National identity is traditionally divided into two categories: blood and soil. You belong either because of your ancestry and bloodline, or because you were born within a certain territory and identify with its customs and values.
Germany and France have long been the archetypes of these categories. German nationality was founded on ethnicity, emphasising the unity and distinctness of the German ‘volk’, wherever it lived. French nationality, on the other hand, was a civic concept, with territory and constitution forming the basis of French citizenship.
Britain has historically straddled these categories, possessing both ethnic and civic notions of belonging. The nation has had well-defined borders for over two centuries and a largely settled population for nearly two millennia. But it has also developed a strong civic identity, based on crown, parliament, empire and church.
It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the 21st report of the annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, published last week, records that the majority of people define Britishness as both a civic and an ethnic identity. By asking people what things are ‘important for being truly British’ and offering them a list that included, among others, the ability to speak English, having British ancestry, feeling British, having lived in Britain for most of one’s life, and respecting Britain’s political institutions and laws, BSA found that 61 per cent of people felt that Britishness demanded both a civic and an ethnic component.
What was interesting in the BSA report was that the proportion of people who considered Britishness to be a civic rather than an ethnic identity had increased significantly in the last eight years. These people saw Britishness lying not in birth or heritage but in citizenship, language, feeling, and respect for British institutions. Further analysis showed that this group was disproportionately young. The authors concluded that ‘there seems every prospect that this group will grow in size as younger generations replace older ones.’
There is much to welcome in the growth of this civic sense of Britishness. It promises, at least in theory, a more open and inclusive society, in which resident foreigners are more easily welcomed and no longer treated as threats or oddities.
But there are also reasons to be cautious. It is unfortunate that the period in history in which we are moving away towards a civic concept of nationhood is also the period in which the four historic pillars of that civic identity – union, empire, monarchy, and Protestantism – have eroded away.
The absence of a common enemy, growing economic inequalities across the United Kingdom and, finally, the political will have all helped unravel the union. The British empire was already under immense stress by the 1940s and was destined to be dismantled in the post-war period. The monarchy could never have survived intact in a country that eschewed deference and, in any case, did its best to self-destruct in the 1980s and ‘90s. And the nation was, in fact, only nominally Protestant by the mid-twentieth century, with membership of the established Church standing at around 10 per cent of the population of England and Wales in 1950.
The collapse of these pillars has left the notion of British civic identity rather vague. The fact that the BSA report cites ‘speaking English’, ‘holding British citizenship’, ‘feeling British’ and ‘respecting British institutions’ as examples of this civic identity merely underlines the problem. The first two are hardly substantial, the third is vague and the last rather hopeful – few British institutions are truly respected today.
The result is that the civic identity we are increasingly inclined to embrace is rather hollow. The fact that around a fifth of people born after 1965 reject both ethnic and civic aspects of British identity – in other words, ‘believe there is very little at all that matters in making a person ‘truly British’ – should not surprise us. If we reject ethnic notions of belonging without a meaningful civic identity to put in its place, Britishness becomes an all-but meaningless term.
This matters. As David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, suggested in a controversial essay earlier this year, without any sense of common culture, the maintenance of an extended welfare state, secure public spaces, effective public discourse and respected public institutions will become increasingly difficult. Moreover, the advantages of inclusiveness that a civic national identity boasts over an ethnic one are devalued when there is no meaningful identity into which strangers may be integrated.
The prospect of developing such an identity is not good at present. Our society’s dominant liberalism, in its economic, cultural and moral strains, acts as a universal acid on all forms of collective identity. Its fundamental premise, that the individual is sovereign and should be free from all kinds of communal obligation, has done much to liberate us from the oppressive restrictions that once marked British culture. But it has also helped atomise society, weakening the bonds that hold us together and dissolving our sense of corporate flourishing. Ultimately, without any motivating sense of what it means to be ‘us’, we will not prosper. If we refuse to hang together, we may end up hanging separately.
For details of Asylum and Immigration: A Christian perspective on a polarised debate, click here.
This article first appeared in the Church Times.
