My point is that “Romanness” meant different things to different people.
And here's the problem, because it doesn't
really work that way. One can't just create their own idea what a Japan-ness is and then say that they are basically Japanese as well because they fit their own criteria of what that Japan-ness is. I'm pretty sure it would confuse a lot of real Japanese people.
Of course, if Japanese people were marginalized somehow and no one cared about their opinion on that matter, and if the idea of "Catalan Japan-ness" became somehow extremely popular in Spain because it would be also considered as something glorious and peak of civilization, then it would probably catch on. There would be a lot of people happy about their new Japan-ness and there would be publications about how it's absolutely valid way of thinking and how eating a Pa Amb Tomaquet expresses your inner Japan-ness.
A triangle is a triangle. You can't really take a circle and say it's a triangle now. You can pretend a circle is a triangle, you can start calling circles "triangles", but that won't
really change anything.
The Byzantines considered themselves Romans, because they were citizens of the Roman Empire, because their emperor was the Emperor of the Romans, because their polity was continuous with the classical Roman state. And they had every right to call themselves so!
They had the only right to do so. Just as only Japanese people have the right to call themselves Japanese. Be it because they were born as Japanese or because they were granted Japanese citizenship. I haven't been born as Japanese and I haven't been granted Japanese citizenship, so I can't say that I'm Japanese, and nothing will change it, no matter how greatly I would love to be Japanese. Without citizenship I can learn to speak Japanese, I can even buy and wear kimono, but that wouldn't make me Japanese either. I can create a complex idea of what a "Japan-ness" is, I can think that "Japan-ness" is
"bowing to everyone, being kind, overworking, having a portrait of the emperor and following bushido", but, surprisingly, it still won't make me Japanese.
It's the same with Romanness. I get it that westerners had their own ideas. I get it that they thought it's absolutely valid. I just say it wasn't enough, because it doesn't
really work that way. Especially when they still had literal living Romans in a literal Roman Empire next to them. But the thing is that they didn't want to adopt
that Romanness and decided to create their own instead.
What I am defending here is that Western conceptions of Romanness were also valid. Both the “Westerners” and the ”Easterners” culturally descend from Rome, and just as it was unfair for later Western historians to deny the Byzantine Empire's Romanness, it is also wrong for random internet people to want to hypercorrect and repeat that fake Voltaire quote that really grinds my gears about the HRE not being holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire (or just generally say that the HRE was pretending or LARPing).
In the case of ERE we had a gradual internal evolution of the Roman state, while in the case of WRE we had a foreign conquest. Sure, a lot of Roman things in the west survived the "fall". Roman people still had babies. But politically and culturally they stopped being Roman after some time. It was 300 years after the "fall" when Charlemagne used the "Romanness dispenser" and even few centuries more when German emperors welcomed that idea with bigger enthusiasm. If
"Byzantines absolutely stopped being Romans after [insert some date here]" as some people claim here, then surely it happened to the westerners as well?
Western conceptions of “Romanness” came to differ from Eastern ones, and that is fine. What was considered “Roman” was different during the Kingdom, the Republic, and the Empire.
But it was always Romans who were deciding what it means, not "barbarians" who came and conquered it. Just as it's Japanese people who decide what a Japan-ness is, not some random ethincally 100% western guy who just loves samurai swords so he proclaimed that his ideas of Japan-ness are equally valid and he has the full right to call himself like that.
Rome has an incredibly long history (something you're very probably keenly aware of). For Westerners, Rome was connected to the idea of a universal empire; that which comandeered the respect of other nations, and was intrinsically linked to Christianity (keep in mind that the whole thing of Dei gratia first applied to Roman Emperors, before the Empire fell!). In this sense, they were Roman, and did indeed consider themselves Roman!
If they came up with the idea of
"empire without celestial borders" would that automatically make them rulers of Mars as well?
And a bit more seriously - various rulers in the ancient times proclaimed that they are gods or, at least, they will become gods in the afterlife. They were happily supporting such idea, they probably indeed considered themselves gods and a lot of their subjects probably believed it. Did that make them gods though?
Because just because someone had some idea doesn't automatically make it true and nothing forces us to accept it as true either.
By the way, if you're wondering about my nationality and citizenship: I'm a Spaniard, ethnically Catalan
A westerner then, but at least with solid Roman ancestry. Congratulations.
Italian is the not a single culture, it's the collection of the cultures of the italian peninsula which are kinda on a continuum. Roman is the ethnicity of the people of Rome, and it's distinct from the people of Lazio (we even have our lite-version of a slur for them). I would really like if you can stop trying to explaing my ethnicity, I think I know it a little better than you...
It's strange to believe that citizens of some modern city form an "ethnicity", especially when about 10% of the inhabitants of Rome are immigrants.
"According to the 2011 statistics conducted by ISTAT approximately 9.5% of the population consists of non-Italians. About half of the immigrant population consists of those of various other European origins (chiefly Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Albanian) numbering a combined total of 131,118 or 4.7% of the population. The remaining 4.8% are those with non-European origins, chiefly Filipinos (26,933), Bangladeshis (12,154), and Chinese (10,283)"
en.wikipedia.org
By the way, have you reported Balotelli for racism for saying about his Ghanaian parents yet?
dictionary.cambridge.org
dictionary.cambridge.org
www.dictionary.com
