Is Biden American or Irish?

“Americanism,” my American friend once said, “isn’t a nationality. It’s an idea.” That epigrammatic phrase obscures more than it elucidates. Take a French socialist, by way of illustration.

French is a nationality. Socialist is an idea. Our hypothetical chap happens to be both, but his nationality is in no way contingent on his idea. He may change the idea to, say, royalism, while still remaining as French as before, arguably even more so.

And what exactly is a nationality? In Russia, the term stands for ethnicity, not citizenship, which it does in most other places, including Russia herself under the tsars. (Russians were at the time defined by their religion, not ethnicity. Officially, that is. Unofficial attitudes come across in the proverb “It’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched.”)

All Soviet citizens carried internal passports with ‘Nationality’ one of its rubrics. It was filled with words like ‘Russian’, ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Jew’, not ‘Soviet’. That practice has been discontinued but, when one Russian asks another “What’s your nationality?”, he still means ethnicity, not citizenship.

The Russian language has two cognates reflecting this distinction. Both are translated as ‘Russian’, but they mean different things. Ruskiy is ethnically Russian; rossiyanin, a Russian citizen.

Britain also has such differentiating words, though they aren’t cognates: British and English (or Scottish, Irish, Welsh). The former is citizenship; the latter, ethnicity.

Someone born elsewhere can become British, but not English. You either are or you aren’t, the luck of the draw. The chance nature of this was emphasised by that great Empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes: “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

That first prize can be won even by those whose families weren’t English originally. A good friend of mine, for example, has a French surname, and indeed he descends from the Huguenots who found refuge in Britain. Yet my friend considers himself English, and indeed he displays every requisite characteristic: a clipped accent, slightly eccentric dress, club membership and alcoholism.

Britishness can be interpreted narrowly, as a comment on one’s passport; or more broadly, as a statement of self-identification and multiple intersecting loyalties. Thus, though I have two passports, my loyalties are in no way divided: I’m unquestionably British. Why, I’ve even let my US passport lapse, and I pass the Tebbit cricket test with flying colours.

Yet Britishness doesn’t have to be as distinct from Englishness as all that. Neither of them is an ‘idea’. Both are a way of looking at the world, a matter of intuitive assumptions, behavioural patterns and social interactions. None of this can be expressed in a written document, the way the American Declaration of Independence began to express Americanism.

I’m not a great fan of that document, but I love one sentence in it. Actually, not even a whole sentence but a phrase: “We hold these truths as self-evident…” A nation is indeed largely defined by the truths most people intuitively hold as axiomatic.

That’s why it would never occur to my friend to describe himself as French. He is an Englishman who happens to have a French surname. Another close friend has an Irish surname, and indeed his family barrel has more than a spoonful of Irish blood. But he is so proudly English that, when in his cups, he’ll punch you if you dispute that.

The two men are quite different, but many of their intuitive assumptions are identically English and British. That’s why they are English and British (I’m not a great believer in genetic memory and the voice of blood).  

Yet Biden routinely refers to himself as Irish, which, mostly on his mother’s side, he ethnically is. Some of this self-identification is strictly political opportunism. In many parts of America securing the Irish vote goes a long way towards an electoral victory, and Joe is a politician before anything else.

In case of mixed origin, an American politician will automatically choose the more politically expedient component. Thus mulatto Barack Obama calls himself black, hinting at the unlikely possibility that his black father begat him by parthenogenesis.

The issue isn’t that simple though. For one can observe that many Americans have, or at least cultivate, the intuitive assumptions prevalent in the lands of their forefathers. Ancestral feuds figure prominently in that package, and they seem to travel well.

The ethnic aspect in ‘American’ appears to be weaker than not only in ‘French’ or ‘English’, but even in ‘British’. The word doesn’t seem to define a person’s intuitive (as opposed to rational) assumptions to the same extent.

That’s odd, even though the US is platitudinously described as a country of immigrants. No doubt that’s what it used to be, but today some 87 per cent of Americans are born and bred, compared to 86 per cent of Britons. Yet no one calls Britain a country of immigrants, not quite yet anyway.

Biden’s maternal Irish ancestors arrived in America about 170 years ago. One would think that’s long enough for him to stop describing himself as Irish, especially since his father’s family was mostly English.

Yet Biden stubbornly clings to his Hibernian heritage, and not all of that self-identification is disingenuous. Some intuitive assumptions seem to have migrated into his mind from the Emerald Isle.

Hatred of the English is one intuitive assumption that many Irishmen share, or are supposed to. Apparently, Biden’s mother possessed that little prejudice not just in spades but in the other three suits as well.

On her trip to England she once stayed at a hotel whose staff proudly told her that the Queen had spent a night there in the past. Mrs Biden was so mortified that she slept the whole night on the floor, for fear of contaminating her flesh by contact with the same bed where Her Majesty might have slept.

That’s not just an idiosyncratic affectation. It’s virulent hatred, and no doubt Mrs Biden raised little Joe in that spirit. Then again, my mother tried to raise me as a loyal Soviet, in which undertaking she failed spectacularly.

How successful was Joe’s mother in injecting her hatred into his bloodstream? And if she succeeded even to a limited degree, does this sentiment affect President Biden’s approach to foreign policy?

According to Georgia Pritchett’s autobiography My Mess Is a Bit of a Life (I like this spoonerism so much I just might buy the book), Biden’s mother had a profound influence on his life. The talented Mrs Biden exerted that influence even in poetic form, by writing “hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on their heads.”

I don’t know how much of it has rubbed off on little Joe. Some has, that’s for sure. Otherwise the president wouldn’t have insisted that any trade deal with Britain depends “upon respect for the [Good Friday] Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.” Taking ethnicity out of consideration, it’s not clear why a US president should base trade policy on how hard the border is between two foreign countries.

Noticing that he seems to have Irish interests close to heart, while sometimes treating Britain cavalierly, some people wonder if Mrs Biden’s influence is affecting the ‘special relationship’. I can reassure them that it isn’t – for the simple reason that the ‘special relationship’ is, and always has been, more in the nature of British wishful thinking than reality.

Using the Lendlease programme as an example, one could argue that the US had a special relationship with the Soviet Union, not Britain. The former got American supplies for free, while Britain had to sell all her gold and overseas assets to pay cash on the nail. And when that ran out, an IOU came into effect. Only in 2006 did Britain finally pay off her special allies.

More recently, Ronald Reagan (who also had Irish roots) refused to share intelligence information with Britain during the Falklands War, and Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger had to disobey Reagan’s orders to do so. Even more recently, Biden ordered unilateral troop withdrawal from Afghanistan without bothering to inform America’s British allies in advance and leaving them in the lurch.

Americans seem to take it for granted that a president’s ethnic origin, no matter how partial and remote, will have at least some bearing on his foreign policy. Yet a Briton would be shocked if Boris Johnson showed a political bias towards Turkey just because he had a Turkish great-grandfather.

The upshot of it is that America and Britain are two countries divided by more than just a common language. The Anglo-Saxons as a homogeneous unity are a figment of French or Russian imagination.