Our families lived in a small village on the outskirts of Stirling. We were surrounded by farm fields, horses, and livestock. It was beautiful. It is difficult to say how emotionally connected we are to that environment, even today. We spent the best part of our childhoods in those farmhouses and fields and hills. It forms part of our identity, as people and as Scots.

That societies are exhaustively made up of citizens is an obviously false proposition yet many take it for granted. Millions of Americans, Brits, and Canadians reside undocumented. The People are only a subset of the people. Some countries do not grant citizenship to members of their societies in an attempt to displace and alienate. Others do so to block them from accessing resources necessary for their survival. Many nations do not guarantee or protect civil rights, or do only on a selective and minimalistic basis (f1). Formal citizenship is a desirable but highly elusive phenomenon. Immigration and naturalization policies vary so vastly across nations. Some countries control or influence other countries’ regulations. Canada and the U.S are co-influential; Saudi Arabia is powerful in the region, especially over foreign workers (f2). There is no universally stable or specifiable notion of citizenship.

The notion of “global citizenship” is equally unstable. There does not seem to be any single way of defining it, the general idea being that one’s national identity can at times transcend the borders of one’s nation state. Appeals to global citizenship have been used by the wealthy elite to evade taxes and manage illegal incomes (f3). However, used carefully, it can capture the peculiar phenomenology of belonging simultaneously to someplace on earth and to the whole earth at once. In the same way that lived experiences are shaped by factors like race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc., we are shaped by the regions in which we reside and our status as residents there. I waited until this year to become a Canadian, but I am also Scottish, and Algerian, and South African. Some indigenous peoples have a unique Canadian status indicative of their right to reside in certain places and access certain goods designated for them on account of Canada’s disgusting history of genocide and systemic violence against them. Naturally, many deplore the nation state known as ‘Canada,’ and personally reject the identity of ‘Canadian’ (f4). Over a hundred million live as part of the global refugee diaspora– their Palestinian, Ukrainian, Yemeni, and Afghan national identities follow them across borders as they are forced to reach Jordan or Turkey or Europe to beg for refuge in alien countries. We cried together at our citizenship ceremony. A small, special bunch cast lifelines through travel; they backpack to find themselves or mission to find others and– never stepping into an immigration office– discover ways to immortalize themselves as part of the place and the people. 

The human experience of citizenship and national identity is ripe for personal and interpersonal exploration. We tease at it when we venture the questions: Where am I from, and to where do I belong? Where are you from, and where do you feel you belong? Ought we stay here together?; Ought we grow apart?; Ought we travel together with open hearts? When answering these questions, try to be as concrete as possible: A country, a neighbourhood, a street address. Go to these places if possible. Find your people. You need not find blood relatives or fellow countryfolk, only those to whom you stand in relation: Friends, teachers, acquaintances, strangers, animals, plants, pieces of earth. Reform the connections with others who form the network of you, not as an isolated one, but as someone to others in the world. Life is hard and short but so incredibly beautiful when it eclipses the barrier of borders between us.

footnotes

1. See, for example, the citizenship policies of Canada pre-1947, which excluded indigenous peoples; of the United States prior to its 14th constitutional amendment; of the South African apartheid regime, which toppled only three decades ago; and of Israel today.

2.  See Meijer (2016) and Walia (2010).

3.  See Langenmayr & Zyska (2023).

4.  See Boyer (2022) for commentary.

references

Boyer, D. (2022). What does it mean to be Indigenous in Canada? | CBC News. CBC. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/what-does-it-mean-to-be-indigenous-in-canada-1.6490030

Langenmayr, D., & Zyska, L. (2023). Escaping the exchange of information: Tax evasion via 

citizenship-by-investment. Journal of Public Economics, 221, 104865. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104865

Meijer, R. (2016). Citizenship in Saudi Arabia.

Walia, H. (2010). Transient servitude: migrant labour in Canada and the apartheid of 

citizenship. Race & Class, 52(1), 71-84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396810371766