever be accepted as a true Francais or Francaise?

 

What defines a nation or the people of a nation?  As globalism, climate change, conflict, economic uncertainty and other historical forces mix up the peoples of this world, will nations retain their so-called cultural identity (which of course was never really that well-defined anyway), or will they simply become collections of people with a common language and government?

 

When the French soccer team walks out onto the field and more than half the players are Black- Beur, (the expression Black-Blanck-Beur is used to describe the mixed nature of the French squad) part of France celebrates its cultural, racial and ethnic diversity, but another, and perhaps growing, part of France doesn’t feel comfortable at all with this phenomenon.  

 

Almost every European nation is struggling with this question.  And it is a question that the USA has struggled with for its entire existence.  Asia is still much more homogeneous, but is there any doubt that as it becomes more economically successful it will eventually experience a similar mixing? 

 

Will the world one day become one big melting pot with races, ethnicities, cultures all mixed up throughout?  And will all of the nations and peoples in this big melting pot simply be molded into the prevailing forms of social media-dictated culture?  Will there even be such a thing as a cultural identity, or will the Internet, Hollywood, and giant corporations herd us all into the same cultural corral?  

 

Perhaps the only remaining pure cultural outposts will be the most impoverished countries, where there is no profit in implanting the world culture.  And we will all plan bucket-list trips to visit them so as to experience these very rare and unique places, then retreat hastily to our Starbucks and Pizzerias and scroll through our Instagram reels to hear the latest world pop sensation.

 

Wow, that took a rather sudden dark turn, didn’t it?  The future may not be as much of a cultural desert as those last couple of paragraphs suggest, but the evolving nature of nations and associated peoples is accelerating and it is not at all clear where it all will lead.