A load of Bull
The British left has always felt vaguely uncomfortable with the whole notion of patriotism. The US’ vision of itself as a bastion of democracy and equality means that both liberals and conservatives can well up at the sound of the national anthem. The French left can believe passionately in the ideals of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ and the superiority of the French social model (not to mention French food, the French language, and just about anything else you’d care to name).
The British left doesn’t have that. Britain never had a popular revolution, no nation creating moment at which the people stood up and declared their dignity. The gradual organic growth of the state means that there are few national symbols which we all feel happy uniting behind. Those we do have mostly seem to represent conservatism, whether with a small C (the crown, Parliament) or a whopping great one (Churchill, the Empire). What’s more, much of the British national identity in recent decades has been forged by the Second World War – and while holding the line against fascism is undeniably something to be proud of, it
a) was sixty years ago; and
b) gets twisted all too easily into xenophobia of the Two world wars and one world cup school. More than one lefty has told me that they adopt an ‘anyone but Britain’ stance on principle during all international sporting tournaments.
The result of all this is that conspicuous displays of British patriotism are most likely to come from boozed up sports fans and UKIP politicians. Perhaps this is the biggest challenge to liberal patriotism: our national icons have been hijacked by the right. If you caught a neighbour flying the Union Jack on their lawn you’d start to worry about their views on race relations. Every time the right-wing media starts banging on about how proud it is to be British, they remind the rest of us pretty much instantly why we were faintly embarrassed about it in the first place. (Remember Up yours Delors or Gotcha!?)
None of those things of which Britons are supposed to be proud relate to my experience of this country. John Major’s warm beer on the village cricket green sounds suspiciously like a world that vanished decades before I got round to being born.
I’m not saying that there isn’t much in Britain’s history to be ashamed of: Suez, Dresden, and the fact we unleashed both the concentration camp and Jim Davidson on an unsuspecting world, to name but four.
But the left does need to develop its own conception of British national identity and national pride. This is partly to prevent it from getting its arse kicked: telling people that they ought to be ashamed of themselves is rarely a vote winner, and will most likely result in a self-appointed oppressed majority ranting on about ‘political correctness gone mad.’
More importantly, though, left wing policies require social solidarity. The welfare state is based on transferring income from the rich to the poor. If voters are to be convinced to give up their pay packets for the national good, they have to feel some kind of connection to those who stand to benefit. If we have no patriotic interest in looking after our countrymen, why would a rich Chelsea businessman give a crap about an unemployed Yorkshire welder? As David Goodhart put it in this month’s Prospect, nationalism
…is also responsible for many of the most positive aspects of modern societies – the idea of equal citizenship, the readiness to share with and make sacrifices for stranger-citizens… It was sentiments of national solidarity as much as class solidarity, a feeling that ‘we are all in this together’, that helped to build and sustain the welfare state. It is the core belief of the left… that there is such a thing as society – but in this modern world that almost always means a specific national society.
This, one suspects, is why Gordon Brown keeps banging on about Britishness. It’s not just to reassure middle England that he’s one of them (let’s face it, they’re not buying it). It’s an attempt to head off the growing animosity between four different national communities, each apparently convinced that the others are stiffing them. The talk of British national pride seems intended to end south east England’s complaints about money trickling north of the border: what does that matter, if we’re all one anyway?
So – what is there about this country that a liberal can actually be proud of? After thinking long and hard for at least, ooh, four minutes, I’ve come up with a list. Some of these things are political, some emphatically aren’t, but all of them reflect my conception fo Britain and make feel faintly patriotic:
-the Beatles
-Shakespeare
-the NHS (the ideal thereof)
–Doctor Who
-London’s reaction to the July 7th bombings
-Michael Palin
-the fact that British television can show mixed race couples without it coming close to being an issue (you try that in the US and see how far you get)
-Edinburgh in August
-the media’s remarkably sane and positive reaction to the civil partnerships act
–Goodness Gracious Me
I’m only being half facetious about this. I’m not saying I would lay down my life for David Tennant’s right to fight unconvincing green aliens on national television every Saturday evening. But all of these things do somehow represent my Britain far better than wars long past and warm beer. All of them are things of which, on some level, I feel strangely proud – things that make me feel part of this country. That’s not something that can be said for the flag.
