How patriotic are you?

Let's all stand for the national answers.....

I'm Canadian, so I don't actually have a real 'nationality'. Seriously, it's an alright place and all but it's about as much of a real 'nation' as Narnia, in fact probably less

I'm not very patriotic at all. I'm very pro-EU tho. I want Britain to join the euro *right now*, none of this shilly-shallying with referendums cobblers.....

I am not patriotic at all. I am Irish, but I see nationality as an accident of birth rather than something to get excited about.

Nah, nationality means nothing to me really. I'm not especially proud of being British or English. Nationality is becoming less and less relevant in many ways, (cos of the wwwinterweb and all), and if this stops people killing each other, then GOOD!

Flag waving isn't automatically bad, but so often it spills over into jingoism and ignorance.

It's equally dangerous though, to prevent people from enjoying and celebrating their particular cultural quirks. As for EU intergration, it's a GOOD thing, but shouldn't be hurried.

Flaming Nora! Sinistah INVASION.

[insert lame pun here]

Dave Q i totally agree, we are so not a real country, i love it that way.

[Lame pun on stickah, surely]

*christ save us*

There was a kind of similar thing in Canada where the Bloc Quebecois was the only party that refused to sign a formal condolence. I think most of the annoyance people feel is that they deal with petty issues (measuring signs etc) that will not have any lasting effect on French culture in Canada anyways yet would jump into bed with any American alliance.

Are there any people here torn between two distinct nationalities? I'm not, as it happens - I was forced to choose which country to sign up for (almost literally) when I was 16, and received my call-up papers for military service in the Italian army. Quick smart off to Petty France to have myself declared a loyal, ma'am-fearing British subject. But Italy's remained a large part of my life ever since - I go there yearly, I lived there for 9 months, and whenever England play the motherland at sport, I always annoy tattooed, pug-faced men who put the "cross" in Cross of St George with my timid cries of "forza azzurri...". But I don't feel very strongly latin; rather, my sense of nationality comes from where I've spent my happiest times, and with the exceptions of some trascendental holidays, it's always been here, south-west London. Aaw.

apart from when it comes to football, I'm not patriotic at all, the sooner we join the rest of Europe the better.

It would be great if you could adopt a nationality at 18, provided you had to conform to the national stereotype.

actually, the UN should make it a law that everyone has to do that.

But what the hell country would I come from, then? The rumpled and vaguely sad land of Geekaria?

On the one hand, I don't want to ever live anywhere else but England, and specifically london, but on the other hand I'm against patriotism as it's normally practiced. Britain produced Shakespeare and Newton and Darwin and the Rolling Stones and lots of other people to be infinitely proud of, but we've plenty to be ashamed of too. And most very patriotic people are entirely horrible, of course.

I don't want to ever live anywhere else but England, and specifically london

I find this a curious sentiment, since I seem to feel the opposite; I take a serial promiscuity attitude to cities. I hope I live long enough to experience a year in Sao Paolo, a year in Lagos, a year in Saigon, etc.

But I was just thinking about this as I walked through implausibly tiny streets and past the eerie white glow of Tokyo neon, the unfamiliar sound of the automated golf range down by the river... I was thinking of a girl I met in London once, whose whole universe consisted of British TV comedy. (She actually worked in TV, presenting some show like 'The Sunday Show'.) I thought of her here, and how she'd just be lost without any references to 70s British TV personalities and UK ad campaign slogans and tabloid jargon. She would want to go home after a week.

I don't know if that's patriotism. And I don't know if my appetite for its opposite -- for sensual estrangement in foreign places -- is some sort of Quisling treachery. It may be. I'm never sufficiently far from the world I knew, as a child and adolescent, as 'normal', and I constantly want to get to the point where everything is, to my mind, equally extraordinary. Every sight on every street corner would be as fresh as if you saw it for the first time.

Of course, this may all just be a cowardly substitute for taking drugs.

