Prospect (London), Issue 29, April 1998
“Identity Parades”
Michael Ignatieff
The recent death of Enoch Powell provided the Conservative party with the occasion to mourn the loss of a great English nationalist; it allowed others to heave a sigh
of relief; it enabled everyone to notice how much the debate about British national
identity has changed since 1968. Then we spoke of race; now we talk about ethnic minorities. Then the ambient atmosphere of the debate was relative economic decline and
post-imperial despondency. Now our new elite is “branding” Britain as “the young
country,” which suggests that we have not lost the capacity to tell ourselves agreeable
fairy tales. National identity is not fixed or stable: it is a continuing exercise in the fabrication of illusion and the elaboration of convenient fables about who “we” are.
National identity is also about what we leave unsaid, what is forgotten or repressed.
To break the first of these silences–about race–we must return to Powell. He was an
ethnic essentialist. He thought that human beings belonged to primary groups–racial,
ethnic and linguistic communities of descent. The English were such a group: a homogeneous national community sharing political traditions. Immigration threatened the
cohesion of the English because the new arrivals could not possibly share English values; and the English could not be expected to extend the protection of these values–
toleration, respect for law, democracy–to non-white newcomers.
In Enoch Powell’s vision of the English, civic values depended for their legitimacy
on ethnic tradition. What tied English people to values such as fair play and tolerance
was not that these were values anyone could believe in; it was that they were uniquely
English. You believed them because you were born with them. If they weren’t “your”
values they could not meaningfully bind you.
It is worth remembering that Powell spoke for millions. Even people who did not
see the river foaming with blood felt he was defending the England they loved. But the
Powellite tide was turned. The response of the British political class of 1968 makes an
instructive comparison with the France of the 1980s and 1990s. Powellite discourse
was ostracised, as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s equivalent has not been. Powell was stripped
of his right to speak for England.
Why? Not because the “racism” which Powell conjured up simply vanished, but
because most English people, when they thought about it, realised that it was absurd to
believe that certain values–tolerance, fair play, live-and-let-live–could only apply to
and among the white English-born. They could bind those who were not born here, no
less than those who were. When the English were asked–as Powell asked them–to
choose between civic decencies and ethnic identity, they chose civic decency.
What are these decencies? We live by “liberal fictions”: that human beings are
equal and that in a civic community all difference is minor. In reality, of course, we are
all incorrigibly different: skin colour, religion, class and accent are the markers by
which we identify ourselves. Yet equality is the moral story which governs even our
hypocrisies; it commits us to a distinctive thought experiment on which all political
life depends: that we see beneath the surfaces of difference to a common identity be-
neath. This is the idea which won in 1968. It was a victory for the idea of England both
as a community of choice and one of descent; a community of values rather than a
community of origins; a “civic” rather than an “ethnic” nation state.
But if Enoch Powell lost the argument over identity, he may have won the war over
immigration. “Racialism” is banned from British political discourse; but so too is any
questioning of the equation that “good race relations” requires “strict immigration controls.” Post-Powellite British national identity is built on the silent proposition that the
ethnic minorities in this country should remain at about 5 per cent of the national
population. If, as Ernest Renan once said, national identity is based on forgetting, this
is perhaps the first act of amnesia upon which contemporary Britishness is based.
Another act of amnesia may be involved in the language of identity which won out
over Powellism: multi-ethnic multi-culturalism. What sense can be given to the idea
that Britain is genuinely multi-ethnic, if the visible minorities remain at 5 per cent of
the population? In inner city London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, “multicultural discourse” does describe the street life by day and sometimes the club life at
night. Yet even here there is enduring residential segregation within the inner cities.
“Multi-cultural discourse” implies that we now live together. In fact, notwithstanding
the rise in inter-marriage, most of us continue to live apart.
Beyond the inner cities, what about the shire counties and the English hinterland of
market towns and countryside where millions of people still live? Here, Englishness
remains much as it was: cricket, back gardens, country churches, hedgerows, the
“green and pleasant land”–albeit dotted now with supermarkets stocking pasta and olive oil, DIY centres, motorways and Sunday car boot sales. Here the language of multi-culturalism describes neither how people live nor how they wish to live. The idea
that we are or should be a multi-ethnic community is regarded by millions of English
people as either false to their own personal experiences or as an exercise in political
correctness by a bien pensant elite which does not actually practice what it preaches.