The problem is not patriotism but nationalism. Why on Earth should a Chelsea businessman have his wealth redistributed to Yorkshire whilst there is still a Somalia in this world?
Thanks for that – I’d always wondered why I have never really felt very patriotic (and am pretty Liberal, if not completely left wing), whereas my brother, who holds fairly opposite political views, is as patriotic as they get.
Your list gives me a little hope. Stick Blackadder on there, and the whole Monty Python crew. Heck, Fawlty Towers!
Biggest one for me however has to be in agreement with 7/7. I never felt so English in my life as then – filled with pride at the strength and bravery of Londoners in a time of tragedy and loss.
The problem with nationalism/patriotism is that the energies that ought to be devoted to the building of the sense of internal solidarity that is essential to the creation of any society with a claim to being, to whatever degree, egalitarian, often seem to be diverted into the construction of a sense of external superiority, which not only seems to dissolve the internal solidarity but legitimates the exploitation of those beyond the borders in question.
Yes, quite. So instead of being one big happy free and equal family, we don’t like ze Germans. Which is bad.
I’m not sure that Doctor Who or even Monty Python can fix this, but maybe it’s a start.
Britain never had a popular revolution, no nation creating moment at which the people stood up and declared their dignity.
I think we did, you know. I really think we did. The trouble is who we declared it against. My vote for Britain Day* is the 30th of January.
*Or British Day, or whatever Gordon Brown’s going to give us so that he can convince the Daily Mail that he’s not a Scottish nationalist.
Is a ‘British Day’ enough to restore lost patriotism though?
Whilst I’m sure a nice extra bank-holiday will have us all tipping our hats to his worshipfulness in thanks, what will I be thinking about on this momentous occasion?
Now I’m sounding positively anti-England. We have plenty to smile about – is our defining characteristic still the stiff upper lip?
What’s quite interesting about the “two world wars and one world cup” line is how politically radical the wars it calls to mind are. One of them decimated the aristocracy and brought in its wake mass suffrage and the birth of the Labour party as a possible party of government, and the other the welfare state, the prospect of which was compared by Churchill to the Gestapo, as well as the first majority Labour government. The fact that the right has been able to co-opt so successfully two wars which were so politically radical in their effects and a sporting victory won under a Labour government and in a decade it reviles suggests something about the politics of nationalism, at least in Britain, it seems to me. It’s not that there isn’t a rationally plausible leftish alternative version of Britishness – the character of the events which form the focal points of rightwing accounts of Britishness suggest that there should be – it’s that somehow the right has managed to totally colonise Britishness. Consequently, I think all this leftish patriotic stuff is shot to shit from the beginning: rather than being explicitly patriotic, the left, I think, needs to form some kind of discourse which is about Britishness without being patriotic – talking about things like a sense of fair play and a concern for the underdog, perhaps, without playing on some sense of national superiority the Tories’ll always trump them on anyway.
Rob, Ernest Renan said over a century ago that nationalism has as much to do with forgetting history as remembering it, which maybe helps explain how the Right co-opted the legacy of the two wars.
rather than being explicitly patriotic, the left, I think, needs to form some kind of discourse which is about Britishness without being patriotic If I’ve understood you correctly, you’re using ‘patriotic’ here to imply some kind of national if not racial superiority, which I agree is very problematic, and I doubt I could support any form of Britishness that implied this.
The trouble is, that while it is possible to conceive of a form of identity based on shared values rather than shared ethnicity – so-called civic nationalism as opposed to ethnic nationalism – the states that are most often cited as examples of this are the USA and France, and yet there are clearly broad swathes of the US and French populations that nonetheless feel excluded.
Is there any way that some form of civic Britishness could be articulated that would avoid this outcome? Myself, I’m not so sure, even though I would dearly like a meaningful counter to the ethnic nationalism that so easily becomes xenophobia.
