Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8.

(For my friend Melany Bennett)

If there is one essay that could be the most autobiographical I’ve ever written, it might be this one. Don’t get me wrong, pretty much all of my latest works have had a fair amount of my own emotional takes on the aspects of philosophy and politics I’ve been studying the most, but this topic in particular is personal. Deeply personal.

I don’t have a country. Culturally speaking, I don’t belong anywhere that can be pinpointed with a flag, a language, a history and an extant government. Ok, maybe this was too much of a starter, so I’ll try to rephrase it in less threatening terms: unlike most people, my legal citizenships and residency status do no reflect my cultural background in a proper way, which, at most, makes me vaguely related to certain national identities, but never truly belonging to them. In other words: I am culturally stateless.

The discussion of what ‘culturally statelessness‘ means is one of those eluding things that cannot really be comprehended with modern standards, because the idea itself defies the modern world as it was set forward with the international relations (and religious) frameworks that were set in the 1646 Peace of Westphalia, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the 1820s Latin American independences, the 1848-1871 rise of European nationalisms, the 1918-1919 end of the Old Order in Europe, the early post-World War II Western integration idealism, at lastly, the 1990s to early 2000s establishment of the current world order.

I make reference to all those events in foreign affairs history because, even though I was born barely a year become the coming of the new millennium, my cultural identity could not be explained simply by pointing out where I was born and what the basic history of the place is, and calling it a day. I don’t have a proper country to call my own, despite holding two different passports entitling me to different legal nationalities, and living as an expat in a third country that has very little to do with the other two.

In the last two years or so, it has become a running thing for me to explain in length my full legal, linguistic and arguably, national background to anyone who asks me about it. At face value, almost no one has been able to guess where I am from, maybe to the point that I cannot really deliver such an answer myself. I have been called Brazilian, Mexican, Spanish, Austrian, Slovak, Turkish, Kazakh, Indonesian and even Samoan, to name a few nationalities, without me belonging to any of those countries.

A common guess has been Italian, which granted, I am, at least legally, but if my experience has taught me anything, is that us, overseas Italians, children of the diaspora that arrived to the New World after the Risorgimento and both World Wars is that our ‘Italian-ness‘ is much different to the one of the Italians born and raised in the fatherland. Maybe to the point that not many of us actually speak the language, and when we do, we are clumsy, unsure of ourselves and our skills out of lack of practice or merely procrastination to learn it properly. It shouldn’t then be a surprise that languages are lost after just two generations in another country.

Still, Italian culture was very much a part of my upbringing, with music, food, football, customs, traditions being very present in my childhood, and with my parents instilling in me an idealistic pride in a nation I belonged to despite being thousands of miles away. This identity was emphasized in the few occasions we had family guests from Italy, in the times we went to visit in Europe, and whenever there was an issue in which we could take part as Italian, usually against another national group, like in football rivalries.

As I grew older, I learnt more and more about these aspects of my Italian identity that could not be explained through a football jersey, a couple phrases or a conversational understanding of the language. I delved deeply into the study of history, trying to connect the dots with the information we had with my parent about our close and distant Italian ancestors, and somehow tie myself into the history of the pre-unitarian Italian states.

Like what happens with many other scions of Italian families outside of Italy, at some point our past becomes shrouded in mystery, with only fewer generations disclosed as for practical matters, such as nationality, for instance, and because we tend, or try to, anyway, to assimilate ourselves more and more into our host cultures. But as I’ll explain in short, that only happens when we find proper cultures in which we can assimilate.

We always knew our family had come from Naples, and that our ancestors who first arrived to Latin America (it has become something of a tradition for one generation to come, one to return to Europe and back and forth successively) had come to do business, as well as the name of their business associates. We also knew about some interesting personalities in the family back in Italy (aside from the contemporary ones one might know if one is into physics, art, politics or psychology), such as Vatican librarian and Classical scholar Mons. Cosimo Stornaiolo/Stornaiuolo/Stornajolo (the spelling has varied in many different sources and yet they all refer to the same person).

