Imagining the British.
| Author | Bright, Jon |
| Position | Features - Critical essay |
What does it mean to be British? The fact that this question is so prevalent in the public sphere today tells its own story: no one is sure any more.
Much of Gordon Brown's short premiership has been spent trying to provide an answer to this question. He is facing the problem of Britishness with an acuteness that his predecessor never had to tackle--and not only because of his Scottish ancestry. Last year Labour lost control of the Scottish devolved assembly--and Alex Salmond is pushing for more power for Holyrood in a coherent and skilful manner. Whilst claiming to defend the Union, it appears David Cameron may endorse the idea of an English 'Grand Committee', or something similar--which would create a powerful, Conservative-dominated English institution for deciding on laws which are only relevant to England. The 'West Lothian question' is being posed with renewed vigour at Prime Minister's Questions--and the English question lurks behind it. And as devolution creates pressures from below, the EU is creating pressure from above--challenging Britain to define its place in both Europe and a wider post-imperial world.
All of this makes the definition of British identity a live political issue--and it is unsurprising that Brown is trying to articulate his version of what it means. But Brown's Britishness is couched in terms of values (liberty, fairness, tolerance, etc.) and his fiercest critics, Cameron amongst them, argue that they amount to nothing more than an abstract statement of liberalism which might equally apply to many countries. True enough. But Brown hasn't misunderstood Britishness: rather, he is giving voice to the continued penetration of liberal culture into our society--a culture which is hollowing out the traditional meaning of the word 'British' and making nationalism itself harder to define.
A system of government is a collective enterprise--and for it to have legitimacy it must be founded on some sort of idea of commonality but also limitedness, that it is for some of the world, but not for all. It is Brown's challenge to express our liberal identity in a way that fulfils these criteria--to create a nationalism out of liberalism, so to speak. This is the challenge he has recognised.
The function of nationalism
Nationalism has often been portrayed as politically powerful yet intellectually weak--something with few articulate defenders. The idea of a nation as a means of creating difference or exclusion has been intellectually unfashionable for the last sixty years at least, for obvious reasons.
Ernest Gellner, who fled Prague with his family in 1939, spent much of his life picking it apart, offering us a materialistic explanation. 'People become nationalists out of necessity', he argued (even if they don't necessarily recognise it), a necessity created by the erosion of traditional social structures by the dynamics of a newly emerged capitalism (Hall, 1998). Large scale capitalist enterprises required a standardised, homogenised workforce (speaking the same language, knowing the same skills)--a workforce that could only be provided by large institutional structures, which needed correspondingly large scale legitimisation. Nationalism was, for Gellner, as manufactured as the products of these enterprises: though laying claim to some great immemorial tradition, it expressed nothing of significance, serving only to replace traditional power structures that capitalism had swept away. It is the perception of this fabrication that forms the basis of Gellner's implicit attack.
Benedict Anderson, who towers over the field, nuances Gellner's argument slightly--nationalism is invented as a means of rationalising collective government, perhaps, but only to the extent that all identities are invented. We live in 'imagined communities'--Anderson's classic formulation--and by 'imagined' Anderson means visualised, rather than merely fake (Anderson, 1991). Changing technologies of...
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