Ian,
I suppose I should have been more careful about my choice of words: ‘needs’ might have been a bit strong. I should have caveated it with something ‘if it’s going to get into that kind of Dutch auction at all’. On the ethnic/civic nationalism distinction, I suppose what I’m suggesting – in a hypothetical, rather than even remotely categorical, imerpative sense, so as to including the ‘Dutch Auction’ caveat – is that the left try a kind of patriotism which has nothing to say about the patria in question, but just plays to particular features of it: that could be described as civic patriotism/nationalism, perhaps. The problem with French and American attempts at civic nationalism is of course though that they are quite clearly tainted with ethnic nationalism – witness recurrent tropes about English being the national language in the States, or the way welfare-bashing is always covertly anti-black, and the obviously disproportionate anti-hijab legislation passed under the guise of laicite in France. Maybe all civic nationalisms end up like that, which is of course why I don’t want an actually nationalist nationalism, but, if it must be done, a kind of nationalism which avoids reference to actual nationality – which is of course probably utterly chimerical.
Phil E:
“I think we did, you know. I really think we did. The trouble is who we declared it against. My vote for Britain Day* is the 30th of January.”
I’m clearly being dense here – who did we come together to declare against on January 30th?
Ian:
“The trouble is, that while it is possible to conceive of a form of identity based on shared values rather than shared ethnicity – so-called civic nationalism as opposed to ethnic nationalism – the states that are most often cited as examples of this are the USA and France, and yet there are clearly broad swathes of the US and French populations that nonetheless feel excluded.”
This is clearly a problem, particularly in France. In the US it does seem to be possible for anyone, whereever their parents came from, to ‘become’ American – what defines the inclusion/exclusion isn’t ethnicity so much as economics. I think that the reason a chunk of the black community are still getting screwed isn’t because they’re black, but because they’re poor, and the US doesn’t support its poor people.
But nonetheless, both countries have an “idea” of Frenchness/Americanness to which people can sign up. I don’t think we have that in Britain. Part of it is the four-nations-in-one-state thing, I suspect: when I said on the Sharpener mailing list that I was thinking about writing about national pride, one response was “which nation?” (And you wouldn’t believe how hard that thing was to write without making direct references to English football fans.)
I think this is what Brown’s “Britain Day” is all about: stengthening, or even creating, that notion of Britishness.
Put it this way… the Beatles, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Doctor Who and Michael Palin all, to may, have something quintessentially British about them. But I struggle to put my finger on exactly what that quality is.
Could you proof your comments, Rob? Knowing your vocabulary, it took me a good minute to realise that there’s no such word as ‘imerpative’. (There is no such word as ‘imerpative’…?)
I’m extremely wary of civic nationalism – I don’t know what it’s there for, other than to provide jobs for managers. Ideally, I don’t feel that civic nationalism should have any positive content at all: as it were, this is the nation-state whose domain we all live in, these are the laws, these are the institutions of government and participation… and, er, that’s it. Start celebrating any of that stuff and you’re immediately saying that we‘ve got it right – which tends to imply not only that they (in other countries) have got it wrong but that they (coming from other countries) can’t understand, what with not being like us.
In an odd way I’m more comfortable with ethnic nationalism – it seems to speak the language of justice, albeit very often in an inflamed and distorted form. Ethnic nationalism is about who’s done what to whom and who should (and shouldn’t) have the right to do what to whom; there’s a story in there somewhere, a possibility of progress towards lessened injustice. (Or rather, there are many stories in there – talk to a Croat about World War II some time – but that doesn’t mean there’s no possibility of progress.)
Digressing slightly, I suppose the worst of all possible worlds is civically-guaranteed ethnic nationalism (as in those (apocryphal?) trilingual road signs in English, Irish and Ulster Scots).
One thing The Beatles, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Doctor Who and Michael Palin all have in common is that none of them have real job.
If that’s what defines Britishness, then I’m all for it!
Jonn – what have they got in common? Er, smug superiority with a quick-witted mask of self-deprecating irony? (Which is very British, I’ll grant you.)
Who did we come together against on the 30th of January? The Man of Blood, of course.
Phil:
Jonn – what have they got in common? Er, smug superiority with a quick-witted mask of self-deprecating irony? (Which is very British, I’ll grant you.)
There might be something in that, actually – the British national identity is this mix of assumed superiority and knowledge of inexorable decline (“We used to rule the world, you know.”) Python-esque ridiculousness and hiding behind jokes fits into that rather well.
