National identities

In my first few months here, I asked Belarusian interlocutors about Belarusian national identity.  I received a variety of replies, but the subject was of more interest to me than to them.  That’s changed recently as events in Ukraine have stirred a debate on the issue.

I am intrigued by national identity.  I first came across the subject in the late 1980s during my first posting to Jordan when I was trying to make sense of the differences between Jordanians and Palestinians.  There was a flourishing literature on the subject, with academic studies such as Anthony D Smith’s “National Identity” and Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”.

National identity is not easy to define.  It is a form of collective identity, or how individuals or groups see themselves within the wider collective.  And, as an abstract concept, it is complicated because it depends on what people think or perceive, and is not based on objective, concrete facts.  But its physical manifestations can be very concrete – like places, or national symbols like flags.

Let me sketch out the idea and try to make sense of it briefly.

There were places and communities of people living together long before there were “nations”.  But as communities grew, their internal organisation became more complicated, and they needed to defend against other communities.  Over time, these more cohesive communities became nations.

The foundation of nations has varied.  Some were based on a common territory, others on a common ethnicity or descent, and there were those where there was a shared culture and language.  The elements of people, place and culture are still the fundamentals of most nations.

The development of nations across the world was not uniform.  They developed first in Western Europe, and as a result of European imperialism, European nations exported a more formal, organised state to most other parts of the world.  The model was the nation state – a unified polity in a defined territory with a legal and political system for the inhabitants.

But not all nation states were based on one “nation” or “people”.  Many came into being as a result of de-colonisation, so that some nation states came into being before “the nation”.  In that respect, as Smith pointed out in his study, there was actually a process of inventing the nation “by design”.

Strong national feelings have been exploited by some leaders to justify the conquest or subjection of other peoples or nations.  Such actions have given “nationalism” a bad name.  Strong national feelings are not inherently bad in themselves, and we have a word of Greek origin to describe a love of one’s homeland – patriotism.  The problem is when national sentiment includes a strong belief in superiority over, rather than differences from, other nations.

Nations and national identity cater for some very basic human feelings – of the need to belong, to have a home, and to have meaning in our lives.  We still ask ourselves:  who am I and where do I come from?  Nations provide part of the answer.

Let me try to set out some of the ideas of national identity as they relate to my country.

The homeland 

Britain has a great advantage over many other nations because our territory is relatively compact and homogenous.  And as an island, we have very clear borders.  It is easy for us to be attached to a distinct place on our “island home”.

Studies on national identity talk of “sacred places”.  Perhaps the most obvious (for England, if not for Britain) is Stonehenge – the strange pre-historical circle of stones that was erected over 4,000 years ago.  They are so ancient, we don’t even have a “national myth” (another common feature of national identity) associated with them.  Our myth is of King Arthur, who was reputed to have led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders sometime after the Romans left in the 4^th century AD.

If there is a more modern “sacred place”, I suppose it would be Stratford-upon-Avon, the hometown of William Shakespeare.  It certainly has the trappings of a sacred place, with many buildings preserved as museums and the town organised around theatres devoted to his memory.

The peoples

Like other nations, there is a “core” and a “periphery”, with differences between them.  Most of the inhabitants of England have traditionally been described as Anglo-Saxon, and those of Wales, Scotland and Ireland as Celts.  But even within England, there have remained marked differences in speech and popular culture between some of the regions.  Today, the essence of England is sometimes described as “middle England”, a non specific place somewhere in Central England.

In fact, the reality is more complex because England was invaded and conquered by the Normans.  Many nations have “founding myths”, but ours was more chronicled history than myth.  In the two centuries after the Norman Conquest, there was a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman culture which spawned “England” and, most importantly, the English language.

The culture and shared history

Our language is certainly a strong bearer of our culture.  We have a rich cultural history to draw on, and were one of the first nations to preserve our oral traditions in written form.  Other nations have harked back to a “myth of a golden age”, a process of remembering not only past glories, but rediscovering national folk tales, popular heroes and past victories.

As in the case of the Great Patriotic War, a victory in war provides a very strong sense of national identity.  We don’t have a direct equivalent because, thankfully for us, we weren’t invaded.  The episodes we tend to commemorate were Dunkirk, when we successfully evacuated an army from North France in June 1940, and what we call the Battle of Britain when in the succeeding months we survived the German aerial attacks.

The long continuity of our history is part of our national identity.  We have changed, but evolved steadily.  We have been spared the sudden shocks of revolution, or “national revolutions”.  We didn’t develop republican values in the way our French neighbours have.  Rather, one of our “myths” was what used to be known as the “Whig interpretation of history” – the steady progression from absolute monarchy to enlightened liberal democracy.

Beyond national identity

But many national identities exist in opposition to others.  Reaction against Britain has provided many nations with an identity or at least the rationale for an identity.  These include the “anti-colonial nationalisms” in some African and Asian countries, but also the reassertion of a separate national identity in Ireland that subsequently led to Irish independence.

Identities are not static – they change and mutate.  Large scale immigration since 1945 has changed British culture markedly.  As I pointed out when writing about British cookery, this has had major impact on such as our national diet.

The English language is now no longer our own.  Even apart from the development of American English, there are now probably more “non-native” than “native” speakers of my language.  With the increasing use of digital media and tools to generate text and speech, I’m not sure how much Britons influence the development of the English language.

As striking is the wide spread appearance of my country’s flag.  While I was reading National Identity on holiday in France, I visited the local market and saw as many Union flags as French flags.  I know that, after the 2012 Olympics, it was a fashion to wear clothes and other consumer goods with the flag (just as London seemed to be taken over by the Brazilian flag during the football World Cup.)  But the flag of my country is also used on the internet to denote the English language.  It seems to me that it is no longer just a British national symbol.

My own country is facing a major decision with the referendum in Scotland on independence next month.  Many of my fellow Britons have admitted to having more than one national identity – of being English, or Scottish, or Welsh as well as British.  Given the elusiveness of trying to pin down what national identity is all about, I think that it is possible to have more than one national identity, or to have multi-identities.  For a post-colonial power, that is a comforting thought.