Entangled Identities

Nations and Europe

Willfried Spohn, Atsuko Ichijo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754643722
• eBook ISBN: 9781351939911
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the way national and European identities are intertwined in old and new member states of the European Union, this volume assembles nine country case studies. Each country has experienced different processes of state formation, nation-building and democratization, thus they have each developed different forms of national identity and different patterns of interaction between national and European identities. The case studies illuminate the similarities and differences in how national and European identities have evolved among the nine countries. Rich in empirical data, the volume examines the historical entanglement of national and European collective identities and is therefore well suited for courses on European studies including European integration and enlargement, international relations and sociology.

Chapter 1
A Balancing Act: British State and Nation Formation and ‘Europe’

Atsuko Ichijo

Introduction

National identity can never be a clear-cut phenomenon but the British case poses an even more complex question in discussing its identity. The question is: what are we looking at? The full name of the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which took its current form in 1922 as a result of Irish independence. Until the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, there were two separate independent states: Great Britain and Ireland. Going back further, until the Union of England and Scotland of 1707, there were two independent kingdoms on the largest island of the British Isles – England and Scotland, although since 1603 both had been ruled by the same monarch. A little further back, Wales was formally incorporated in England in 1536 although it was for long under de facto English rule since the 14^th century. Due to the historical circumstances, the UK has at least four constituent nations: English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. In addition, there are a large number of ethnic minorities, both white and non-white, in the present day UK.¹ The issue of national identity in this polity is indeed complicated.

What I propose to do, in this limited space, is to concentrate on the Anglo-British polity, a fusion of England which has been a dominant force in the British Isles and Britain which came into a formal existence with the Union of 1707. This should allow us to appreciate the complexity of the British reality while acknowledging the dominance of the English perspective in the formation of Britain’s identity and its relationship with Europe.

1. The Formation of Britain: The State and Nation

Great Britain as a state formally came into existence with the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, when the Scottish parliament agreed to vote itself out of existence, and the Westminster, i.e., English parliament was refashioned as the British parliament. While England and Scotland were independent states until the union, whether the English or the Scots constituted a fully fledged nation by then is a matter of controversy which lies outside the scope of this chapter. The idea of Britain or Great Britain had been around for a while albeit more as a geographical category than a political unit. For instance, in 1474, when a marriage between the daughter of Edward IV of England and the son of James III of Scotland was proposed, one of the declared purposes of the plan was to advance the peace and prosperity of ‘this Nobill Isle, callit Gret Britanne’ (Hay 1956: 61). John Mair, a Glaswegian educated in Paris, published Historia Majoris Britanniae (History of Greater Britain) in 1520 declaring that although there were two kingdoms on the island, those who lived there were ‘Britions’ (Robbins 1998: 4). However, the process of producing Britons can be argued to have started in earnest when James VI of Scotland succeeded the English Crown in 1603. He styled himself the King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and is known to have manoeuvred to bring about the formal political union of England and Scotland (Murdoch 1998; Kearney 2000). Although the Stuart dynasty did not succeed in bringing about the political union of three kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland), the period between 1603 and 1707 was formative in creating the British state and nation: the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, for instance, was reaffirmed by two revolutions. Moreover, England, Scotland and Ireland were for once united, admittedly by force, under Oliver Cromwell to form the godly Commonwealth (1649–1660). As a consequence of this, Protestantism was firmly established as the principle that bound the country, except in Ireland. The idea of Britain which was thus developed had a sectarian tone, i.e., it was the country of Protestants.

Forging Britons, as Linda Colley put it, was not a smooth process (Colley 1992). Although Scotland went into the Union with England voluntarily, there was much popular dissent to the Union as well as to the Hanoverian regime which had been installed in 1688. Those who supported the deposed Stuarts planned to regain the Crown in 1715 and 1745. The 1745 Jacobite Rising was the last civil war fought on the British soil. Although the Jacobite army was initially successful, the much modern army of King George II won and a severe punishment for the Jacobite supporters followed. The main casualty was the Highlands way of life; bagpipes were banned, and so was the wearing of weapons. The suppression was followed by Highland Clearance in which landlords forced crofters to leave the land in order to secure pasture for sheep. In other words, Highland society was one of the most visible casualties of the formation of the British state.