Who did we come together against on the 30th of January? The Man of Blood, of course.
Ah, Charlie. Problem is, wasn’t Charles II crowned in Scotland pretty quickly after the execution…?
What makes me proud to be British?
Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus (but then the last one’s gone the way of the dodo). I suppose these are all English so they don’t count anyway.
Dickens? Blake? Keats? Burns? Thomas? Brunel? Stevenson? Darwin? Definitely Edinburgh in August. With you on the Beatles and Python. Second Blackadder. The fact that the British invented time in Greenwich!
These are all biased towards the English as I guess I’ve always thought of myself as English rather than British, which rather underscores your point.
I would love there to be a national day but not in January as we’ll freeze, and I worry about how we will actually celebrate it. I have visions of very worthy BBC programming, with Top 100 British film/comedy/pop songs on C4 and ITV doing back to back best of Corrie, BBC 2 doing last Night of the Proms best of, with everyone outside ignoring it. Some people attempt to do something like hold the worl’s biggest village fete, and everyone else just starts drinking furiously and rampaging about with George crosses culminating in race riots in the evening.
Hmmmm.
Do you think our defining national characteristic is not really knowing what our defining national characteristic is?
not in January as we’ll freeze
Antipholus mentioned Edinburgh in August (probably much to the disgust of any passing Edinburgian, but I know what you mean, AP). I saw Hattie Hayridge there once, years ago; she said at one point that she loved coming to the Festival, but why couldn’t they have it in summer?
Anyway, with enough duffel-coats we won’t freeze. Foot Day!
Antipholus – being pedantic, Magna Carta was drawn up, in Latin, by a bunch of French-speaking Normans; the Bill of Rights was passed into law by a Dutchman; Habeas Corpus was passed into law by a Scotsman. None of them are English.
Ian’s mention of Ernest Renan’s little maxim is entirely appropriate – a frequent characteristic of British/English patriotism is lack of knowledge of British/English history. Hence the constant repetition of the “1,000 years of history” nonsense, repeated claims that Magna Carta actually achieved anything, and constant attempts to ignore the fact that there hasn’t been an “English” monarch since 1603 (and even she was a quarter Welsh)…
Where are we with the Leg and Reg reform bill. If it passes, we might need another Jan 30th (Symbolically that is!).
Nosemonkey:
Antipholus – being pedantic, Magna Carta was drawn up, in Latin, by a bunch of French-speaking Normans; the Bill of Rights was passed into law by a Dutchman; Habeas Corpus was passed into law by a Scotsman. None of them are English.
…which rather gives the lie to all those claims that Britain or England had always determined its own destiny until that man Heath sold us down the river in ’73. I’ve always thought that if you squint there’s some irony in the fact that the “Little Englander” attitude that does its “a thousand years of history” rants seems to be pretty much a creation of the post-war era. It’s a function of decline, I suppose.
Rob, sorry if I came across as overly critical, it looks as though we’re both approaching this from a similar direction. I very much like your ‘Dutch Auction’ metaphor. Given that nationalism has, like it or not, proven to be such a powerful phenomenon over the past couple of hundred years, some kind of response is pretty much required, but I wish I knew what kind.
I share your and Phil E‘s distrust of civic nationalism, particularly if you consider who would most likely be asked to articulate it for Britain today (I doubt that any politician would risk espousing an English nationalist cause). Lord Birt? Ye gods… Whatever the shortcomings of the results, at least the Americans and French were consciously setting out to forge a new identity for new kind of nation.
Regardless of what UKIP might say, and despite the existence of Scottish and Welsh “parliaments” I don’t believe enough people in the UK perceive a sufficiently genuine threat to their national identity to take seriously any attempts to reinforce it; the very difficulty we’re having in proposing concrete traits or symbols suggests to me that it just isn’t a live issue. Gordon Brown may have a different view of his political survival chances, however, which may be why he’s trying to wrap himself in the flag.
But Phil, I can’t instead accept that ethnic nationalism is a preferable variety. I daresay there are plenty of Croats with opinions about WWII, not to mention more recent conflicts…
I’ll go with Rachel‘s epigram for now, lightly spiced with Jonn‘s ridiculousness. Erm, hang on, that didn’t come out quite right.
