What Does it Mean, This England?

Today, they say, is St George's day.

St George.
Slayer of Dragons.

St George.
Whoever he was.

But to many, he is the spirit of England, England, the brave little knight that stands up to Dragons, the Boudicca spirit, the Alfred the Great spirit, the Queen Elizabeth spirit, the Churchill spirit.
Be the dragons Napoleon, Hitler, or the EU.

A lot of English bloggers are 'flying the flag' today.
But whose flag is it?
What is English nationalism?
Who are the English?
What is nationalism?

It's not an easy question. England has a funny history. England was a born as a nation, long before any others, so we take it for granted. Other countries have evolved towards their nationhood. National identity, the way the English see it, has been more recent, an invention of the age of enlightenment, when people demanded that they, not kings, rule themselves. The feudal monarchies of the middle ages became the national monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They in turn, become the monolingual democratic republics of modern Europe. The nation-state. A people united by common language, common history, common government. A social construct. The French had to cut the head off their king to discover that they, not he, was France. Up till then they had been Bretons, Normans, Poitevins, Provencals.

And the radical politicians of the nineteenth century created the model state to serve the dynamics of capitalism. It did not serve the brave new world of the railway age for so many small states to survive. So, the ultimate unit of government, should be the highest unit possible; people who understood eachother's language.

But where is the line crossed? Because nationalism had another side to it. And in it's early days, the boundaries were- as they still are- blurred.
One people. One race. One state.

This is our land, this is our people. We, the speakers of the native tongue are bonded to this soil till the end of time. You, the interloper, are not.
But it's not that easy, as European history showed. What of the isolated Saxon communities who had lived for ever in Rumania, or Russia? What of Sorbs and other Slavic peoples lingering on as isolated communities in parts of Germany? Where was their homeland? Were they to be ever foreigners in the land they had always lived in?

And what of the Ashkenazi Jews, a European people by any definition (they have lived in Europe longer than say, the Turks)? No land for them to call home.

The fact is, there isn't really any line. The logic of racism, ultimately, is the logic of nationalism. Racism, is nationalism put in simple terms, it is the gauntlet with the velvet glove removed.

The fact remains, nationalism cannot be anything other than an exclusive concept. It says 'This is MY country, you only live here by OUR sufferance. We judge you not on your contribution, but on your blood.'



And Englishness is exactly that. Because Englishness remains an ethnicity.

I'm British. Of course I am. I possess a British passport. But I can't claim to be English. I have English blood in me, but it is a tiny part of my make up. Go back a few generations, and a good number of European nations are laying claim to a piece of me. But I define my ethnicity as being Irish, because that's the community I identify with.
I can never be truly English. You can't be naturalised as an Englishman. You can be black British or Asian British, you can't be Black English, or Asian English.

Yes, I wear an England shirt to support the England team. It is the team that represents the land I happen to live in, but the team doesn't represent Englishness. It includes Black players, it represents a geographical region people happened to be born in, and that, yes, I can identify with that, I was born here too, I've always lived here. Who else would be my national team?

And yes, I'd never live anywhere else. But not because of any of the reasons championed by the Little Englanders. I love it for all the reasons they despise.
I love it, because in England, most of us have grown beyond caring what colour someone's skin is, or whether the dish we're eating was first invented on this island, or a far away subcontinent. If it's good, we embrace it, if it's bad, we don't.
Just take a look at France to see how NOT to do the whole different people living together thing.

I used to be quite Anti-Europe. In some ways, I still am, but my perspective has changed. Europe is bad for Britain, yes. But not because the idea is wrong, the idea is sound. In today's world, little insular nations just aren't viable. We DO need to co-operate, and in the present situation, a federal government for each geo-political unity makes sense. One for the Americas, one for sub-Saharan Africa, one for the Arab world, and yes, one for Europe.

What is wrong with the EU, is that it is dominated by Napoleonic ideas of government. It uses the government gives rights to the people model, not the people give rights to the government model, the best of all the concepts the English people gave to the world.

I daresay the West Saxons and The Mercians mourned the loss of their identity in the new Englishness that was formed in the resistance to the Danes.
But hey, we all understand eachothers languages now in this continent- or most of us speak English, anyway.

We build our houses the same, our roads the same, the differences are disappearing. How French are even the French any more?

England, like Wessex, like Tuscany, like Prussia, like Aquitaine, it's part of history. A historical state that evolved to become the British Empire, before changing the whole world. And now, it's gone. If we're honest. As has Germany, as has Sweden, really, it's the nation state that is now the artificial concept, a concept used to divide, a concept used to promote the rights of one lot of people over another. 'More of my dead ancestors lived here than yours'.

Nations, they were never real. They were groups of people speaking similar dialects owing obedience to a common ruler, the next stage up from a tribal system.



To be honest, I'd like flag waving become something we just do at sporting events. If nationalism can be reduced to simple team sentiment, all well and good.

But it's time we started having our primary loyalty being to the DNA that all our species hold in common, rather than some nineteenth century mumbo jumbo about a mystical bond between land and ethnicity.

This is the space age, not the steam age.