Is Englishness a contemporary invention or a resurgent sensibility? What is the shape and character of a re-awakened sense of English nationhood? The complexity and difficulties inherent in answering these and other questions means there is a growing imperative for political scientists to reflect more self-consciously upon questions of evidence, methodology and interpretation in this area, writes Michael Kenny

Richards, Dave

Smith, Martin

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3/14/2014Critical re-assessment of conventional wisdom on the topicof Englishness is overdueblogs.lse.ac.uk /politicsandpolicy/the-politicisation-of-englishness/Is Englishness a contemporary invention or a resurgent sensibility? What is the shape and character of are-awakened sense of English nationhood? The complexity and difficulties inherent in answeringthese and other questions means there is a growing imperative for political scientists to reflect moreself-consciously upon questions of evidence, methodology and interpretation in this area, writesMichael Kenny.The question of how the English perceive their national identity has made a dramatic entrance onthe political scene in the last few years, and has moved onto the radar of a growing number ofpoliticians, political commentators and social scientists. It brings with it an urgent set of historicaland normative challenges. Does Englishness, as is widely assumed, represent a largely unaltered seam of culturalnationalism which predates, and may well outlast, the efforts of political elites since the eighteenth century todisseminate an encompassing British nationhood? Or is it better seen as a contemporary invention – forged fromlongstanding materials – designed to serve as a vehicle for a range of current social aspirations and culturalanxieties? Has Englishness become politicised, and how should politicisation be defined and measured in thiscontext? More fundamentally still, we need also to ask if the resurgence of an English sensibility (which tends to bemore strongly felt by those living furthest from London) is a further manifestation of the revolt against the power-hoarding and centralised model of UK government which has long been underway elsewhere in the UK.An important dynamic behind growing interest in this topic is the widespread belief that higher levels of Euroscepticsentiments in England (in comparison with other parts of the UK) may well reflect the development of a more insularand resentful sense of nationality among the UK’s ethnic and national majority. Some observers have gone so far asto argue that it is in fact the English, not the Scots, who are incubating the kinds of resentment and disenchantmentthat are more likely to pose a threat to the long-term viability of the Union. There is certainly a considerable body ofevidence indicating a quite significant growth in the number of people, living in England, who are more inclined toidentify themselves in national terms as English, not British, and some recent polling reports a growing correlationbetween such sentiments and individual-level attitudes towards the European Union and the domestic Union.But care needs to be taken when characterising the mood or identity of the English. Polls consistently report that aclear majority of people living in England still see an affiliation to Britain as either synonymous with being English, oras an important, additional form of identification. And there are important variations – according to class, ethnicityand geography – that disrupt any simple idea of a uniform growth in English national sentiment. Most strikingly of all,most English citizens from ethnic minority backgrounds still identify overwhelmingly with Britishness, and detect inEnglishness an expression of ‘white’ ethno-cultural identity (although there are also some intriguing signs that thisattitude may be shifting within some BEM communities).1/4There is, then, a growing imperative for political scientists to reflect more self-consciously upon questions ofevidence, methodology and interpretation in this area. Much of the relevant polling tells us very little about howsalient are people’s feelings about the issues on which they are quizzed. And while political scientists andcommentators typically see devolution as a trigger for an English backlash, there are few signs that the issuesassociated with it resonate strongly with English publics. As a consequence, other potential causes andramifications of its re-emergence have been obscured by this constitutional focus. Little attention has been paidwithin political science to the qualitative dimensions and meanings which this form of collective identity has come toembody.This weakness is especially apparent if we consider the welter of insights generated by a growing body of workexamining how English identities are created and claimed in contemporary society that has emerged from other,nearby disciplinary fields. Such studies tend to employ qualitative methodologies, and explore the appeal andcharacter of contemporary forms of Englishness within the lived experience and everyday reasoning of differentgroups of people. A number of these studies observe an important connection between an angry and populistnationalism and the identification of various ‘others’ (especially radical Muslims) as threats to the English ‘heartland’.Others chart the growing importance in recent years of appeals to English tradition and culture as a frame ofreference through which unease about deep-seated changes in the political economy and social character of thecountry are expressed.In political science, by contrast, the conventional assumption remains that a more assertive sense of Englishnessconstitutes an overdue backlash against the model of devolution introduced by the first Tony Blair government