Rachel:
Do you think our defining national characteristic is not really knowing what our defining national characteristic is?
Does anyone know what the Latin for “Erm” is?
Yeah, sorry about that Phil. No more posting whilst a little ‘tired and emotional’. I do get the exlcusionary thing about nationalism and patriotism, which is why I think it may well be chimerical to hope for a decent progressive patriotism – unless, perhaps, you can find some way of aligning the others of patriotism with the others of progressivism, as, with a bit of intellectual self-harm, you might be able to do with Scottish patriotism.
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Well this is precisely what the whole Britishness / Fabian society conference debate is all about. Since July 7th in fact I’ve increasingly seen debates about national identity on the left. Remember that big debate kicked off in the Guardian by publishing David Goodhart’s essay?
Its something the left has been grappling on for a while but not really figured it out yet.
Yes there are national symbols we can all relate to. But this sort of stumbles because cultural markers are different for the new immigrants – specially since this debate has gained traction since 7/7.
What I mean is this. America makes patriotism about the flag and just about being an equal American (in theory) to everyone else. And about the American dream of making money etc.
It works because its something anyone can relate to, specially immigrants. They want to be part of something new.
With cultural markers such as The Beatles and Dr Who (big fan of the second but not the first) it makes it difficult. Will you be waving a flag when Dr Who comes on? Huh.
Ultimately, bringing people together has to be empowering so they want to be part of it. Hence why France and America work. There isn’t that much empowering about Michael Palin to be honest. I hope this makes sense.
A few Indian wince with Goodness Gracious Me too. What do we do about them? But then Indians are never known to have a great sense of humour….
The problem, at the most basic level, is that the Left believes in equality. To be patriotic, one needs to have pride in one’s country. One cannot be proud of something inferior, therefore to be patriotic, one has to believe that one’s country is superior to others (in whatever way you define that to be). This notion of feeling superior is an anathema to any Leftist that believes in absolute equality.
Oh, and I have been known to — not entirely seriously — use the phrase “two World Wars and one World Cup” and I don’t feel xenophobic; I don’t hate the Germans. I do, however, feel proud of our stand in the World Wars; I am proud of the fact that we honoured our treaty obligations; I am proud of the “Blitz spirit” (which was pretty much what we saw after the 7/7 bombings) and I am proud that this pissy little country kept fighting, against massive odds, until we won.
What the Left associates with that time is, primarily, guilt; guilt about the Empire, guilt about our hegemonising ways, guilt about any time when Britain was superior.
This is why the Left has a problem building a patriotic identity: not only do they have a problem with the concept of superiority, but they feel guilt about the methods used in the time when Britain was superior.
The problem with attempting to be a patriotic Brit these days, is that there is so little to be proud of in Britain (this is something that I have written about at length).
DK
Jonn – This country could be run like North Korea, and still keep every single one of the characteristics that you so admire. It seems that you are proud only of those things in Britain that have absolutely no significance whatsoever.
I might add that if the NHS is so unique after 58 years, it really must be a bad idea.
As for the British Left’s problem with patriotism – I think that the most obviously unique point about British history is that it was the centre of the Industrial Revolution, the bithplace of capitalism, and the place where the modern world was created. And no socialist will ever forgive it for that.
“we unleashed both the concentration camp”: really, this tired old tosh should be left to rot. It ain’t true. An opposition MP referred to the camps used towards the end of the Boer War as “concentration camps” in hopes of making them sound as odious as the camps of (roughly) that name used by the Spanish in Cuba and the Americans in the Philipines, so the British weren’t even first. More to the point, none of them – Spanish, American or British – had the purpose of Hitler’s camps; it was just typically adroit propaganda from the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
DM – I think you’re arguing with a strawman of your own devising. The British in South Africa ‘concentrated’ (i.e. rounded up) Boers in camps; these camps were therefore known as ‘concentration camps’. After the Nazis took power in 1933, the Brownshirts spontaneously rounded up Communists, Jews, and other people the cut of whose jib they didn’t like, and interned them in what were then called ‘concentration camps’. After the war, the discovery of the death camps (and ‘sick camps’ like Belsen) led it to be assumed that ‘concentration camp’ was a term for places where people were sent to be killed, but it wasn’t – even under the Nazis, most concentration camps didn’t actively kill their inmates.
