Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

Negotiating English identity: Englishness,Britishness and the future of the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT. The current interest in Englishness and English national identity, spurred partly by parliamentary devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, has been accompanied by calls for an English parliament and even the promotion of a robust English nationalism. This article argues that this is a mistaken direction for the English. English traditions have been non‐national and even supra‐national. English identities have been especially bound up with Britain and Britishness. An England without Britain is hard to conceive, and would be impolitic to pursue. Survey evidence shows continuing Britishness among the English, with scant support for an English parliament or English independence. The expressions of English nationalism remain relatively muted. ‘England for the English’ is neither a realistic nor a sensible strategy.     

Romantic Scotland,tragic England,ambiguous Britain: constructions of ‘the Empire’ in post‐devolution national accounting

ABSTRACT. This article compares the ways in which references to ‘the (British) Empire’ were constructed and used in interview accounts of national identity and domestic politics in Scotland and in England. In Scotland, spontaneous accounts of Empire were typically formulated in conjunction with nationalist moral meta‐narratives. Respondents variously inferred heroic national character from Scotland's role in Empire, or cast Scottish history as an enduring struggle between progressive forces of nationalism and atavistic forces of Anglo‐British colonialism. The construct of Britishness was often seen to derive from, and to be synonymous with, the history of Empire. In England, the Empire story tended to be framed within anti‐nationalist meta‐narratives. Imperialism was generally understood to represent a product of excessive nationalism, and tales of Empire were used to draw exemplary moral lessons concerning the deficiencies of Anglo‐British national character and of the catastrophic consequences of the pursuit of national self‐interest more generally. The existence of Britain, and the construct of Britishness, were generally understood to both predate and postdate the history of Empire.     

Celebrating British multiculturalism,lamenting England/Britain's past

Drawing upon Littler and Naidoo's ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment, this article examines English newspaper coverage of two ‘British’ events held in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games). In light of recent work on English nationalism, national identity and multiculturalism, this article argues that representations of Britain oscillated between lamentations for an English/British past – marred by decline – and a present that, while being portrayed as both confident and progressive, was beset by latent anxieties. In doing so, ‘past’ reflections of England/Britain were presented as a ‘safe’ and legitimate source of belonging that had subsequently been lost and undermined amidst the diversity of the ‘present’. As a result, feelings of discontent, anxiety and nostalgia were dialectically constructed alongside ‘traditional’ understandings of England/Britain. Indeed, this draws attention to the ways in which particular ‘versions’ of the past are engaged with and the impact that this can have on discussions related to multiculturalism and the multiethnic history of England/Britain.     

Who ate all the pride? Patriotic sentiment and English national football support

ABSTRACT. The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate the presumption that support for the England football team maps onto claims to patriotic sentiment in any straightforward way. People with far‐right political affiliations did generally use national football support to symbolise a general pride in English national identity. However, other people either claimed not to support the England national team precisely because of its associations with nationalism, or else bracketed the domain of football support from more general connotations of English patriotism.     

Reading between the lines: national identity and attitudes to the media in Scotland*

ABSTRACT. The relationship between national identity and how people perceive and consume media is a central but largely untested assumption of studies of nationalism. Using a previously developed classification of identity among English migrants to Scotland, this paper explores associations between how people use the media and how they make sense of their national identity. Compared with Scottish nationals, who tend to adopt a more taken‐for‐granted and uncontentious view of the media, except when they feel that the media presented to them challenge their sense of identity, English migrants find that the agendas of the media in Scotland differ from those they are used to south of the border. Specifically, how they view the media tends to vary according to whether they view themselves as ‘English’, ‘British’ or as ‘becoming Scottish’.     

Anglo‐Saxon attitudes: In search of the origins of English racism

In this article I examine the attitudes of the dominant ethnic group in Anglo‐Saxon England, the Germanic ‘settlers’, to the subordinate group, the indigenous British. 1 confine myself to the earlier period, before the tenth century, because the British population of England has disappeared from the historical record by that time. This probably means they had been absorbed into Anglo‐Saxon society and were no longer recognised as a distinctive group. Then, partly by means of a comparison with white English attitudes to black people today, I ask whether Anglo‐Saxon attitudes constituted, in modem terms, a racist ideology, and conclude that they did. Realising that this question will be held by some historians to be illegitmate, I finish by considering why they might take this view, and suggesting that racism has in fact been part of English national identity from the beginning.     

Of Navies and Navels: Britain as A Mental Island

In this paper, the conception of .Great Britain. — a wholly unsatisfactory nomenclature — as an island nation is examined. In this case, a relatively small land mass acted as an originary point of departure for outward‐bound Great Power projections across the open spaces of seas. This paper further explores the varied implications for nationalism within Britain of the diverse island ‘roots’ of the British navel and the ‘routes’ of British navalism. Three themes recur in the popular mobilization of British maritime island nationalism: the besieged island, the island as universal exemplar of civilization, and the navy as national protector. Some consideration is given to the significance of island symbols such as Britannia as a marker of the fate of great island nationalism.     

