Motherland. Fatherland. Homeland. Patriotism. The national family.

So much of the language that’s used to incite patriotism/nationalism is rooted in ideals of home, in ideals of domesticity, in familial ideals. Hearth and homestead, familiarity, good food, comfort, cosiness. Citizens are encouraged to think of the nation as akin their mother or father and of other citizens as their siblings. Sometimes the metaphor is even more defined. The nation is the nourishing mother, the alma mater, the government is the providing father and preserver of her sexual virtue, the pater familias. The citizens are the children, who must be obedient, respectful and above all else, loyal to the family.

Comforting, no? Cosy? Egalitarian and all that, to think of your fellow citizens as your brothers and sisters?
No.

It isn’t. Not comforting, not cosy and sure as hell not egalitarian. I don’t think so, anyway.

It strikes me that when the nation is imagined as a family, it’s always a particular kind of family that’s imagined. A `happy’ family. No divorce or domestic violence here, folks. No custody fights or acrimonious property disputes. No deadbeat Dads skiving off on the child support payments. No sexual abuse to mar the cosiness, no lives of quiet desperation, no skeletons in the closet (or LGBT folk either for that matter), no `Mother’s little helper’ in the bathroom cupboard. A family where, although people might have their differences, their similarities are more pronounced. A homogeneous family – certainly not a trans-national family – because that would play merry hell with the metaphor. And it’s a defensive family, which, though it might have its internal squabbles, will quickly unite to attack any interloper who dares participate in them.

Ah, yes, foreigners. I bet you wondered when I was going to get to them. Because it’s not just about who is included when we play happy national families. It’s also about who is excluded.

Where does the foreigner fit in this picture of the nation as family?

When they are within national borders, they are the short-term family guest, who will remain tactfully and discreetly silent, keeping their fucking piehole shut for the blessedly brief duration of their visit. They will observe the formalities, tell the nice polite lies, bite their tongue and ignore the desperate weeping from the upstairs bedroom. Good house guests. At best. More often they are the interloper, the unwanted guest, the cuckoo in the nest, the changling in the cradle, the thief in the night. Sometimes they are the `yellow peril,’ the `thieving gypsies,’ the `flood of immigrants,’ the `undesirable element,’ the `influx,’ the `deluge,’ the `horde,’ the `false asylum seekers,’ seeking to rip `us’ off and steal `our’ jobs.

Beyond the national borders, they are `them.’ Those strangers who are outside the family, who must be defended against, who are exotic, unfathomable, and `not like us.’ The barbarians at the gate, the uncivilised Malthusian masses, the threat to `our’ society and `our’ values. Whose bodies can be bombed, burned and buried with impunity, whose thousand lives are worth but one of `ours,’ who are indistinguishable, nameless, faceless, moths at a candle flame.

The nation as family metaphor invites people to divide the world into `us’ and `them.’ From where I stand, that right there is a huge stroke against it.

But this rabbit hole goes deeper.

The family is a site of intimacy – not necessarily pleasant, happy, loving intimacy, but intimacy none-the-less. Family members usually know each other through long acquaintance. They may not like or love each other, but odds are they know each other’s habits, their preferences, their dislikes, their small pleasures, their antipathies. They have learned to live in shared spaces. In most – though not all – cases, the family is a site of particular and private personal knowledge. At their best, families are sources of love, friendship and joy because they are based on mutual respect and private personal knowledge.

Nations are not sites of intimacy. Let me say this again because I think this is really important. Nations are not sites of intimacy. Even the little minnow-nations like Aotearoa/New Zealand are not sites of intimacy. N.Z. has a little under five million citizens and there are about four million people living there. Pretty small, no? But not a site of intimacy. Hell, even my first home-town was not a site of intimacy – I could and did walk around town all day many times without running into a single acquaintance or friend.

This matters because the `nation as family’ metaphor is often invoked precisely because it conjures up familial bonds of affection, loyalty and justifiable partiality. Because the family is a site of intimacy, people are supposed to value the lives of family members above those of strangers. When you’re offered the terrible choice between saving a family member and saving a stranger, you’re supposed to save the family member and let the stranger die.

Within the logic of the nation as family metaphor, you are similarly supposed to save the person who has the same passport as you over the person of a different nationality.

But despite the metaphor, the nation is not your family.

You are not bound to a stranger by ties of affection, shared personal knowledge and personal history simply because you happen to have the same citizenship due to the merest accident of birth. But you could well be bound by real ties of affection, shared ideals, and shared personal knowledge to people who don’t share your citizenship.