My passport is maroon

Posted on: 28 March 2017 by Fiona Rintoul in Posts

Speaking to me recently about Brexit, a German living in Luxembourg mentioned that the scariest border experience he had ever had in his life was crossing between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the 1970s.

I countered that my scariest border experience was crossing between West and East Germany in 1986. 

Both these borders are gone and little lamented, even if the German-German border did have a certain spy thriller glamour. However, one of them could be back. If the UK government fails to reach agreement with the EU and hard Brexit ensues, a hard border between the six counties of Northern Ireland and the rest of the island looks inevitable.

This teaches us something about how friable political settlements are. Ten years ago, five years ago, even one year ago, who would have contemplated a hard border in Ireland? Then again, when I was studying at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig in 1986 – just three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall – the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany seemed impossible. Far less could I have imagined that my friends in Leipzig would one day be part of what was then the European Community and I would not. Or that the constituent nations of Yugoslavia would join the European Union, and my country would leave.

The Irish and German examples also teach us something about borders. There is nothing natural about borders. Borders are political. Taking back control of our borders means choosing to shut certain people out of our country – nothing more, nothing less.

Nationality is political too. I’m Scottish. That simple statement of fact has political overtones these days. The statement ‘I’m Irish’ has had political overtones in parts of what I’m going to call Ireland – because I believe that is what the whole island of Ireland soon will be called and should be called – for decades. As Seamus Heaney wrote in 1983 in response to his inclusion in the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘Be advised my passport is green / No glass of ours was ever raised / to toast the queen.’[1]

No glass of mine was ever raised to toast the queen either. My passport is currently maroon, and I’d like it to stay that way. Why? Because I feel much more strongly European than I do British. I’m proud to be Scottish. I’m proud to be European. I couldn’t say I’m particularly proud to be British. As each new step on the path to Brexit is engaged and each new idiotically jingoistic headline is published in the right-wing press, any feelings of Britishness I might once have had perish on the vine of my deepening disenchantment.

Of course, others will feel differently. That’s kind of the point.

It is a dangerous game to assume that citizenship will unite people. The East Germans tried it. They tried to make people feel that they were citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) rather than Germans. ‘What is Germany? A hotel in Leipzig,’ the East German politician Willi Stoph once quipped, referring to Hotel Deutschland on Leipzig’s main square. Did it work? History is our guide.

When people advocate independence for Scotland they are accused of creating division. But on this archipelago called the British Isles we are already divided. The division may be overlooked by a London-centric media – the same way Gibraltar was overlooked in Theresa May’s letter triggering Article 50 – but it’s still there.

Now our unelected prime minister wants us to unite and respect the will of the British people. But who are the British people? Am I one of them? Was Seamus Heaney? What about my Czech friends who’ve made a life for themselves in Glasgow and now face an uncertain future?

Our prime minister says we are going to return to being a great global trading nation. But, as Gideon Rachman pointed out in the Financial Times recently, this misunderstands the past. Britain wasn’t a great global trading nation; it was a great imperial nation. In that guise, while it may possibly have created some useful infrastructure, it committed atrocities that make the Nazis look like parvenus. If we’re uniting behind that, count me out.

Citizenship doesn’t unite people; other bonds are stronger. When I lived in East Germany, I discovered that the political regime could not obscure the commonality between myself and the citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We were all Europeans. That’s in the heart, not on the passport.

In fact, because of my background, I had far more in common with the East Germans I met in Leipzig than I did with most of the people I’d met in the three preceding years at the University of St Andrews. At St Andrews, I was one of a minority of students who’d been educated at a comprehensive school, a tiny working-class island floating in a great privileged sea of ex public school boys and girls. Class, in my experience, is a far more potent divider than nationality.

The beauty of the European Union was that it papered over the cracks. The tensions in Ireland. The splits in the former Yugoslavia. The mutual distrust that still exists between East and West Germany. We were all in it together. We were all Europeans.

To expose these cracks is to invite fragmentation.

Of course, we in the UK are still Europeans; that’s a matter of geography, not politics. And no blue passport can insulate us from the social and environmental concerns of our fellow Earth dwellers. 

Brexit won’t stop us being citizens of the world. But it might stop us being British subjects. Just as East Germans ultimately could not be persuaded that they were citizens of the GDR rather than Germans, the Scots and Irish will not buy into a Brexit Britain that is essentially English – and a particular version of English at that.