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“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.”

When Theresa May uttered these words at the Tory party conference in 2016, there was uproar. May was targeting the liberal establishment, who flit business class from Mayfair to Monaco, from Davos to Doha; those in positions of power, who, as May put it, ‘behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road’.

But many people who don’t fit in this frequent flyer category felt under attack too. For this group, believing you are a citizen of the world is a badge of honour, not shame. The cosmopolitan impulse, they believe, isn’t about loyalty to any single community. On the contrary, you can be a citizen of your street, your city, your country and the entire globe. And in our interconnected world, those with a burning concern for global justice, for the environment, for the strife and carnage happening beyond our borders, see themselves as part of humanity at large – as citizens of the world.

But for a different group of people, May’s words resonated deeply. These are the people who feel genuinely rooted in their communities, who feel the strongest sense of solidarity with those who share their history, language and other elements of a common culture. These people often feel sneered at as nationalists or worse, as bigots, by the elites who do not understand their profound intuition that the nation state is the natural expression of group identity.

To unpack these divisions at the heart of contemporary politics, Intelligence Squared is bringing together Simon Schama, one of Britain’s most celebrated historians, who embodies the cosmopolitan spirit; and Elif Shafak, the Turkish novelist and commentator, who calls herself a ‘world citizen and a global soul’. Joining them will be the author David Goodhart, whose bestseller The Road To Somewhere identifies two tribes –’Somewheres’, who feel strong local and national attachments, and ‘Anywheres’, global villagers who value autonomy and mobility; and David Landsman, a former diplomat now in the corporate world, who is concerned about the growing intellectualisation of work, which is widening the gap between the professional classes and everyone else.

Hannah and welcome to this event based around a famous or infamous quote by Theresa May, if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.

A quick question just to kick us off, who here believes they are indeed a citizen of the world?

We are still fighting on and we fight to win.

So this is a sort of rally more than a debate.

I do have a couple of admissions just to kick us off.

Not only do I work for that bastion of liberal elitism, the BBC, although of course if it is a conspiracy, that would suggest there needs to be some form of organisation behind it, but for anyone who's worked there will know that's absolute rubbish.

The Davos man I have met and rubbed shoulders with the capitalist megalomaniacs who basically run the world to the detriment of not this lot, because we're all in that same elite, but certainly the detriment of most people in Britain.

A slightly more serious question actually taken from David Goodhart's remarkable book, which we will obviously touch on hugely this evening.

And it is a question which I would like you also to answer.

Put your hand up if you agree with this proposition.

And we can test the very representative British audience here with what people actually answered in this YouGov poll in

So If you agree with this question, do raise your hand.

Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition.

It sometimes feels like a foreign country, and this makes me uncomfortable.

Excellent, So I would say that's in the below 5% category.

The number of people in Britain who agreed with that statement was

So you are completely disconnected from the rest of the world, and I hope you can enjoy that thought as you walk home, stepping on the heads of the poor, downtrodden people who live elsewhere in this great country.

So let me introduce the fantastic panel we have who are going to take us through this often delicate, often controversial, touches on interesting debates around immigration, around culture, of course around economics, which is the area I look at most closely.

To my direct left, though not politically, is David Goodhart, the head of the Demography Unit at the Think Tank Policy Exchange and the founder and former editor of Prospect magazine.

His recent book, The Road to Somewhere, the populist revolt and the future of politics, certainly 1 of the most influential pieces of work in this debate coming out post-Brexit has been rightly on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

To his left, David Lansman, former diplomat who ended his foreign and Commonwealth office career as ambassador to Greece.

He also worked in what was then Yugoslavia, oversaw the end of Libya's WMD programs, and was ambassador to Albania.

Apparently a model we're going to be following after we leave the European Union.

He is currently the European head of the Indian headquartered Tata Group.

To his left is Elif Shavek, award-winning novelist and political commentator.

She's the most widely read female writer in Turkey.

She's published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, the most recent of which is 3 Daughters of Eve.

