Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

THE CASE FOR NICER NATIONALISM

STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE | November 9th 2007

recursion/flickr

You can be a Scottish (or Irish or Tibetan) nationalist, and the world will enthuse with you; but try being an English one and the world (to say nothing of the Scots) will give you a dark look, complains Stephen Hugh-Jones ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

What do we mean by English? Much of the world, Americans included, uses the word as if it simply meant British. In the early 1970s I explored a ruined French farmyard whose gateway still bore, just legible, a slogan painted by its occupiers 30 years earlier: Gott strafe England. Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast should have been so lucky. But from inside the United Kingdom, this usage sounds very odd. And increasingly so.

I'm prompted to these thoughts by the extraordinary Indian summer (there's another national adjective of diverse meanings) that the English south has enjoyed this year. We cannot match New England, with its fiery maples. But the autumn woods on the Sussex-Hampshire borders have been, oaks and beeches above all, a tapestry such as I've never seen of green, yellow, copper, bronze and gold, and, here too, occasional flaming reds.

And what a sense of place, and gratitude for it, they give me. I was brought up in Scotland. I'd happily live again in France. I'm an urban being, having spent most of my adult life in London. Yet when I see the rare splendour of these trees, the church spire amid them (not that I go there), the lanes and small, hedged fields, the Hereford cattle (all right, or Friesian) and blackfaced sheep--yes, even the plethora of pheasants, albeit bred for a slaughter I dislike by sportsmen whom I've little in common with--I feel profoundly English. This is where I belong.

That's a spirit much mocked these days. Middle-brow writing a century ago was full of England and English feeling. Yet that has largely gone, or been transmuted into a feeling for Britain. Today you can be a Scottish (or Irish or Tibetan) nationalist, and the world will enthuse with you; but be an English one and--if it's heard of Englishness at all, or has any idea that that is not identical with Britishness, which mostly it hasn't--it will mutter words like cricket, vicar, Grantchester, fox-huntin' and cream teas, or hint darkly that what you really mean is you don't like people whose faces are brown or black. Or indeed, if you go to Scotland, may greet you with a frostiness, or worse, that could make you think Edinburgh was Dublin in 1916 (where, for the record, oddly few of the Irish thought the largely justifiable Easter rising was justified at all).

Of course this isn't true of all the world, nor all Scots. And many of those muttering will be English themselves. That truly is absurd: to many Englishmen, it's fine to belong to almost any nation on earth and be proud of it (America perhaps, in their eyes, excepted), yet to say I'm English and happy to be so is at best laughable and at worst next to bellowing the Horst Wessel song at a bar-mitzvah.

I think the world, and those of my fellow English, mistaken, both in historical fairness and, more important, about present-day fact. Patriotism has been called "the last refuge of the scoundrel". So it can be. But as a generality, that is nonsense. The feeling is deep-rooted in most of us. Very deep. You can be an American and deplore this or that aspect of your country or its policies; and yet, as I surely would, sing the "Star-Spangled Banner" with a lump in your throat.

I once on television saw Jessye Norman singing the "Marseillaise" in Paris, as France celebrated the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille. As a performance, it was ludicrous: the unfortunate diva, swathed in a huge pennant-shaped tricolour, had to sing slower and slower as band and crowd fell behind, till the lively anthem sounded more like a funeral dirge (or "God save the Queen"). But I was moved, and if I were French, my goodness I'd have felt proud.

Regional, local or ethnic 'nationalism' seems to me as natural. And sometimes as significant. I'm disinclined either to proclaim or apologise for the right or wrong that we English have done in past centuries: that was then, this is now. And much of it anyway was done in Britain's name by Scotsmen and others. But to ignore the political potential of any loyalty is folly.

Strangely, for a nation once so proud of itself, we British--yes, I'm that sort of nationalist too--have often underestimated the patriotism of others. We did it in Ireland, India, Egypt, Cyprus (and Malvinas-seeking Argentina), to go no farther afield or longer back. Dominant majorities do it at their peril, as the English so long discounted the feelings of many Scots. Northern Ireland's Protestants made that mistake, so for decades did Anglo Canada.

But the converse also can be true. Majorities have their feelings too. As Scottish separatism has grown, English nationalism is rising. Some politicians see votes to be won in it; not least, our Conservatives' leader, David Cameron, his party beaten three times on the trot and with little to lose in Scotland anyway. The results may not be pretty.

That's true, though, of any strong sentiment. I'm happy for anyone to feel Scottish or Irish, or Ruritanian or red-headed for that matter. Just allow me to be English, even if that feeling is spurred merely by the passing colour of some leaves. I don't want to stick the red cross of St George on a pole in my front garden, still less beat some rival football hooligan round the head with it. But what I feel is what I feel, OK? One can do worse.