Having quelled internal dissent by the mid-18^th century, post-union Britain was involved with many wars, not in Europe but overseas. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) confirmed Britain’s status as the dominant colonial power at the expense of France. The Treaty of Paris of 1773, which concluded the war between Britain and France, allocated Quebec, Florida, Minorca, further parts of India and West Indies to Britain. Although Britain lost the Thirteen Colonies as a result of the Wars of American Independence (1775–83), the British overseas territory kept expanding especially in Asia.

In the meantime, the British state was consolidating its position as the one and only world power due to the Industrial Revolution. The world’s first steam engine was invented in 1712, and the invention of the flying shuttle revolutionalized the cotton industry. By the end of the 18^th century, die Industrial Revolution was clearly making its impact felt. British manufactured goods dominated the world market for a few decades in the 19^th century, and as a consequence, Britain was dubbed as the ‘Workshop of the World’.

It is perhaps worthwhile to add another viewpoint in relation to the formation of the British nation and state. A group of historians now argue that it would be more helpful to see the British state as a union state or Unionist state, not as a unitary state like post-revolutionary France (Eastwood et al. 1997).² It did not have an all-abiding constitution or a strong centralizing tendency. Therefore, the Scots were left to get on with their distinct educational and legal systems and their Church intact.³ Moreover, there was not an all-Union working environment which could have helped to forge a strong sense of being British amongst elite (except the military) until well into the 19^th century; engineers, lawyers, doctors and clergy continued to operate in their ‘national’ or regional frameworks (Brockliss 1997). The Unionist British state worked precisely because it did not ask too much from its subjects: what was demanded was ‘loyalty to the Crown, obedience to Parliament, tolerance of Church establishment, and acceptance of English as the primary public language’ (Eastwood et al 1997: 194–5). According to these historians, Britishness, which came about as a consequence of the Union of 1707, emerged much later than Colley suggested; and it was largely institutional. There were no conscious attempts by the British state to create and promote a hegemonic cultural British identity, as Colley pointed out, during the wartimes, some patriotic sentiments, especially in the form of Franco-phobia, were heightened. However, the historians are at pains to point out that Britishness was something juxtaposed upon existing identities and was not a primary identity for many.

The relationship with Ireland was another issue that Great Britain as a union state tried to solve. Ireland, like Wales, was never politically united; this arguably made it vulnerable to threats from outside. After the Reformation in England, because it was a Catholic country, Ireland became a potential threat to England. England, and at times Scotland too, tried to subjugate Ireland by means of military campaigns and plantation over years. In a sense, England, and later Great Britain, as the de facto ruler of Ireland, was always looking for the optimal solution for the troubled relationship with Ireland. Great Britain gave Ireland an independent parliament in return for their support at the Wars of American Independence, for instance. However, given the deepening confrontation between Catholics and Protestants and the impeding threats of invasion by Napoleon, the British government decided to form a union with Ireland which would enable them to rule it directly. Thus, in 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was born. Another symbol of Britishness, the Union Flag, was redesigned to incorporate the red saltire of St Patrick in the same year. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 was arguably another step in forging Britons, this time inclusive of Catholics and Irish, albeit up to a point.

The 19^th century is said to have witnessed Britain in its prime. Britain came through the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15 victorious, thus consolidated its position as the greatest power in the world. Its colonies kept expanding and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India in 1876. To the outside world, Britain represented modernity, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 were occasions of celebrating British success. Internally, successive reform acts (1832, 1867, and 1884) eventually extended franchise to adult males, allowing the masses to have a say in the way Britain, or more precisely at that time, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, was run.

