When I talk to my French or American friends, I go out of my way to object whenever they mention British citizens.
To them, the difference between citizens and subjects is trivial. To me, it’s vital.
In republics, heads of state are elected. In monarchies – real monarchies, that is – they are anointed. In some mysterious or not so mysterious ways, a monarch isn’t just a symbol of continuity, a link between generations past, present or future. He’s also the embodiment of metaphysical unity between God and nation.
A nation so constituted can have any number of laws protecting life, property and the rights of every subject. The government guarantees such protection in exchange for its subjects’ allegiance. But the government’s claim to legitimacy derives from that transactional arrangement only to some extent. To a greater extent, a monarch establishes his sovereignty at a level high above such factors.
Today’s France and America started out as revolutionary republics, whose claim to legitimacy was based on repudiation of subjecthood and assertion of citizenship. Repudiation of subjecthood went hand in hand with repudiation of God as the origin of sovereignty. Assertion of citizenship went hand in hand with assertion of man as the subject of sovereignty.
Man was now the master of his own destiny, and hence the sole giver of his own man-made laws with no claim to divine inspiration or lineage. The life, property and dignity of an individual were now protected not because this was God’s will, but because it was a good idea.
That led to a different understanding of nationhood. In a country like France, where a republican revolution overthrew the ancient monarchy, most of the old adhesives of nationhood (language, culture, customs, an intuitive sense of belonging) still held. But man-made ideas now reigned supreme.
The problem is that man’s thinking is fickle. What seems like a good idea or a just law today, tomorrow may draw widespread opprobrium. And if the government consistently failed to come up with good or at least popular ideas, its claim to sovereignty was weakened. A sovereignty that lives by ideas may die by them.
In America, the post-revolutionary problems were even greater. The country’s language came second-hand, so did most of its laws; its population was a mishmash of arrivals from various European countries. Thus, if the founding ideas of the French republic were added to a nationhood of long standing, in America the founding ideas became more or less coextensive with nationhood.
One can hear many intelligent Americans say even these days that Americanism isn’t a nationality but an idea. Hence anyone sharing that idea and legally entitled to settle in America can become an American the moment his feet touch the tarmac at JFK.
Every American knows that, whenever he was born as a person, he was born in 1776 as a citizen. The French have something similar but to a lesser extent: they had been French for centuries before 1789.
In both countries, as well as in any other republic built on the ideas of the Enlightenment, politics has to play a much greater role than in ancient monarchies. And republics’ presidents have infinitely more political power than a British monarch, who has next to none.
But he has something no president can have: a lineage that goes back so far in time that one may as well accept that it was originated, not just anointed, by God. That acceptance went into the making of Englishness, and it was perceived either consciously or intuitively by every English subject for many centuries. Even in our godless time, it still is.
However, over the past century or two, that self-perception came under a concerted and ever-accelerating attack. At present, one may think it has been expunged, but that conclusion would be too hasty and superficial.
England is no more pious than France and perhaps even less so than America. But the link between nation and God, with monarch as its conduit, was too deeply wired into the national psyche to disappear overnight or even over a century.
That’s why an English monarch, no matter how much he may be ridiculed and dismissed as an irrelevance, draws something no president can ever have: residual if understated love and filial devotion. These may only slightly etch today’s sense of nationhood, but they do add a vital touch.
That’s why poll after poll shows that the English don’t want to become a republic. Not yet at any rate. Good thing too, for the monarch sits at the very centre of a constitutional ganglion of interlacing synapses, and removing him would create a chaos the nation might not be able to survive.
Such is the rational argument in favour of the monarchy, but it’s insignificant compared to the irrational ganglion of loyalties, ancestral affections and intuitive kinship also centred on the monarch. That’s what makes subjecthood profoundly different from citizenship, for all the external features they have in common.
One can become a citizen legally, by being born or naturalised in a country and pledging allegiance to it. One can even become a citizen who passionately shares the founding ideas of the country. But sharing the intuition passed on from generation to generation for centuries is a different proposition.
Both America and France have to look for slightly different national bonds, and they find them in man-made ideas and practices all converging on collective amour propre. Since repetition is the mother of all learning, ideas must be constantly reiterated lest they may weaken their grasp on the national psyche.
That’s why every public building in France prominently exhibits the founding triad of the republic. But whatever the French think of that tripartite slogan, and whether or not they realise that the middle element, égalité, makes the other two untenable, they still crave extra-rational bonds.
Religion has been legally disqualified from acting in that capacity since 1905, and monarchy is no longer an option. Hence the French have found their metaphysical surrogate in their culture and especially language. Any native speaker of French, regardless of where he comes from, is accepted as French to a much greater extent than a native speaker of English from, say, Canada or South Africa, is accepted as English.
Americans too need constant reminders of their nationhood, and those are almost exclusively civic and political. Schoolchildren reciting the pledge of allegiance, hand over heart whenever the national anthem is played, Stars and Stripes flying outside people’s houses – these are all reiterations of nationhood.
Britain is different from them and also from England. Britishness is a civic identity that can be acquired in ways not that different from an equivalent process in France or the US. Englishness, however, isn’t something that can be acquired, not without a total immersion for decades and usually not even then.
A parallel distinction between civic and ethnic identity doesn’t exist in France and America or, if it does, it’s not reflected in terminology. A naturalised American is an American, a naturalised Frenchman is French, but a naturalised Englishman doesn’t exist.
Subjecthood plays a critical role in that sense of both British and, more subtly, English identity. Unlike the truths declared self-evident in the American Declaration of Independence, this identity is indeed self-evident, and hence not in need of constant reassertion and reiteration.
A British politician ending his speech with “God bless Britain” would be laughed out of Westminster, and not just because most MPs and their constituents are atheists. They just know, some consciously, most subliminally, that an anointed monarch is an eternal conduit between them and God. Their personal beliefs don’t really matter in that regard.
English identity is like the English language. It’s easy to acquire good command of it for everyday purposes – but acquiring perfect mastery is harder than in most other languages. There are too many nuances that have to be sensed and can never be explained.
In the context of the on-going events, it would be interesting to consider how all of the above relates to the issue of integrating and assimilating new arrivals. But that discussion is for another time.
Whenever the subject of disdain for immigrants or assimilation is broached, my thoughts turn to the work of Archbishop (Dagger) John Hughes of New York. He was the one man responsible for the transformation of the Irish immigrant community in New York. That transformation was based on education and strong Catholic faith (especially confession, i.e., personal responsibility). The Irish went from being considered subhuman to productive members of society in very short order.
It is interesting that news reports of the white “riots” are everywhere, but reports of the immigrant “unrest” in the preceding week are sparse, and use very different language. As with the Home Secretary, the language is based on the ideology of the reporter.
In the census form of 1911, my paternal grandmother’s place of birth is given as “New York”. But in parentheses under those words, in small but legible writing, are the words “British subject”. I like to think that she proudly insisted on having those words added.