Immigrants and Identities in Europe and America

Navid Kermani has an article in Sign and Sight on being European that contains this revealing passage. He writes:

My parents came to Germany 50 years ago from Iran to study. They are well integrated, interested in toleration and understanding, socially active and speak good German – pious Muslims in a European model. They are happy to live in Germany. They are thankful. But even after 50 years, they would never say that they are German.

I don't think that just has to do with my parents. It might also have to do with Germany. I would never say that I am German. I was born here, I have both an Iranian and a German passport, the language in which and from which I live is German. And yet I can't imagine uttering the sentence: I am German. At best, I'd say it double-barrelled, almost apologetically: German-Iranian.

My cousin who has been living in the United States for six years already says that he's an American. One doesn't become German. As a migrant, one remains an Iranian, Turk or Arab, even in the second and third generation. [emphases in the original]

Read the whole thing here.

What he is talking about is a fundamental distinction between the ethnic states of Europe and the pluralism of America. America is as much a dream and an idea and an expression of common will as it is a nation. The same cannot be said of the European states that are based on a shared heritage. The ethnic component is paramount there.

To be German means something more than a legal status, or even a personal history. It means being part of the great German tribe whose ancestors inhabited the North European Plain for millenia. That deep heritage, much of it manufactured to be sure, lies at the heart of European nationalism. America is something quite different. To say you are American is not to assert an ancestral connection, or a deep cultural identification with the past. It is simply to say that you share the common ideals and aspirations of the American people, whatever their origins.

America already is, what EU enthusiasts hoped to create; a "community based on will" and nothing more -- and that, I fear, is something that European states never will be.