Frank was born in (what was then) Foobaria moved to another country and took up permanent residence there. Frank has no living relatives ‘back home’ and went back there.
Long after Frank emigrates, Foobaria undergoes a series of civil wars, political coups and other events, such that it ceases to exist as Foobaria; some of it is broken up into new sovreign states; some of it is absorbed into the control of a large, existing neighbour country.
How is Frank most likely to describe his origin? Do people in this situation typically still call themselves Foobari? Do they now refer to themselves as coming from whichever country now contains their home town (or its location, if the town no longer exists)? Something Else?
This is a little different , but one side of my family comes from a region was part of Yugoslavia when my grandparents left for the US. They *never *called themselves Yugoslavian - they were Gottschee. And people whose ancestors came from that area still identify as Gottschee, to the extent that they identify as anything other than American. They certainly don’t identify as Slovene ( the region is now in Slovenia).
My great-grandparents emigrated from what today would be the Czech Republic or Czechia. At the time they emigrated it was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Their immigration paperwork even listed their nationality as “Austrian”. As far as I know they always considered themselves Czech.
Kinfolk in that situation over the years --------- use the name of their birth-country while here or anywhere else outside their borders and usually the name of their adopted country when “back home”. Lets face it, a family with tied to the White Revolution may have some issues calling themselves “Russian” inside Communist Russia and I doubt someone going back to Zimbabwe on a visit would want to identify themselves as Rhodesian.
Exactly so. Most people’s identity is based on nationality and culture more than citizenship; it’s a coincidence if they happen to have citizenship of a state which is a nation-state for the nation to which they belong. Irish people identified themselves as Irish, and were identified by others as Irish, at a time when there was no Irish state or Irish citizenship, and if the Irish state were to cease to exist I wouldn’t expect this to cause people to stop identifying as Irish.
"Only those born in Tigana before the invasion can hear or speak its name, or remember it as it was; as far as everyone else is concerned, that area of the country has always been an insignificant part of a neighbouring province, hence the rebels are battling for the very soul of their country. "
I suspect it depends on how he or she felt about the home country. I know people who identify themselves as Yugoslavians and others who call themselves Bosnian, Croatian, etc.
And they may even identify under multiple names, same as people who have multiple ancestries, or whose ancestry is one but their nationality is another, or who are actually talking about which their home language is… I mean, it’s not as if all those Americans who claim to be Irish on St Paddy’s are actually Irish by most legal, linguistic or ancestral definitions.
There hasn’t been a Kingdom of Navarre for some 120 years, but that doesn’t mean nobody identifies as Navarrese; many of us (a majority in fact, going by electoral results) identify with the poem that begins “I’m Navarrese first of all, and being Navarrese, a Spaniard…”. The Low Navarre has been part of France for even longer (16th century, Enrique II de Navarra aka Henri IV de France) and doesn’t even give their name to a French administrative district of any kind (unlike the High Navarre, which corresponds to a Spanish province), but there are people who identify as Navarrese while also identifying as Landaise, French, European…
Whether you happen to be living outside the ancestral homeland or not has shitall to do with your identity.
Right- the question is probably a uniquely American one, in that most of us don’t have a nationality that’s separate from the United States. So most of us sort of wrap our nationality/culture right up with our citizenship, and don’t really think of the two as separate.
There are exceptions- native Hawaiians think of themselves as something other than just citizens of the State of Hawaii, and I suspect that a lot of Texans remain Texans, even if they’re living somewhere else quite different like Oregon or New Hampshire.
For a long time, the concept of nationality was ethnicity-based, not geography-based (You can drive across a country, but driving across a nation would be genocide), so you would retain your nationality regardless of geopolitics. The complication happens when there’s a movement to create a nationality based on geography.
The example of the country being broken up was just an example - a country that retains the same borders, but changes its name/identity (amongst other things) seems a valid alternative example.
If global warming were to overwhelm the dikes and the Netherlands flooded into oblivion, I shall refer to myself as originating from either Lyonesse or Atlantis, as the mood strikes. I’m whimsical like that.
Interesting. All the people I know that once came from Yugoslavia, now consider themselves to be from the “new” country.
Off course these countries used to be the republics that made up Yugoslavia, so people identified as being from that region even when Yugoslavia existed.
These first two sentences gave me goosebumps, because I say the exact same thing about my great grandfather. I never knew him, and I don’t know what he thought. When I describe my heritage, one of the ethnicities I claim is Czech.