Brexit: the myth of British superiority

The arrogance behind British nationalism is not supported by facts

One of the nationalistic-xenophobic assumptions of Brexiters is that Britain is in some way ‘better’ than its European neighbours, and, for that reason, should not be in a union with them. How else could the following comment on passports by the pro-Brexit Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell be interpreted?

“The humiliation of having a pink [sic] European Union passport will now soon be over and the United Kingdom nationals can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling…”

However, the myth of British superiority is worth probing with a few comparative facts, contrasting Britain with its immediate European neighbours. Let me take these to be Ireland, France, Germany, Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and Scandinavia, all democracies since the Second World War. It is worth noting that this group of countries, including Britain, contains a majority of the EU’s population and wealth.

Among these countries, according to the IMF in 2017, Britain is the poorest in GNP per head, with $ 43 500 per year – only marginally below France, but well below Germany on $ 49 800. The smaller countries of Benelux, Ireland and Scandinavia are all considerably richer. And by the end of 2017, as a consequence of Brexit, Britain’s economic growth is lagging behind that of Eurozone, exacerbating rather than reducing the difference.

For working people, their situation is even worse than their mainland European counterparts. Britain is the most economically unequal, with inequality at an index of 34, while France and Germany both score 29. (To understand these figures, zero represents complete equality, while inequality in the United States stands at 40.)

In fact, Britain is more unequal today than at any point since the middle of the nineteenth century; And with welfare cuts in a deteriorating economy, inequality is growing further in the UK. In absolute terms, in the period 2009-16, a massive 70% of households experienced stagnation or a drop in income.

Inequality is linked to a dysfunctional society. Just to take one example, in every 100 000 people, Germany imprisons 81, France 118, but Britain a staggering 150.

If the current situation is bad, the future is worse. Brexit is already causing capital investment to avoid Britain, and for business to relocate out of the country. The prospect of trade barriers after March 2019 further impedes the economy. The Tory Brexit elite, with a whip hand in the May government, want to spurn the European social-market model all together and fall into step with the US economy. After the shocks of EU withdrawal, they seek a society of low taxes, minimal rights for workers and consumers, with little or no social welfare - a European America or a Singapore on the Thames.

The outlook is grim.

Socialism and nationalism are not compatible

You can be a nationalist or a socialist, but you can’t be both.

A nationalist is someone who prioritises allegiance to a national group ahead of other political considerations. Thus those Labour politicians who talk about 'the will of the British people' as a trump card in politics are nationalists – just like the fascists who shout out "Britain First." Of course, there are many different varieties of nationalists. Politicians and parties combine their nationalism with other political objectives; and some varieties are far less odorous than others. Yet whatever the type, there are two reasons why socialists do not embrace nationalism.

First, the nationalist, by virtue of making the national group the most important factor of identification, creates a dichotomy between those who are members of the defined national group and those who are not. People are divided, favoured and discriminated against by characteristics that they cannot, or at least cannot easily, change. Socialists, in contrast, are universalists, whose politics embrace people irrespective of nationality or ethnicity. Nationalism and socialism cannot be combined because one negates the other.

Second, the nationalists’ construction of the concept of a nation is a historical undertaking, which involves looking backwards to find historical customs, myths, language usage, etc. which supposedly bind the people of the nation. By looking backwards, nationalism tends to be conservative and finds its ideals in the past. Socialists, in contrast, believe in freeing people from historical oppressions and see the ideal world as something to be created by human beings in the future. And that future is based on what is progressive from a combination of all human history, not that of one nation.

Internationalism is not the opposite of nationalism. Internationalism involves the recognition of different nationalisms and works for them to coexist on a friendly and cooperative basis. The opposite of nationalism is anationalism (or cosmopolitanism), which seeks the unity of people irrespective of nationality or ethnicity.

One thing should be made clear. Someone who calls for autonomy or independence for a territory, is not for that reason alone, a nationalist. For instance, the demand for an independent Scotland can be less nationalistic than those wielding the unionist rhetoric of the 'integrity of the British nation.'

In England Brexit has fuelled nationalism, and socialists need to confront it.