Whither Britishness? English and Scottish people in Scotland*1

Abstract. National identity, and especially what being British means, appears to have become more problematic in recent years. Our research on national identity over the last decade suggests that people regularly construct Britishness in quite diverse ways. This article focuses on ‘territorial’ identity and points to the limits of conventional survey work on national identity. It also explores how different conceptions of Britishness are developing within Scotland and England. Differences also emerge within the group of Scots‐born nationals, as well as English‐born migrants in Scotland, as the latter come to reassess how they construct Britishness, given the new context in which they find themselves. To assume one uniform, explicit meaning of Britishness is, in short, highly problematic.     

Losing the peace: Euroscepticism and the foundations of contemporary English nationalism

ABSTRACT. Political resistance to European integration in the UK laid important ideological foundations for contemporary English nationalism. The politics surrounding accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) was such that it signalled that accession was a matter of supreme national importance and, via the device of a referendum, it led to the fusing of parliamentary and popular sovereignty. The unfolding of the Thatcherite project in Britain added an individualistic – and eventually an anti‐European – dimension to this nascent English nationalism. Resistance to the deepening political and monetary integration of Europe, coupled with the effects of devolution in the UK, led to the emergence of a populist English nationalism, by now fundamentally shaped by opposition to European integration, albeit a nationalism that merged the defence of British and English sovereignty. Underpinning these three developments was a popular version of the past that saw ‘Europe’ as the ultimate institutional expression of British decline. Thus Euroscepeticism generated the ideology of contemporary English nationalism by legitimising the defence of parliamentary sovereignty through the invocation of popular sovereignty underpinned by reference to the past.     

The British Empire and revolutionary national poetry

ABSTRACT. The British empire set off an explosion of poetry, in English and native languages, particularly in India, Africa and the Middle East. This poetry – largely neglected in the scholarship on nationalism – was often revolutionary both aesthetically and politically, expressing a spirit of cultural independence. Attacks on England and the empire are common not just in native colonial poetry but also in poetry of the British isles. This article discusses some of the most influential poets, including: Shawqi of Egypt, Tagore of India, Rusafi of Iraq, Yeats of Ireland, Iqbal of Pakistan, Greenberg of pre‐State Israel, and Kipling, the ‘poet of empire’. In contrast with other empires, many poets were inspired by British culture to create revolutionary art and seek political independence. Most strikingly, British rule was instrumental in the revival of vernacular Hebrew poetry after 1917 as the centre of Hebrew literature shifted from Odessa to Tel Aviv.     

Indifference towards national identity: what young adults think about being English and British*

ABSTRACT. National identity should be sharply distinguished from nationalism. People speak by reference to a general and assumed membership of a country, and routine markers of behaviour and style may exhibit this sense of membership. This matter‐of‐fact acceptance of ‘national’ membership does not guarantee enthusiasm for the ‘nation’ and it cannot be taken as a signal of nationalism, banal or otherwise. While theoretical statements and assumptions often suggest that national identity is fundamental to individuals in contemporary societies, empirical investigation of people talking about national identity uncovers some broad strands of indifference and hostility towards national identity in general, and towards British and English identities in particular. This may reflect young adults' wish not to appear ‘nationalist’ just as many would wish not to appear racist. But the level of apathy and antagonism towards national identity among young adults suggests that we ought to reconsider any assumption that national identity is ‘normally’ a powerful and important marker, embraced with enthusiasm.     

The necessity of Britishness: ethno‐cultural roots of Australian nationalism*

ABSTRACT. Until the last third of the twentieth century, Britishness figured prominently in the national identity of Australians. Many scholars of Australian nationalism have assumed an inherent antipathy between British and Australian solidarities; others have appreciated that there was a degree of mutuality between the two; few have explained why. This article offers such an explanation. It focuses on the crucial nation‐building period twenty years on either side of the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. Drawing on ethno‐symbolist approaches to nationalism, it argues that Britishness provided the necessary ethno‐cultural foundations for Australian nationhood, the only available repertoire of myth and symbol that could fulfil the nationalist aspiration for unity. Yet Britishness in the antipodes was significantly different to that of the British Isles, as were the civic/territorial components of Australian conceptions of nationhood, giving rise to a distinctive British‐Australian composite nationalism.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

The Parthenon Marbles as icons of nationalism in nineteenth‐century Britain

Theories of nationalism place native culture at the core of national self‐fashioning. What explains a state's adoption of foreign objects to sustain national identity? In this paper, I argue that the incorporation of the Parthenon Marbles into British public life is an early example of supranational nationalism. The nineteenth‐century ‘art race’ was a competitive field in which European nation‐states vied for prestige. Of the thousands of art trophies that were brought to Britain from Mediterranean and North African countries, the Parthenon Marbles were uniquely iconicised. Using data from period newspapers and official documents, I assert that this was because they were assiduously presented as prenational by British authorities. In this way, they belonged simultaneously to no nation, to every nation, and to Britain. The case demonstrates the emergence of a particular form of national distinctiveness that transcended the smallness of particularity and rose to the level of universal civilisation.     

