WHY I AM PROUD TO BE A SUBJECT OF THE
QUEEN
In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,
Anne Applebaum, a US citizen living in Poland,
has decided to become British
NEEDLESS to say, there were no star-span- gled hats, no hot dogs and hamburgers, no crowds of emotional spectators, no judges making patriotic speeches. Nor, in fact, were there any ceremonies of any kind: I became a British subject — or I think I became a British subject — in a room lined with rows and rows of British telephone books, copies of the Yellow Pages and helpful brochures on doing business in Britain. While waiting for my appointment, I flipped through one par- ticularly informative one on 'Media in the UK', which usefully listed the names of national newspapers in Britain. I was in the Com- mercial Section of the Con- sular Department of the British embassy in Warsaw, and, on the day I swore to 'be faithful and bear true alle- giance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors', I am sorry to say that not a single would-be Polish investor in the British media was avail- ing himself of the section's services. The woman admin- istering the oath, although a bona fide vice-consul, was not herself British, and grew quite sniffy when I asked her, timidly, if that mattered. 'Naturally not,' she snapped, in heavily accented English.
She also failed to congratulate me after the half-minute's worth of unceremonious oath-taking ceremony was up, but I don't think that was because of ill humour. Throughout the nearly three years it has so far taken to obtain a British passport sufficient time to quit two jobs, write much of a book, have a baby and temporarily move abroad — no one has ever congratu- lated me, patted me on the back or mur- mured 'welcome to the club, old girl'. No one has even said anything so straightfor- ward as 'Anne Applebaum, you are a British subject now'. Instead, bureaucratic letters have arrived at irregular intervals, mostly demanding that I write to various tax officials proving that I am not in arrears. More recent, equally brusque com- munications have come with British pass- port application forms enclosed, leading me to believe that I am now a subject of Her Majesty, as well as a citizen of the United States, but until I actually hold the document in my hand, I can't be sure.
Nor, for that matter, has anyone ever asked me to say or do anything remotely patriotic; aside from the oath, all that the Immigration Service has required are docu- ments — documents concerning marriage, documents concerning residency and, above all, those documents concerning taxes. By contrast, Anthony Hopkins — as he must be called in America, where he is legally obliged to renounce the 'Sir' — had to undergo an FBI background check and an interview with immigration officials before becoming, infa- mously, a US citizen two weeks ago. He was also required to produce two witnesses at his citizenship ceremony (Steven Spielberg and John Travolta) and to pass a 'general knowl- edge test', which presumably required an intimate familiarity with major league base- ball and NFL football, the only form of gen- eral knowledge which the vast majority of Americans can reasonably be said to hold in common. Sadly, the presence of witnesses was not required at my oath-taking ceremo- ny, so I couldn't invite my celebrity friends. As for general knowledge — I am fully pre- pared to read up on the correct way to address a duke's daughter if that should be required. Or, maybe in New Labour's New Britain, one ought to be able to list the zones of the Millennium Dome. But it hasn't mat- tered whether I am willing or not, as no one has asked.
Knowing what a commotion the United States makes of its 'new citizens' — there really are star-spangled hats, toasts and emo- tional renderings of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag — I did, when I began this pro- cess, find this utter lack of ceremony a touch off-putting. For all of the mythology about Britain as a haven for unscrupulous foreign- ers, Britain isn't, in fact, a country which much encourages immi- grants or immigration, legal or otherwise. The rules are very clear: you live here the right number of years, you marry another British sub- ject. Then you get in — but don't expect anyone to get excited about it. There isn't a statue in Liverpool har- bour proclaiming Britain a haven for 'your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free', and British children do not memorise such lines in school, as I had to memorise the poem that is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. The very notion of hundreds of British Albanians (if there even are hundreds of British Albanians) marching down the streets of London protesting against the deportation of an Albanian Than' is laughable.
Nor, contrary to popular belief, is it partic- ularly easy to get a British passport using Britain's allegedly lax political-asylum laws, although I too am a beneficiary of them, albeit indirectly. Amusing though it would be to claim that I, as an inhabitant of the liberal East Coast of the United States, have been persecuted for alleged Tory sympathies, I am in fact British because my husband is British. And my husband is British because as a stu- dent he was a Solidarity activist who found himself stranded in Britain in 1982, after the declaration of martial law in Poland. At that time there was a brief upsurge of sympathy for Poland and Poles; as a result, he was one of a staggering 400 or so of his 38 million countrymen to be honoured with the status of political refugee. As recently as 1994, only 825 people received full refugee status. In 1999 the official number did go up to 7,075 as a consequence of the Kosovo war — a lot more, but hardly representing a threat to the ethnicity of the British Isles, and not a partic- ularly magnanimous gesture, given that Ger- many has taken in hundreds of thousands of Balkan refugees over the past decade. Refusal rates have already returned to their pre-Kosovo norms in any case: fairly or unfairly, they are now hovering around 90 per cent. True, there are quite high numbers of refugees waiting to have their cases heard, but that strikes me as the fault of those who hear the cases, not that of the refugees.
