Three seemingly unrelated facts have caught my attention this week (maybe motivated by an e-mail that arrived just in time). It got me thinking about the nationality business again. Strong nationalist feelings never made sense to me. Maybe it is because I am not exactly proud of my origin country, maybe because I have moved and traveled so much that borders cause more hassle than help, but there is something about nationalism that I just don’t get. I thought that, at least in academia, we would be better than that as our community is highly international, but these events make me think otherwise, unfortunately.
The first thing that happened was the release of results of Marie Curie projects. This is organized by an European funding agency, it is open for anyone to apply with a project to be developed at a host institution somewhere in Europe. I applied for France, to follow-up on the post-doc I have until November. It was not accepted, sadly, but that’s another story. The interesting thing was the e-mail I got from the French branch of this agency. It mentioned very proudly that France was the second country in terms of number of approved projects, being only behind the UK. Being a Brazilian researcher applying to work with an American coordinator, nothing made less sense than counting my project as “French” only because it just so happens we are both in France. I know a French researcher that applied for a project in Germany, a Russian researcher that applied for a project in Austria… By the way, the whole idea of this grant is to move people around, so you cannot apply for a country where you have lived in for more than one year in the past three years. So most applicants for an institution in country X are not actually from X. How do you consider a project being from one country or the other like this? Worse, you create a fake sense of pride for the people that happen to be in their home country, and prejudice against foreigners. The foreigners that contributed for that count in the first place.
I am applying for another thing, a permanent position this time, at Inria in France. There is a document with many many sections to fill in, and at some point they ask us to list our publications. The subsections for the publications are split in “International Journals”, “Reviewed international conferences” and then “National Journals” and “Reviewed national conferences”. What do they mean by international and national? Is national French? Is national a conference or journal that have the name of a country in the title? If I am in France and publish a paper in a workshop organized in Brazil by a Brazilian university, is this international? On top of not being clear, the division of publications into national/international suggests there is a difference of importance between these two types of events. I do not know any conference or journal that restricts submissions based on the nationality of authors (also because authors usually are from different countries) so there should not be a difference of importance based on this criteria alone.
At this point one might think that the bureaucrats are to blame. They are the ones organizing reports and templates for applications, and they are the ones that think of boundaries between national and international. The researchers are aware of the nonsense of this distinction, and are only interested in the development of science for the sake of the human kind. Right? Well… here I am at a workshop in France, which is being streamed for three locations, whose invited speaker was German and gave the talk in English, but the rest of the talks are being given in French! The guy talking now has even the slides in English, but he is speaking French. If the invited speaker was talking in English, would it kill them to give a talk that he (and I) would understand better? Sigh… I am not a native English speaker, but this language made it possible for me to get where I am, so I have no problem in using it if it is enabling a better integration of the people in the world. Franchement…
In spite of all that, I don’t feel like an outsider. On the contrary, the outsiders for me are people who give so much importance to the nationality question, and I feel sorry for them. If they have some kind of prejudice against me because of where I am from, it is really *their* loss, because I am awesome xD