The historian Linda Colley has devoted much of her career to thinking about national identity, and British national identity in particular. One of her previous books, "Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837", won the Wolfson History Prize in 1992. Her latest book, based on a 15-part series for BBC Radio 4, is "Acts of Union and Disunion". In it, she returns to the theme of British identity and the nature of the British polity and asks: "What has held the UK together—and what is dividing it?"
Colley dropped into the Prospect offices last week to talk to me about the past and future of the United Kingdom. I began by asking her about the point she seems to me to be making at the beginning of the book to the effect that all nation states—and in this Britain is, arguably, not distinctive—are, to some degree or other, fissiparous assemblages of discrete and often incompatible parts.
LC: It’s not true of all states, and it is the case that some states attempt to implement and rationalise a consciously assimilationist policy—France would be the classic example, extending Frenchness not just to its own borders but incorporating its colonial peoples, when it had them, as French citizens. The UK has been very different and it seems to me that it approximates much more either to what is neutrally called a “composite state”, but is more provocatively, and I think more accurately, called a “state-nation”, which traditionally operates at two levels—having an idea and rationale of the whole, but also paying due recognition to the component parts as well.
France went through so many tumultuous periods that it had to try harder—it had a much more rural composition than the UK did; it was bigger; it was not as linguistically united; it had to cope with sequential revolutions and changes of dynasties. So I think France had to think harder about unitary policies, whereas it was a rather different situation in the UK.
JD: Among the things that bind nation states together are what you have called elsewhere "constitutive stories". These, you argue, are an essential part of nation-building and of the sustaining of nation states. Economic well-being is not enough, you’ve argued. Nations need these overarching stories to tell about themselves, too. Now, in the February issue of Prospect, John Kay says of the referendum campaign in Scotland: “[It] is characterised by a near exclusive focus on economic issues.” Do you agree with one implication of that, which is that the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of forgetting that the promise of prosperity isn’t enough?
I actually think the SNP, and certainly Alex Salmond, do realise that economics is not enough. Part of Salmond’s adroitness is that he understands the importance of language. And he recognises the importance of history—choosing these patriotic anniversaries for various important SNP junctures. So I think he is appealing to gut sentiment in a way that it’s quite difficult for the unionists to contend with. But I would argue that they [the unionist side] could still try harder than they have.
Are the difficulties that the "No" campaign finds itself in partly a consequence of various botched attempts to explicitly articulate a notion of Britishness over the past 20 or 30 years?
I think we should drop the focus on Britishness per se. Gordon Brown tried that, but I’m not sure you can necessarily reinvent the wheel like that. The theme to bang on about might be union, and reinventing unionism. What could a 21st-century union of different countries look like and what would the rationale be? To obsess about defining “Britishness” is in some way to ask the wrong question. I’d say that you cannot have a working union without constantly refurbishing and reinventing unionism—the idea of union. It’s not enough to say “Better together”. It might be true, but what does being together mean? And why is it better together?
We were talking about constitutive stories just now. One constitutive story that Britain tells about itself, which you discuss in the book, is an island story. But you make the very important point that “islandhood” does not equate to insularity.
Right. I wanted to take this notion of an island story, which is often repeated unthinkingly, and pull it apart and reconstruct it a rather different way.
That’s why in the third part of the book you have chapters on Britain’s relationship to the US and Europe. There’s another bit of the story Britain tells about itself which you’re interested in and which you’re sceptical of: the cult of “liberty”. You worry about the way that story has been deployed don’t you?
Potentially, it can be a very valuable story. Obviously, it’s better to believe, or to claim to believe, in liberty than it is to believe in despotism or tyranny. And I don’t accept the notion that liberty stories were merely imposed from above for the convenience of the ruling class—that’s a very instrumentalist view. But clearly liberty could put blinkers on people, as well as free them. In some ways, liberty stories have been arrested and detoured in various ways.