During my dad’s research work for the publication of his book Historias de la Migración Italiana al Ecuador, we found additional info into our heritage, including some apocryphal references to family members having sided with (Napoleonic) King Gioacchino Murat, and our Stornello ancestors (again, our current last name might be the misspelling of a misspelling) belonging to the Veronese and Venetian patriciate, as well as a direct predecessor of ours being a Marquis of the Holy Roman Empire.

These links are, as of now, mostly trivia facts I can talk about if someone asks me, in many different contexts, but aside from interesting talking points and maybe a genetic predisposition for some things (like writing, my dad, granddad, granduncle also being writers themselves), they add little to how I’ve lived and try to run my life as of now, pretty much in the same vein as my parents and some other ancestors: as self-made men, with our talent as our main asset.

But does that background make me Italian? According to Italian nationality law, as long as I have proven Italian ancestors and I am properly registered as an Italian citizen, so I am one. And legally speaking, I am indeed one, but that does not reflect my identity. And aside from the legal advantages of such a status, to (re-) assimilate into the culture of one’s ancestors is harder than what it seems, especially when the ideal ends up being different to the actual reality.

The other place I might have a cultural (and legal) stake as belonging to is much harder to guess. Maybe because irrelevance is its primary characteristic. I have been almost never been guessed as coming from this country, with one of its neighbours, Colombia, being most likely, and the other, Peru, being considered just as rarely as my actual country. So when I get to say I was born (and raised) in Ecuador, it comes as a surprising reveal, as if it was something exotic. The first reply in those cases tends to be something along the lines of “…but you don’t look Ecuadorian!“, as if nationalities had stereotypical features, which while in some cases might be true, it has turned out to be more of repeated lie than anything else.

Ever since I moved out of Ecuador, I have tried to define what Ecuadorian culture is, because unlike Italian culture, which is mostly based around the Italian language and the commonalities of the people speaking it around the Italian peninsula, Ecuador does not have such elements, and internally, it is more divided than whatever anyone from within or from outside can tell.

In Ecuador, just as in the rest of Latin American, the main language is Spanish, inherited, of course, from the Spanish conquest and administration of its overseas provinces over the Atlantic Ocean. For almost 300 hundred years, it belonged to the Kingdom of the West Indies in the Crown of Castille and Leon, and as alternatively administered as part of the Viceroyalties of Peru, based in Lima, or of New Granada, based in Santa Fe, now Bogotá, but ultimately, it was pretty much an autonomous, self-governing unit centered around the Andean city of Quito, with further self-governing governments in Guayaquil and Cuenca (now the second and third largest cities in Ecuador), as well as in other cities that were absorbed into its neighbours, mostly Colombia, after independence.

As a historical curiosity, both the integral territory of current Ecuador, as well as Naples, and the south of Italy (where the branch of my family to which I belong is from, despite our ancestors also being Venetian/Veronese), were ruled by the same monarch, the King of Spain, for around 200 hundred years, which was more or less 250 years before I was born.

In Ecuador, a national idea is barely found in a common government, usually corrupt, no matter its leanings, a common football team, and one widespread beer brand. Local history is usually written and re-written according to the interests of the ones in control of the government apparatus, or to promote certain regional views, always to justify whatever position is presented through these narratives. This is why most people barely know about the history of the country, aside from the most repeated propaganda points that get recycled by all and everyone in their own political formulas.

In principle, there are two major cultures within this country, both of Hispanic identity, one based around the Andean criollo elites, with major influence from Andean indigenous peoples, and another based around the Pacific coast patriciate, with minor influence from local ethnic groups, such as populations of Black descent in the North, or the mixed Montubios. People living in the Amazonian forest might have another different culture, with larger indigenous cultural intake, but they are far too small, population-wise in comparison to the other two.

