A citizen of nowhere

Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street … but if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.

Here I’m quoting the UK’s ex-PM Theresa May in a speech she made soon after the 2016 Brexit referendum had turned her from a ‘Remainer’ into a ‘Leaver’ almost overnight, as she scented the juicy prospect of finally running the country. Just three years later, her political career is in ruins.

And all I can say in reply to her inane pronouncement is that I do believe I’m a citizen of the world, and for that matter a citizen of nowhere – and that I do understand what citizenship means. It’s just that I don’t much care for it.

So why have I held a Dutch passport for the past 30 years? Quite simply because in order to travel any great distance I need a passport, or within the European Union (and a handful of other European countries such as Norway and Switzerland) an identity card – and both passports and identity cards are still invariably linked to specific nationalities.

I have always said that in the as yet unlikely event of the EU introducing a pan-European passport, without any specified nationality, I would be first in the queue to apply for one – assuming I could use it as widely as my current Dutch one.

One main reason why I decided in 1988 to apply for Dutch citizenship was that I wanted to be able to vote in national as well as local elections in the country where I was going to be spending most of my then foreseeable future, and so help influence its politics – and back then that country was Holland. As a national of another EU country (the UK) I was allowed to vote in local Dutch elections as well as European ones – but, like all countries that I’m aware of, Holland only allows its own citizens to vote in national parliamentary elections, which as far as I am concerned are the ones that matter most.

Until the early 1970s I had only been able to vote three times, in the British general elections held in 1970 and (twice) in 1974. Then in 1975 I moved to Switzerland to take up a job with the United Nations specialised agency the World Health Organisation (WHO); and that gave me an unusual residence status. I was not treated as a standard immigrant to Switzerland, but was issued a special UN-only identity card. I of course retained my British citizenship, and during the eight years that I lived in Geneva I could have voted in just two elections, both held in 1979: the UK general elections that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, and the first-ever elections to the European Parliament. But this would have involved getting myself onto the British ‘electoral roll’, and for some reason I can no longer remember I chose not to. In Switzerland I had no voting rights at all, since I was not a Swiss national, and had no intention of becoming one; nor was Switzerland (then as now) an EU member state.

In 1983 I resigned from WHO and had to leave Switzerland; but I did not move back to the UK, for two reasons: (1) Margaret Thatcher was now firmly in power, and consistently pursuing policies I deeply despised; and (2) I was now openly gay, and had no wish to live in a country where this had been illegal until I was 15 years old, and where public opinion on the subject still lagged a long way behind the decriminalising legislation enacted in 1967. Holland, on the other hand, had much more enlightened legislation and attitudes (on this and other matters), and so I moved there instead, already determined to take Dutch citizenship at the earliest possible opportunity. After the statutory five years’ residence I applied, and within a year I was a Dutch citizen.

If I could have kept my British citizenship, I probably would have; but Holland was one of only a few European countries that did not allow dual nationality (it still doesn’t), and so one condition I had to meet was to produce evidence from the UK authorities that I had surrendered my British passport.

Once again, this was not my choice, but was entirely predicated on governments’ automatic assumption that everyone has a ‘home country’ to which he or she should feel a ‘natural’ allegiance – and that there is something fundamentally wrong with anyone who does not. Precisely what Theresa May implied in her 2016 speech.

I could hardly disagree more.