Waddling patriotism

Waddling Thunder asks, "if America were to declare war against your ethnic homeland, and draft you to fight, would you go? The answer? He'd go.

According to Reihan Salam, there are many Americans without an ethnic homeland abroad. These Americans, according to Reihan, are American-Americans, or American volk, meaning that their ethnic homeland is, in fact, America. While I don't see things quite as Reihan does on this issue, I do think there's a continuum in America between those whose non-American (or Native American) ethnic roots are all but forgotton and those who maintain strong ties that go beyond ethnicity with some other nation. WT gives examples of Japanese- and Iraqi-Americans going to war against their respective ethnic homelands--I'd imagine a far larger number of German-Americans fought with the Allies in World War II, but I could be wrong. Regardless, German-Americans would have likely fallen under what Reihan deems American-American, which might explain why WT didn't think to mention them when offering examples.

So many things factor into one's loyalty to an ethnic homeland--the reasons for leaving, whether it's a country in which you grew up or one whose residents you vaguely physically resemble, etc. If you fled a country because it was oppressive and horrible, and then the U.S. decided to fight that country, you might well be delighted, whereas if your parents' jobs just happened to get transferred to the U.S., you might be less enthusiastic about going to war against your former home. And then comes the question of, how frequently is an ethnic homeland that neatly drawn as corresponding to current political boundaries? Is my "ethnic homeland" Russia? Poland? Israel? I can only trace ancestors back to the Pale of Settlement, and I can't imagine the U.S. will be fighting that no-longer-existing entity any time soon. And whatever affinity I may have for Israel, none of my recent ancestors lived there. The same could have been said for someone of German ancestry, if the U.S. were fighting East or West Germany, or someone who's generically Anglo, but whose ancestors are both English and Irish. In other words, ethnicity and nation-state are not perfectly overlapping categories.

But as for the question itself--let's say you're 100% sure you're Armenian-American, and America drafts you to go to Armenia. Let's say you yourself grew up in Armenia, and think fondly of your old home. And then you get drafted by the U.S. military. Should you go? Yes. Here, WT is right, and in his rightness, a weakness of the more-American/less-American hypothesis is exposed. Levels of Americanness really do (or ought to) come down to loyalty. The German Jews who fought in WWI on the side of Germany always struck me as the most tragic victims of the Holocaust, if such an assessment can be made. The difference between a liberal state and an illiberal one is that, in a liberal state, loyalty trumps ethnicity when it comes to determining national identity. In fact, in a liberal state, ethnicity plays no official role whatsoever, except in the case of remedying discrimination. If intellectuals accept that other factors determine nationality, if the fact that WT would be a bit more upset about fighting Armenia than would someone of non-Armenian ancestry is seen as making WT sub-American, then there's no reason to believe that the government wouldn't eventually follow suit.

More on this later, perhaps.