Indeed, the majority of those who apply for asylum in Britain can hardly be said to loll about eating grapes on cushions, living a life of luxury financed by the British tax- payer. Many perfectly legitimate applicants for refugee status are in fact forced into camps and detention centres — more than 10,000 are detained every year, according to the British Refugee Council — and treated with suspicion. They have to submit them- selves to medical examinations by immigra- tion officials who may well conclude that the scarring on your back shows evidence of injury, but the Secretary of State is of the opinion that this does not show a cause or reason', as one did in an asylum refusal let- ter I once saw, sent to a man who had marks on his body consistent with his claims of heavy beating and torture. Or, as in the case of one Chinese dissident, their applica- tions may be pompously refused because 'M October, 1997, the Chinese authorities signed the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights', which didn't seem to prevent Chinese authorities from hauling religious dissidents out of Tiananmen Square last week. Such official suspicion comes, of course, on top of the fact that every morning those victims of torture and veterans of foreign jails seek- ing safety in Britain will pick up the news- papers only to find that the words 'bogus' and 'asylum-seeker' have now become inex- tricably linked.
Aware of all of this, I nevertheless per- severed with my own application. For the appeal of Britain, to those of us willing to brave the bureaucratic struggle required to settle here, remains stronger than you born in Britain probably realise. After all, only a country whose idea of itself is fun- damentally stable — only a country whose identity is completely secure — would treat its `new citizens' with such fantastic indifference. And there, for those of us Who want to get in, as opposed to film stars and other riff-raff who are trying to get out, lies the appeal. What mystifies me about the fuss recently made of Sir Antho- nY s — sorry, Mr Hopkins's — decision to be Come American despite his long ties to his Welsh birthplace is why anyone here should care. It just doesn't speak well of the man, his decision to leave a small, exclusive club, one notoriously suspicious of outsiders, in order to join a large, loose- ly defined organisation with a virtually open membership policy.
Or perhaps these ripples of insecurity are a sign of the times. Of late, Britishness, as such, has been under unwarranted attack — to the detriment not only of the inhabi- tants of Mr Hopkins's native Welsh valleys, but of would-be British immigrants as well.
No one is more British than a naturalised British subject, who cannot, after all, ever be English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh. Break up the United Kingdom, and it is not only those chinless wonders retired in the shires, so detested by Peter Mandelson and his kind, who will huff and puff about it. Where will the break-up of the UK leave, say, the British Asians, who belong to a long, grand tradition? Or the British Jews? All of us who come here do so because the notion of Britishness is far more than merely ethnic — or at least we think it is. You may not go on about it as much as Americans do, but you also have a set of ideas attached to your national identity, and we admire them. We most admire, in fact, those bits of your national identity which you seem most keen on discarding: not just boring old political liberty and eco- nomic freedom, which we could get in America or lots of other places, but history, tradition, centuries of stability, tolerance of eccentricity, cars which drive on the wrong side of the road, flat green lawns and, above all, a Queen, together with her Heirs and Successors. After spending the first part of my life being a mere citizen, I am delighted to find myself a subject as well.
I suspect, in fact, that the chipping away at the notion of Britishness, and the new national obsession with relatively tiny num- bers of asylum-seekers, are linked. There is no other explanation; as far as I can work out, the greatest anti-refugee hysteria has been provoked by a handful of women with babies in central London, and a few pathet- 4c Afghans who had the bad luck to be on a hijacked plane and the good luck to find themselves ending up in Essex. I don't begrudge Britain its immigration laws: every country has the right to take in or reject as many foreigners as it wishes, and I accept that this is a crowded island. But why has everyone suddenly become so unpleasant about those who seek to stay? Why call them nasty names? Why not at least speak of 'bogus asylum refusals' as well as 'bogus asylum-seekers'? Some of those who settle here are legitimate, some go home — even my husband went back to Poland, where he is now a government minister — some even write for the nation- al newspapers that are helpfully listed in the brochures provided by your consulates abroad. And you make a mistake if you think the foreigners who do manage to stay here are somehow lesser Britons. We will always be your most patriotic patriots, even if you never ask us to prove it.
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