(From this perspective, taking drugs -- the soma 'half holiday' of 'Brave New World', for instance -- would be a kind of patriotic duty, a homeopathic palliative, an alternative to flight and exile.)

Quisling treachery wd be if you wanted to raze London and REPLACE it with the Momus version of Tokyo (or Sao Paolo).

Taking sides: "I'd like to find someone I can grow old with" vs "I'd like to be sure I have a new lover every two years" (ps I don't think either of these is wrong, but I *do* think they both come with an emotional and psychic price)

London is full of extraordinary things. You just have to spend a bit of time looking. It is the oldest actively and dynamically multi-cultural city on earth (I think some way ahead of Rome or Istanbul or Alexandria, all of which are older and were probably multi-culturally dynamic in a bigger way once upon a time.

I lived in London for 13 years, longer than I've lived anywhere else. So it's like the city I was 'married to', whereas all the rest have just been affairs. And I'm sure it's true that you never really get to the end of someone, and truly know them, even after a long marriage.

But I do feel there's a kind of sameness about any London experience I might have. The streetlamps would be the same, people would be sitting in their houses on any given street watching similar TV shows, there would be an inescapability to the concept of 'the pub' or 'Friday night' or 'the Queen' wherever you were. Certain things are threatening or funny or acceptable in London that aren't threatening or funny or acceptable in Tokyo or New York.

It's those predictable qualities which both give a city its identity and limit its appeal, for me. Once I twig all those, I really want to move on. (I also can't stand seeing commercials more than once, or hearing the same records time after time on the radio, though many people seem to like things more the more they're repeated.)

I remember watching Carax's 'Boy Meets Girl' and seeing the scene where Alex writes his most intense experiences on the back of a map of Paris and says he wants the map of his life to match the map of Paris. He will never leave it. (Unlike the director, who traded Paris for Los Angeles for a while.) That fills me with a weird mixture of envy and dismay.

I think I feel the same loyalty to the Mac OS (whatever it may be this year) that other people feel to a country. I don't care what country I die in, but it's hard to imagine dying a Windows user.

...or (heh heh) a 'rockist'.

Actually, I should have remembered that Ambrose Bierce had the best word on patriots and all:

PATRIOT -- n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

PATRIOTISM -- n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

i don't identify as a patriot, but there are particlaur aspects of new zealand culture that i really like, and often i think its sad that new zealand tries so hard to be international - like a lot of new zealanders seem to have the attitude that something from new zealand is only good if overseas people like it. when people talk about rugby and the man alone i don't feel like a new zealander...but in a way i can relate to the DIY aspect of "nz identity" - not for the whole fix-it-up-with-#8-wire ethos exactly, but in terms of the music i make. i only feel like a new zealand identity is crucial cos so much of what we hear and see on radio and tv is american, and yet people are doing good stuff right here. i kid you not, when i'm singing its so easy to slide into an american accent and thats really scarey, i have to make a conscious effort not to do that.

I like New Zealand. I can't really make comparisons because I haven't lived anywhere else, but in terms of the people, or the culture, it seems ok. Kind of annoying in lots of ways, but maybe everywhere's like that. In terms of the other things that compose a country: the beaches, the mountains, the plants, the smell of the sea, the weather, the shape of the hills, colour of the soil....I am completely partisan. I really like New Zealand. I think it is absolutely fucking beautiful.

I am now going to run outside and impersonate Julie Andrews, the Disney Snow white, etc.

Do other people think about the places they live in terms of the physical landscape, and if so what do you think of it? or do you always think of places in terms of people? Maybe its a difference between coming from a small relatively recently colonised place and somewhere with a long history.

issadora has hit on another one of the reasons why i like new zealand.

The longer that I live in Europe, the less I feel like an American, although -- weirdly -- the more I feel like a Marylander.

National borders are arbitrary and manmade. Ethnic and racial identities are much more significant.