A nation is a nation when enough people, both inside and out, are prepared to recognise it.
Sometimes, recognition is a fight about borders: “That’s not yours, it’s mine”… and so the blood flows.
Often, recognition is about other things as well. Religion, ideology, laws and taxes are good examples.
The German tribes had issues with the Roman empire over borders and laws. Ultimately, external events overtook the issues, and tribes, themselves under threats from the east, pushed into the empire and – depending on what view you take – were absorbed by it.
For its first few centuries, the English / Irish feud was about the English being in Ireland at all. Then religious differences, the movement of labour and famine each entered the equation. Still today, the border of Northern Ireland and Ireland defines England’s role in Europe.
In a number of England’s American colonies, the issue was money. In particular, whether England could impose taxes on the colonies without allowing them much of a say in how to spend that income. The result of that issue was the creation of the United States, which would speedily, in historical terms, eclipse England and others as a superpower.
Germany only became Germany in 1871, before being split as East and West while the superpowers spent the second half of the twentieth century fighting it out. That war was a cold war, where odd borders sat while words were thrown.
No border was odder than that of West Berlin, the non-communist half of a former and later capital of a re-united Germany set in East Germany.
All of which makes 26 June 1963 a day well worth remembering. In West Berlin, an American who had fought for the presidency both on and in spite of his Irish Catholic background, told 120,000 West Berliners:
Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum [‘I am a Roman citizen’]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!‘… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’
There are two very human reasons to take joy in the day.
The first is the fact that in the decades following the speech, the main question for the world was whether JFK, who wrote the speech, got it wrong, the legend being that “Ich bin ein Berliner” meant to the locals, “I am a cupcake.”
The second is the context. One might have thought that the proudest boast of the 2,000 year-old ancestors of JFK’s audience was “I am not a Roman citizen”. Ah well, let them all eat cake.