This does not amount to saying that most of white English society remains racist.
Far from it. The politics of anti-racism, embodied by the Anti-Nazi League and similar
organisations in the 1970s and 1980s, alienated the majority because it failed to understand that most people in this country accept that their civic traditions commit them to
a nominal exercise in fair play. But fair play has its limits. It is useful to make a distinction between “negative” and “positive” definitions of tolerance, by analogy with
Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between “negative” and “positive” definitions of
liberty. Negative tolerance simply means putting up with what is different. Positive
tolerance means actively embracing what is different.
The virtues of positive tolerance–of multi-ethnicity and multi-culturalism–have
been asserted, rather than argued, by the postwar liberal elite; for most of the British
population–not just whites–their plausibility is not self-evident. In reality, like continues to live with like, and the practice of tolerance looks much more like polite–and not
so polite–avoidance. Moreover, when advanced as a vision of national identity, multiculturalism bothers many people because it appears to be a prescription for moral relativism. Tolerance appears to require that universal values bow the knee before cultural
prejudices.
I believe in a multi-cultural society. What else can I do? I am a foreigner here. But
we have to face up to this criticism that multi-culturalism is an apology for relativism.
We need to define the core values which any society has to agree upon if it is to have
the cohesion necessary to prevent arguments over priorities and values spilling over
into irreconcilable conflict. Beyond tolerance, what? Beyond live-and-let-live, what?
Where is the common moral ground under our feet?
Who would have imagined, in 1968, that it would be religious rather than racial difference which would force these issues into the centre of national debate? Since Powell’s rivers of blood speech, the Rushdie affair has been the moment of truth which defined the limits of British civic tolerance. It certainly taught me where I stand. But it is
well to realise that the affair led many Muslims to believe that this apparently liberal,
multi-cultural and tolerant “secular” state actively despises the doctrinal content of Islam, its attitude to heresy, its treatment of women, its definition of family authority.
Liberal secularism–to a convinced Muslim–masquerades as value neutrality. In reality,
it is not value neutral.
The Rushdie affair also made liberals discover the limits of liberal value neutrality.
Why, they asked, should a liberal society tolerate book-burning? What civic respect is
owed to doctrines which are either empirically untrue or which deny freedom to others? Obviously Islam was not the only faith which raised these issues, but it is by far
the most powerful tradition in our midst which contests the tolerance at the core of
British identity.
Islam made us realise that this core was less secular than we had supposed. The almost forgotten protestantism within the British identity came to the surface. It is the
protestant faith which the Crown is supposed to defend. If a multi-cultural society is to
gain symbolic recognition at the heart of British institutions, the Crown will have to
redefine itself not as defender of the faith but as a defender of faith. Even then the
change will not necessarily command assent among the secular majority. Why should
the Crown defend faith at all? Protect its freedom, certainly. But defend it? It was Islam which broke a key silence in British national identity: why a secular society fails
to separate church and state altogether. (The West Indian immigrants who were at the
centre of the race debates in the 1960s had not raised this issue because they shared the
protestant faith of their “hosts.”)
The Islamic challenge also laid bare the question of whether a secular society
should tolerate forms of religious education which deny the validity of the scientific
tradition. Were Muslim schools to be allowed to teach creationism rather than Darwinism? Should such schools receive public funding?
As liberal society struggled with these issues, it became clear that our moral problem is not relativism–anything goes–but pluralism, the enduring conflict between
competing definitions of the good. On the one hand, it is apparent that all nations in
the modern age must use their public education system to teach the values of secularity
and science. Without such a core, confessional minorities will secede from the community and reproduce themselves on the basis of values which would make their
young people unfit to understand or participate in the wider national culture. At the
same time, a liberal society is committed to defend the right of religious groups to
maintain their own communities of choice and descent.
So the balance struck between the Scylla of ethnic fragmentation and the Charybdis
of secular tyranny is to allow religious communities to teach what doctrine they want,
provided that they also expose students to the core of secular science; to hold what
views they wish about writers, provided that they do not endorse fatwahs; to maintain
what values in respect of female obedience they wish, provided that the females in
question retain the right to leave and join the secular majority. In this way, a liberal
society reconciles core values necessary to national cohesion with freedom for minority cultures. In this way, national identity can be reconciled with moral pluralism.