And on the far left, of course, Simon Sharma, 1 of the UK's best known historians, at the moment presenting the new Civilization Series for the BBC's university.

He is university professor of art History and History at Columbia University in New York.

The latest of his many books is Belonging, which is the second volume of his history of Jewish people, the story of the Jews.

Welcome panel, thank you so much for joining us.

I'm just gonna go through that first question and in brief order from David to Simon, do you believe, Let's try and answer this in a sentence.

We will have further time for expositions a little later.

But do you believe, David, you are a citizen of the world?

No, I do not believe I'm a citizen of the world because to be a citizen, you have to be a citizen of a state.

And I'm glad to say there is not a global state, so none of you are citizens of the world.

I am very happily a citizen of the United Kingdom.

Do you know, I suppose I should because I felt very at home in every country I've lived in.

I'm sure most of my friends come from well beyond a 50 mile radius of where we're sitting now.

But do you know, I think I'd feel rather arrogant if I were to say I was a citizen of the world, so no.

Elif, what's your sense about your citizenship?

I think I'd like to borrow a metaphor from Rumi, the great poet.

He used to talk about living like a drawing compass.

1 leg of a drawing compass is quite stable, fixed, rooted in 1 place.

Meanwhile the other leg draws a huge wide circle around that.

So I have a very strong attachment to this country as well as to Turkey to Istanbul I think that's possible and at the same time I see myself as a world citizen and the global soul So

things I can be many things at the same time

Simon Do you believe you are a citizen of the world?

Yes I'm also a British passport holder and only a British passport holders despite having lived in America for more than 40 years.

I'm also a permanent resident alien of the United States of America, and probably the most passionate tribal allegiance usually historically doomed is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club as well.

I would say, but I do remember, and I don't quite agree with this actually, but it was very much in my memory when Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky came to my Cambridge College when I was a baby Don.

Deutscher, rather aggressively, what are your roots?

And he said, I'm a Jew and trees have roots Jews don't.

Let's try and frame a little bit of this debate.

Why has it become, and maybe obviously touching on your book, the people from somewhere and the people from nowhere, why do you think it has become such a part of our discussion, both culturally and economically?

Is it linked back to the events of the financial crisis and what flowed from that, or is something else going on?

No, I think our society has become, our societies have become miles more open economically and culturally in the last 30 years or so.

And 1 might say that the people I describe as the anywheres, the people who support openness and autonomy, who are comfortable with rapid social change, have basically won all the arguments in the last 30 years.

And we now talk about, don't we, we talk about how open v.

Well, I think that's a very self-serving way of looking at the world, actually.

I've never met anybody who wants to live in a closed society, but a lot of our fellow citizens think that the forms of openness we've had have not served them well, economically, culturally, and so on, as we saw from that opinion poll that you described earlier.

And I think what in her, I'm afraid, typically clumsy way, Theresa May was pointing at a very obvious truth, it seems to me.

Now, of course, she could and probably should have prefaced her remarks by saying, it's fine to be internationally minded, it's fine to be internationally connected.

I was going to say earlier, I feel very internationally connected, I lived in another European country for 3 and a half years, I can speak the language a bit rustily.

But nonetheless, she was pointing to a basic fundamental truth which is that whether it's our freedoms, our welfare, particularly the least well-off people in our country, and indeed just a sense of belonging, for all of those things we require successful, strong nation states and national social contracts.

And I think what she was saying was that too many people are disentangling themselves from those national social contracts, particularly some of the most affluent, some of the best educated, some of the most influential people in our society.

And that diminishes and fragments our society.

And it is absolutely fine to be, you know, to support international openness, indeed to be post-national.

So long as you also respect the vast numbers, the much greater number of people who still find national attachments extremely important to their lives.

And What is not fine is to believe that because you have disentangled yourself from national attachments to some extent and think of yourself more internationally, because it is not fine to do that and then think you're morally superior to other people.

It is also not fine to believe that you have transcended tribe because on the whole, citizens of the world I think have not transcended tribe.

It's also, I think, not fine to caricature quite mainstream views, quite mainstream national attachments as xenophobic.