It’s unfortunate, for example, that so much of the vocabulary of freedom and liberty has been taken over by Ukip and those who wish to bash Brussels. Now, there are many reasons why Brussels is not functioning as well as it might. And there are all sorts of things that are wrong with the current organisation of the EU. But Brussels gives us an other against which we can define our “liberty”, without then going to trouble of asking what are the more positive, domestic stories about liberty. How free are we? In what way are we free? How might be freer? And that leads into discussions of things like bills of rights, written constitutions and so forth, which are being extruded because of this adoption of liberty as a stone to throw at Brussels.
Is there an equivalent in the English or British story to the American idea of "manifest destiny", some sense of enduring Englishness or Britishness of which liberty is an essential part?
Yes. For example, one of the great justifications for the Empire was that Britain was spreading the rule of law and constitutional freedoms across the globe. So you have this fascinating paradox that this polity which has no written constitution is writing constitutions all over the world, on the grounds that “they” need it. Whereas the British don’t because they know and have it. It’s others who need a codification of these things.
There’s another interesting paradox you identify in the book, which is the way that the language of “English liberty” becomes a kind of lingua franca for the subjugated peoples of the British Empire.
Postcolonial scholars sometimes have difficulty coming to terms with this. But it is interesting how many of the first generation of freedom fighters and anti-colonial activists had gone to the Inns of Court in London and had—Gandhi would be a classic example—been deeply impressed by this canonical story of liberty. It’s only gradually, with Gandhi and also Nehru, that it mutates into opposition to empire. Initially, it’s part of a belief that you might dislike aspects of the British Empire but it has this great redeeming quality.
Part two of the book is entitled "Divisions", but despite that emphasis on division, you’re not what one might call a “Nairnian” determinist are you? That is to say, you don’t agree with Tom Nairn and others that the breakup of Britain is inevitable?
Nairn first wrote [about this] in the 1970s, and here we still are, rumbling on. I've tried to say that nobody knows what’s going to happen in September in Scotland. Even if the Scots vote for secession, which I think is possible, nobody knows quite how traumatic that’s going to be. Someone like John Kay says that in many ways it won’t make much difference, because we live in a global economy. I think that’s to underrate the likely impact. But I don’t take the view that there is something peculiarly perverse about the construction of the UK, which makes its fragmentation inevitable. Because if the fragmentation of the UK is inevitable, then presumably the ultimate fragmentation of, say, India is also inevitable.
But you do think that there is nevertheless a democratic deficit in the UK, don’t you? That there’s a hole, for example where English representation should be. As I understand your argument, you think that this is partly a consequence of the way devolution was carried out, that it left certain questions of political representation unresolved.
Devolution was incomplete. I think it has caused great and growing resentment. The lesson one could draw from the devolution of the 1990s is that constitutional reform was something that had to be allocated to the so-called “Celtic” nations but somehow England could go on as always, and, apart from a few gestures to northern mayors, you didn’t need to do anything else. I do understand that politicians are desperately overwhelmed with work and have to consider short-term imperatives and partisan repercussions, and that the idea you can take time off to rethink the entire polity is fanciful. But nonetheless some more systematic thinking and a more historically informed awareness of the issues—looking harder at what other countries have done—might have been useful.
So academic historians have a contribution to make to the debate here then?
Academics are divided over this question. Some are professional purists and don’t feel that academics should sully their hands or get embroiled in political argument. I certainly don’t believe that academics should pretend to be what they’re not, but I do think that a lot of the issues that are involved in these debates require a certain amount of historical literacy, which often doesn’t exist.
Right. And one of the things you argue in the book is that far from the current debate being a kind of eruption of unprecedented anxiety about the union, questioning of this sort has actually been the norm.
Not quite the norm, but some of the discussions and projects being broached at the moment are not without precedent. Scholars, political scientists, historians and legal theorists differ as to how close the UK came before 1914 to achieving any serious constitutional reform. Some think that although there was a lot of noise, it would never have happened. Others think that it did come very close to happening but for the First World War.
I’m not weighing in on that debate. And in a sense I don’t think it’s what matters most. What does matter is the idea that politicians at a high level have always been complacent about constitutional organisation and have treated parliamentary sovereignty as the only truth that matters. This notion that the British are strictly pragmatic people who just muddle along is based on a selective view of the past.