The curse of nations

The European, and particularly British, political left is incarcerated in national parochialism

In the mid 1980s a group of socialists in Exeter decided to set up Exeter Labour Briefing which soon morphed into Devon Labour Briefing. We identified with the politics of London Labour Briefing (the capital city of the UK) and adopted the Labour Briefing rubric. At around the same time there was a Brighton Labour Briefing, a Dover Labour Briefing and so on. There were surprises in the bag when an Isle of Wight Labour Briefing was in the pipeline, but nobody expected, nor was there any talk of, for instance, a Calais Labour Briefing.

If there had been we would have said in surprise, “Yes, but their situation is so different; they’re part of French politics - and anyway how can we understand them unless they write in English, and why would they do that.” Very much the same applies today: North Devon may get its own branch of Left Unity, but North Brittany will not. Let’s unpack the obviousness behind all this.

Since the French Revolution, but particularly since the First World War, the nation state has become the main terrain of cultural and political identity. The legal and political structures of the state are the focus of identity and meaning for the state’s citizens, even its socialist ones. Knowledge of the political position facing people in the neighbouring states is usually thin on the ground. In addition, everyone in one state knows (or should know!) the state language, but armed with single language literacy, meaningful communication with citizens from another is rendered difficult to impossible.

The political and cultural zenith of the nation state occurred in the years following the Second World War, when nation-statism was bolstered by state economic planning and the welfare state. Since the 1980s neoliberalism has undermined that dominance to some degree through globalisation at the economic and cultural level; yet the nation state remains the focal point of organisation for popular political activity.

So today the focus of all socialist and progressive activity in Britain is national. No significant political movement in Britain has its HQ outside the UK. British political organisations may affiliate to pan-European organisations, but the key unit of organisation remains national. In contrast, even if they have a national base, many corporations are international in their scope, while the left, trade unions and left-leaning political parties are stubbornly national. The asymmetry of this situation is noteworthy.

So long as pan-European political identity remains non-existent, and while the nation state remains the key unit of legal, political and financial power (even more so since the financial crisis of 2008), there is no option other than social struggle at the national state level. That much is clear. But the way out of the stranglehold of exclusive national identity can only be through downsizing national identification to bring it into balance with other identities: municipal, regional, European, international. To do that requires the acceptance of universal values plus opening up means of international communication.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Nationalism conceived as an imagined community continues to be a driving force in the world today.

Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, prompted a series of investigations into nationalism that embraced several other writers such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner. Of the book itself, there is much discussion on the net, so here I only want to add a few points which were of particular interest to me.

Nation as an imagined community is a gripping idea. The members of these communities (British, Swiss, Indonesian, etc) imagine themselves as part of a family or Gemeinschaft even though it is impossible for them to know one another. The book is an attempt to account for that conception in the modern world.

Anderson traces the first steps towards the development of the nation in Europe. The Middle Ages were nation-free. Allegiance was to king, church and lord and neither language unity (except for the Latin of the elite) nor clearly defined geographical boundaries existed.

Printing changed everything. After the market had been exhausted for Latin texts, publishers sought to exploit the vernacular and in so doing put in train the process of turning some local dialects into literary languages. In parallel, the development of the absolutist state expanded the state bureaucracies, whose officials used the vernacular language which was unified, consolidated and disseminated in printed form across territories.

Anderson comments on the seeming oddity of nationalism taking off first in the New World before exploding in Europe in the French Revolution. In discussing this, the book draws not just on North but in strong measure on South America. The argument is that the colonial officials of these states resented the growing centralised power of their European masters, so the middle rank state bureaucrats in league with commerical interests in the colonies rebelled. Rebellion had nothing to do with either ethnicity or language.

In Europe by the late Nineteenth Century the key promoters of nationalism were the school teacher, civil servant and journalist. Nation increasingly became anchored in an ethnic conception of language. Royalty and aristocracy engineered a new basis for their position: their representation of nation-ness as opposed to loyalty to them through God and tradition.

By the end of the nineteenth century most of Africa and Asia were colonies of European powers. As the state apparatus and commercial organisation expanded the number of administrators grew. European colonialists had their superior position preserved through growing levels of racism. The racist aspect of nationalism expanded.

In ruling their colonies, the imperial powers also imported their own nationalisms, which became templates for the oppressed people of those lands to copy. For instance, the story of the French revolution taught in colonial schools became a ready tool for those fighting for national Independence in Indo-China. Independence movements consolidated the existence of nation states across the globe, however ethnically heterogeneous those states were.

