The question of Englishness – broadly, what should and can be done culturally and politically about ‘the English’ today – doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, in both senses of that phrase. It remains a point of lively discussion among journalists, politicians, academics and the general public, but with any satisfactory answer to the question seemingly as far away as ever. The perceived character, failures and promise of Englishness have of course long been analysed and debated, but it was New Labour’s devolution of powers to the smaller nations of the UK that is widely considered to have ignited the touch-paper for the interest of recent years. The increasing powers of the devolved parliaments and assemblies, and the successes of Scottish nationalist politics north of the border, have undoubtedly contributed to a steady stream of newspaper comment pieces, research projects, political speeches and initiatives (from different ends of the spectrum) concerned with the current state and future potential of English national identity. Today, in the post-referendum/pre-Brexit malaise, notwithstanding a narrow Welsh vote in favour of Brexit, it is the ‘left behind’, primarily English-identifying working classes – whether in small town Lincolnshire, seaside Kent or the urban North East – who are widely ascribed responsibility (if not numerically then symbolically) for the Leave campaign’s victory.
In this context, many on the left and right alike argue that reinvigorated and explicitly English identities and institutions could provide a more authentic alternative to, variously, divisive multiculturalism, rootless cosmopolitanism, neo-liberal individualism, or a Britishness caught within a dying, anachronistic union.[i] Others, particularly academics whose focus is the study of race and racism, aren’t so sanguine. In a 2012 New Statesman interview, Stuart Hall suggested that the inheritance handed down to present generations of English men and women is ‘structured powerfully against a contemporary radical appropriation’, an argument echoed by Paul Gilroy’s description of English politics’ ‘disabling historical deficit’ of racism. Survey research consistently finds a far closer association between Englishness and whiteness than Britishness and whiteness – a pattern even partially pre-determined in the most recent UK Census in which ‘White English’ was the only specifically English ‘ethnicity’ option available.[ii] Recent qualitative research based on in-depth interviews and focus groups, including my own and that of Robin Mann and Michael Skey,[iii] suggests close, often tacit relationships between Englishness, whiteness and white racism. White English identities are, furthermore, found to be bound up with anxious and angry articulations of personal and political issues closely related to class or gender but problematically interpreted through frameworks and rhetoric concerned with nationalism, immigration and race.
Such associations between whiteness and Englishness are, however, perhaps unsurprising given the long-term relationship between Englishness and white ethnicity, in contrast to a Britishness that has (in principle at least) long been open to all residents of the UK, Empire and Commonwealth. As Amartya Sen argues, it is futile to complain that national identity categories such as ‘the English’ were not ‘historically pre-fashioned ex ante to take note of the future arrival of multi-ethnic immigrants’.[iv] All of the great historians and theorists of nationalism demonstrate how national identities have been and are continuously struggled over, constructed (or invented), reappropriated and obscured by different sectors of society in relation to the economic, political and cultural patterns of a particular time.[v] And there is evidence for Englishness having recently become a site for a progressive struggle towards a more ethnically inclusive identity category, with notable contributions from campaigners such as Paul Kingsnorth, ex-Labour MP John Denham, and through initiatives such as the thinktank British Future’s #WeAreAllEngland campaign. From politically progressive perspectives specifically, therefore, rather than dismissing English nationalism, as Hall, Gilroy and others (including myself) have done in the past, as merely reactionary and bound up with ethnocentrism and racism, might it be more sensible to try to harness Englishness for progressive ends? Should we try to ride rather than slay this particular dragon? Or, put another way, do we need to try to reduce what Gilroy terms the ‘disabling historical deficit’ of Englishness in these times of austerity for progressive politics?
I remain very sceptical. Since 2010, during three separate research projects, I have conducted over one hundred in-depth qualitative interviews regarding nationalism, immigration and politics in England. Subsequent analysis has consistently identified strong associations between nationalism and regressively prejudiced politics, regardless of interview participants’ social or political background. During the same period the radical right-wing UKIP rose to political prominence and the British government and people have rejected both European integration and the granting of asylum to all but a nominal number of the millions displaced by conflict and poverty south of Europe’s borders. Non-EU ‘migrants’ based in Britain, many of them long-term residents, have been subject to increasingly draconian rules and Kafkaesque practices as the coalition and Conservative governments have signalled a steady but clear retreat from Britain’s commitments to European and international human rights principles. We will soon learn how destabilising the effects of Brexit and Trump’s ‘America First’ policies are for global politics and economics, and whether, as the world wars disappear from living memory amidst a surge of right-wing populism, the political settlement and public opinion that has brought decades of relative stability to Europe has ripened or become rotten.
With all of this in mind, I would suggest the argument that we need more and not less nationalism as a salve for the issues of the day is somewhat akin to the American gun lobby’s perverse advice that the only way to prevent mass shootings is for yet more civilians to be armed. The ideologies and structures of nationalism were formed during the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries – a period of rapid industrialisation, state expansion and social homogenisation aided and consolidated by massive inter-national wars (the flames of which nationalism played a crucial role in stoking). Although the idea is perhaps that we haven’t yet seen the best of nationalism (echoing those socialists in the late 1980s who confidently suggested that internally reformed communist parties would save a doomed European communism), both the historical record and recent qualitative research suggest that nationalism is an anachronism ill-suited to an increasingly globalising world or to any kind of globally oriented, universalist morality. It is therefore naïve and dangerous to suggest that some kind of respectable and sentimental, more ostensibly progressive English variant of ethnocentrism can defeat the right in the longer-term without unleashing dangerous forces at the local and international levels.