The other side of conflict between religious community and national identity which
has emerged since the Powellite 1960s concerns women and the family. Here Islam is
not alone. Jewish Orthodoxy and Christian fundamentalism also disagree with the feminist egalitarianism which has transformed secular family values in the majority culture.
At one time, the gulf between majority and minority culture on family values might
not have been large. But in the 30 years since the Wolfenden Report on homosexuality, the chasm between traditional family culture and the norms of liberal secular culture has steadily widened. Traditional religious groups now feel their very moral identity threatened by the norms of secular culture. This is a conviction which unites traditional Islamic families no less than Orthodox Jewish families and traditional English
conservative families. All feel that the wider culture is fragmenting into an aimless hedonism which is weakening the social order itself.
For the moment, the truth of this view is not the issue: liberal sexual culture may or
may not be hedonist; it may or may not be fragmenting the family. The fact is that significant ethnic and religious groups feel that it is. A liberal need not apologise for the
freedoms–moral and sexual–which the 1960s brought about. But even a liberal has to
acknowledge that his own values are not hegemonic. In place of consensus we have
confrontation; in place of silence we have a furious debate.
As the moral cohesion of secular society appears to fragment, minorities question
the terms of identification and assimilation. They pull back and begin to think of themselves as Orthodox Jews first and Britons second; Muslims first, citizens second. All
modern societies are experiencing the fragmenting effect of “identity politics.” The
elective “civic” bonds which tie national societies together are fraying; the “ethnic”
bonds–of religion, race and origin–are re-asserting themselves. One dimension of this
is an increasingly bitter disagreement about what constitutes acceptable family and
sexual values.
When theorists talk about national identity, they rarely discuss the family. But some
consensus about what families are or should be is central to any idea of a nation. In
Britain, “we” were a “we” to the extent that we all believed, or thought we believed, in
the same kind of family. To an important degree this was always an illusion. A postwar suburban consensus in favour of the nuclear family–holidaying at Butlins, buying
their first Morris Minor–was central to the British self-image of the mid-1950s and
early 1960s. This image was based on keeping certain realities out of the frame of the
family album: father’s affairs, mother’s unhappiness, Uncle Jack’s homosexuality and
little Annie’s homoerotic stirrings. Moral consensus depended on silence and exclusion. But since the 1960s, moral disagreement is out in the open: there are single par-
ent families, same sex families, and all the variants of post-nuclear divorce families.
Once a set of norms sustained policy discussion about how to target welfare assistance
to families. Now these norms are gone, and with it has gone one of the elements of
consensus on which national unity was once based.
As the value systems regulating family values have fragmented, the terms of assimilation to the “civic” core have also changed. Assimilation used to mean introducing
the children of ethnic and religious groups to the terms and conditions of the majority
culture. Now these groups are seeking to protect their children from the majority culture.
Even secular families feel that they should protect their children from the public
culture of modern entertainment and from crime in the streets. Even the secular family–whatever its form–often feels itself to be a haven in a heartless world; instead of
assimilating children into the public realm, families now try to protect themselves from
its intrusions. Children no longer venture out into the public realm unaccompanied;
they no longer have their own private world outside in the streets; they grow up locked
inside families; and as trust in the safety of the public realm has diminished, the gulf
between the private and public worlds has grown.
All this has had an important impact on our sense of national identity. Commitment
to “civic” values–toleration, fair play, openness, mutual trust–is only as strong as the
public sphere itself. If families lose faith in the public sphere–lose faith in the streets,
in the culture of public entertainment–if they increasingly look to the family to protect
them against the public sphere, the “civic” core of attachment to national identity will
weaken.
A strong “civic” culture depends on public investment and public services: schools,
hospitals, roads, street lighting, police, libraries, swimming pools, parks. These are the
institutional sinews of a strong national identity. If these services deteriorate, three
things happen: the wealthy secede from the public realm and purchase these amenities
on the private market; they cease to be willing to pay the extra taxes needed to renew a
public realm from which they have decided to secede; those who are left both abandoned and dependent on failing services are tempted to withdraw their consent from
the national project. This downward spiral has to be reversed if we are to renew the
terms of civic cohesion.