I chose to define these two cultures on this basis, mostly through their ruling groups, because that is the most defining characteristic of them. Back in the day, both used to be land-owning classes, but that has mostly survived in the Andean mentality, nominally more conservative, whereas the Pacific Coast culture has leaned towards a more mercantile approach, thus making them nominally more liberal.

For example, Andean cities still have bullfighting events, like Quito used to have when I was younger (not anymore), or horse-riding events, like polo matches and tournaments, and many people in the higher classes still owning large haciendas and other landed estates in the countryside, with all what it means in a certain fake-ish cowboy fashion so common among Hispanic peoples (think of Rioplatense gauchos, Chilean huasos, Mexican charros and even Texan cowboys, since Texas, or well, Tejas, used to be Spanish and then Mexican). The Ecuadorian version of the cowboy used to be called chagra (from the kichwa/quechua word chajra/chakra, meaning farm, agricultural field) but it has long become a local ethnic slur to refer to more indigenous-looking people.

Coastal cities also had their own elements of local identity, maybe tied to their own openness to the rest of the world, needed for trade to happen. I can think of how baseball, the sport most closely associated with the USA I can think of, used to be quite popular in Guayaquil, or how a small city in the region, Vinces, used to be called “Paris Chiquito“, “Little Paris” due to how many of the cocoa beans-exporting landowners around a century and a half ago had sent their kids, and sometimes also themselves, to live in Europe, Paris mostly, with the wealth from their activities.

This, of course, means nothing because ultimately, the cities of Quito and Guayaquil have developed a culture of their own, based on wealth extraction from the rest of the country, isolating themselves from other cities, peoples and local problems.

Having been born and raised in such a context made it even more difficult for me to find myself in a proper national culture, an issue that grew more once I left the country. For one, while based in Quito, in time I grew to have many friends and a strong connection with Guayaquil, to the point I did take some speech patterns from them and got in return jokingly declared as a “Guayaco honorario”, an “honorary Guayaquilean“, by many of them.

My political and cultural interests made me join for a short period a group of Hispanist enthusiasts, that is, of people who studied and promoted the Hispanic heritage, but their internal political leanings made me break away with them quite soon, given our deep differences on substantial matters. I still credit them for having made me understand how that Hispanic element, mostly linguistic now, but also of cultural Catholicism, was maybe one of the only things keeping Ecuador together, as well as having introduced me to the study of history through more heterodox methods and without the same academic progressive bias I had become used to since middle school.

But if this was not enough from my background, I should add that my first language, despite my Italian ancestry, and maybe alongside Spanish, was not Italian, but rather French. Yes, that is right: ever since I was a kid, I have been speaking, writing, reading, listening… thinking in French.

My mom, having studied in France in her youth, spoke it, and my dad, having taken enough lessons of it during his studies of international relations, decided to raise me up in that language, enrolling me in the local French government school.

I think I had access to French language resources for as long as I remember, and unsurprisingly, many of the authors that defined my early views on pretty much everything were either French, or Francophone. This, on one hand, meant an easy understanding of the political dimension of my European citizenship (paradoxically not through Italy but France), but on the other, it also meant cross-contamination with some of the most nefarious ideas of continental postmodern philosophy.

I am not exactly sure to what extent I also belong to the French cultural sphere, but as far as my experience goes, I have no issue passing as just another one in such circles, since language, accent, and general knowledge are almost the same, although we might blame the last on how Americanized is the West nowadays.

I am still lucky to understand some exclusively French inside jokes, though, and that may be the standard over which I hold my self and my understanding of French. You don’t belong to a culture unless you’re able to make fun of it in its own language. Or maybe when you study some of its fundamental institutions, like law, which I am currently doing while enrolled in a French university, or when you work on an everyday basis with it, like I also currently do in my day job.

And so that also extends to my links with the English-speaking world, but let’s face it, by default everything now must be integrated into the Anglosphere. This is the price we pay for a globalized world under the Atlanticist principles of trade and deliberation.

I guess being able to read the Classics and write in length in English are my letters of credence as a proper scholar and writer in such a world, and so far, it has opened many doors for me, in studies, research, business, work, publication and even friendship and love.

