This is necessarily an imprecise question but I was wondering just how much relation each country currently has with the predominant country that established them.
For example:
US -> England
Canada -> England
Quebec -> France
Mexico -> Spain
etc.
Having only had experience with the US and Canada, I would say that Canadians definitely consider themselves more “English” than Americans do. But I was wondering how this compares to other American countries? Does Mexico think it’s more “Spanish” than Americans think they’re “English”?
I don’t know any Americans who consider themselves English, since we’re not. I have known several self-proclaimed Anglophiles, all of them women, for what that’s worth.
One thing to remember is that most of what is now the United States was never under direct British control, and that most of the population has ancestors who arrived after independence.
ETA: I can trace one line of my family to the colonial era, and I had one grandmother who was born in England, but I would feel silly claiming to be English myself.
I’ll bump this thread and mention that until the first half of the 20[sup]th[/sup] century, English Canada was much closer to Britain than Quebec (or more accurately French Canada, at the time) was to France. For example, both in the First and Second World Wars, English Canadians strongly favoured going to war to help the motherland, while French Canadians shared Americans’ isolationism and felt Canada had no business in European wars.
Today though, English Canada has changed a lot, in part because of the influx of non-British (and non-European) immigrants, and is much more similar to the US. Quebec and France share some bilateral agreements, which may make them a bit closer than a few decades ago, but not that much. I couldn’t tell you about Mexico and Spain.
This map (from this article) shows the American colonies circa 1750. Probably shouldn’t read too much into it (I doubt many of today’s Alaskans identify particularly strongly with Russia), but it’s a start.
There’s a joke that the patriation of Canada’s constitution marked the time that Canadians stopped defining themselves by how they differed from the English and started defining themselves by how they differed from the Americans.
In fact, I wouldn’t say that we’re “more English” or even “more European” that the States, but rather “less American”.
… I’ve been greeted by Latin Americans (mostly Miami Cubans, a few Costa Ricans as well) with a “from the Motherland!” and hugs and a recount of how many and which of their specific forefathers came from said Motherland, but I don’t think anybody between Tierra del Fuego and Rio Grande considers himself particularly Spanish…
Maybe I’m just not understanding the question.
Would the OP consider that the guys who wrote (the figure is very outdated) a song talking about “300 million of latin people, united by a common language” think of themselves as Spanish? They don’t, they consider themselves Hispanic. As another song says “who discovered who?,” meaning that there was cultural influence going both ways (try cooking common Spanish dishes without any American ingredients; it’s possible but damn hard).
Whatever. I think it’s obvious Shalmanese isn’t suggesting Quebec is currently an independent country; what he’s saying is that France is the “motherland” of Quebec in the same way Britain is the “motherland” of (the rest of) Canada.
“English Canada” means the common language spoken is English, not that there is a specific connection to the country in the United Kingdom called “England.” In Canada, language is the critical political and social dynamic.
Of course, we share a head of state with the UK, and a few Canadians take that really seriously.
I’d say there’s still a reasonable affinity in some ways between English Canada and the UK, but that on a personal level that’s going away. We still have many Canadians who remember when they were British subjects, not Canadian citizens, when our official national flag was the Union Jack, and when Canadians kowtowed to Britain in the conduct of a major war. But as more and more Canadians are not of British descent, and those that are are increasingly distant in time and generation from when the connection was one that mattered, fewer Canadians really care much. To me (36 years old), the UK is just another European country interesting for the fact that its residents speak funny-sounding versions of English; the legal connection is a strange detail I don’t much think about.
Italy isn’t the motherland of Argentina, although it does be the motherland of many Argentinians. Sort of the same as the motherland of the USA being the UK and not Italy or Mexico or Germany or any of the other myriad places from which the USA has gotten large groups of immigrants.
