England: the very epitome of stability and security. Arguably the oldest nation state in the world, possessed of a long history of constitutional government and the rule of law, that has proved exemplary for so many other countries. Yet today and suddenly it would seem, it is seized by a crisis of identity, its future is uncertain, and it is riven by cultural conflicts.
To understand why this is
so we have eventually to see this crisis as but one manifestation of a more
general emergency of the West, but first we have to pay attention to peculiar
features of the English situation.
The most peculiar is
English people’s uncertainty about which country they now belong to. Are they
English or are they British? Research suggests that the English view themselves
as first of all English, yet with the blithe assumption that Britain (and once
the entire British Isles) is a kind of greater England, with a further penumbra
extending to the former empire and especially the white dominions. In other
words, “Englishness” is for a majority not a typical matter of a Romantic
self-contained folk identity, as with the Celtic outliers, but inherently a
matter of glorious expansion, albeit of perceived native values of fairness,
liberty, and tolerance of difference.
The minority in England who
see themselves as first of all British do so for essentially liberal and
cosmopolitan reasons. But those in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland who
see themselves as primarily British do so for essentially opposite,
traditionalist reasons that have more in common with the primary Englishness of
small “c” conservatives in England. Perhaps only those (albeit many) English of
half-Celtic descent, like myself, identify first and foremost as British for
these sorts of reasons that have as much to do with a sense of intertwined
cultures as with a shared enterprise of empire and mission in the past.
It was the majority group
whose primary Englishness is, all the same, inseparable from their sense of the
wider renown of Britain that tended to vote to leave the European Union,
whether we are talking about folk in the well-heeled shires or those on the
margins, in the north or the far west, or in the many areas of distressed
coastline.
In each case, culture and
not economics was at the fore: greater England is an independent, sovereign
reality whose subordination to a European imperial oligarchy was taken to be
obviously unnatural. If you were doing well in Midlands pastures, then why not
vote to loosen English enterprise from Continental restraint? If you were doing
badly, say on the ramshackle post-industrial Isle of Sheppey at the end of the
Thames, then why not vote for a fully independent island that might just come
more under the control of the unfortunate?
But by now the attentive
reader should have anticipated the massive irony of self-deception that was at
work here. The specific mode of Englishness that engendered a majority for
Brexit also threatens just this sense of Englishness. Without membership in the
European Union, it is much harder for England to re-invent its global power
through subsumption in a wider Continental enterprise (the prospect of such
re-invention was a considerable part of what inspired France, Germany, Italy,
and the Benelux countries to subsume their separate political identities into a
political union in the first place). For the English to imagine that they can
stand outside such a logic, despite the Commonwealth and the “special
relationship” to the United States, is surely self-delusion. Indeed, it is
Emmanuel Macron, and not any British prime minister, who has started to think
about how to restore France’s old imperial influence, especially in Africa,
precisely through the mechanism of the European Union. Any English return to
influence East of Suez will only be possible because of the United States, and
the Far Eastern powers will be more concerned with their relations to the
European Continent as a whole than with an offshore island.
In this respect then,
English global pride, which in part prompted Brexit, also doomed that very
pride, possibly to extinction. But it also threatens something far worse.
For it turns out that
sovereign self-isolation as the guarantee of integrity is a fiction. To the
contrary, internal unity can depend upon the delicate tissue of relationships
to the outside world that help to keep internal tensions in balance and under
control. This is obviously the case with Northern Ireland, whose fate has been
considered with callous (even murderous) disregard by the political drivers of
Brexit. Sadly, their indifference is echoed by perhaps a majority of the
English, who astonishingly just do not care whether a substantial chunk
(incidentally the best-educated and most solidly traditional chunk) of their
own country just peels away, with all its distinctive natural beauties and
cultural glories. This peeling away will probably be hastened by the
realization of (mainly Protestant) Ulster loyalists that their loyalty is
spurned on the British mainland.
But it is also the case
with Scotland. Even if economic logic after Brexit suggests this country should
remain within the Union, the unwanted loss of a political belonging and court
of appeal beyond an increasingly alien Westminster will most plausibly trigger
a Scottish exit. If Ireland re-unites, as is likely, this will leave England
and Wales on their own for the first time since the Norman Conquest of Ireland.
Thereby, any sense of the greater England that is Britain will have been lost
forever.
And what is English
identity without this? The history of English expansion in the face of both
Celtic and continental entrapment stretches back before the Reformation.
Surely, then, some sort of psychological crisis must inevitably then ensue?