What does that make me? I barely feel connected to my apparent homelands, and my linguistic background links me to wide regions and specific countries to which I could potentially belong. I christened myself as a culturally stateless person, and I abide by those words. But there might be two other concepts that might be useful to define what this cultural statelessness is.

The first one is that of “third culture kids” (TCKs), or “third culture individuals” (TCIs), people like me, who were raised in cultures different to that of our parents, to the one of our legal countries and nationalities, and who had been greatly exposed to yet another culture or cultures during our developmental year, that is, in childhood and adolescence.

Unlike mono-linguistic people (legal nationality here becomes less important), us TCKs had such a number and variety of cultural influences that were not bound to any particular cultural setting, and moreover where further enhanced by the internet, which exploded in its use during my transition from kid into teenager.

While most TCKs grow out of frequent movement in their early lives, that affect their ability to fully develop a personal and cultural identity tied to a single place and language, my case is such of one that happened without such movement but by circumstance in which I got placed in a context where I absorbed both the culture of my foreign ancestors, the culture, or cultures, of the place I was born and raised in, and the third culture in which I was educated, different from the other two.

TCKs have some common issues I certainly know and have suffered myself, such as confused loyalties in our politics and values, often trying to find syncretic synthesis in which we might be able to find ourselves comfortable (maybe that’s why The Libertarian Catholic is such a right place for me to write for), identity crisis on a cultural level, where we are unable to feel a sense of oneness with any one nationality or culture, without being able to define where is home, or what country fits into that idea of home, a painful awareness of reality, where we are unable to adjust to self-centered cultures, and lastly, some difficulties with adjusting to adult life, where our mixture of different cultural influences challenge our development of a proper identity with a sense of belonging. For us, rootlessness and restlessness are everyday feelings, despite extensive knowledge of ancestral cultures and of our personal genealogies.

The strict definition of a TCK places their first culture to the one of the country from which the parents originated, the second refers to the one in which the family resides, and the third to the distinct cultural ties among the TCKs community that share no connection with the other two.

I guess if we go by such a definition, I am not a TCK, moreover now that I am an expat in a country that had nothing to do with any of the other countries and cultures to which I could belong and assimilate myself, so I suppose I could apply myself the second useful label to define my cultural statelessness, that is, as a cosmopolitan. But there is one problem with such a label, and that is exactly the reason why I do not embrace it, but instead reject it.

I remember once talking to French national-liberal ideologue Henry de Lesquen, and becoming exposed to his conceptions of globalism and the international order. Like me, he had that mix between European and Latin American (belonging to an ancient Breton family, but with a Hispanic ancestor as well), but he was, and still is, much older, and way more controversial than me.

In any case, during our conversation, he explained to me that he rejected the categorization of globalism for the current international project in which there would be no borders, complete intermixing of races and ethnicities, and most likely a single language, English, is not precisely globalism nor globalization (which he supports, to some degree, as a result of free trade between proper nations), but cosmopolitanism.

For instance, the word “cosmopolitan” means “citizen of the world“, given its Greek basis in the words cosmos and politês, the world, or universe, and the city.

For Lesquen, this concept is self-contradicting, because the very idea of a city implies an inside and an outside, a relationship of inclusion-exclusion. You either belong in, or you are out of it. The world, composed of a multitude of such cities, and other polities, such as countries, regions, cultures, civilizations, cannot be a city in itself, there must be a difference between what is in and what is out, and who belongs in and who does not.

He retakes from Heraclitus’ Fragments this phrase: “People ought to fight to keep their law as to defend the city walls.” For him, the invention of the city in the form of the Greek polis defined the most basic meaning of patriotism, that is that civic rights carries military duty. One truly belonged to a city as a freeman, that is, as someone entitled to political rights, as long as they were willing to risk their freedom, and life, to defend it from outsiders attacking it.