The Irish continued to be a problem for the UK state. As a result of the 1885 General Election, the Irish Home Rule party held the balance of power in the House of Commons. The then prime minister Gladstone introduced a home rule bill in 1886 in a bid to keep the unity of the UK; the bill was subsequently defeated. The defeat of the bill could be interpreted as the retreat of the all- inclusive Britishness which could accommodate all denominations, and the shift to a more ethnic, more English idea of Britishness in the late 19^th century (Kearney 2000). But the home rule debate refused to disappear. The second bill was introduced in 1893 and defeated in the House of Lords. The third one introduced in 1912 became law in 1914, but with the outbreak of the First World War, it was suspended and then abandoned. By the time of the introduction of the third bill, the idea had grown to ‘Home-Rule-All-Around’ which included some devolution measures for Scotland and Wales as well as English regions (Bogdanor 1999: 44).

The 20^th Century

The First World War is often described as having killed a Liberal Britain since it coincided with the rise of the Labour party and the rapid decline of the Liberal party. The UK was a member of the Allied Powers, and came out of the long, traumatic war victorious. One can perhaps single out two effects of the First World War on the British state and on Britishness. The War, firstly, reinforced the sense of Britishness. There were several dimensions to the newly emerged unity of the country. Conscription was one of them; English, Welsh, Scots and Irish fought as British. The loss was felt across the UK; it was not confined to a certain area or class. The First World War established some rituals which are still practiced today. Remembrance Sunday, for instance, was institutionalized to commemorate the war dead after the First World War, and so was the Poppy appeal. Even today, from late October until Remembrance Sunday in November, one still sees politicians, TV personalities, and people in the street wearing a poppy, whose significance is widely recognized, and the Remembrance Sunday ceremony is televised. Whether or not they still have a mass resonance, these rituals are repeated to symbolize the unity of the nation, and by so doing, the state. The War had another effect on the British state and nation: Irish independence. Following the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish nationalists formed the Irish Free State in 1922 and seceded from the UK, though leaving the six counties in the north as part of the UK. This settlement was the cause of the so-called ‘Troubles’, the conflicts between the Protestant (Unionist) and Catholic (Nationalist) communities in Northern Ireland. It was also a birth of the current UK – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Britishness arguably lost a large part of its Irish dimension as a result of this.

The Second World War was also significant in terms of British identity as well as the future of Britain’s relationship with Europe as we shall see later in this chapter. In 1940, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany and before the participation of the USA, Britain literally stood alone in the face of the advancing undemocratic force. It is suggestive in our investigation into the British attitudes to Europe that what is often referred to as ‘Britain’s finest hour’ was experienced during the confrontation with the Axis power, when Britain was defending freedom and democracy on its own. In this vision, the continent was occupied by the evil powers of fascism and Nazism while the British Isles were seen as the last bastion of freedom and democracy. One can detect a strong Anglo-British element in this vision that the English (and occasionally British) are people of freedom. Also some influence of racialist thinking seems to have set in to replace the religion; the British/English love freedom because they are Anglo-Saxons (McLeod 1999). When the USA joined the war as a response to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, the UK forces fought with the Americans. This appears to have consolidated the idea that Britain has a special relationship with the US, which would have some effect on the relationship between Britain and Europe in the postwar era. The Second World War was important in the way it conditioned the ideas about Britain. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Balancing Act: British State and Nation Formation and ‘Europe’
• 2 Germany: From Kulturnation to Europeanization?
• 3 Austria: From Habsburg Empire to a Small Nation in Europe
• 4 A European Spain: The Recovery of Spanish Self-Esteem and International Prestige
• 5 Italy and Europe: Internal Others and External Challenges to National Identity
• 6 Modern Greece: A Profile of a Strained Identity
• 7 Nation, State and National Identity in Modern Hungary
• 8 Czech Republic: Nation Formation and Europe
• 9 Europe and the Formation of the Polish State, Nation, and National Identity
• Index