The rise of English nationalism and the Balkanization of Britain.

• Author: Harris, Robin

The continued existence of Britain as a medium-sized power with a more than medium-sized role has long been one of the given assumptions of international affairs. It is also a strategically crucial American assumption. Enthusiasts for the "special relationship" extol alleged Anglo-Saxon commonalities of culture, values, and understanding. For their part, the more realpolitik-ally minded emphasize instead Britain's unique status as a UN Security Council member with a first-rate professional army, and at the same time a country with no psychological inhibitions about accepting the realities of American world leadership.

But what if all that were to change? What if not just the institutions but the allegiances and even the identity of Britain were fundamentally to alter? Until quite recently such a hypothesis would have seemed risible. But suddenly it is not. For, though most of the rest of the world has not yet grasped it, Britain is now Balkanizing and, as elsewhere, the dynamic imperative in the process is changing national awareness.

The British, and especially the English, have traditionally considered themselves above nationalism. The Right has understood that as well as the Left. For example, in his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton, Britain's leading conservative political philosopher, notes: "In the United Kingdom nationalism is confined to the celtic fringes, where it has been associated with movements for home rule in Ireland, Scotland and - to some extent - Wales. English nationalism is virtually unknown, at least under that description."(1)

Professor Scruton's judgment has an array of disparate evidence to support it. But one of the more revealing testimonies is provided by music. Here the uneasiness of the nation with reflective self-definition is quite apparent. The British national anthem is, for instance, an expression of loyalty not to the nation but to the sovereign - even though he is slightly ominously urged to "defend our laws and ever give us cause" to continue to sing "God Save the King." "Rule Britannia", composed in 1740, is a somewhat strange affair. It refers specifically to Britain's naval prowess ("rule the waves") and to its political freedom ("Britons never will be slaves"), but not to its cultural identity or geographical characteristics, or even its people. "Land of Hope and Glory", though evocative of patriotic pride for the wartime generation, is in essence just a celebration of imperialism: "Wider and still wider shall thy bounds be set; / God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet." It is, observably, the expansion that is celebrated, not the characteristics of the national identity expanding.

As for English nationalism, it has generally been a subject for ribaldry. This was so in Victorian times when Gilbert and Sullivan's "H.M.S. Pinafore" ironically extolled the First Lord of the Admiralty who, "in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, remain[ed] an Englishman." And it was still the case in the 1960s, when in their comic "Song of the English" Michael Flanders and Donald Swan sought to remedy the lack of a suitable national song with a composition whose chorus line runs: "The English, the English, the English are best: I couldn't give tuppence for all of the rest" - a refrain that even the most enthusiastic anglophobe would admit to be self-mockery.

None of which, of course, is to suggest that the British in general, or the English in particular, have altogether lacked self-awareness. The apparent absence of introspection has often been a pose. But it began as a reflection of the reality that the British in their heyday did not need to assert their national identity because it was already so pervasive. And not just good manners but common prudence required that such power be cloaked in a degree of self-effacement.

When Britain's Empire bestrode the globe and the schoolroom maps were largely colored red, London was a vantage point for overseas advance, not a refuge for a threatened society in retreat. The mentality this induced still affects the outlook of the older generation of British politicians. In her memoirs, The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher describes her first visit as a young girl from a provincial town to the metropolis:

For the first time in my life I saw people from foreign countries, some in the traditional native dress of India and Africa. The sheer volume of traffic and of pedestrians was exhilarating; they seemed to generate a sort of electricity. London's buildings were impressive for another reason; begrimed with soot, they had a dark imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world.

The notion of London being "at the centre of the world" may already have been wishful thinking by the 1930s. But it was a pretty accurate description of geopolitical realities over much of the previous two centuries. In such circumstances, it was only natural that the constituent components of the British state - English, Scots, Welsh, and even on occasion Irish - were generally prepared to ignore their national differences. Britain thus became that very rare entity - a multinational nation-state.

Of course, it was never entirely harmonious. Not just Scots but even some die-hard English objected to subordinating their primary national identity in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. But the economic benefits arising from the removal of internal trade barriers reconciled all those actively prepared to exploit the new opportunities. Even the irreconcilables, alienated by religion and culture from the new dispensation, were less united than they have sometimes been portrayed. Nowadays historians recognize that the 1745 Jacobite rebellion - the last rising by the supporters of the Stuart cause - was about religion and the distinctive problems of the Scottish highlanders, not essentially about the fate of an as yet largely unformed "Scottish nation." As many Scots - perhaps even as many highlanders - fought on the "English" as on the "Scottish" side at the subsequent Battle of Culloden. It took the romantic genius of Sir Walter Scott to turn the highlanders into a quaint epitome of Scottishness - though arguably he and his later, more clod-hopping successors thereby did the Scots no favors by encouraging them to cultivate a mythic reality that a recent Scottish writer has described as "the Bogus State of Brigadoon."(2)

The Welsh, having been formally united with England since Henry VIII's reign, are accordingly even better integrated into the British framework. In fact, over the years most of Wales has been economically, socially, and culturally anglicized, sharing fully in the ups and downs of Britain's industrial economy and absorbing a large English immigration. Admittedly, the western part of Wales has retained use of its own distinct language. But the four-fifths of the Welsh population who only speak English regard the resolve of the Principality's dogmatically multiculturalist political elite to impose bilingualism as a tiresome and inconvenient obsession.(3) Language is thus tangential to the question of whether Welsh nationalism can properly be said to exist. Certainly, anyone who witnesses the reaction of the Welsh spectators at Cardiff Arms Park when Wales plays England at rugby will be conscious of pride and passion. And there is a distinctive religious, cultural, and political atmosphere which strikes the Englishman who ventures far beyond Offa's Dyke. But then something similar is true of Yorkshire, Cornwall, and other English outlying provinces too.

The Irish were always, of course, in a different category. To a greater extent than either Scotland or Wales, Ireland was subdued and colonized through the brutal assertion of English power. Moreover, the Irish question after the Henrician Reformation was both affected by and has itself constantly exacerbated the anti-Catholicism of the British state. Yet even so, today's Irish nationalists are wrong to portray the relationship between the Irish and English as exclusively one of struggle and repression. In truth, Ireland can as little shake off its English connection as the English can disentangle themselves from the fate of Ireland. One commentator, arguing the case (albeit tongue in cheek) for re-unification of the Irish North and South, but within the United Kingdom, has pointed out:

A man from Mars would find it difficult to understand why there are two states in the British Isles in the first place. None of the usual ethnic or linguistic criteria for nationhood seems to apply in this [Irish] case. A glance at the current Irish cabinet reveals nine Irish surnames, six English or Scottish and one [de Valera] Spanish.(4)

There was moreover another, oddly perverse, effect of the tangled and treacherous Anglo-Irish relationship This was that the perceived danger from Catholic Ireland long provided an element of ideological solidarity for Britain as a whole. During most of the days of Empire - until, in fact, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 - Britain was a self-consciously Protestant state in which predominantly Protestant Welsh, Scots, and Ulstermen were its especially representative citizens. Of course, the later decline of Empire and the processes of secularization and liberalization would weaken those bonds This is Linda Colley's influential thesis:

As...