But this conception evades larger ideas, such as the one of empires, where cities dissolve as distinctly different peoples integrate and merge. Such subjects of imperial rule, like all those conquered by the armies of Alexander the Great, were the first cosmopolitans, citizens of nowhere, only claiming to be part of the world to deny their duties towards a city they reject or don’t know.

Maybe that’s why cosmopolitanism is so troublesome, because it is too close to cynicism, with Diogenes of Sinope, who actually coined the term of cynic (from the Greek kynikos, ‘dog-like‘) to refer to himself as the wild, homeless dog he considered he was in regards to others, also embracing cosmopolitanism at its fullest after having been expelled from Sinope for having apparently minted counterfeit currency, having done to the word what was advised to him by the Oracle of Delphi, to “deface the currency“.

The experience of poverty made him embrace it as a virtue, and so he began to live a wandering life, eventually arriving to Athens, where he begged for a living and slept in a pithos, a big ceramic jar or barrel, to protect himself from sun and rain. He also twisted the meaning of the Oracle’s prophecy, decided that it meant defacing the political currency rather than actual coins, making his purpose that of challenging established customs, social values and institutions, which he considered were the reflection of the corruption of society and civilization as an evil in itself.

Of course, since he did not belong to Athens, where he was a xenos, a stranger, nor to Sinope, from where he was ostracized. Since he had no allegiance to either place, nor to any other, he declared himself a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. Maybe that was what impressed Alexander the Great the most from Diogenes, that since he could not belong to a place, he rejected belonging altogether. For an imperial conqueror like him, expansion also meant the end of belonging to a singular place, so their fates were not that different in the end.

This connection between cynicism and cosmopolitanism is what makes me reject the cosmopolitan label for myself, since it encapsulates a certain disdain to belong to determinate orders in which one owes duties in exchange for rights.

I do have my moments of cynicism, as maybe we all do, especially when it comes to the issues with the countries and cultures I have links to, but I am fully unable to accept this philosophy as a lifestyle for the very fact it is the embodiment of rootlessness.

The cynical, uprooted from everything and everyone, targets order itself (not only certain orders worth attacking, due to their unfairness) and looks to undermine these social foundations to reduce others to his position of uncertainty and disregard in respect to the world.

If anything, my goal would be to assimilate myself into something so I could bridge my individuality into the larger community. I see this as the ultimate conservative goal: the construction of permanent social bonds, of small platoons and intermediate bodies that can endure in time.

Cosmopolitanism is at odds with this ideal, for it relies on the individual but not on the social. It does not create networks based on organic commonalities, like language, but simply accumulates, stacks people as long as they serve some useful purpose, mostly related to work and money.

I see this in my day job, where due to the nature of our tasks, we rely on a fairly international workforce, composed both of local polyglots and of foreigners like me. The natural tendency is for people with similar linguistic backgrounds (not even age groups) to come together, like Russian-speakers (both Russians and Belarusians but also Ukrainians) becoming fast friends, Poles tagging along, Hispanics hanging together in and out of the office, Arab-speakers becoming cliques (and many of them also Muslims also praying together)… You get the idea: even if many of them are expats, like me, their national, linguistic and religious background binds them together in ways that make them belong, even far away from their countries of origin.

But that does not happen with me, mostly become, once again, I don’t have a country, nor a proper culture, thus, I cannot belong to any group that is based on nationality or language. This is what cultural statelessness means.

But I can make an exception, and maybe this is also why Poland has been so welcoming for me, despite the difficulties to learn the language, which still to this day is an ongoing process. Poland, just like Latin America, is culturally Catholic. Christianity, in its Roman form, is a central element of Polish identity. Perhaps in Latin America this has become increasingly reduced in the last decades, but it still remains substantial enough to represent what most Hispanic peoples think of themselves, of their local cultures and of their image in regards to the rest of the world.

For someone like me, whose cultural identity is always flowing from one side to the other, Christianity becomes something of an anchor: as long as I am able to find other Christians, and most important, other Catholics, I feel like I can find fellowship and community.

