[Discussion] An English identity? (the modern drive for regional government an d the European community may accelerate the sense of Englishness vs a BRi tish identity)

[Paksoy, Hb]

An English identity? (the modern drive for regional government and the
European community may accelerate the sense of Englishness vs a BRitish
identity) 
Author/s: Jeremy Black
Issue: March, 1998

present there is a scholarly emphasis in fashionable circles on the extent
to which all communities are imaginary and, more particularly, on the
definition of a nation as an imagined political community. As with much
historical writing, this is largely a matter of stating the obvious, or
rather of disguising it with a new vocabulary. Fuelled by the devolution
debate, this argument has been repeatedly applied to Britain. It is readily
apparent that, as a political entity, Britain was in large part created, and
that this creation owed much to the formulation and dissemination of new
images. Where though does this leave England and the English? How are they
supposed to respond to growing calls for Scottish independence? Is their
identity to be sought in regional assemblies and European Union, and is
there anything in between?A sense of Englishness has a long history. A
number of periods can be selected as of particular formative importance, not
least the transformation of Wessex into the Old English Monarchy in the
tenth century. Such a process was interrupted by the Norman Conquest, which
linked England to the Continent politically. The Norman and Angevin kings,
however, failed to create a permanent trans-Channel polity, and this
failure, and the earlier shift in the centre of gravity from the French
dominions to England, interacted with the development of national
consciousness in England. It was appropriate that John, who lost Normandy,
should have taken the title, King of England (as opposed to the English),
for the first time.A similar change occurred in France in this period. It
was due to the hardening of national boundaries and the emergence of the
idea of `statehood' as opposed to the earlier natio, in its original meaning
of people of a common descent. This territorialisation was related to the
development of a sense of political community separate from the monarch.
Such a notion of community, headed by the king but to which he could be held
accountable, lay behind the political and constitutional developments of the
thirteenth century, such as Magna Carta. This understanding was
institutionalised in Parliament, which, unlike the royal court, did not
represent the full extent of the monarch's possessions and connections. It
did not extend to France. It was in Parliament that hostility to `alien'
influences, whether political, ecclesiastical or commercial, was voiced most
clearly.A growth of national consciousness was not, however, dependent on
the development of the authority of a unitary state. For example, the
stronger consciousness of German identity and nationhood evolved in a
different political context from that of England and Scotland. It has indeed
been argued that nationalism was a concept developed in the
Revolutionary/Napoleonic period and thereafter, and that the sense of
collective identity which had previously existed within the framework of the
monarchical state took a different form from that to be found in the
nineteenth-century nation-state. Nevertheless, nationalism can also be seen
earlier, in terms of ethnic communities which shared what Anthony Smith in
his The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986) has termed `dimensions of
ethnie: a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, a
distinctive shared culture, an association with a specific territory and a
sense of solidarity'.	


Continued from page 1
Such a definition of nationhood is one that can certainly be employed in the
later Middle Ages to distinguish nations and, in parts of Europe,
nation-states. The late-medieval expansion in the scope of royal power and
foreign wars both encouraged a focus on the pretensions, power, personnel
and politics of central government, and contributed to the growth of
national consciousness. A `zero sum' model, in which such a consciousness
could be developed and sustained only at the expense of other competing
consciousnesses, local, regional and international -- a form of `loyalty
oath' approach to the past -- may, however, be inappropriate. There was a
diversity of consciousness, identity and allegiance.
In the Early Modern period, Protestantism helped in the integration of
England with Wales and -- to a certain extent -- Scotland, but not Ireland.
The struggles of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encouraged, in
both England and Scotland, the conflation of a sense of national
independence with both anti-Catholicism and hostility to major Continental
Catholic powers. As with other episodes in which national consciousness and
a rhetoric of national interest was advanced, these actually served a
partisan purpose, for national consciousness was defined against domestic as
much as foreign opponents, especially Catholics, and this gave that
consciousness a particular force and urgency. Protestantism was something
that was shared with foreigners, a universal cause, and yet also a crucial
aspect of a new sense of national distinctiveness.
National consciousness of course is a `hegemonic' concept: states and
`peoples' are rarely united with shared views and a common purpose, although
national myths about present identity and past history generally pretend
otherwise. As public politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
especially those associated with a culture of print and a representative
system, led to a discourse of national consciousness, the need to define
such a concept in an acceptable fashion increased. It was politicised, taken
from the literary discourse of nationhood that had been characteristic of
the later medieval period, and given a number of competing partisan
interpretations. Presented as a consequence and source of unity,
nationalism, or, at least, the language of national consciousness, was the
product of division and itself divisive. Indeed, it was as national
divisions, encompassing large numbers outside the elite, became politically
important, that the language of national unity became politically
significant. It was part of a process in which elite and non-elite political
groups were united in a common cause; and also a defence against the
disunity of political division. Nineteenth-century confidence in definitions
of national interest relating to territorial consolidation and expansion,
domestic order and stability and national strength, are of little help in
the appreciation of the Early Modern period. The role of Parliament in
articulating and encapsulating a sense of national identity and interest
cannot be removed from the partisan content in which that was contested, but
that very context helped to accentuate this role.


