Robert Jenrick, frontrunner in the Tory leadership race, realises that Reform UK schismatics threaten to perpetuate Labour rule.
Unless they are brought back into the fold, the Tories may for ever remain a rump party with little chance of reclaiming power. Hence the need for pushing the Conservatives far enough rightwards to make Reform UK redundant.
One way of doing so is to reassert the Tory claim to Englishness, thereby knocking the nationalist sabre, or perhaps pint, out of Nigel Farage’s hand. To that end Mr Jenrick set up his stall in an article saying that: “The attitudes and policies of our metropolitan establishment have weakened English identity. They have put the very idea of England at risk.”
Mr Jenrick gets top marks for his political acumen, but his thinking on national identity in general and English identity specifically sounds muddled. However, he can console himself with the thought that he isn’t the only one. This matter has baffled many thinkers, even some serious ones.
Jenrick talks about being equally proud of being British and English, lamenting that the second part is getting a rough treatment: “Whereas all of the most high-status people in Scotland and Wales are proud to be Scottish and Welsh, most of the English political and media elite are far from proud to be English.”
That’s doubtless true, but there is a ready explanation for this difference. While a great part of Scottish or Welsh identity consists in not being English, an Englishman can’t seek his own identity in not being Scottish or Welsh.
Anyway, though I wish the Tories well, neither their politics nor Mr Jenrick’s ambitions interest me very much. But the matter of national identity does, starting with the question of what constitutes a nation.
The question isn’t one of especially long standing. The issue of nationhood only moved to the forefront of people’s thought after the collapse of Christian universalism and its replacement with national, even ethnic, particularism.
This isn’t to say that national identity hadn’t existed until then, only that it played second fiddle to other identities, such as fickle dynastic allegiances and rather more constant folkloric differences, those of language and what’s broadly described as culture.
I always cite Thomas Aquinas as an illustration. He was born and raised in Italy, but his family had Germanic roots and was even related to the Holy Roman Emperor. As an adult, Thomas then spent most of his life in Paris. So was he Italian, German or French? I don’t know, and I’m sure neither did he.
The idea of blood-and-soil nationhood became popular in the 19th century, the first in which victorious modernity ruled the roost. That notion received rather bad press following the Second World War, but it survives to this day.
For example, the American ‘paleoconservative’ (the term was coined by my friend Paul Gottfried but I don’t especially like it, though I like him) Sam Francis wrote: “Every real nation is a people of common blood and descended from the same ancestors”.
This idea is attractive but too one-dimensional for my taste, to the point of being nonsensical. It certainly doesn’t help the denizens of multi-national countries, such as Britain or Francis’s own US. By his criterion, the US isn’t a nation at all and has no hope of ever becoming one. Britain isn’t a nation either, and neither is just about any sizeable European country.
In general, Francis’s definition of a “real” nation makes me uncomfortable because it’s fundamentally anti-Christian. Christians are all brothers not because of any consanguinity but because they all have the same father who stands above ethnicity or nationhood.
It’s not by accident that most proponents of blood-and-soil nationalism have problems with Christianity, and that includes Francis. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he once wrote, for example.
Which race was that? Hebrews? Caucasians? Americans? Christianity wasn’t created by or for any particular race or nationality, this is basic. My point is that nationalism of any kind, and especially the blood-and-soil variety, doesn’t sit comfortably with Christianity. Patriotism is something else again, but the etymology of the word points at one’s country, not at the composition of one’s blood.
A Breton and a Provençal aren’t “of common blood”, and neither do they “descend from the same ancestors”, unless it’s Adam and Eve. Yet both are French. The common blood of Englishmen may be less dubious, but it too has had many different inputs.
It all depends how far back we’re willing to go. Let’s just say that at first various Germanic and Celtic tribes contributed to the English bloodstream, then the Romans dropped a little in, and then Scandinavians and Frenchmen added some major tributaries – and we shan’t even talk about the minor ones.
Paradoxically, America, for all its mongrel make-up, is in some ways ahead of us in the blood-and-soil stakes because the previous inhabitants of the North American continent, those of the wigwams, tomahawks and white man speak with forked tongue fame, didn’t have countries in our sense of the word.
Britain, however, was formed by a union of four countries, each predating her. Mr Jenrick is clearly aware of the 1707 Acts of the Union, which is why he talks about identifying as both British and English.
That’s wonderful, but can one really claim allegiance to two nations at once? I’m in an ideal position to know that it’s possible to possess more than one passport, but belonging to more than one nation does create conceptual problems.
One detects some confusion there, and it’s common even to men who are older or more intellectually accomplished than Mr Jenrick. Even such achievers routinely talk about Britain being made up of four countries or four nations, which doesn’t solve my problem with definitions.
Let’s begin to sort it out by stating that the concept of a nation presupposes cultural, geographic and political commonality, and it may even include an ethnic element, but that is more debatable. This is reflected in terminology, though not everywhere.
Thus ‘French’ implies both citizenship in the French Republic and cultural commonality. ‘American’ is a term that’s also both political and cultural. But then one thinks of Jannik Sinner, the best Italian tennis player ever, whose first language is German even though he is Italian born and bred, and the cultural aspect of nationality begins to totter.
Now, it’s possible to date a multi-national Britain back to 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and united the two crowns. But even if we go back only as far as 1707, that still makes Britain an older country than Germany, Italy or for that matter the US. Nevertheless, British nationhood needs, according to Mr Jenrick, to lean on the crutch of Englishness to stand on its own hind legs.
Everything I’ve said so far points at a problem. How do we solve it?
Let’s agree that ‘British’ implies mainly, though not exclusively, a political identity, whereas ‘English’ is mainly, though not exclusively, ethnic. That doesn’t solve the problem, but it does simplify it by eliminating conflicting allegiances. It’s thus possible to be both British and English at the same time.
Other than that, I can’t think of any objective criteria of nationhood, only subjective ones. If one identifies as English first, British second, that’s what one is. Such self-identification may be based on any number of factors: family roots, language, preference for warm beer rather than, say, cold vodka. Above all, I think, it’s based on what Otto Bauer (d. 1936) called the “commonality of fate”, and I thought I’d never quote any Socialist approvingly.
This has to do not only with one’s past but also with one’s commitment to the future, one’s – ideally unspoken – commitment to sharing one’s country’s fate, whatever that may be. Wearing St George’s Cross underpants is strictly optional.