I think the point that I think liberals find it very hard to take on board is that you can be strongly attached to group, to nation, to locality, and also not fear or dislike the other.

Now, obviously the history of nationalism in the 19th and early 20th century suggests that you can also, there are also forms of nationalism that have led to that.

But I think we've been through that, we've come out the other side.

1 of the great achievements of the European Union indeed was to kind of recreate the modern liberal open nation state.

So I think we can have attachment and openness, but openness can go too far.

And I think a lot of our fellow citizens have used the opportunity of the ballot box to constrain what they think is the over-internationalized elites, economic and cultural.

David, can I push you a bit on this liberal group, as you described, maybe the elites or whatever they might be, the people who've become detached, have won all the arguments?

Haven't we been having a huge debate for decades and certainly since the large amount of European Union immigration into the UK from the A8 nations?

A massive debate about immigration, it's rarely off the front pages of many of our newspapers.

Even if you go back to David Blunkett and Tony Blair and Charles Clark, they spoke regularly about immigration.

The immigration theme, is that a 1 argument?

It's 1 of those things that has in effect been removed from the democratic contest.

I think this is another of the things that, you know, people like us are happy to see things removed from the democratic contest.

We understand that for the world to be governed effectively, things often have to move beyond the level of the nation state.

The liberal technocratic remainer class are quite comfortable with that.

Partly because they have quite a lot of sovereignty in their own private and professional lives.

But I think a lot of people feel the loss of sovereignty when things are removed from the democratic contest.

You know, whether it's, you know, it seems to do with trade.

Immigration has not been removed, has it?

Or rather, politicians have simply not responded.

I mean, you know, the second great wave of post-war immigration began in

with the Blair government, and it was then turbocharged after 2004 with a huge inflow of people from the former communist countries.

And I think a lot of people felt they were experiencing a kind of double whammy.

People had sort of got used to the idea that we lived in a more open economy, your factory might close and move to a lower cost part of the world.

But then a whole population of people were imported to compete against you in your own labor market in the service sector jobs that you might then be doing.

And we discovered we could do nothing about it.

I mean this is clearly the single biggest, not the only, but the single biggest reason for the Brexit vote.

And so, you know, we have had opinion polls for the last 15, 20 years.

We've had consistently about 75% of the population saying immigration is either much too high or too high.

And politicians have either not wanted to respond or post 2004 haven't been able to respond.

So I think it is 1 of those things that is in the basket of things that have been taken out of the democratic contest and put in that, sorry, you can't decide on this.

Independence of the Bank of England, much more judicial activism, anti-majoritarian human rights judicial activism.

All of those things in their own terms may be perfectly good, but they have shrunk the democratic space, and you can bet your bottom dollar, when something is taken out of the democratic contest, it will be decided according to

Simon, the liberal elites have failed, haven't they?

The people who stoke on trend voted Brexit because of the failure of politicians.

Well actually, I want to, if you'll allow me, ignore your question.

And even if you don't allow me, because actually, I think, I respect and actually agree with a lot of what David said.

And I think what we're stuck with in Theresa May's formula is a classic example of a false dichotomy.

The anywhere somewhere also with respect strikes me as a false dichotomy.

You can absolutely, and I don't actually recognise whether in this room or in London, the sort of sense in which actually if you feel in some philosophical sense a citizen of the world, you necessarily belong to some kind of free floating anywhere interchangeable identity.

Most of us who actually do have some sort of empathy with people all over the world, or who think actually ultimately it matters, for example, like climate change, borders and barriers don't make a whole lot of sense in the long term, do not for a second think that that dilutes their strong sense of British national identity and culture.

So I think the whole premise, I think it's relatively benignly put in this country, but as you know, Kamal, I live in the United States, where it is certainly not benign.

And there was a certain amount after the Brexit vote of people being screamed at on buses who were not Polish or Romanian or Bulgarian.

They were your colour and from your origins and the scream ran, go home, actually, to people.

