Band of Brothers – Recovering the English Nation
June 14th, 2012
This, very understandably infuriated the Scots, less so the Welsh and Protestant Irish, but a determined effort was made by the British government to insist on the use of the United Kingdom in relation to the European Economic Community (EEC) particularly in the run-up to the first pan-European Parliament election in 1979.
In fact, one of the confusing curiosities about the two principal British Isles is the variety of names which have been used to describe them and their inhabitants. In Roman times, AD43 to 410, the largest island off the coast of North-West Europe was referred to as Britannia, its principal neighbour being Hibernia, both descriptions surviving in various present day songs and names[2]. The appellation “Great Britain” was first used in an official document to describe the territory of England, Scotland and Wales at the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, to distinguish it from Brittany in France, sometimes referred to as “Little Britain”. ‘Britain’ is an alternative political description of the United Kingdom: its citizens in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales are therefore described as British.
It is commonplace for politicians to refer to the citizens of Britain, France, Australia and so on as the British, French, Australian “people”, but this is really an alternative to “citizen”. If British citizens emigrate to Australia, or vice versa, probably most will in time be incorporated into the terms Australian or British people[3]. However, there is a more profound meaning of the world “people” which is independent of the state, and therefore more enduring. In Bede’s History of the English Church and People[4], an English ‘state’ did not exist, and ‘people’ is a rendering of the Latin “gens, gentis”, i.e. a people marked out from others by common race and language, which in Bede’s clear view are the Germanic settlers of the preceding three centuries which he labelled Jutes, Angles[5] and Saxons. Their different names referred to the different maritime parts of North Germany and Denmark from which they came, as one might today refer to Lancastrians and Devonians.
So what of the word ‘nation’ and its derivative ‘nationality’ as in ‘national identity’? What is meant by nation-state?
The five elements of People, Nation and State
In the United Nations when we look at its 193 member states and reflect on the huge changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, we can see that for independent states which have lasted 5 or 6 generations or more, there are five features which are present in some degree and that at least three of these features must be strongly shared by its citizens if it is to endure. Besides independent states, there are ‘nations’ within states and ‘peoples’ which may be in several states. A state with only one nation is termed a nation-state.
The five features of what we may call ‘nationism’ are: common language, compact geography, common race, common history (experience), and common culture in the form of laws and institutions deriving from its people. Obviously these interact with each other, but we can see that until very recently Britain scored about four and a half on this scale and it was (and is) generally seen from outside as a very stable multi-nation state. Prior to the Act of Union in 1707 England as a single nation-state scored fundamentally 5 on the scale.
Modern Switzerland has no single common language, but scores highly on the other 4 elements. The British Empire of settlement – broadly the Crown Commonwealth of today[6] – moved gradually from being a single national entity in the 18th and 19th centuries (say 4 on the scale) to a number of sovereign states today linked only through the Crown – as the original British races have been joined by settlers from other European countries[7] and the fact that the fundamentally disparate geography has meant increasingly different experiences (i.e. history) has greatly reduced the shared nationism score. By contrast, the Soviet Union, whose individual nations only ever had a shared score of about 2 and were held together by brute force, fell apart when that brute force was removed in the early 1990s.