What should they know of England, who only England know?
– Rudyard Kipling, "The English Flag" (1903)
For people are different and so are nations
You can borrow ideas, but you can’t borrow situations."
– Billy Bragg, "North Sea Bubble"(1991)
British Minister of Higher Education Bill Rammell recently unveiled plans to promote "British values" through new citizenship classes to be taken by school students aged 11 to 16. Central among such values, Rammell identified free speech, democracy, liberty and fair play. "The vibrant, diverse communities we have in Britain are a cause for celebration," he added, "but we need to embed greater understanding of our values and what our society expects from all its citizens."
Our values. Our society. The implied emphasis was impossible to miss. In this "we/them" vision of the nation, just who did the government think was in need of "greater understanding"? In part, at least, Rammell’s scheme is a response to last summer’s London bombings and the associated fear that support for Islamic radicalism is on the rise in Britain. "There is reason to think that… students are being exposed more than any of us would like to wrong-headed influences, under the name of religion," Rammell explained. "In particular, exposed to teachings that either explicitly condone terrorism, or foster a climate of opinion which is at least sympathetic to terrorists’ motivation."
So there we are. The classrooms of Britain have become the latest theatre of combat in the so-called "war on terror." This prospect has alarmed some critics of Tony Blair’s Labour government. "This kind of state-sponsored flag-waving stemming from a ministerial order rather than a natural impulse," argued the Daily Mail, "belongs to totalitarian regimes rather than British democracy." Rammell remains unmoved. "None of this is about silencing voices," he replied. "It is quite legitimate to voice concern, dissent, frustration, even anger. That must be at the heart of our democracy."
Rammell is right. The legitimacy of dissent – the right to revolt, even – lies at the heart of western democracy. Indeed, the idea of the modern nation itself can be traced back to two revolutionary moments.
The first occurred in the 1770s, when American colonists rebelled against a sovereign power whose legitimacy – specifically its right to collect tax revenue – they no longer recognized. The Declaration of Independence subsequently rooted the new republic on a foundation of "certain inalienable rights," notably "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The second moment came a decade later, in 1789, when French revolutionaries overthrew the bloated Bourbon monarchy in the name of the people and founded their own republic on the ideals of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."
Over the next two centuries, those same ideals fuelled countless new nationalist movements across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Each one was different, reflecting its specific historical and cultural context, but all shared the basic idea that "the people" and "the nation" were one and the same thing. And as such, it was the people, and not this or that particular government, who ultimately determined the boundaries of legitimacy when it came to the expression of "concern, dissent, frustration, even anger."
And yet here was a problem. Just who were "the people"? After all, revolutions cannot continue forever, and eventually the unifying fight against an oppressive regime must give way to more mundane reasons for a group of people to identify themselves as a single nation. In short, what is it that unites them among themselves and differentiates them from others?
In the 19th century and for much of the 20th, ethnic nationalism provided the answer. What bonded a particular collection of people together as a nation was a combination of factors – common ethnicity, language, territory, history, culture, religion, etc. – sufficient to give them a distinct identity. Thus Germans were Germans because they spoke the same language (more or less), told the same sorts of stories about themselves (for the most part), ate the same kind of food (sometimes) and shared common hopes for their future as a nation.
If such ethnic nationalism sounds a bit vague, that’s because it lacked any objective reality. Some 19th century thinkers tried to root national characteristics in dubiously biological concepts of race and blood, but in the end, nationalism was always a subjective identity. In short, you were as German as you felt or believed yourself to be. Or as historian Ernest Gellner put it, "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist."
By the late 1800s, ethnic nationalism had spawned new forms of patriotism – such as jingoism – that paid barest lip service to the old revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality. Instead, nationalist fervour now justified rival imperialist claims among European powers, claims backed up by a rising wave of militarism. It would take two world wars and more than 50 million casualties to convince politicians that the price of a global order based on competing ethnic nationalisms was simply too high to pay.
And so, in the dust and rubble of the Second World War, the United Nations came into existence. The UN, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signalled the start of a new era, declaring the ideals of the American and French revolutions to be the heritage of all humanity, not just a few privileged nations.
There were still some problems. Were those ideals – liberty, equality and so on – really universal goals, or were they instead the product of specific (i.e. western) situations? And what, if anything, was to replace ethnic nationalism as a way of uniting different people together as a nation? Or were we really on the verge of a post-national world?
With the end of the Cold War and breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, such questions were far from academic. Ethnic bloodbaths in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia ended 50 years of relative peace in Europe, raising fears of a return to August 1914. Alarmed by this revival of ethnic nationalism, a number of writers dusted off the old idea of civic nationalism, an ideal dating back to Ancient Greece. Among these was Michael Ignatieff, who in Blood and Belonging (1993) denounced ethnic nationalism and instead promoted civic nationalism for its emphasis on rationalism, objectivity and collective support for the law. "The only guarantee that ethnic groups will live together side by side in peace," Ignatieff argued, "is shared loyalty to a state strong enough, fair enough, equitable enough to command their obedience."
It is this sort of "shared loyalty" that the British government hopes to promote through its new proposals. Yet can those values be taught in a classroom, or is it only by action and example that a sense of civic nationalism will be instilled among a diverse people? And just how far are Rammell and Blair prepared to tolerate "dissent, frustration and anger" if the British people reject their plans? |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.