And the issue is really what it's become, and as I said, there's a lot of what David says I absolutely respect and agree with, but what this has become in the kind of poisonous zone of populist politics now is the sense actually that having a devotion to your national allegiance essentially means stigmatising and demonising others.

Your sense of being able to be British or American or Belgian, I was talking to a very angry taxi driver the other week, presupposes that this will, you know, a world of flowing populations will all somehow go away as the Lega, who've just been elected this morning into a very prominent power could only organize mass deportations.

So I think I absolutely sort of again agree with David that if we really were completely just really part of some sort of nebulous, interchangeable, nomadic, liberal cast, that is really...

We live in a kind of cyber sphere really where our little machines we float around and that's actually created a stronger sense of wanting to belong to an identity which I don't really like to call tribal, but I don't mind calling that for the moment.

But so in fact, in all sorts of ways, there is absolutely nothing wrong with national passion until it starts to say, it starts to pick out who actually are, you know, can be truly of our country and our community and those who can't.

And 1, I don't agree with Tony Baird a whole lot, but he actually said, you know, when people walk down the street in Britain and say, I don't recognise my country anymore, they are not talking about Romanians.

Simon, as I am in the chair, I will ask you the question again.

But do you think you have failed to win the argument because of a lack of understanding of how some people that David speaks about feel about their country?

I'll answer it in this way with a story, as historians unfortunately do.

I was befriended rather wonderfully by the great Isaiah Berlin, mostly to try and keep me out of trouble, failed at Oxford, used to go to tea, and he was working very, very interestingly on the, you know, modern national identity was sort of invented in the 18th century by Johann Gottfried Herder and the very strange Johann Hammann.

And Isaiah, who was an absolute Voltarian, 1 of his favourite people was Alexander Heltsin, the much travelled Alexander Heltsin.

And I said, how can you, you know, why do you want to do research on these people who are blood and soil partisans?

He said, look, Simon, it'd be very nice if we all thought like the Baron de Montesquieu, but the vast majority of people don't.

They, I seem to be getting back to football all the time, but this is what Isaiah said, they feel like football supporters.

And he meant it in a, not that he knew anything about football, but what he meant was that nationalism actually calls to our emotional and visceral sensation that that's how humans are wired.

And I think it does actually behoove those of us who, you know, imagine that the world is constructed out of thought to think about that.

But I also want to say, and in that sense, there was a kind of tone deafness.

And there was in the election which produced Donald Trump as well, I think.

Although a lot of that election absolutely turned on race and not on the sense of economic neglect.

This whole issue goes back rather wonderfully a long, long time.

The great, you know, against Theresa May, I would like to put up Plutarch.

In De Moralia, there is an incredibly moving, beautiful mini-book on exile.

And Plutarch is trying to console somebody who's been banished from his home in Sardis.

And it's in that, it's a sort of founding text.

And Plutarch doesn't say, and he's trying to console people, remember, city-states, and he's living in the second century, he's living in the Romano-Hellenic world.

Theists, of course, famously fought a bitter war in the Peloponnesian Wars.

So he's not trying to say these allegiances aren't real, but they are actually very deep.

But then he says something, He does say we are not born into a nation out of nature.

His point is, which is a wonderful consolation, but also if you're Jewish, and I remember my father who could on Saturday morning recite passages from the Bible by heart, and on Sunday did the same with Shakespeare, felt it was unproblematic, those identities.

What Plutarch says, he says you become part of the country by the use it makes of you and the use you make of it.

And we're sitting in a city where the mayor is Sadiq Khan, where I hear Michel Hussain every morning, where Saeed Javid is in 1 party and Chuka Umunna is in the other.

That sort of world was something which was horrifying to Enoch Powell, who thought it was fundamentally the possibility that we had someone like Sadik Karnas, Lord Mayor, was the end of Britain.

Elif, you touched on this notion of your compass being rooted in many different places.

It just made me remember James Baldwin's famous phrase on identity being like a flock of starlings that rests on different trees at different times.

When you look at this debate, and as you've lived in Britain for a long, long time, but with your background, is this a debate that is peculiar to what I've sometimes described as the worried rich.