Nationalism did not die with advent of communist regimes after 1917. Revolutionaries consolidated their power within existing state apparatuses. Indeed, Anderson begins his book by focusing on the conflict which broke out in 1979 between two communist “nation” states, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Anderson highlights two features of nationalism which traditionally are overlooked: the map and the museum. Every nation state carves out is territory on the earth and so makes a shape of itself. In fact that shape comes to represent the nation as a shape without marking for rivers, mountains, towns, etc. The museum collects together the images and artefact's of the nation.

Several other features of the book are worthy of comment.

First, Anderson’s argument is distinctive, not just in his characterisation of nationalism and his argument that it is not something which is historically finished, but in the fact that the bulk of his examples are taken not from Europe and North America, but from Latin American and Asia. While this is fully justified given the argument, some of the material calls on historical knowledge which might challenge the “educated amateur.”

The book avoids jargon, though it does overflow with metaphorical language, but it is less flowery than the writing style of his brother Perry. The text is nonetheless easy and enjoyable to read.

Finally, the book ends with a chapter on its own history and an account of its publication and translation around the globe. Against the charge of arrogance, one could certainly excuse Anderson given the influence that his book has had. And strangely, the chapter is interesting to read in its own right.

ANDERSON, Benedict,Imagined Communities, Verso: 1983, 2006.

Zamenhof: the forgotten philosopher

Ludvik Zamenhof's humanism led to a rejection of nationalism.

Ludvik Zamenhof tends to be known, if at all, as the creator of Esperanto. As an ethical and social philosopher, his humanism is little studied outside the Esperanto community. Zamenhof’s thought had biblical origins. He was influenced by the prophet Hillel the Elder, whose Golden Rule, what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow, was developed by Zamenhof into a rejection of nationalism and religious intolerance. In their place Zamenhof promoted cosmopolitanism and universal human values. Below I provide a translation of a single passage of Zamenhof’s writing.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

The original Esperanto was:

“Mi estas profunde konvinkita, ke ĉiu nacionalismo prezentas por la homaro nur plej grandan malfeliĉon, kaj ke la celado de ĉiuj homoj devus esti: krei harmonian homaron. Estas vero, ke la nacionalismo de gentoj premataj — kiel natura sindefenda reago — estas multe pli pardoninda, ol la nacionalismo de gentoj premantaj; sed, se la nacionalismo de fortuloj estas nenobla, la nacionalismo de malfortuloj estas neprudenta; ambaŭ naskas kaj subtenas unu la alian, kaj prezentas eraran rondon de malfeliĉoj, el kiuj la homaro neniam eliros, se ĉiu el ni ne oferos sian grupan memamon kaj ne penos stariĝi sur grundo tute neŭtrala.”

Be careful with nationalism and patriotism

In his post, Walter extols the virtues of patriotism. Walter’s loved one is the nation state as opposed to political identification with one’s town or region. The reason is hard-nosed: only the institutions of the nation state can achieve socialism and a majority for socialism can only be achieved through love of the nation state.

In an earlier post, I dealt with the role of the national state in the developed capitalist countries in the age of market fundamentalism. Here I want to look briefly at the meaning of Walter’s patriotism.

Walter’s use of patriotism in this context is indistinguishable from the notion of nationalism, i.e. the belief in the promotion of the “values of the nation” which Walter believes could and should contain socialist values. After all who does not become a little nationalistic when arguing with Americans about the virtues of the NHS?

The problem for me lies in the construct of nationalism. If one means, in the tradition of the French Revolution, the notion of “citizenship nationalism” – i.e. everybody with a British passport (plus long-term residents in the UK), then that is acceptable, so long as we don’t deny other levels of identification: municipal, regional, pan-European, and of course universalistic ones. In fact citizenship nationalism is not only desirable it is inevitable.

Yet nationalism in many people’s minds is not citizenship nationalism at all, but ethic nationalism: a group of people defined by origins, race, religion, language, etc. This is pernicious because what it is about is “taking possession and excluding the other” When the English flag is raised it summons up notions of ethnic, not citizenship nationalism.

To back up my argument against ethnic nationalism I will give the wonderful quotation of Ludvik Zamenhof.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self-defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

In conclusion I could say this. If the citizens of Britain value socialism and struggle for it in Britain, fine. If the fires of ethnic nationalism are fanned by talk of patriotism and nationalism, then that’s bad. I fear that in highlighting the notion of patriotism, one will cause the latter rather than the former.