"Acts of Union and Disunion" is published by Profile Books (£12.99)
Colley dropped into the Prospect offices last week to talk to me about the past and future of the United Kingdom. I began by asking her about the point she seems to me to be making at the beginning of the book to the effect that all nation states—and in this Britain is, arguably, not distinctive—are, to some degree or other, fissiparous assemblages of discrete and often incompatible parts.
LC: It’s not true of all states, and it is the case that some states attempt to implement and rationalise a consciously assimilationist policy—France would be the classic example, extending Frenchness not just to its own borders but incorporating its colonial peoples, when it had them, as French citizens. The UK has been very different and it seems to me that it approximates much more either to what is neutrally called a “composite state”, but is more provocatively, and I think more accurately, called a “state-nation”, which traditionally operates at two levels—having an idea and rationale of the whole, but also paying due recognition to the component parts as well.
France went through so many tumultuous periods that it had to try harder—it had a much more rural composition than the UK did; it was bigger; it was not as linguistically united; it had to cope with sequential revolutions and changes of dynasties. So I think France had to think harder about unitary policies, whereas it was a rather different situation in the UK.
JD: Among the things that bind nation states together are what you have called elsewhere "constitutive stories". These, you argue, are an essential part of nation-building and of the sustaining of nation states. Economic well-being is not enough, you’ve argued. Nations need these overarching stories to tell about themselves, too. Now, in the February issue of Prospect, John Kay says of the referendum campaign in Scotland: “[It] is characterised by a near exclusive focus on economic issues.” Do you agree with one implication of that, which is that the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of forgetting that the promise of prosperity isn’t enough?
I actually think the SNP, and certainly Alex Salmond, do realise that economics is not enough. Part of Salmond’s adroitness is that he understands the importance of language. And he recognises the importance of history—choosing these patriotic anniversaries for various important SNP junctures. So I think he is appealing to gut sentiment in a way that it’s quite difficult for the unionists to contend with. But I would argue that they [the unionist side] could still try harder than they have.
Are the difficulties that the "No" campaign finds itself in partly a consequence of various botched attempts to explicitly articulate a notion of Britishness over the past 20 or 30 years?
I think we should drop the focus on Britishness per se. Gordon Brown tried that, but I’m not sure you can necessarily reinvent the wheel like that. The theme to bang on about might be union, and reinventing unionism. What could a 21st-century union of different countries look like and what would the rationale be? To obsess about defining “Britishness” is in some way to ask the wrong question. I’d say that you cannot have a working union without constantly refurbishing and reinventing unionism—the idea of union. It’s not enough to say “Better together”. It might be true, but what does being together mean? And why is it better together?
We were talking about constitutive stories just now. One constitutive story that Britain tells about itself, which you discuss in the book, is an island story. But you make the very important point that “islandhood” does not equate to insularity.
Right. I wanted to take this notion of an island story, which is often repeated unthinkingly, and pull it apart and reconstruct it a rather different way.
That’s why in the third part of the book you have chapters on Britain’s relationship to the US and Europe. There’s another bit of the story Britain tells about itself which you’re interested in and which you’re sceptical of: the cult of “liberty”. You worry about the way that story has been deployed don’t you?
Potentially, it can be a very valuable story. Obviously, it’s better to believe, or to claim to believe, in liberty than it is to believe in despotism or tyranny. And I don’t accept the notion that liberty stories were merely imposed from above for the convenience of the ruling class—that’s a very instrumentalist view. But clearly liberty could put blinkers on people, as well as free them. In some ways, liberty stories have been arrested and detoured in various ways.
It’s unfortunate, for example, that so much of the vocabulary of freedom and liberty has been taken over by Ukip and those who wish to bash Brussels. Now, there are many reasons why Brussels is not functioning as well as it might. And there are all sorts of things that are wrong with the current organisation of the EU. But Brussels gives us an other against which we can define our “liberty”, without then going to trouble of asking what are the more positive, domestic stories about liberty. How free are we? In what way are we free? How might be freer? And that leads into discussions of things like bills of rights, written constitutions and so forth, which are being extruded because of this adoption of liberty as a stone to throw at Brussels.