It's the peculiarity of developed Western economies to be fearful of what it has brought.

Or is this a debate that is had in Turkey and in other countries in a similar manner?

You know what I find interesting is the Anglo-Saxon media discovered populism relatively recently.

But in other parts of the world, We have been discussing this for such a long time, including in continental Europe, including in very prosperous countries such as Sweden, or crisis-ridden countries such as Greece.

And of course Turkey is a very important case study in itself, because so much of what's happening in Turkey, in my opinion, holds important lessons for anyone who cares about the future of democracy anywhere.

Because it's not only happening in Turkey, it's happening in different countries, 1 after another, in different degrees, and there are similarities, there are echoes.

But as I was listening to Simon, I was thinking about this another...

Thinker from the past, from history, the Greek thinker, Diogenes...

He came actually from a town in Black Sea, which is in Turkey today, in a town called Sinop.

Every year, every couple of months, mobs of Turkish nationalists go there...

And they try to pull down the statue saying...

Why do we have the statue of a Greek philosopher in the middle of our town?

And to me that whole scene is a good example because that is what nationalism does to us.

First of all, it makes us forget our own history.

Asia Minor, Greeks, Turks, so many communities living together, contributing throughout history.

There's no such thing as a homogenous identity there never was.

It really shrinks our minds and I think it shrinks our hearts as well.

So maybe We need to make a distinction between nationalism and patriotism.

You know, to love where you come from, your cultural belongings, your friends, your history.

And whenever there's a crisis, it will come as a package with the assumption that us is eventually better than them.

So we need to make a distinction there, just like we need to make a distinction between faith and religiosity.

We need to stay away from this false dichotomies.

This is not a, we don't have to choose a side between identity and non-identity.

I don't like identity politics, but what I like is belongings, plural, fluid, flexible.

So when I look at myself, yes, I'm an Istanbulite, I'm quite attached to Istanbul, but I'm also from the Aegean, from the Mediterranean.

I carry in my soul so many elements from the Middle East.

This is where I was born and the values that I uphold.

And I have become a Londoner and I'm very attached to this country.

Why can't I be many things at the same time?

So all I'm saying is, we have to be careful about this all around the world as we are speaking Extremist ideologies are saying the same thing.

They're telling us we can't be multiples.

We can't be plural That's the definition of extremism.

So I think we need to start by rejecting the identity politics and the categories that they're trying to push us into all over the world.

APPLAUSE Can you recognise, and I hope I sort of phrased David's arguments correctly, but can you recognize that the arguments that are made, not by you, but by people who make similar arguments, can seem very exclusionary and can seem to ignore people who are proud of their country and have a patriotism, but that doesn't mean they are therefore immediately portrayed as being extreme.

That the liberal approach to nationalism very quickly aligns patriotism with extremism.

If I may come back on that, I think we have to make 1 thing very clear.

Not everyone who voted for Brexit is a xenophobe.

Not everyone who voted for Trump is an Islamophobe or not everyone who voted in a certain way is a racist.

And to be honest, I think 1 of the biggest mistakes that Hillary Clinton made in the run up to the elections was to call half of Trump's voters a basket of deplorables.

So we can be critical of people like Trump, in my opinion we should be, you know, populist demagogues everywhere, but it's quite something else to connect with the people, to listen to people.

If we don't, that would be our big mistake.

So definitely I understand and I can by no means belittle the huge inequality, not only economic inequality, but also cultural gaps, emotional gaps.

We never talk about emotional gaps, but we need to care about these.

We need to put more thought, effort into that.

The populist demagogues also are telling us that they are the spokespeople for the real people.

And I want us to be very careful about that dichotomy.

But let us understand that Marine Le Pen is no less elite than the people she is criticizing.

So many of the figures like Viktor Orban, Kaczynski, 1 after another in every country, they're also part of the elite, except it's a different elite with a different worldview, but they are an elite.

And this is exactly what the Italian sociologist told us, Pareto, at the beginning of the 20th century.

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If You Believe You Are a Citizen of the World, You Are A Citizen of Nowhere