Identity and state formation in multi‐sectarian societies: Between nationalism and sectarianism in Syria

The relation between state formation and identity in MENA multi‐sectarian societies is examined, taking Syria as a case study. The paper looks at the impact of the mix of sectarianism and nationalism on the formation of state institutions and the impact of the latter on this mix. The flawed export of the Westphalian state system to MENA established the structural context—multiple identities, hybrid states—wherein the two identities compete, overlap, and coexist. Next, the factors that explain varying identity patterns in MENA are surveyed and their likely consequences for state formation; then, reversing the analysis, the impact of state formation and state institutions on the nationalism–sectarianism balance is examined. The Syrian case is briefly discussed in order to illustrate the argument, looking at three periods when the identity balance interacted differently with state formation: pre‐Ba'thist Syria when nationalism eclipsed sectarianism; Ba'thist Syria (1970‐2000) when patrimonial instrumentalization of sectarianism was compensated for by inclusive bureaucratic institutions, populist policies, and nationalist ideology; neo‐liberal Syria under Bashar al‐Asad (2000‐2010) when inclusion shrank, reanimating sectarianism; and civil war Syria (2010‐) when partial state failure fostered exclusionary militant sectarianism at the expense of nationalism.     

Team Arab: al‐Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The linking of living rooms across state borders by al‐Jazeera and other pan‐Arab satellite television channels has prompted claims that a ‘new Arabism’ that undermines state nationalism is emerging. Until now, analysts have mostly focused on the ‘hot’ Arabism in the news coverage of politicised events such as the Israel–Palestine conflict. This article offers a new dimension by suggesting that as important to satellite television's construction and reproduction of Arab identity is the everyday discourse found in less overtly political programmes such as sport. To demonstrate this, it offers an analysis of al‐Jazeera's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics showing how the broadcasts address viewers as a common Arab audience who are simultaneously encouraged to be nationalistic towards their separate nation‐states within a given ‘Arab arena’ of states with whom they should primarily compete. This suggests that new Arabism should in fact be considered a ‘supranationalism’, not a revived Arab nationalism as it simultaneously promotes Arab and state identities in tandem. Finally, it aims to expand our understanding of ‘everyday nationalism’ by adapting Michael Billig's theory and methodology of ‘banal nationalism’ in British newspapers to facilitate the study of sport on supranational Arab identity on satellite television.     

These Englands,or where does devolution leave the English?*

Abstract. Devolution to Scotland and Wales has not yet led to popular demand for a new constitutional settlement for England, but it has led to renewed debate about who the English are. One reason why the English find this a difficult question is that there is more than one construction of England with which to engage. This paper distinguishes four constructions, each with its distinctive orientation to time and place: Anglo‐British England, Little England, English England and Cosmopolitan England. Each has its light and dark sides. Each also enjoys considerable currency, but none has an exclusive appeal. Cosmopolitan England may be thought to constitute the future, but the uneven cosmopolitanisation of the regions will continue to complicate the collective representation of England.     

“The Cockroaches of Canada”: French‐Canada,Immigration and Nationalism,Anti‐Catholicism in English‐Canada, 1905–1929

This article examines the central influence of anti‐Catholicism upon English‐Canadian nationalism in the first third of the twentieth century. Anti‐Catholicism provided an existing rhetorical and ideological tradition and framework within which public figures, intellectuals, Protestant church leaders and other Canadians communicated their diverse visions of an ideal Canada. The study of anti‐Catholicism problematises the rigid separation that many scholars have posited between a conservative ethnic nationalism and a progressive civic nationalism. Often times these very civic values were inextricable from a context of Britishness. In addition, anti‐Catholicism was not simply about theological differences between Protestants and Catholics. Instead this theological thread often intersected with the perceived socio‐political problems that Catholics and Catholicism posed. Hostility to Catholicism was not limited only to fraternal organisations such as the Orange Order; indeed the importance of anti‐Catholicism as a component of Canadian nationalism lies in its presence across the political and intellectual spectrum. Catholicism was perceived to inculcate values antithetical to British traditions of freedom and democracy.     

Whence nationalism?

ABSTRACT. There is widespread agreement that nationalism emerged in the historical fountainheads of modernity, and was subsequently diffused outwards. Contrary to that, there is a long standing view that nationalism precedes modernity even in the broadly accepted cradles of both modernity and nationalism, such as England or France, neither of which was modern when it engendered nationalism. Besides, some emergent nationalisms ran concurrent with their English or French counterparts, with little evidence of having been spawned by diffusion. Such early or protonationalisms often sprang from resistance to foreign conquest, putting in doubt the invention‐diffusion hypothesis. I am therefore suggesting that nationalism has not emerged in few societies, but in many, and that it was engendered by social interactions, not by a particular social formation. While nationalism emerges within society, its genesis occurs in‐between social groups and societies, making it a product of their interactions. That makes it u‐topic, its cradles socially diverse, and its conception interactional, not gestational.