Is there an equivalent in the English or British story to the American idea of "manifest destiny", some sense of enduring Englishness or Britishness of which liberty is an essential part?
Yes. For example, one of the great justifications for the Empire was that Britain was spreading the rule of law and constitutional freedoms across the globe. So you have this fascinating paradox that this polity which has no written constitution is writing constitutions all over the world, on the grounds that “they” need it. Whereas the British don’t because they know and have it. It’s others who need a codification of these things.
There’s another interesting paradox you identify in the book, which is the way that the language of “English liberty” becomes a kind of lingua franca for the subjugated peoples of the British Empire.
Postcolonial scholars sometimes have difficulty coming to terms with this. But it is interesting how many of the first generation of freedom fighters and anti-colonial activists had gone to the Inns of Court in London and had—Gandhi would be a classic example—been deeply impressed by this canonical story of liberty. It’s only gradually, with Gandhi and also Nehru, that it mutates into opposition to empire. Initially, it’s part of a belief that you might dislike aspects of the British Empire but it has this great redeeming quality.
Part two of the book is entitled "Divisions", but despite that emphasis on division, you’re not what one might call a “Nairnian” determinist are you? That is to say, you don’t agree with Tom Nairn and others that the breakup of Britain is inevitable?
Nairn first wrote [about this] in the 1970s, and here we still are, rumbling on. I've tried to say that nobody knows what’s going to happen in September in Scotland. Even if the Scots vote for secession, which I think is possible, nobody knows quite how traumatic that’s going to be. Someone like John Kay says that in many ways it won’t make much difference, because we live in a global economy. I think that’s to underrate the likely impact. But I don’t take the view that there is something peculiarly perverse about the construction of the UK, which makes its fragmentation inevitable. Because if the fragmentation of the UK is inevitable, then presumably the ultimate fragmentation of, say, India is also inevitable.
But you do think that there is nevertheless a democratic deficit in the UK, don’t you? That there’s a hole, for example where English representation should be. As I understand your argument, you think that this is partly a consequence of the way devolution was carried out, that it left certain questions of political representation unresolved.
Devolution was incomplete. I think it has caused great and growing resentment. The lesson one could draw from the devolution of the 1990s is that constitutional reform was something that had to be allocated to the so-called “Celtic” nations but somehow England could go on as always, and, apart from a few gestures to northern mayors, you didn’t need to do anything else. I do understand that politicians are desperately overwhelmed with work and have to consider short-term imperatives and partisan repercussions, and that the idea you can take time off to rethink the entire polity is fanciful. But nonetheless some more systematic thinking and a more historically informed awareness of the issues—looking harder at what other countries have done—might have been useful.
So academic historians have a contribution to make to the debate here then?
Academics are divided over this question. Some are professional purists and don’t feel that academics should sully their hands or get embroiled in political argument. I certainly don’t believe that academics should pretend to be what they’re not, but I do think that a lot of the issues that are involved in these debates require a certain amount of historical literacy, which often doesn’t exist.
Right. And one of the things you argue in the book is that far from the current debate being a kind of eruption of unprecedented anxiety about the union, questioning of this sort has actually been the norm.
Not quite the norm, but some of the discussions and projects being broached at the moment are not without precedent. Scholars, political scientists, historians and legal theorists differ as to how close the UK came before 1914 to achieving any serious constitutional reform. Some think that although there was a lot of noise, it would never have happened. Others think that it did come very close to happening but for the First World War.
I’m not weighing in on that debate. And in a sense I don’t think it’s what matters most. What does matter is the idea that politicians at a high level have always been complacent about constitutional organisation and have treated parliamentary sovereignty as the only truth that matters. This notion that the British are strictly pragmatic people who just muddle along is based on a selective view of the past.
"Acts of Union and Disunion" is published by Profile Books (£12.99)
