In the USA and Europe, immigration is the root cause of the new identity crisis. In China and Asia, it’s about politics and Taiwan. There seems to be a new global quest for identity similar to the one that shaped nation-states two centuries ago, moving away from old royal identities.

America was a nation of immigrants and settlers. The difference between the two is largely ideological: settlers radically displaced the previous population, whereas immigrants adapted to the anthropological environment they found.

Therefore, settlers established the cultural framework immigrants had to accept to be integrated into society. Still, when immigrants become too numerous, they de facto turn into settlers, anthropologically displacing the original inhabitants. So, the difference between the two could be paper-thin.

America’s recurring problem has been and remains integrating each new generation of immigrants from different countries. Another of its problems, until recently, was maintaining a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (WASP) majority identity. 

To preserve this majority identity, America didn’t incorporate the Philippines or Cuba, nor did it expand too far into Mexican.

King Charles’s address to Congress in Washington was a masterpiece of British humor and rhetoric. It received applause and consensus from both parties because he addressed Congress as a whole. At the same time, it was a carefully crafted diplomatic attempt to mend fences between the two sides of the Atlantic, with religion at its core.

Our traditions are our history, and our history is a story of begetting — that is why it weighs on our shoulders as something that concerns us in the first person, even when it has become the history of another nation. In short, this was the theme around which the king of England’s speech to the American Congress was built: “This citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people to advance the sacred rights and freedoms.”

Recalling that the history between the “United Kingdom and the United States is, at its heart, a story of reconciliation, renewal, and a remarkable partnership”, King Charles led the Congress in an exercise of memory that the America of today seems to accept only from.