A strong national identity depends not just on a well-financed and efficient public
sector; it also depends on an economy and a welfare state which facilitate inclusion. To
the degree that the economy fails to employ those who are prepared to work, the national project as a whole is failing them and their loyalty is bound to be provisional.
National identity is inseparable from an idea of justice. The economic system must be
seen to be delivering–not equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity and discernible reward for effort.
Anyone on the centre-left of British politics believes that national identity is linked
to an idea of social justice derived from the British socialist and social democratic tradition. A decent and humane welfare state, after all, is what is held to distinguish our
society from the savage capitalism of the Americans. This perception is rooted in the
British educated middle classes, who are among the chief beneficiaries of a system
which, they suppose, exists for the benefit of persons less fortunate than themselves.
The reality is that few of those who actually depend on the welfare state for their housing, health care and income believe that it is especially decent or humane. Certainly,
few believe that in return for rights to welfare, there is an implied duty of responsibility to the society as a whole. If you live in crumbling tower blocks on the pittance
which single mothers receive, it is a little too much to be asked to believe that rights
entail responsibilities.
It is a middle class hypocrisy–or complacency–to suppose that much perception of
justice, and any great sense of obligation, enter into the poor’s relation to the welfare
state. So that if we credit the welfare state with the sense of national identity which we
prize, we should beware of assuming that its beneficiaries (at the bottom end) feel the
same.
If we believe that Britain is a “civic” rather than an “ethnic” nation, a community of
values rather than a community of common descent, we had better realise that the institutions which make it plausible to believe this–mainly the welfare state–are badly in
need, not simply of so-called “reforms” but of basic investment. In short, more cash. If
we want a “civic” community, we had better be willing to pay for it.
This brings me to the final act of amnesia on which contemporary Britishness is
based: the place of the nations of Britain in the national self-image of the English.
Britain has been a multi-national nation state since the incorporation of the Welsh and
Irish in the 16th century and the union with the Scots at the dawn of the 18th century.
Yet the English persist in believing that they are an ethnic–that is, English–nation
which happens to have, by accident of history, a Celtic fringe. If, as I said at the outset,
the English resist the sense that theirs is a multi-cultural state, it is because, in part,
they refuse to understand their own history as a multi-national state. Britishness has
been much less salient to the white English sense of national identity than to any other
national group. It is no accident, therefore, that blacks and Asians rarely describe
themselves as English, always as British. This is because they regard English as an
ethnic term, a badge associated with a certain skin colour. Among white people, the
“ethnic” definition of the state as an “English” creation has persistently competed with
the “civic” components of British national identity, the ones associated with parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and the traditions of tolerance and fair play.
With Scottish and Welsh devolution accomplished, regional English assemblies on
the way and, just possibly, a Northern Ireland assembly as part of a peace plan, Blair’s
Britain has embarked on a constitutional experiment which will concentrate English
minds for the first time on the extent to which they belong to a multi-national state of
which they are just one, albeit the most important, part.
A Canadian such as myself is bound to view this experiment in devolution with
some foreboding, since our own devolution has gone to the brink of jeopardising national unity itself. But there is no going back. For the alternative is unthinkable: a further centralisation of authority in London, exercised on peoples with a growing consciousness of themselves as separate nations. This path would have fractured the “civic” core on which a British national identity depends: the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament itself.
In a devolved Britain, “civic” and “ethnic” identity will surely be ever more completely sundered. For the nations of Britain may share the same history, but they do not
believe the same myths. The English cannot be expected to understand the battle of
Culloden as the Scots remember it; any more than the protestant Irish can be expected
to accept the myth of Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda.
Silences on which the British identity once depended have been broken. Once broken, they reveal the extent to which we live in a plural moral world. In belief systems,
we are no longer of one faith; in our private lives, we are no longer within one family
model; in the nation itself, no longer under the stable or uncontested dominion of the
English; and we no longer belong to a community of common origins. We are living in
what Isaiah Berlin called a “pluralist” world of incommensurable and sometimes incompatible visions of the good.
If we no longer believe the same things and no longer originate from the same
place, it becomes even more important that the institutions we have in common should
deliver a common basis for citizenship. The decay of “ethnic” commonality–of origins
and values–makes the “civic” core the only remaining common element of national
identity: a police force which we trust; courts which do justice; politicians who don’t
have their hands in the till.
