Band of Brothers – Recovering the English Nation
June 14th, 2012
A people is not confined to one state whereas a nation probably has to be. The state of Israel includes Jews, of course, but there are more persons identifying themselves as Jewish in the USA and elsewhere than in Israel itself. To be of a “people” seems to require a score of at least 2 on the scale, with common descent (gentis in the Bedian phrase) and language being the most common elements. Examples include the Russian people dispersed in various former Soviet Republics like the Ukraine, or the English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh diasporas in the USA and the Crown Commonwealth.
A “nation” is more distinct than a “people”, ranging from 3 to 4 on the scale and requiring a minimum number – say a million – to sustain distinct cultural features and institutions over at least 6 generations – say 200 years. Present-day examples are the French in Québec, the English and Scottish in England and Scotland respectively, scoring around 4. This is less than 5 because today substantial minorities of the people would not identify themselves or be identified as English in England or Scottish in Scotland[8]. In Northern Ireland there is the Ulster, largely Protestant, people, who wish to remain in the United Kingdom with a substantial largely Roman Catholic people, who wish to join another state, distributed among them. The Basque people in Spain would identify themselves as a nation with a very distinct language and a score of over 4, while Catalonia – with the same race, and a similar language to Spanish, but not so many distinct cultural features – would score around 3.
Overall we can point to peoples and nations sitting within independent states which may today be defined by membership of the United Nations[9]. “Independent states” are to be distinguished from mere ‘states’ as in the USA which may have considerable political autonomy, but do not engage in defence and international diplomacy.
Independent states are the political expressions of one or more peoples and nations. The Versailles settlement in 1919 at the end of the 1st World War took as its principal ideal making the new states in Europe as coincident with its nations as possible on stability grounds, i.e. to have as high a nationist score as possible. It proved impossible however to get much above 3 in some cases in the face of the determination of many of the new states to obtain as much territory for themselves as possible.
Acquiescing in Poland’s taking over large chunks of the Ukraine for instance made for instability in the future since only about half the population east of the Allies’ preferred Curzon line[10] was Polish–speaking and there were few shared institutions or even common lettering. Likewise ‘rewarding’ Italy with German-speaking Austrian Sud-Tirol, and France with German-speaking Alsace, meant decades of border changes and language turmoil.
Britain since 1707 has been an independent state containing two geographically and historically distinct nations, England and Scotland, together with a principality, Wales, administered entirely with England from 1536 right up to Welsh devolution in 1999 when limited powers of self-administration were transferred to a newly established Welsh Assembly. On the nationist scale, Wales probably scores less than 3, given that about 80% speak only English and in the more heavily populated South Wales, the inhabitants are mainly of English descent[11].
Northern Ireland is a province of the United Kingdom and came into being as a result of the Government of Ireland Act 1922, which also established the Irish Free State – now the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland’s turbulent history is a result of its population’s two very distinct peoples – one English-Scots (mainly Protestant in origin) and one Irish (mainly Roman Catholic in sympathy) – which have only recently reached a political accommodation with each other[12]. Prior to the 1922 Act, exhaustive attempts were made to define a compact geographical boundary between the two, i.e. to obtain another point on the ‘nationist’ scale, but this proved impossible.