Ambiguities of Belonging: the right to vote in the EU
I was born in the 1960s in Burgundy, but until recently had never experienced any great sense of French patriotism. I moved to the UK in the 1990s as a PhD student, ready for a new adventure, and embraced a language for which I did not have particular talent, as German was my first love. I am an anthropologist by passion and academic training and I have now lived as long in the UK as I have in France, my birthplace. Yet I remain a ‘French person on holidays’ for the British, mainly due to my strong accent, and ‘in exile’ for the French. What has characterised my individual journey is my lack of any acute sense of belonging and my curiosity for observing others in their individual and collective engagement with nationality and allegiance.
Since my appointment to my first UK university in the 1990s, I have paid taxes, over a period of 22 years, like any British citizen, while keeping, for different reasons, my French passport. When I question my own belief in those values of Frenchness, I have a long list of questions about their own validity. What does being French mean in the world today? Belonging is about negotiating where you feel more at home and on which values your social and political being relies. Yet these questions take different forms, depending on where you were born and what you have experienced in your life, and in which context you articulate them.
Over the last three decades, I have been involved in the teaching of concepts such as identity and culture to students of European politics, language and society; and have constantly sought to question their sense of belonging and their identification with specific values and ideologies. Yet my students have often had difficulty in explaining what identity means as a social practice and as a discourse. Often these international, but also British students, have, in turn, started the process of questioning what these claims of belonging entail and signify in a context of globalisation. Potentially polemical, and often ideologically charged terms, “belonging” and “identity”, despite their limitations, offer a platform to question what it means to be European in the twenty-first century.
Belonging to Europe presents other challenges, such as the right to vote and to engage politically, because the EU remains an ill-defined political object and is now the target of growing criticism and hostility.For French citizens, the right to vote in another EU member state than France is limited to elections to local authorities, devolved legislatures and the European parliament, as well as French elections. Interestingly enough, the right to vote in this context is not related to your residency and your contribution to the wealth of the Nation, but to your nationality as well as European political citizenship. For a French citizen, French republicanism and the values it encapsulates is the framework through which belonging is framed, and I would even argue, coercively imposed. Claiming that you do not feel French is an insult to Frenchness and the same applies to a lesser extent to being a Republican.
So the key question for me is where do I belong? And do I need to belong politically? If I was given the choice I would like to be able to engage with British politics and to vote at national level as it is where I live, where we have brought up our children and where my future and end lie. Voting is one of the most important political acts in our democratic societies and voting for a political structure that you are not part of on a daily basis seems ideological. A recent petition to the UK government and parliament, in the context of the forthcoming referendum, denounced the fact that EU citizens living in the UK are prevented from exercising their right to vote on a major political decision that is more likely to affect their lives than that of many UK or Commonwealth citizens. Moreover, it is not clear what would happen to me and other ‘Europeans’ if Britain were to leave the EU: would we be left in peace or simply shipped off to Calais…?
Marion Demossier
Professor Marion Demossier is Head of Modern Languages, Professor of French and European studies in Modern Languages and a social-anthropologist by training. She has devoted three decades to the study of wine and to the concept of terroir defined as the European idea of a connection between locality and quality in an era that is often described as intensively globalized as well as writing about European and French politics.
