Some thoughts on nationality.

[andrewducker]

I was reading a piece here about the Liberal Left needing to define Englishness, and how it shouldn't leave this to the right-wing nationalist types.

And I utterly, totally, and unapologetically, disagree.

I specifically _do not want_ Englishness to be defined.*

England is a chunk of rock where a wide variety of people live, who have a wide variety of different things in common with different chunks of each other, but nothing which binds together every single one, except for the things that also bind together every person on the planet.

The second you define some things as “English” you define everything else as “Not English” and you tell some people that they do not belong here. And much though some unpleasant part of me would like to define, say, the BNP as being Not English and kick them out – the truth is that this is as much their home as it is mine, and declaring any of us as “Not being _really_ English” is just another way of making people feel bad, of telling them that they are inherently in the wrong.

I _loathe_ the idea of culture as a controlling force. Of dividing people into groups that are This or That and declaring that we should support Thisness over Thatness. It is the exact opposite of what I want from my politicians. It's why I find the idea of multiculturalism disturbing, when it is used to mean that "There is a place for Culture X and a place for Culture Y.", because it erases all the people that are now lumped into these cultures despite not being a perfect fit for either of their ideals.

I'm all for understanding of _people_ and their differences, and their similarities. If you defined me as English (and, let's face it, I grew up there, and you can see the culture stamped onto me), then that would tell you a variety of things about me, and miss out on a huge amount which doesn't fit into whichever definition you use.

If you want to become a British Citizen then you have to take a test which asks you a variety of questions about life in the UK, and every time I've seen people who were born here take the test they've failed miserably, because that's _not_ what being British is about. If anything, being British is about not being the kind of person who cares about any of that stuff. Except, of course, for the people that do - who are just as British as the rest of us.

Because being British just means having the piece of paper that says you were born here, or chose it as your home. And frankly, that's all it _should_ mean.



*Or Britishness. They aren't interchangeable, after all. I know I switch to Britishness for the last two paragraphs, but that's because that's the test you take.

Comments

[ironjeff]

It's good to see Amercia* isn't the only country whose citizens wouldn't pass the citizenship test required of immigrants!

* Apparently Mitt Romney's political team are among those who would not pass the test!

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

But - it's worked so well for the French.

[andrewducker]

With their delightful National Front who got 18% of the vote last time around, and their departments to declare what words are officially French. Brrrrr.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

+1,000,000.

Europe and visas mean that even "chose it as your home" doesn't apply - you could be from any nation. The only thing the piece of paper really says is that you might have been born here, or one of your parents might.

[andrewducker]

Kinda. If you have British citizenship, but are from Indonesia originally, then you probably did choose Britain as your home, even though it means you are free to work in France if you choose.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

In Watching the English by Kate Fox, the author (a social anthropologist) spends about 400 pages studying how English people behave in various situations and trying to put it into words in some sort of helpful and insightful way. (One experiment involved walking along a street, purposely bumping into people and counting how many of them apologised even though it clearly wasn't their fault.) She discusses all the unwritten rules of social interaction we all gradually pick up as we go along, and also studies the various rules of etiquette emerging around relatively new technology like mobile phones. I found it all very interesting, and it's probably time I reread it.

And much though some unpleasant part of me would like to define, say, the BNP as being Not English and kick them out
I would certainly say that they've fundamentally Missed The Point about being English, but then my idea of being English includes a sort of gruff but friendly inclusivity at its core - a kind of "we're English, and we'd rather not make any fuss about it, but if you'd like to be English too, then good for you". Perhaps I've missed the point too, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

[andrewducker]

Yes, my English is somewhat like that. But I accept that everyone has their own English :->

I have Watching The English on my reading list. Jeremy Paxman's "The English" is quite good, IIRC.

[mair_in_grenderich]

Several chunks of rock, in fact.


-- Mair, on the Isles of Scilly.

[andrewducker]

It's just irregular, and bits of the rock are covered by the sea :->

[makyo.livejournal.com]

The late, much-missed blue_condition wrote this a few years ago, trying to put into words what being English meant to him. I think I'd agree with pretty much all of it, although my list might differ in some minor details. (I really like his remark about "villages with names that sound like elderly upper-class homosexuals and vice versa".)