For one thing, “the United
Kingdom of England and Wales” will not be a natural reality. However
economically implausible, the Welsh sense of difference and dignity, buttressed
by a living Celtic language, may eventually lead them to follow the Irish and
Scottish examples. If they do so, Cornwall may even recall that it was once
West Wales. Northumberland, forgetting Percy and Reiver pride, might also
recall (as some polls have shown) that the northern border has been fluid and
that its alienation from London is as great as that of the Scots.
Above all, the North of
England might object to being left still more at the mercy of the South
East—something qualified in the past by Celtic votes for the Labour Party, once
dominant in the North of England also. It might in effect recall that in
medieval Oxford northerners were housed as part of the same “nation” as the
Scots, while Daniel Defoe remarked as late as 1727 that the often physically
impassable Trent was a greater border than the Tweed. Not, of course, that the
North would ever join Scotland, but without the allure of past shared glory the
unity of England could soon prove somewhat fragile.
Of course, in theory the
mainstream English could at last identify with the many bohemian bourgeois
efforts of Ralph Vaughan Williams and others to uncover their authentic folk past:
the songs, the dances, the stories, and the customs which the English secretly
possess in as much abundance as anyone else. But to do that would be also to
re-awaken a greater consciousness of English regions, which is today notably
lacking. Equally, and most ironically, it would be to re-awaken a sense of an
insular culture common to the entire British Isles. For English music, poetry,
ornamentation, architecture, and dance was in reality subject to continuous
Celtic influence (and vice-versa) from pre-conquest times onwards. Indeed, it
is not even clear that the English are a separate ethnicity at all—even if it
is hard otherwise to explain the Dark Age language shift and the relapse into
paganism after the retreat of Rome. Archaeology fails to disclose any evidence
of large-scale “Anglo-Saxon” invasions or even of elite replacement in any way
comparable to those of the Norman Conquest. The names of the first kings of
Wessex were Welsh; the pronunciation of Old English indicates Welsh influence,
as does its already more Latinate syntax compared to that of most Teutonic
languages.
Thus the English, for all
their pride, are a strangely lost people: perhaps that is why they were doomed
to wandering from the outset, as so many Anglo-Saxons poems would suggest:
passing through the world half-blinded and disguised, like the god Woden, who
was sometimes glimpsed in pagan times stepping forth with his staff over the
southern downs on the Wansdyke that was named for him.
And just what great story
about themselves might they turn to in order to know who they really are?
Again, there are distinctly English and distinctly British alternatives. There
are the tales of Hereward the Wake, of Robin Hood and Guy of Warwick, of outlaw
resistance to conquerors and enclosers, the tales that render the English
strangers on their own terrain under the aristocratic tyranny of the Norman
yoke. And yet even these powerful stories cannot readily be dissociated from
Celtic influence: the supreme outlaw rebel was the Scotsman William Wallace and
the most resonant tales of Robin Hood were invented by Sir Walter Scott. Those
like William Cobbett, John Clare, and William Barnes who have most spoken of
the resistance of the true English to the ending of the commons and to the
state appropriation of Church lands have also been alert to the fact that
Ireland suffered a more extreme version of this “Norman” fate.
In terms of content also,
these defining legends suggest apparent contradictions. According to the at
times overrated George Orwell, the English prize liberty and yet also order,
while being fairly indifferent to equality. But how does this square with the
continuous celebration of outlawry which Britain has bequeathed to both North
America and Australia? Or with the linked thematic of robbing the rich to pay
the poor and the sense of a threatened guild and peasant solidarity forced to
retreat to the Greenwood, which is how the Robin Hood stories are best
interpreted?
Just like the Scots, the
English are able to combine a certain sense of equity and sharing with an
acceptance of the need for aristocratic familial leaders. In this respect it is
the American South that seems rather more in continuity with both England and
Britain than the American North, settled largely from the Puritanical Eastern
counties of England, with their stronger links to continental free-thinking and
rebellion.
But the tales of outlawry,
of lurking in fen and forest in order to enact occasional raids and plunderings
in the name of a lost and truer, perhaps faerie order, are only one resource of the English legendarium. The other concerns the entirety of the “Matter of
Britain,” which extends to Lear as well as Arthur.
This was indeed much
promoted by the Norman conquerors and their vengeful Breton allies: they even
tried to link it via spurious genealogies to the alternative Danish stories of
English origin, focused upon Lincolnshire, in order to please their equally
vengeful Danish allies, some of whom had also fought at Hastings. Yet the
English, from Chaucer to Purcell to Tennyson, also felt able to embrace these
stories, perhaps in part because the Anglo-Saxons themselves explicitly
embraced the Romano-British legacy, which archaeologists now conclude left far
more traces than the Germanophile Victorians once supposed.