Continued from page 2
This stress on nationalism as partisan is clearly the case with Britain
because of the contentious nature of the Union. Concern about Jacobitism
played a major role in securing the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, just as
anxiety about the loyalty and security of Ireland in the crisis of the
French Revolutionary War was crucial to the Anglo-Irish Union of 1801. In
Scotland, the `Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89 had created a new order, with
Presbyterianism as the established church, excluding not only the Catholics
but also the far more numerous Episcopalians. Support for the exiled Stuarts
among these groups fuelled serious risings in 1715 and 1745. The suppression
of the latter was followed by an extraordinary period of harmony in
Anglo-Scottish relations. Scotland benefited fully from imperial and
economic expansion and a sense of Britishness developed. The crushing of the
'45 at Culloden in 1746 ensured that the new British state created by the
Union would continue to be one whose political tone and agenda were set in
London.
This was the basis of British consciousness, a development that did not so
much alter the views of the English political elite, for whom Britain was
essentially an extension of England, but, rather, that reflected the
determination of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish Protestant elites to link
their fate with that of the British state; indeed the Anglican elite in
Ireland persisted in defining itself as English. Such a development did not,
however, prevent the coincident and still vigorous senses of local,
provincial and national identities. This situation repeated the earlier
combination of the English national myth with the linguistic, cultural and
ethnic diversity of an England that stretched from Cornwall to the Scottish
borders.
The notion of Britishness still exists within a similar context that is at
once open to partisan interpretations and composed of a fluid interaction of
more diverse identities with themes of Britishness. It is far from clear how
this situation will develop, but it is mistaken to imagine that current
challenges to the notion and practice of Britishness either are novel or
impact on a rigid and uncontroversial tradition.
If, though, these challenges are to stem from a revived or newly-defined
sense of Englishness, then it is unclear whether Britain will be much more
than a federal residue, and one made redundant, before its new role, by the
rise of the European Union. Short-term political strategy can be important.
The Labour need for Scottish MPs in Westminster will not only sustain the
political existence of Britain; it will also push the issue of England into
greater prominence.
There is clearly a sense of regionality in some parts of England, such as
the North East, but attempts to translate them into geographical clarity and
political action are, at present, less plausible. To take the North East, a
group of assumptions and practices based on working-class experiences in a
culture of hard physical work in socially sharply-differentiated coalfields
and great industrial cities, means far less in Alnwick or Corbridge, Hexham
or Barnard Castle, or in the new urbanscapes of executive estates and
out-of-town shopping centres. In the South West the notion of control from
Bristol is not welcome in Cornwall, Devon or Dorset.


Continued from page 3
A drive for regional government may encourage a historical probing of
regional histories, but this is unlikely to yield much of present political
value, particularly in the South East and Midlands, where much of the
population lives. As a result, there may be greater pressure to understand
England as a unity and its history as a theme subordinated to that of
Britain, but not irrevocable. This could lead to an interesting attempt to
define new identities and trajectories. Unwelcome at present to the Labour
programme of modernity, an understanding of England and its history might be
an unexpected consequence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism.
Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His latest
book is Why Wars Happen (Reaktion, 1998). 
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