[cosmolinguist]

Aw, thank you for reminding me of that.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Oh thank-you - I'd missed that at the time.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Thanks Nick. I missed that one first time round somehow. Curiously, I was just thinking of Pete... there was some LeMans footage on TV (we went there together, IIRC in 99) and I just suddenly really missed the daft old bugger.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

"every time I've seen people who were born here take the test they've failed miserably, because that's _not_ what being British is about"

But the test isn't about the CONTENT of the test. It's a test of "can you pass this arbitrary beaurocratic hoop by (a) realising that you need to buy the book of answers and (b) memorising it". Presumably if the test were about things that WERE typically British (is there a country on earth where people automatically memorise the demographics of its largest subregions to the nearest one percent? "how to queue" might be more typical) you would equally much think that should not be a requirement.

[naath.livejournal.com]

There would be a practical exam (stand in a queue for ages, strike up appropriate small-talk with fellow queuers after an appropriate length of time, display appropriate responses to queue jumpers, appologise when bumped into etc etc) followed by a brief test of things people really need to know like "how do you register for a GP" and "how do you get your kids into a school" and "you do know that women can ask for a divorce" and stuff like that.

But yeah, it's mostly a test of how much your care about becoming a citizen - demonstrate your care-levels by memorising useless facts! Unfortunate that it is very biased towards people good at memorising disconnected facts.

[cosmolinguist]

There are some attempts at things like "how to queue"; I remember getting a question on what to do if you accidentally spill someone's pint.

All it really does is ensure you can speak English (or Welsh, the only other language it's offered in), use computers, and pay lots of money. It is an odious, xenophobic, soulless relic of the last Labour government and I fervently wish to see it done away with.

[crm.livejournal.com]

If anyone on the Liberal Left feels a need to define anything to do with nationality as anything other then regressive* and vestigial* then they need go and take a long look at the 'Left' part of there self-definition.

somewhat related:
Somone on facebook posted a flag which was half union jack and half Anarchest Black, to which i responded:
British Anarchesm makes about as much sence as The Church of Athiesm.

* unless such a definition is part of the vital and necissary regulation and judging of 'The Eurovision Song Contest'

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe.

I think Englishness/Britishness is a fuzzy set, nothing you MUST or MUST NOT do/be (other than maybe "say you are English") but if you are most of these things then... and I think it is a different (overlapping) fuzzy set to other nationalities. I think it's important not to loose sight of the fact that other peoples sometimes do things differently, in ways that might seem very odd to us, but are none-the-less not wrong. Saying that Englishness doesn't exist seems to me to be denying some very real differences in the world. But equally trying to pin it down doesn't seem useful.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Britishness is often used in a far more inclusive way than references to Englishness are, other than the obvious inclusion of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. News stories about second-and-beyond generation immigrants tend to refer to them as British rather than English, as far as I can recall without actually checking.

I'm from England and, much as you are, am unmistakably English but I consider myself as both British and English since both matter to me in slightly different ways. I wouldn't really want to be anything else.

Other than being a stolidly punctual German, perhaps. I'd like that, I imagine.

Although if there were separate Scottish passports in the future, I'd be interested to see if I counted as dual-nationality at that point!

[andrewducker]

I would imagine that Scotland would do similar things to Ireland, although probably not quite so inclusively (Ireland also offers passports to all NI people).

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I guess there are two levels to this for me, first, the question of nationalism and patriotism, and secondly that of English nationalism and patriotism.

I'm mostly with Orwell on this - that there is a difference between nationalism and patriotism, and that patriotism can be healthy - he says it far better than I can, here: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

Billy Bragg had a crack at defining English patriotism in "The Progressive Patriot" - he certainly defined something that I don't share as a Scot, so probably he did a good job of it.

I also think that the SNP is slightly hamstrung by the "Nationalist" part of their name. I don't think that any party that actively campaigns for more immigration deserves to be in the same category as the BNP...