Unlike the Robin Hood
legends, these stories are hieratic, chivalric, and imperial. They certainly
celebrate just rule and the overthrowing of tyranny, but the tyrants here are
more like primordial anarchists. Perhaps Scott allowed a certain mediation
between the two idioms by telling how the noble Sherwood outlaw was really the
servant of the true King, the crusading adventurer and continentally jaunting
Anglo-French Richard Coeur-de -Lion, in contrast to his laggardly and corrupt
stay-at-home brother.
It is just about
conceivable that the spirit of Hereward the Wake could have caused England to
opt with Brexit to be, as it were, to be a kind of greater Sheerness: exiled
from globalizing marauders, living in a “moral utopia” of enforced if desperate
improvisation, as the German modernist Uwe Johnson described it, when in
implausible exile on the Kent islet. But for the English imaginary, King
Richard stands in disguise behind the outlaw, and the Continent is resisted
just because, ever since Arthur, a kind of “West Byzantium” has rivaled the
Holy Roman Empire, which the European Union in one sense attempts to revive.
If only, one might suppose,
the Pope had granted Henry VIII his divorce, and if only Henry had assumed the
emperorship as he desired. Or if only, much earlier, the Empress Matilda had
routed King Stephen during that terrible and bloody English winter. But instead,
England, a little like Russia, has always sustained a rival claim to inherit
the Roman project—a claim later sustained by the United States.
It
might seem far fetched to say that the disaster of Brexit has occurred because
no one has reflected on any of this. And yet it is true: both English folk
culture and English working-class memory and self-education were already dead,
and a decadent elite had ceased to ponder anything remotely serious. In search
of rootless global wealth and glory, the political and ideological
preconditions of this quest were totally neglected by those who had forgotten
that English expansion has always depended upon coming to terms with its Celtic
neighbors and upon an intense engagement with the power politics of the continent.
More profoundly, one could
say that Brexit supposed that a country could continue to exist without a soul:
without a religion, without links to its neighbors as soul-mates, without a
consistent narrative sense of why it exists—a sense that can admit and
partially resolve the many contradictions of the past. Instead, it turns out
that because the English have failed to reflect on the preconditions of their
own identity, and on the pressing need to reforge that identity in a more
Romantic folk idiom (that would also involve a more federalist version of the
United Kingdom), they are in danger of seriously losing themselves altogether.
Perhaps they have, after Chesterton, “at last spoken,” but if so it could be
only to sound their own last gasp.
Remainers as much as
Leavers are responsible for this. They failed to attend to the new division of
England between the supposedly better educated and those who had left school,
with their increasingly poor life-prospects and more localized horizons. They
failed to realize that alarm about excessively high levels of immigration,
involving both mutual exploitation (of incomers and those already there) and a
lack of integration, was far from “racist.” They failed to register coherent
working-class anxieties about Brussels’ treatment of Southern Europe, the
passing on of bankers’ debts to citizens and a totally inadequate response to
the refugee crisis, which anticipated an even more inadequate one to the
pandemic. They failed to recognize a wider reasonable English anxiety about the
power of an unaccountable and unelected oligarchy to overrule national
preferences.
At the same time, Leavers
gratuitously ignored the way in which the United Kingdom is too large to be
just like Switzerland or Norway: outside the E.U. it faces a dire choice
between damaging its own economic and political interests and merely accepting
continental decisions in which it now has no say. It blithely chose to ignore
the equal reality that one’s near neighbors tend to be one’s most important trading
partners and allies. At a cultural level it shamelessly recycled old Whig myths
about the supposed independence of
common law from Roman and canon law traditions—again much encouraged by
Victorian Germanism—not to mention Protestant ones of Roman tyranny.
No one was asking what
England really is and how she could be sustained in the future. Yet this is not
to say that the European Union and its member countries are necessarily in much
better shape. As with England, centuries of excessive centralization, partly
enabled by a continuous imperialism, are starting to come undone in France,
whose deeper reality, as Graham Robb has shown, is really one of a
near-anarchic local dispersal. Meanwhile, the European Union has been more and
more corrupted by a technocratic vision which, from the outset, with Jean
Monnet, rivaled the subsidiarist, corporatist, economically participatory, and
personalist one of Robert Schuman and other Catholic founders.