And more often than not, it happens these other Catholics have other things in common with me, like another language (not Polish) in which we can communicate, usually English or Spanish, less often French and Italian, and common interests, sometimes based around our professions or around our politics. This has also extended to other countries in Europe, like Austria or the United Kingdom, where I’ve met like-minded people through our common Catholic connections, while also discovering we might also be colleagues in the legal profession or co-fellows in our academic pursuits, or that we agree with the same ideas when it comes to politics.

It is also fitting that the etymology of ‘Catholic‘ comes from the Greek katholikos, meaning universal, all-embracing. While I don’t face discrimination due to my differences with locals and other expats with a stronger base culture, I know I can find myself in the universality of the Catholic Church, where differences are embraced into different charismas and vocations. I know I can belong in youth ministries full of other laymen like me, that I can find other English, French and Spanish speakers in other Catholics, ordained religious and not, and that I’ll eventually find other nostalgics of the Old Order among Catholic co-workers, classmates and flatmates.

For a culturally stateless person like me, being Catholic becomes my main cultural identity, because it is the one thing that can bring together cultures so dissimilar like the ones that compose my overall fragmented cultural background.

And the beauty of it is that if you belong through faith and works, you will still belong even if you disagree with other individuals and groups within. It might be the actual unity in diversity so much preached in the secular order but so difficult to achieve in it. You don’t need to adhere to certain local rules, as in the ones that are imposed onto the members of one Catholic institution, for those are local in nature and do not define the universality of the religion.

That is a basic difference with national culture: it is very locally bound, whereas religious culture tends towards the universal. Linguistic culture is found in between, with less spread languages becoming more locally bound and others, like Spanish, becoming regional and even global vehicles of the spirit of a common culture.

English, due to its current importance as the international language, has lost that element and has replaced it with a different spirit, which at this point cannot really be defined as liberal. French also suffered that fate as France broke away from its tradition, but due to the reduced area in which it is normally spoken, it keeps some traditional spirit, but its differences show (think of Québécois vs. African French, the one derived from the language of Ancien Régime, the other from the colonial language of the Third Republic, itself a successor to various Revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes).

That does not happens with religion, with Christianity when it comes to my Protestant and Orthodox friends, and with Catholicism with my fellow Catholics. We all share the same Nicene faith and thus “speak” that same “language“. Some might be more intellectually inclined than others but that does not change our belonging to a same group that transcends local bounds.

I can think of maybe two examples in history of polities in which my case might not be such an oddity, and those are, fittingly, in the Habsburg monarchy and in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the first, what managed to unite Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats… for almost five centuries was their common Catholic religion and its political manifestation in the figure of the Emperor and his dynasty.

In the second, there was a more complex arrangement, of political nation, people and origin in some cases, which was key to integrate the different ethnicities composing this mosaic republic. Such arrangement was illustrated by formulas such as Natione Polonus, gente Prussicus/Ruthenus…, and sometimes also origine Judaeus, for example.

But what ultimately kept together this Polish-Lithuanian identity was its Catholic faith, even if the Commonwealth was highly tolerant of other religions. Catholicism was a central element of its political constitution and so was the basis of its culture, alongside the ideology of Sarmatism in its ruling aristocracy.

I don’t try to stress the element of religion too much, because after all, we live in a secular age, and religion tends to be overlooked in the public sphere, out of spite, fear or simply of ignorance. But it reassures me and gives me solace when a nationality and a language cannot support my needs for belonging, broken away by the intricacies of a diverse background and even more diverse life circumstances.

Aside from religion, I have found a similar vibe and a similar sense of belonging in shared politics, but since politics are derived from culture, and culture (from cult) is derived from religion, it always leads the way to the same idea.

I am far too deep into life and with some many layers of complexity added to keep clinging to the definition of been a Third Culture Individual, and by principle, I reject cosmopolitanism, due what it means and what it does to people and cultures. I stand by my cultural statelessness, and I hope that at least through religion, I can find some mirage of belonging.