How I Became “the Italian” (Without Meaning To) by Leonardo Aidan Lattanzi

Patriotism. Today, for many people it’s the defining characteristic of certain far-right parties. For others, it's sitting down to watch your national team play in some competition. For some it’s the virtue that pushes young people to enrol and go defend their home country. And yet, inside the walls of our campus, many people who were never patriotic when they still lived in their homeland are now firm supporters of said homeland. But how does this “expat-patriotism” phenomenon come to be?

Here at UCU we have a real “melting pot” of students: most people have a very lengthy and complicated background, maybe because they lived in many different places or maybe because their parents are from different countries and decided to raise their children in a third country (something that I’ve noticed is very common amongst UCU students), and only some have been living in their parents’ homeland for most of their lives. This is to be expected, since we are on the international campus of a very prestigious school. And yet, many people have big flags hung up on their walls, talk passionately about their language and culture and are glad when they find someone with whom they can share this passion. There are some countries that are more represented than others (like Italy and the US), but even for the “nicher” ones, they still manage to form a tight-knit community. But upon asking some of my friends if they have always felt this proud of being from their homeland, often the answers are mixed: some say that they have always been like this, but most realise that when they still lived there, they could only see the bad things about their country, while taking the culture, food, and, in general, their community for granted; one of them said: “I guess I’ve never really cared for patriotism and this kind of stuff while still living in [home country], but now I somehow feel more inclined to do so”. Hearing this made me wonder: how does this happen? I too feel the same way, but becoming proud of one’s homeland only after leaving it seems like an illogical process, and yet it’s what happens to some expats.

While trying to find an explanation for this phenomenon, I realised a couple of things: when a person is living in their home country, they are rarely asked “where are you from?” and if they are, it’s usually meant as “which part of the country are you from?”, while on an international campus the question becomes about your country of origin. Being constantly asked where you're from slowly makes you more aware of your roots, and perhaps this could spark the pride and passion that I talked about before: after saying “I’m from Italy” a dozen times, it started becoming “I’m from Italy!” without me even realising, and soon enough in my head I started being “the Italian”.

Nostalgia might also play a role: since now most of us are far away from home, feeling homesick could make us remember our country as an idyllic paradise, even if it's probably not.This feeling could drive us to become more patriotic, even if when we were still living there we either didn’t care for our country or even critiqued it.

There's also a simpler, more social explanation: it could be that now that we are living far away from home, we look for our compatriots, and thus we seek out a community that is similar to the one we have grown up in. This is also supported by how people who are from the same country are often in similar friend groups, or even by the existence of some country-based groupchats.

Illustration by AIM

All of these hypotheses were based on a few conversations I had with some people around campus, but they still pointed out a very interesting phenomenon. The fact that so many of us, myself included, seem to go through the same process of “expat-patriotism” is really fascinating. It could be interesting to conduct actual interviews around campus to see if, with a wider sample and more accurate data, this still holds up. But for the time being, I’ll just keep being “the Italian”, and, as it turns out, I don’t mind it half as much as I once would have.