Angst in the Anglosphere

Who am I? What is my life for? Do I want to honour my heritage? Or reinvent myself somewhere else? These are the sort of questions asked by a million young adolescents, school kids and undergrads all across the world. But such ersatz existentialism is rather more surprising in a 300 year old nation state. 

If national identity feels like an unsolvable puzzle in which we’re all collectively trapped, it can be illuminating to see it from an outside perspective

Britain is of course not without cause for its identity crisis. For one thing, “Britain” is itself not uncontroversial. Are we the “United Kingdom”? Or the eponymous “YooKay” — a multicultural NHS with an army attached. There is “Britain”, or, patriotically “Great Britain”. But does that include Northern Ireland? And what of England, which we cheer on furiously at the football, before it is put safely back in its box. We’re not quite “allowed” to be English in the way Scots and Welsh can celebrate their national symbols and history, albeit in safely disarmed civic nationalist fashion. Once, English and British were freely exchangeable without much anxiety in either direction or apology to other nations in the Union. Now, we English are expected to knuckle under a faux Brit-ish identity convened by vapid “British” values of diversity, tolerance and so on. 

If national identity feels like an unsolvable puzzle in which we’re all collectively trapped, it can be illuminating to see it from an outside perspective. Crudely pawing at the national Rubik’s Cube at present are millions of Americans witnessing the World Cup. Online banter and “flame wars” over football are nothing new, but thousands of England and Scotland fans descending on America have created a curious three way international psychodrama. 

Americans are of course relative outsiders to the sporting obsession of most of the rest of the world. In America football is a game played by burly corn-fed Midwestern farm boys and African American college athletes in helmets, a masculine national sport drenched in commercial sponsorship, elaborate half-time shows and conspicuous consumption. As far as most Americans are concerned, what’s coming to its shores at present is “soccer” a sport beloved of recent Hispanic immigrants, and metrosexual hipsters drinking imported beer. 

In the 21st century, the hosting of a World Cup is an online event, spun, memed and monetised by influencers and experienced via hundreds of gonzo viral videos. One popular self-flattering format was Europeans reacting Yeltsin-like to American wealth and abundance. Wide-eyed Germans slobbering over cheeseburgers and Mexican food was comforting fare for the contented citizens of the imperial centre, receiving the deference of the periphery. 

But a more uncomfortable clash was coming in the form of English football fans. A far less agreeable breed than tame continental fans, they swiftly complained that American stadia were not proper football grounds. Fans found them generic, commercialised, soulless. Americans would sit down for more of the match, rather than being packed in and on their feet cheering. England fans made fun of US chants, and images of Americans eating entire meals on tables during matches drew particular mockery. 

Americans responded angrily, and matters soon descended into the sort of days long rolling mutual denunciation that these things inevitably end in. The English were poor, ate terrible food and simply envied Americans. But another participant in the drama was about to take the field. 

The Scots were arriving in America ahead of the English, instantly recognisable in their kilts and tartan. They, unlike the ungrateful Sassanach, were having a grand old time. The Americans like us more, was the message. Scotland, like Ireland and America, was a victim of wicked British imperialism, with Scots Nats piling into the argument. Left-leaning Americans are curiously keen to engage in performative anti-English rhetoric, and did so. 

Behind the fighting was a culture clash. American “soccer” is a commercial sport for immigrants and bourgeois. English football is a working class sport embedded in local communities. Even the massive globalised monetisation of the premier league is in no small part built on this traditional culture, and the obsessive enthusiasm of working class fans. In this respect its closest American cultural equivalent is baseball, a working class sport wreathed in sentiment and history. 

The intensity of feeling behind the clash, which dragged in not only Scots, but also Irish users, tells us something about the crisis of British and English national identity. Whilst many European states have a relatively unbroken history of cultural unity, whatever the shifting fortunes of imperial unions and foreign occupation, and little history of overseas empire (think of Finland, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland), and other post-colonial powers have either reinvented themselves as sheerly European (the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Sweden), or come to a soft cultural detente with their former colonies (Spain, Portugal), or in the case of France, retained a vestige of its former empire, Britain is in a unique situation. 

Whilst there is a very long history of cultural exchange throughout the British Isles, the formal political union of Scotland and England was coterminous with the establishment of a worldwide empire and a new global order built on trade, protectionism, law, language and shared institutions and ideas. The emerging economy was built on finance, shipping, and manufacturing all linked to these imperial structures. Even as Ireland pulled away from the union, the expectation of the outcome of independence was for a long time home rule and active membership of the British Empire, not partition and a republic in Dublin. Early Scottish Nationalists had the same thing in mind — home rule as part of the Empire. Elites understood themselves to be members of a shared civilisational project, from Canberra to Toronto. 