Because it is such common institutions, rather than common meanings, which now
define our identity, the final challenge–the European project–is perceived as a threat. If
it is our institutions–parliamentary democracy, the common law, the monarchy–which
make us what we are, these are the pillars which European federation and a common
currency appear to knock out from over our heads.
Yet perhaps we should realise that our institutions are good because they work well,
not because they are distinctively our own. It might be reasonable to be proud of British institutions; but it is not necessarily reasonable to believe that our institutions are
unique or uniquely good. We sense that since the 1960s both our institutions and way
of life have converged towards European norms. For centuries we defined ourselves as
an island of freedom on the edge of a continent of despots and fanatics. With political
stability and representative democracy securely established among our ancient rivals,
defining ourselves as an island of liberty sounds increasingly like an exercise in nostalgic narcissism.
Our liberty is rightly precious to us, but it is no longer very distinctive or especially
English. Nor is it clear that our liberty could not be equally protected by European institutions. It already is, by virtue of the fact that our laws allow British citizens to refer
claims to the European court; and by virtue of the fact that much useful protection of
the rights of consumers and of the environment has come our way through European
directives. The idea that European legislation is necessarily illiberal, pettifogging and
intrusive is a parochial fantasy. It has sometimes made us freer and more efficient. If
our identity is rooted in our civic liberty, it may offend our pride to discover that other
nations in Europe are just as free as we are; but it should surely change our estimate of
the risks of ever closer European ties.
As citizens, we must be clear about the distinction between sovereignty and legitimacy. There seems little doubt that closer European union will reduce the sovereignty
of the British parliament: it will not eliminate it, but it will become a middle-level assembly, with local and regional assemblies below it and a European parliament above
it. Sovereignty in Britain will be distributed across three tiers of government rather
than two. But what matters more is legitimacy: whether the laws and regulations, executive decisions and other directives which originate from these tiers of government,
have our consent. Legitimacy is the issue, not sovereignty; and the opponents of European integration are engaging in a fine exercise in English narcissism if they suppose
that our existing British institutions already provide us with fully legitimate government. Already we are not nearly as democratic as we should be. I cannot see how European integration will make us less so.
Opponents of European integration make the same essentialist argument about legitimacy which Enoch Powell made: that the only institutions which can be legitimate
to the British people are their own ones; anchored in their own traditions and values.
This might have made sense if Britain remained the only island of liberty in Europe.
But this is no longer so. There are many countries just as well governed as we are.
There are many countries from which we can (and do) learn. The legitimacy of institutions is not a matter of tradition, but a matter of function. For example, I would be in
favour of Britain becoming part of a European federal state if I could be convinced that
the decisions of the European parliament would be legitimate: that is, based on electoral consent of the governed; and if strict subsidiarity restricted the decisions of this
tier of government to those matters of genuine pan-European concern.
I am not pro-European because I believe our destiny is in Europe; nor because in
the end globalisation and economics leave us no choice. Peoples do not have destinies;
and their politics are not determined by fate or by the global market. They always have
a choice. We have a choice over the euro and over federation. And we will continue to
have a choice, even if the euro and the federation go ahead with or without us. On the
balance of probabilities, our economic future is more secure within a common European currency than outside it. But if we find that it is not–and over a long enough period
to make the demonstration certain–democracy demands that our rulers take us out. The
only convincing argument in favour of European integration is that it will make the
British Isles better governed and more democratic. The European project is drastically
unfinished: it is not democratic now. It will have to become so, if it is to survive.
Whether it does so depends on us and our elites and what we negotiate as the terms of
further integration. If our negotiations cease to be obsessed about retaining British
sovereignty and turn instead to the task of gaining for British citizens a structure which
has democratic legitimacy, we may produce a Europe which enhances rather than diminishes British identity.
In any event, the point about the European decision is that if it is about legitimacy
and not about sovereignty, its outcome need not threaten British identity as such. This
is not a young country; it is an old one, with great traditions of liberty. These are neither so distinctive nor so democratic as we like to suppose, but they are a matter of
quiet pride. The task is to worry less about our identity and care more about our freedom; to care less about sovereignty, and more about legitimacy, both here and in Europe. Were we to make this change in our heads and hearts, we might look to our future with a good deal more hope and a good deal less fear.