in1999. In fact, disaffection on issues such as the West Lothian question, or the allocation of funding across the UK,may be better seen as a manifestation of a deeper-rooted and complex mixture of resentment, democraticdisappointment and anxiety – and the latter has some of the hallmarks of the kinds of ethnic-majority nationalismapparent in other western societies.Chronologically there are good reasons to believe that it was in the decade prior to 1999 that the roots of thiscomplex shift in national consciousness can be discerned. In those years a potent combination of anemerging Euroscepticism and an extended bout of elite-level soul-searching about the viability and prospects ofthe UK created the space for the renewal of interest in avowedly English symbols and forms of identification whichhad hitherto been the preserve of eccentric or extremist-political elements.2/4One further analytical weakness also needs to be jettisoned if the richness and significance of ideas about, andclaims upon, English nationhood are to be grasped by political analysis – the habit of essentialism. The progressiveassumption that Englishness amounts to a quintessentially nostalgic and Arcadian fantasy, rather than a modernform of egalitarian nationalism, has cast a long shadow over much academic analysis of this phenomenon. It maywell have led to an under-estimation of the variety of ideologically rooted arguments that can be made in relation toEnglish tradition, and the importance of recent attempts to shape a modern English imaginary rooted in the realitiesof modern urban life.These weaknesses have inhibited an appreciation of the fluidity and contested character of England as an imaginedcommunity. In recent years there has been several rival, loosely political understandings of English identity. Theseinclude projections of Englishness as: a vehicle for resentments directed both at various national ‘others’ and inopposition to political and economic elites; a broadly conservative idiom which remains Anglo-British in kind and ismore constitutionally moderate in implication; and as a multicultural, liberal nation, which – as much elite politicalthought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries insisted – can sustain the image of the English as atolerant and politically moderate people, whose sense of nationality does not hinge upon a narrow sense of ethnicheritage or bloodline. There is an on-going political contestation happening over and around Englishness –marshalled around these competing visions – which exists at some remove from the domain of constitutional policy,though which may now be feeding back into shifting attitudes towards issues such as the EU and the domesticunion.Critical re-assessment of conventional wisdom on this topic is now overdue, and this topic is starting to attract theinterest of experts from a wider range of sub-fields, including the comparative study of post-imperial nationalism, theintersection of party politics and territorial identity, and normative political theory. England ought to be seen both asa laboratory for the study of the growing disquiet of ethnic and national majorities in the face of the perceived awardof undue concessions and benefits to national, and other, minorities, and as a test-case for the growing disjuncturebetween the search for meaningful communities of attachment among anxious and fearful electorates, on the onehand, and the imperative to develop forms of multi-national association and co-operation in the face of the risks andthreats associated with the world order and global economy,  on the other.  In the context of these increasinglydivergent trends, the imagined national tradition of the English has become both a barometer and source of theexpression of disaffection and frustration ‘from below’.Studying England also provides an important opportunity to consider if a people who have for the most part beenhappy to define themselves in culturally conservative terms are able and willing to generate a new sense ofbelonging that might underpin a political, and not only cultural, sense of community. For public policy specialists,meanwhile, there is the intriguing question of how the structures and institutions that maintain UK-wide governanceare responding both to the very immediate threat associated with the Scottish referendum, and to the slow-burningimplications of the possibility that largest national public in the UK is no longer content with the terms of union –either domestically or in Europe. There is a particular imperative to consider whether ways can be found toaccommodate new forms of national sentiment and emerging representative claims at a time when the UnitedKingdom will very likely be set on a different constitutional footing whether Scotland votes No or Yes in September.Note:  This article was originally published on the PSA’s Insight blog and gives the views of the author, and not theposition of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our commentspolicy before posting. Image credit: Steve Webster CC BY 2.0 About the Author3/4Michael Kenny is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and a VisitingResearch Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge. His researchon the ‘The Politics of English Nationhood’ has been supported by the award of a Leverhulme TrustMajor Research Fellowship. His book on this topic is published by Oxford University Press on 11thMarch. There will be a panel discussion to mark its publication at 6.30pm, Tuesday 25th March atQueen Mary University of London (with Jon Cruddas, Matthew D’Ancona, Andrew Gamble andJudith Bara). Tickets for this event can be booked here.4/4

Critical re-assessment of conventional wisdom on the topic of Englishness is overdue

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