Schuman, more so even than
Jacques Maritain, had insisted that for the sake of its legitimacy the European
Community must acknowledge the ultimate importance of the Christian faith,
something that never really took place. A vision of mixed government, tempering
democracy (which had proved recently capable of electing monsters) with wise
and shared advice, has been warped into a rule of mere cartel mercantilism, a
German priority of law over politics and an ordoliberal favoring of the free
market over the real needs of workers and consumers.
In consequence, the increase
in European unity has been no organic process of shared development, common
citizenship, and mutual rule, but a series of opportunistic coups and arbitrary
decrees on the part of the European Court of Justice and the Commission. Any
democratic rebalancing of the E.U. that did not give way to an unrealistic and
undesirable erection of a superstate would have to open up the council to
continuous delegation from national assemblies, besides subordinating the
commission to the council and a strengthened parliament. But none of that is in
sight, nor any clear path to its achievement. In these circumstances, and the
failure so far to learn any lessons from Brexit, further exits from the Union
and even its ultimate disintegration cannot be ruled out.
This is more than sad,
because, at its best, as with its earlier support of French small farms (now,
however, much threatened) or its much greater support for a region like
Cornwall, than would ever be plausible be offered by national governments, the
E.U. has shown how a “commonwealth-empire” can correct the domineering and
culturally monochrome tendencies of the nation state and of its false doctrine
of absolute sovereignty.
Already
Brexit-voting Cornwall is discovering that, after all, it was Westminster and
not Brussels that was wrecking its inshore fishing industry. Many British
farmers and small businessmen are also realizing, some of them with regret
that, it is now too expensive to export to the E.U. in the face of heavy
duties. Inversely (though this was for a time concealed by the pandemic)
British consumers are discovering just how expensive it has become to import.
For now and for similar reasons, those in the much bigger service sector have
yet to face the real reckoning, but since services were left out of the E.U.
deal that day will come.
Meanwhile Boris Johnson has
to square the political circle: satisfy two camps who voted for Brexit for
opposite reasons: the well-heeled in order to escape even the light hand of
E.U. regulation, the marginalized in order to free the state from supposed (and
certainly exaggerated) European prevention of state aid. We are already seeing
how he will do so: a combination of trade deals like the one just signed with
Australia that will compromise consumer and ecological standards alongside
centralized infrastructure projects for the North that will offer no real
prospects for empowerment or self-transformation.
It is true that more jobs
are now on offer and some wages are going up. But that is mainly down to the
impact of Covid and a generally perceived need for some capitalist rebalancing
towards production and genuine consumer demand in the face of the instability
of the finance sector and overreliance on debt at every level—tendencies also
in evidence in the United States. As to whether all the jobs can be filled,
that remains doubtful: British firms often turned to European migrants not
simply because they could but because no equivalently trained and able British
workers were available.
If the E.U. does survive,
it is consequently possible to imagine that one day a sad, divided, almost
powerless England, once more trapped between the Celts and the continent, and
now more dominated than ever by an ethnically diverse population, will creep
back, tail between its legs, to ask for re-admission from Brussels. Neither
Robin Hood nor King Arthur will any longer be recalled or spoken of; West
Byzantium will be no more, as England is finally subordinated to the realm of
Charlemagne.
But of course the E.U. will
not really be that, and not being that it may not even be there at all, or not
for long. Yes, it is still more needed today for both collective defence and
the securing of borders, if European civilization is to survive in the face of
large and partially alien “civilization nations”: culture and politics are
after all inseparable. But can it exist in perpetuity at all, without any echo
of Christendom, of Jerusalem and Athens and Rome, of all these “matters” of
which the British and French ones are simply offshoots?
The problem of England is
in the end the same as that today of the Celtic nations, the European ones, and
the E.U. itself: a loss of psychic identity. As a result of this, besides the
horrendous political miscalculations of David Cameron, both England and
Scotland look set to become one-party states, governed by all too similar
versions of state-capitalist oligarchy. Democracy is here as elsewhere dying,
because the mythoi that upheld any real sense
of a shared demos have already perished.
Without them, England, Britain, Europe, and the world now face a dire future in
which left-wing transhumanism allied to rampant artificial intelligence and
surveillance will be increasingly in conflict with xenophobic and racist
nationalisms.
No enlightened liberalism
proffers any answer to this. A revival can only come from a return to the roots
of our Western civilization, in all their ultimately European variety and yet
entangled unity.
John
Milbank is emeritus professor in the Department of Theology and Religious
Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he is president of the Centre of
Theology and Philosophy.