Why isn’t Vladimir Putin French?

MayCaesar

Defining one's nationality based on their allegiance is strange, at least. There are plenty of people who were born and and have lived for a long time in France, loathing it intently and wanting to move somewhere else, which they ultimately did - are those people not French in your eyes? I was born in Soviet Union and spent the majority of my life in Russia, yet I never liked the country and its culture and bailed out of there as soon as I reasonably could; I live in the US and love this country, but I do not have the US citizenship. People still generally call me Russian, and I do not mind it, even though this is not how I would describe myself.

This just illustrates one of the multiple problems with the concept of nationality. You get all kinds of situations in which nationality becomes hard to determine. Is a person whose parents are from Korea, but who was born and lived their whole life in Japan, Korean or Japanese? What about a person who has lived their whole life in Taiwan, but always supported the mainland Chinese government and studied its culture - are they Chinese or Taiwanese? For that matter, there are people both in China and Taiwan who believe that all of them are Chinese, and there is no such thing as "Taiwanese" - which is the case? How about people from Scotland: are they Scottish, English or British - or more than one of these? People both from Northern Ireland and Ireland are Irish, but should they not be considered different nationalities, considering that these territories belong to different nations?

Nationality is certainly a social construct, ill-defined at that.