“The British in South Africa ‘concentrated’ (i.e. rounded up) Boers in camps; these camps were therefore known as ‘concentration camps’.” Not so. The British govt called them Internment Camps: an opposition MP called them Concentration Camps because he wanted to associate them with the “Reconcentration” camps that the Spanish and Americans had used.
Dearime:
The British govt called them Internment Camps: an opposition MP called them Concentration Camps because he wanted to associate them with the “Reconcentration†camps that the Spanish and Americans had used.
Can we just clarify – are you really arguing that the British government didn’t invent the concentration camp because they didn’t call it a concentration camp?
Isn’t that somewhat akin to claiming someone isn’t a thief on the grounds that they say they liberate rather than steal?
I’ve long been fascinated by the question of identity – it’s quite a hard one to unpick.
The question that I keep asking myself is: why does feeling proud of one’s nation have to imply a sense of superiority? I know that nationalism has led in many cases to oppression, exploitation and xenophobia, but are such outcomes inescapable?
Is it possible to feel a sense of pride for something that is part of your self-conception without having to lord it over everyone who’s different?
I’m pointing out one of the great anti-patriotic delusions. The British Government set up camps which had neither the name nor the purpose of the Nazi camps. So why peddle the falsehood that they did?
DM – I take the point about naming, but I don’t see any essential difference between an internment camp and a concentration camp. As for the Nazis, the vast majority of Nazi concentration camps were just that, concentration (or internment) camps: the comparison between British internment camps and Dachau or Buchenwald may not be comfortable, but it’s quite appropriate. If anyone says that the British invented concentration camps and subsequently makes it clear that they’re specifically talking about camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, have at it. Otherwise I’m afraid it’s as I said before – you’re attacking a strawman of your own devising.
Patriotism doesn’t necessarily mean you have to feel superior or hate others. Just because I’m originally from India and love the country doesn’t mean I hate Pakistan. Just because I love England doesn’t mean I think they’re better than the Scottish (I think I like the people there more) or the French. It is simply a like for your immediate surroundings and the desire to make them better.
Basing patriotic zeal on feelings of xenophobia or superiority simply means you’ll keep trying to find one enemy after another. That whole ideology becomes fixated on someone to bash in the way that for a long time Pakistani identity was based around bashing India and vice versa (though its slowly changing).
And lastly, your point about the British empire would also imply that Germans could never really feel patriotic because any feeling would imply that they approved of the holocaust and Germany’s “glorious past” in the same way that Britain was responsible for millions of deaths around the world during its empire (if you think I’m exaggerating read up on the Bengal famine).
Just telling it how the rest of the world see it . . .
Phil E, you said “the Brownshirts spontaneously rounded up Communists, Jews, and other people the cut of whose jib they didn’t like”. That’s not remotely what the (British) army did in South Africa, so your claim that there is no essential difference completely fails. My point is that you are repeating an old propaganda claim which is simply false. (The camps in South Africa proved pretty awful bloody things, but that is not your point.)
Someone once said that all internet debates ultimately turn into questions of semantics. I suspect we’ve reached that point.
The disagreement seems to be about the definition of concentration camp. Both myself and, I think, Phil are using it in the original sense of “place where government concentrates particular section of society it wants out of the way.” The British were undeniably the first to do this.
But DM is arguing that it the British did not invent the concentration camp because they didn’t operate them on the Nazi model. Did the British intend for the South African camps to be death camps? Probably not. Did people die there? Yes (lots, I seem to recall).
But nonetheless – noone’s been claiming that the British invented the death camp. But they did invent the concentration camp. Hence the “strawman of your own devising” stuff.
Nosemonkey:
When you say that Habeas Corpus was passed into law by a Scotsman do you mean Charles II?
What with the Blair regime merrily dismantling every last vestige of due process and English common law, I’ve found myself clinging to a ludicrously romanticised view of England worthy of Arthur Mee. I am thoroughly guilty of bewailing that 2005 marked the end of 790 years of Habeas Corpus in the full knowledge that it was not extended to the general populace until 1679.
