The ethnic/civic divide

Barack Obama is about to lead a country with millions and millions of houses the front gardens of which are decorated with American flags. Gordon Brown’s own brand of patriotic fervour would like to see something similar happening in his country. More about it next time. This time, our topic as such is not the good international news following the catastrophe of a global financial quasi-meltdown. There is plenty of it anywhere else. Our topic is still how Gordon Brown goes on about his mission of articulating a sense of ‘progressive’ British national identity. To do so, almost three years down the line, I still take as reference the symptomatic keynote speech he delivered in the Fabian (Society’s) Future of Britishness Conference (14 January 2006). This week I go academic and I  do a bit of name-dropping. Next week I’ll look at it from a more political angle.

The first thing to do when discussing Gordon Brown’s own brand of excluding nationalism is not to be distracted with the would-be ‘anti-nationalist’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ babble to which the whole political spectrum (from civilised conservatives to centre and left “liberals” not to mention ‘radical’ intellectuals) have us accustomed; – which ironically include Gordon Brown’s own highly anti-nationalist and cosmopolitan civic-patriotic rhetoric. After all, as Zizek tells us often, ample evidence exists of how by way of constantly and adamantly refusing and mocking nationalism they only show the fascination that nationalism exerts upon them.

Gordon Brown’s emphasis on, and actual contents attached to his British national building project will help explaining this ambiguity. In this respect, the very repetition in that famous speech of a series of words quite loaded semantically such as the creation of a British national community clears the way for a conventional reading of its underlying meaning via some well-established scholarly texts on the topic of nationalism.

Is it not be the case then that the new British imagined community (Benedict Anderson, 1983) ultimately rests on the creation (Ernest Gellner, 1983, 1987) and invention of [a] tradition (Eric Hobsbawn (1983, 1990) that seeks to prevent The Breaking up of Britain (Tony Nairn, 1977) both from within (i.e.: Scottish, say, ‘local(ist), ‘tribal petty-nationalism’, un-mixed self-centered religious communities…) and from without (global terrorism, illegal asylum seekers, uncontrolled emigration…)? Is it not the case, likewise, that the very boundaries of ethnic nationalism and civic patriotism (Anthony Smith, 1981, Walter Connor, 1994) are ambiguously blurred, to say the least, rather than clearly defined in Gordon Brown’s project of British ethno-patriotic revival?

Certainly, Gordon Brown dismisses in an explicit way some of the very routinely “must-refute” teachings of German romantic Johann Gottfried von Herder’s ‘cultural nationalism’ mainly presented in Materials for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784). Simultaneously, Gordon Brown duly embraces some of the just as routinely “must adopt” slogans on ‘civic-political patriotism’ by French liberal Ernest Renan in more or less the exact terms of that celebrated lecture What is a Nation?  he delivered at the Sorbonne University, Paris, as far backa as 1882. However, while Gordon Brown explicitly rejects some of the ugly ‘objective’ factors, criteria or components such as an overly religious foundation or, most particularly, an ethnic(ist) approach to national building which are usually associated with the German tradition (i.e.: this British patriotism is, in my view, founded not on ethnicity nor race), he, nevertheless, complies to Herder’s romantic portrayal of the nation as a positive focus of identity and, at the same time, that is to say, the central piece of cultural nationalism-, as paramount.

Yet Gordon Brown’s reference to language is not only delivered as an explicit statement: to help integration – for which we should look at expanding mandatory English training. By the same token, this constraining reference to language also constitutes the ultimate bearer of an implicit assumption sustaining the whole ideological edifice of British national unity. In other words, Gordon Brown’s keenness to follow Ernest Renan’s own liberal plea for a person’s identity being rooted in universal humanity and individual ’subjective’ will seems rather immaterial as the explicit call for mandatory language tuition brings the whole argument full circle to the very disavowed point of departure:

Language invites people to unite, -Renan says- but it does not force them to do so (…). The political importance attached to languages derives from their being regarded as a sign of race.

Is this not an instance, therefore, of how by seeking the best of both worlds one may end up producing the worst of all possible middle-of-the-road mixtures? There is no escaping from this fact: in Gordon Brown’s circular argument, the English language IS indeed the language of the Anglo-Saxon race that others are forced to learn.