England's occluded nationalism: state and nation in English identity.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Wellings, Ben
• Date: 22 December 1999

English nationalism, like English Common law, is difficult to pin down, but it clearly exists. The English are becoming increasingly aware of this particular identity, an identity which is emerging out of the end of Empire, the rise of the European Union and, most notably, the process of Scottish and Welsh devolution. If the union state of Britain, built around Protestantism, Empire and war with a foreign foe, submerged the nations on the periphery, then it just as equally obscured the nation which formed the majority of the population of the British Isles. For the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, it was always easy to discern where 'England' ended and 'Britain' began. Not so for the English, however. For centuries such distinctions seemed like hair-splitting, as England became shorthand for Britain and its apparatus of state. This tendency in English thought to conflate England and Britain, can be analysed via Tom Nairn's concept of 'occluded multi-nationalism' (1) which characterizes the British state. According to Nairn, 'Britain', a state-based identity, politically dominated by England and discouraging nationalism in its constituent nations, obscured the identity of Scotland and Wales. However, England's own 'occluded nationalism' is not only a result of its position as the demographically and culturally dominant nation within the United Kingdom, but also due to the relationship between state and nation in English nationalism. This is not to argue that English national identity is entirely imposed on the English people from above. Nevertheless, an important theme in English nationalism conflates the institutions of the state with the embodiment of the nation. This becomes problematic when attempting to articulate a concept of 'Englishness' and to tease that identity away from 'Britishness'. The importance of this re-emerging identity is not to be under-estimated. Perceptions of self, whether group or individual, help people to make sense of and interpret their material and cultural surroundings. As a sense of British identity appears to decline, it is apparently being replaced by allegiances to just such national identities previously obscured by Britain's 'occluded multi-nationalism'. It is these allegiances which underpin New Labour's program of modernization of the British political system via a process of devolution of power to Scotland and Wales. However, such a process is asymmetrical in that no such power has as yet been devolved to England as a whole or to the English regions. The centrality of nationalism and national identity in current British politics creates problems for England. Much less thought has gone into understanding the distinction between 'Britain' and 'England' than has been the case in Scotland or Wales. This being said, the complexity of post-imperial English society makes any articulation of an emerging 'English' identity fraught with tensions and complexities ill at ease with an encompassing concept of a national identity.

England's Nationalism

Today there is a tendency to perceive England as lacking a clear sense of identity, resulting from the loss of Empire, whilst it is not yet fully reconciled to the idea of the European Union. Unlike the resurgent, Euro-friendly nationalisms of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, the English, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown 'do not have other aspirations to invest in'. She goes on to argue that the English have yet to develop a 'confident, post-imperial cultural identity, locked as they are somewhere between embarrassment and guilt'. (2) This theme of imperial guilt stifling an articulation of English identity (or at least a less reactionary expression of it than given by the political Right and England football fans) had also been picked up by Bryan Appleyard a year previously in the Independent. However, after the heady month of the English soccer team's Euro96 campaign (unmarred by violence on the terraces), he felt confident enough to blame others in the West for making the English the scapegoat for a collective, western post-imperial guilt complex. (3) The implication is that discussions of what 'Englishness' --as opposed to 'Britishness'--might mean in a multi-racial society are conspicuous by their absence.

Whilst the loss of empire is important for understanding English identity and nationalism, such a lack of identity manifested itself (in its absence) even before the loss of Empire. In 1940, George Orwell berated the English left-wing intelligentsia for eschewing English culture, commenting that 'they take their cookery from Paris and their ideas from Moscow'. (4) More recently, Nick Hornby has written of an identity vacuum, located specifically in the culturally and financially dominant south-east of England:

The white, south of England middle-class Englishman and Englishwoman is the most rootless creature on earth; we would rather belong to any other community in the world. Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about, songs to sing, things they can grab for and squeeze when they feel like it, but we have nothing, at least nothing we want. Hence the phenomenon of mock belonging, whereby pasts and backgrounds are manufactured and massaged in order to provide some kind of acceptable identity. Who was it that sang 'I Wanna be Black'? The title says it all, and everybody has met people who really do; in the mid-seventies young, intelligent and otherwise self-aware white men and women in London began to adopt a Jamaican patois which frankly didn't suit them at all. How we all wished we came from the Chicago Projects, or the Kingston ghettos, or the mean streets of north London or Glasgow! All those aitch-dropping, vowel-mangling punk rockers with a public school education! All those Hampshire girls with grand-parents in Liverpool or Brum! All those Pogues fans from Hertfordshire singing Irish rebel songs! All those Europhiles who will tell you that though their mothers live in Reigate, their sensibilities reside in Rome! (5) Such concerns about a lack of distinct identity arguably result from the relation of the English nation to the state. It is the state which contributes to what Robin Cohen describes as the 'fuzzy frontiers' of British identity, of which English is, arguably, the hardest to distinguish. (6) According to the British Election Survey of 1997, forty-six per cent of English people feel themselves to be equally English and British, compared to twenty-seven per cent of the Welsh who feel equally Welsh and British and twenty-six per cent of the Scots who feel equally Scottish and British. The high English figures may not indicate a dual identity, but rather a shared one where little distinction is made between the two categories of belonging. (7) One explanation for this conflation of identities in England lies in the national politics of Britain. Since 1707, one of the main concerns of English politicians and the ruling classes has been to defend the Union from threats and enemies both within and without. In such a situation, any overt expressions of English nationalism would have been inimical to the Union and were therefore to be avoided.

Such an explanation, whilst tainted with a notion of public duty and stiff-upper-lipped self-sacrifice, does have the merit of focusing attention upon the historic relationship between the English and the state. It is this relationship that has obscured an understanding of England as a distinct national entity amongst other nations within Britain. Arguably, some sort of English identity first began to appear during the Tudor period and conflict with...