Scream: “The British were undeniably the first to do this” is bollocks too. The first to do “this” in modern times, as I said in my first comment, were Spain (in Cuba) and the USA (in the Philipines). Why can’t you accept that you are repeating a falsehood? You were wrong. No great offence, except when you fail to correct it. I I too believed, for many years, that what you said was right, but I happened to find out that it isn’t.
I will give you that Britain wasn’t the first and was stealing an idea from Spain and the US (not something I knew before this debate, I’ll admit).
Nonetheless I fail to see exactly how the fact that the government of the day didn’t describe the Boer camps as concentration camps stops them from being just that.
Half way there. Then we do reach semantics, I suppose. If by “concentration camp” you mean a place where you lock up your party’s domestic political enemies without judicial process – which was your account of the Nazi meaning of the term – then the British, and American, and Spanish camps weren’t concentration camps. If you mean something else, then they might have been, depending on what that something else happens to be. When Churchill had Italians temporarily locked up on the Isle of Man, was that a “concentration camp”? FDR’s internment camps for ethnic-Japanese US citizens? Stalin’s Gulag? The Black Hole of Calcutta? WWII POW camps? Guantanemo Bay? Robbin Island? What on earth would be the point of using one term to cover such a vast variety of circumstances when it would be the opposite of critical thinking to do so?
And, if we get into the essence of what a concentration camp is, we find that Peter the Great got there about two hundred years earlier, when he rounded up the obstructive population of Livonia after his invasion and stuck then into forced labour camps.
It might, I think, help to distinguish between patriotism, love of, or at least attachment to, one’s native country (however defined), and the political ideology of nationalism. The former is probably a pretty universal human emotion. The latter is a political ideology that grew out of German Romanticism and is, for good historical reasons, very un-British. It’s the impetus that led, on the one hand, C19th speakers of German and Italian to say that there were such things as the German or Italian nation, quite apart from the various principalities and dutchies where people mostly spoke these languages, and that all the German- and Italian speakers should get together as political entities. On the other hand, it led people like the Hungarians and Irish to say that there was an Hungarian or Irish identity that was far more valid than that of being subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who happened to speak Hungarian (at least to the servants) or West Britons. The English have never been in that position, or at least not in recent history, so have never needed such an ideology. And a British ‘nationalism’ is an oxymoron, since the whole point about Britain is that it’s a union of separate countries.
Pace Devil’s Kitchen, patriotism, or pride in your country, doesn’t involve thinking it’s superior to anywhere else. Most of us love, and are proud of, our families but few of us would seriously try to maintain that our children are superior to all other children or that our wife is more beautiful than anyone else’s. You love and are proud of your country because it’s your country, surely, rather than because you’ve actually sat down and, after a serious consideration of the respective merits of various places, come the happy conclusion that yours is the best one on offer. We British know that we’ve won the first prize in life’s lottery; we don’t have to convince anyone else of the fact (and, indeed, it’s pretty un-British to remind foreigners of their misfortune). That sort of thing is all very well and necessary for countries that, like the USA and the former USSR (and, to a lesser extent, France) are built on an idea — that all men are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example — which others ought to share. Britain, as are many other countries, is built on no such thing; people are British through an accident of birth or because they’ve voluntarily accepted the rights and obligations of being British subjects (a more helpful term, I think, than citizen, at least in this context) and that’s it.
Being proud of who you are doesn’t mean you think you’re superior to everyone else — that’s the sort of mistake we leave to the French and the Americans and all others, who, for whatever historical reason, feel they have to justify their existence and way of life to anyone else.
When talking about British identity, I find it strange that most people miss out two important concepts: citizenship and geography.
I am a Bruneian. This isn’t because of my race, religion, language, culture or values I adhere to. I identify myself as a Bruneian because I have a Bruneian passport. Moreover, I was born and raised in Brunei and although I may settle in the UK, there will always be a bond between myself and that land.
I suspect that most British people of ethnic origins define their Britishness in the same way i.e. “I am British because I was born ‘ere”
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