Two Fatherlands

On May 22, 2026, Lee Hsien Loong told reporters in Shanghai something Beijing prefers not to hear. "We are a Chinese-majority country, but we are a multiracial society," said Singapore's former prime minister. "We are a separate country with separate sovereignty from China." The two countries cooperate, he added, because they share interests, and not because their people share an ethnic descent.

The remark landed hard because the Chinese Communist Party has spent years treating "Chinese" as a political category. Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and the overseas diaspora all hear the same implied question. If your ancestors came from China, do you owe Beijing your loyalty? Lee answered no, and he answered on Chinese soil.

The question is older than the Communist Party and older than China as a nation state. Greeks and Romans fought over it for centuries, and their answers still show which kind of loyalty lasts.

Around 435 BC, a quarrel between Corinth and its colony Corcyra, modern Corfu, began pulling the Greek world toward war. Corinth had founded Corcyra two centuries earlier. By the 430s the colony was rich, and its fleet ranked among the three great navies of Greece, alongside those of Athens and Corinth itself.

Thucydides records Corinth's grievance in plain terms. The Corcyraeans had stopped giving Corinthians the customary honors at shared festivals and the first portion at sacrifices that a colony owed its founder. When both sides pleaded their case at Athens, the Corinthians said they had founded the colony "to be their leaders and to receive from them all proper respect."

Corcyra's envoys answered with a sentence Lee could have used in Shanghai: "Colonists are not sent forth on the understanding that they are to be the slaves of those that remain behind, but that they are to be their equals."

The episode complicates a popular reading of Beijing's restraint toward Singapore. Many commentators argue that strength buys respect, and that Beijing stays quiet because Singapore is too valuable to bully. Corcyra was strong too, and Corinth did not go quiet. The dispute led to a sea battle at Sybota in 433 BC, and Thucydides considered it one of the key grievances that started the Peloponnesian War two years later. A kinship claim can survive a shift in the balance of power, and sometimes it hardens into war.

In 451 BC, Pericles sponsored a law limiting Athenian citizenship to children of two Athenian parents. Athenians took pride in being autochthonous, sprung from their own soil. The rule protected the privileges of a small citizen body and kept that body small. Athens never had enough citizens to hold the empire it built, and it lost its empire within fifty years.

Rome took the opposite path, though not willingly at first. Its Italian allies fought beside the legions for generations without Roman citizenship or a vote, and in 91 BC they revolted to demand citizenship. Rome won the Social War in the field but conceded the question at stake. By 89 BC, nearly every free man in Italy south of the Po was a Roman citizen.

Cicero, born in the hill town of Arpinum, gave the result its theory. In his dialogue On the Laws, he says every man from a municipal town has two fatherlands, one by nature and one by citizenship. Arpinum was his home by birth, Rome was his country by law, and he saw no conflict between them.

The emperor Claudius made the same argument for inclusion, and he made it from the throne. In AD 48, Gallic nobles asked for the right to sit in the Senate, and senators objected. Claudius, who had been born in Lugdunum, today's Lyon, answered with history. In Tacitus' account he asked, "What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered?" A bronze tablet carrying his speech was unearthed in Lyon in 1528, and the city still displays it.

The policy compounded. Trajan and Hadrian came from Spain, Septimius Severus from Leptis Magna in Libya, and Philip from Arabia. In AD 212, Caracalla extended citizenship to nearly every free inhabitant of the empire. A Jew from Tarsus named Paul could stand before a Roman governor, say "I appeal to Caesar," and be sent to Rome. Roman culture still set the terms through Latin, law and the toga. A provincial could acquire that culture, and Rome never required him to be born into it.

The idea outlived Rome. Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio on August 15, 1769, fifteen months after Genoa ceded Corsica to France. French troops had crushed the island's independence at Ponte Novu only three months before Napoleon's birth. His family spoke Corsican and Italian, and at military school in Brienne his classmates mocked the Corsican boy's accent. In fact, as a young man he idolized the Corsican rebel Pasquale Paoli and resented the French.

However, in 1793 he broke with Paoli, and the Paolists drove the Bonaparte family off the island. Napoleon chose France. Six years later he governed it under a Roman title, First Consul, and in 1804 he crowned himself emperor and gave his regiments Roman eagles. That same year he gave France its Civil Code, which drew on Roman law and still underpins French civil law today. France accepted a ruler whose first language was Corsican because he went all-in for the French state.

Few readers of this newsletter will ever govern a province. Many will run a company that buys another one, and that decision mirrors the one Claudius faced in AD 48. The acquired team arrives with its own history, its own habits and its own loyalties. The acquirer can treat those people as a conquered population, or it can give them full standing in exchange for their commitment.

The ancient record shows the cost of each choice. Corinth demanded deference from a colony that had outgrown it and got a war. Athens guarded the privileges of its founding families and ran short of citizens. Rome let the Gauls into the Senate and drew emperors from Spain, Africa, and later Thrace, among other regions.

Executives see the Corinthian version often. The legacy team keeps the best accounts, the founders' early hires sit in the meetings that matter, and the newcomers learn that their seniority starts at zero. The best of the acquired people leave as soon as their retention packages vest, and the deal model quietly writes off what the company paid for.

The Roman version asks more of both sides. Newcomers commit to the institution's law, language and standards. In return, the institution grants them the full rights of insiders, including the right to run the place. Rome extended that right to Gallic senators and to emperors born in Spain and Africa, and it governed the Mediterranean for four more centuries after Claudius pressed for inclusion.

Sources

Lee Hsien Loong's remarks in Shanghai, May 22, 2026, reported by Malay Mail

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.25, 1.34, 1.38 (Crawley translation)

Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 26.4

Cicero, On the Laws 2.5

Tacitus, Annals 11.23 to 11.25 (Church and Brodribb translation); the Lyon Tablet

Acts 22:28 and 25:11