Territorial animals

This follows last week’s reflections on the patriotic predicament  to which a global dimension is also added that explains how the new ‘progressive’ British neo-nationalist discourse works. On the clip iconic folk singer Billy Bragg ‘repeats’ Gordon Brown. More next week.

Remember when on the wake of the London bombings Tony Blair said The rules of the game have changed? Despite the apparent dramatic depth of such lapidary a statement, the question was then and still is now as follows: have they though? Were they not already radically changed under the auspices of the post 9/11 US led war on terror? Or were they, really, even there and then? This is what, in the heat of the debate, Slavoj Žižek wrote in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London, New York:Verso, 2002, pp 46-7):

So what about the phrase that reverberates everywhere: ‘Nothing will ever be the same after September 11’? Significantly, this phrase is never further elaborated – it is just an empty gesture of saying something ‘deep’ without really knowing what we want to say. So our first reaction to it should be: Really? What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11? What if – as the massive display of American patriotism seems to demonstrate- the shattering experience of September 11 ultimately served as a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to its basics’, to reassert its basic ideological co-ordinates against the antiglobalists and other critical temptations?

Talking of phrases that reverberate, to one’s mind come also earlier inputs into the cultural debate by always polemical but equally acute Conservative maverick Norman Tebbitt . After all, the very apparent insidiousness behind his legendary Cricket Testshould only remind us of a fundamentally depressing rather than racist exhortation. One, namely, that coerced British citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent into choosing between two equally mediocre sporting teams. On the other hand, however, as Jaqueline Rose stated in States of Fantasy(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p.149) Norman Tebbitt turned out to be quite right, for instance, in explaining Tony Blair’s first 1997 electoral victory:

Many traditional Labour voters realised that they shared our [Conservative] values – that man is not just a social but also a territorial animal: it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.

What is important to understand regarding New Labour’s increasing descent into ugly nationalism is that under the concealing discursive guise of seeking integrative and participative cultural policies through the supposedly healthy medium of ‘progressive’ British national identity, these new proposals also respond to a specific defensive framework whereby the process of globalisation seems to be perceived more as a cultural and political threat than the economic opportunity we are often told to believe in: a widely held feeling, let’s face it, that under the present circumstances of deep financial crisis no amount of gimmicks as to the leading role Gordon Brown is apparently taking to save global capitalism can conceal.