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• Title: England's Occluded Nationalism: State and Nation in English Identity (Nationalism and Post-Nationalism)
• Author : Arena Journal
• Release Date : January 22, 1999
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 209 KB

Description

English nationalism, like English Common law, is difficult to pin down, but it clearly exists. The English are becoming increasingly aware of this particular identity, an identity which is emerging out of the end of Empire, the rise of the European Union and, most notably, the process of Scottish and Welsh devolution. If the union state of Britain, built around Protestantism, Empire and war with a foreign foe, submerged the nations on the periphery, then it just as equally obscured the nation which formed the majority of the population of the British Isles. For the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, it was always easy to discern where 'England' ended and 'Britain' began. Not so for the English, however. For centuries such distinctions seemed like hair-splitting, as England became shorthand for Britain and its apparatus of state. This tendency in English thought to conflate England and Britain, can be analysed via Tom Nairn's concept of 'occluded multi-nationalism' (1) which characterizes the British state. According to Nairn, 'Britain', a state-based identity, politically dominated by England and discouraging nationalism in its constituent nations, obscured the identity of Scotland and Wales. However, England's own 'occluded nationalism' is not only a result of its position as the demographically and culturally dominant nation within the United Kingdom, but also due to the relationship between state and nation in English nationalism. This is not to argue that English national identity is entirely imposed on the English people from above. Nevertheless, an important theme in English nationalism conflates the institutions of the state with the embodiment of the nation. This becomes problematic when attempting to articulate a concept of 'Englishness' and to tease that identity away from 'Britishness'. The importance of this re-emerging identity is not to be under-estimated. Perceptions of self, whether group or individual, help people to make sense of and interpret their material and cultural surroundings. As a sense of British identity appears to decline, it is apparently being replaced by allegiances to just such national identities previously obscured by Britain's 'occluded multi-nationalism'. It is these allegiances which underpin New Labour's program of modernization of the British political system via a process of devolution of power to Scotland and Wales. However, such a process is asymmetrical in that no such power has as yet been devolved to England as a whole or to the English regions. The centrality of nationalism and national identity in current British politics creates problems for England. Much less thought has gone into understanding the distinction between 'Britain' and 'England' than has been the case in Scotland or Wales. This being said, the complexity of post-imperial English society makes any articulation of an emerging 'English' identity fraught with tensions and complexities ill at ease with an encompassing concept of a national identity. England's Nationalism

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