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

In their way the BNP are actively campaigning for more immigration. They're just campaigning for more immigration from the UK to other countries.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I entirely agree. My favorite quite about nationalism comes from Ken Macleod's novel Engine City:

"'What you are looking at', said Matt, 'is the most obscene and disgusting thing I've seen in centuries. It's a map of the world which happens to be a rectangular sheet of chauvinist shit. Every one of those barbarously, artificially carved-up fragments of the world is tagged with a little rectangle of its own, a bloody badge of shame - a flag! They've got nationalism down there. If they had a virulent strain of bubonic plague instead I'd be happy for them.'" [Engine City page 137].

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

As an expert on fucked up national identity (European, if I *have* to pick), yes. Exactly that. Thank you.

[andrewducker]

My pleasure!

[makyo.livejournal.com]

In case you haven't already seen it, somebody has put together an alternative citizenship test with questions that are much more appropriate to daily life in the UK.

[andrewducker]

9/10!

(Presumably because I can't tell Ant and Dec apart)

Thanks!

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I see why the Liberal_left might be well advised to have a crack at defining Englishness.

If you accept that the concept of Englishness is going to be used as a political construct, no matter how sceptical you are about the use or validity of the concept, it probably pays to have defined it. Even if that’s just to muddy the definition of your opponents.

Englishness just becomes a lose proxy for politically acceptable.

For example – Englishness is about fair play ->-> Therefore if you support England you’ll want to support our policy of stopping people getting unfair benefits.

Englishness is about building the NHS out of the rubble of the Second World War ->-> Therefore if you support England you’ll want to support our policy of not reforming the NHS.

Etc etc.

As to the concept itself I think there are two approaches to defining it (if possible)

Firstly, you could try to discover the quintessence of Englishness. Englishness is this and only this. If you don’t have this no matter what you do have then you don’t have Englishness. I think this is an intrinsically exclusionary approach. This is English. This other thing is not English. Sharp lines between the two.

I’m not so sure being exclusionary is necessarily a bad thing. There are lots of individuals I’d like to not share a label with. Practically, I think defining a quintessence of English (or Scottish or British) looks pretty nigh impossible.

You could go down a bundle of preference of route. I’m imagining a very long list of matched preferences to be scored on a nine point scale.

Do you prefer?
Tea or Coffee,
The Pub or The Café,
Cricket or Baseball,
Being Sickeningly Deferential to Hereditary German Monarchs So Long As No One MAKES You or Being MADE to Be Sickeningly Deferential to A Self-Appointed German Monarch.

You could build up a picture of shared preferences and I guess a Venn diagram would start to show you were Englishness was. But there are a whole bunch of shared experiences layered on top. There are a lot of people who prefer Tea and Cricket to Coffee and Baseball, and some of those people won the Second World War and built the NHS in the 1940’s and some of them kicked the British out, had a bloody civil war and Partition.

Moving deeper than the shared experiences is the shared response to an event. Like a lot of people in the UK I watched the coverage of the car crash that killed Diana Spencer. My response to it was that it was sickeningly deferential and sycophantic but that I was glad I lived in a country where I could say something like that. Others had a different response to the event, viewing it as a national tragedy. My response to Shakespeare is to really enjoy his writing and especially watching or performing his plays. Other’s find his work really inaccessible and painful. Others consider it to be close to the religious experience that defines Englishness. We’d all respond to being cast in Richard III in a different way.

Then I think there are some shared views on processes. (Is processes the right word – I’m not sure?)

Is it okay for some of us to disagree about the coverage of Diana Spencer, Henri Paul and Dodi Fayed’s deaths? Should we all be forced to watch Shakespeare? Should we all be forced to enjoy Shakespeare? Who gets to decide? What is the sanction – mild tutting or death by stoning?

Again, I guess you could build up a picture of the common qualities of those who call themselves and each other English and arrive at a statistical centre of Englishness. That might be an interesting exercise but I’m not sure how it would me identify English people.

[andrewducker]

I think that's rather my point - one could descriptively poll people who currently live in England to find out what they are like, but that doesn't define Englishness in any way apart from the immediate.

And yes, you could use Englishness as a weapon. But that's exactly what I don't want.