All of that said, as stated at the beginning of this piece, questions of Englishness and nationalism are not going anywhere – and certainly not because some sociologists think they’ve seen through them. Nationality and the nation-state remain utterly embedded as the basis for political identifications and institutions for the vast majority in Britain and beyond. This is of course true for the many who foreground issues of immigration, whose nationally-framed concerns represent perhaps the key ideological vector in British (or even Western) politics today. But even among those more sympathetic to immigration, who routinely invoke cosmopolitan ideals and their own position within globalised, transnational and Europeanised social and cultural networks, the ‘front of mind’ political concerns they articulate are securely grounded in the politics of the nation-state. Their interpretations of politics also remain durably nationalist in character, albeit in often banal, largely implicit ways. As I will be arguing in a forthcoming book, to be published by Routledge (working title: ‘Everyday British politics: populism, nationalism and the individual), the social and spatial mobility and the liberal and cosmopolitan (sometimes avowedly anti-nationalist) ideals of many (mostly middle-class) Britons routinely serve to screen the thoroughly national foundations of their political outlook.
Therefore, at present, particularly with Brexit apparently imminent and the wider fabric of the EU under threat, it seems there is no foreseeable, plausible and workable political competitor for nationalism, either ideologically or institutionally. It is, furthermore, unclear what any replacement would look like or how desirable this would be. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote following the end of the Cold War, ‘(t)he alternative to an old convention, however unreasonable, might turn out to be not some new convention or rational behaviour, but no rules at all, or at least no consensus about what should be done’.[vi] The absence of a politically tangible anti- or post-national direction at present does not, however, imply that we should sign up to the kind of old-fashioned nationalism – marked by ceremonies, national days, and so on – advocated by Gordon Brown or David Goodhart. We need to think of effective ways – institutional and emotional, locally and globally – of replacing nationalism as the preeminent principle of social and political division, in a way that can meet the geopolitical and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century and also produce the kind of political unity and social solidarity nationalists (often in historically highly dubious ways) associate with the nation-state.
This kind of approach would be immensely difficult to sell to a large constituency in Britain (particularly England) and would involve a faltering, long term process in terms of its necessary institutional (and constitutional) development at local and global levels. A key problem here of course is that, from the perspective of the present English left, we don’t have a very long time if we wish to prevent more than a decade, and potentially considerably longer, of continuous Tory rule. The Labour Party today faces what a recent Fabian Society report termed ‘the Brexit dilemma’ – a need to appeal to an alienated traditional working-class constituency, many of whom are hostile to immigration, in a way that does not in-turn alienate existing liberal-left voters, many of whom are instinctively pro-immigration. I would suggest that one approach around this dilemma may be to adopt certain nationalist policies alongside more cosmopolitan-minded, explicitly anti-nationalist principles.
To give a concrete example of this kind of approach in relation to the imminent Brexit negotiations, a clear policy of ending freedom of movement within the EEA could be proposed to the electorate alongside short-term aims of maintaining high levels of political cooperation with Europe and foregrounded, long-term commitments to universalist ideals and the aim of ultimately breaking down national barriers and inequalities. The resultant reduction in net migration could be accompanied by a substantial increase in Britain’s refugee intake and, when deemed necessary economically, the controlled relaxation of the existing points based system for skilled and unskilled workers (particularly perhaps for non-Europeans: Nigel Farage and scholars of race make strange bedfellows when agreeing that the current freedom of movement principles are implicitly racially biased towards white migration). Coupled with a more creative focus on highly localised everyday issues, inequalities and community-building – as advocated by John Harris and Marcus Roberts among others – such an approach would aim to win elections through a necessary short-term nation-state centred parochialism and protectionism, with net migration controlled and reduced, whilst working towards a broader long-term anti-nationalist globalised politics.
Getting this kind of pragmatic, nationalist approach to policy in an effective political relationship with a genuinely, not merely rhetorical or platitudinous, anti-nationalist ethos and programme would not be an easy balancing act. However, the short-term costs of Conservative rule and the long-term geopolitical dangers of nationalism make some sort of creative solution along these lines essential. The left today needs to keep alive the memory of the rubble-strewn path nationalist societies have travelled down whilst staying alert to the potentially very similar road presently being paved for future generations.
Charlie Leddy-Owen is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth.
Footnotes
[i] E.g.: David Goodhart and Eric Kaufmann’s recent Fabian essay (http://www.fabians.org.uk/a-respectable-englishness/), Bragg, B. (2007). The Progressive Patriot: A search for belonging. Random House; Kingsnorth, P. (2011). Real England: The battle against the bland. Portobello Books; Perryman, M. (2009). Breaking up Britain: Four nations after a Union. Lawrence & Wishart; Scruton, R. (2006). England: an elegy. A&C Black.
[ii] It was possible for any census respondent to identify as ‘English’ nationally, but all specifically UK-located ethnicities were appended to the word ‘British’.
[iii] Leddy-Owen, C. (2014). Reimagining Englishness: ‘Race’, class, progressive English identities and disrupted English communities. Sociology; Leddy-Owen, C. (2013). ‘It Sounds Unwelcoming, It Sounds Exclusive, but I Think It’s Just a Question of Arithmetic Really’: The Limits to White People’s Anti-Essentialist Perspectives on the Nation. Sociological Research Online, 18(3), 4; Mann, R. (2011). ‘It just feels English rather than multicultural’: local interpretations of Englishness and non‐Englishness. The Sociological Review, 59(1), 109-128; Skey, M. (2011). National belonging and everyday life. Houndsmill Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[iv] Cited in Aughey’s The Politics of Englishness (2007) p.117
[v] See Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Smith, John Breuilly, Michael Billig, Rogers Brubaker etc
[vi] The Age of Extremes (1995) p.335. See also Calhoun’s Nations Matter (2007)