What we can’t escape is how globally entangled our national belonging has become over the centuries

What changed? Today, Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalists define themselves as oppressed by and at odds with English-speaking civilisation. Even as regional and national distinctiveness is increasingly broken down and blurred by globalisation and centralisation, ressentiment-fuelled narratives of national victimhood gain traction. 

What we can’t escape is how globally entangled our national belonging has become over the centuries. It wasn’t just Canada and Australia that were once strongly identified with a sense of English-speaking cultural unity, this also once extended strongly to the USA. Before the dissolution of the British Empire, America’s WASP elite was both more culturally English, and the links between the American and British political systems were far more often stressed, with British legal reasoning and precedents frequently borrowed by American courts. The growth of easy trade, transport and communication between Britain and America in the late 19th century created a real-terms alignment of interests and ideas, and softened the distinctions between an industrialized Britain and an agrarian America. US “dollar princesses” married into the British aristocracy, and America joined the gold standard, aligning itself with the British financial system. 

Prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic looked forward to a union of America and the British Empire in a single English-speaking union. At the height of the Second World War, Winston Churchill proposed a “fraternal association” with a “common form of citizenship, under which citizens of the United States and of the British Commonwealth might enjoy voting privileges after residential qualification and be eligible for public office in the territories of the other”. According to reporting at the time, “all the American guests present said that they had been thinking on more or less the lines propounded by the Prime Minister, and thought that it was not impossible that American opinion would accept them or something like them.”

Yet there’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, and the fraternal chalice of English-speaking unity seems to have rolled under a sofa at some point, never to be retrieved. A hard-headed American leadership rapidly dismantled the trade and financial system of the Empire in favour of American dollar diplomacy. Any autonomy for Britain was ruthlessly reined in, a lesson harshly applied during the Suez Crisis. US capitalism and the power of Hollywood saw American culture globalised well beyond the Anglosphere. Tens of millions of non-American English-speakers were left in an ambiguous situation, under the shadow of US culture, but not fused into the common civilisation dreamed of by Churchill. 

But for all that, we cannot help living in one another’s pockets. The ancient British divisions of upland and lowland, west and east, north and south, are obscurely mapped onto former colonies. Scots-Irish J.D. Vance condemns mass migration to the British homeland, whilst Irish Joe Biden opposed extraditing IRA suspects to Britain as a senator, and showed little favour to the United Kingdom as President. Back in Britain, aristocratic Welshman Enoch Powell and working class Welsh coal miner Aneurin Bevan were both fiercely opposed to the “Special Relationship”, each disdaining America’s aggressively consumerist and capitalistic culture from different parts of the political spectrum.

America inherited the mantle of the Anglosphere, but it has proven an uneasy and ambiguous burden. America, heading a continental scale-economy with a burgeoning population of non-anglos found itself diverging economically and culturally from Britain and her former dominions.

The growth of “hyphenated Americans”, deplored by Teddy Roosevelt, has proven an enduring influence. Italians, Slavs, Hispanics, Asians and a dozen other major ethnicities have come to define America as the land of year zero, rather than the inheritor of ancient English liberty. Despite English ancestry being one of the most ubiquitous, it is now rarely stressed, unlike Irish and Scots-Irish identities. Italian-American, Irish-American, Hispanic-American and Jewish-American heritages may be lightly worn, but they have shown little sign of disappearing into the melting pot. Instead they are readily adopted, including by those only marginally connected to them, but keen to stress a unique identity, often mapping onto civic and regional identities. Over time, a generic, bland Americanism of equality, autonomy, constitutional rule and civil religion is often favoured over the more particularist narratives of the past.

Anxiety or pride over this situation is frequently projected onto Britain, but often largely in the form of contempt. The US Right sees the image of America’s own demographic and cultural transformation in an increasingly multicultural Britain; a Shire invaded by Saruman whilst Gondor wasn’t watching. The Left for their part, like to sneeringly identify Britain with colonialism, or as a gauche, problematic “TERF Island”. Neither of these portraits are particularly accurate, with the Left seemingly unaware of how progressive much of institutional Britain has become, and the Right describing fantasies of non-existent “no-go areas” and ethnic conflict in the heart of London. 

America is a victim of its own hegemonic culture, continually exporting its discourse and ideas, and being surprised when they turn up on its shores, subtly changed or taken to unimagined extremes. It is at once a deeply insular culture, yet also a global hegemon. With vast resources, energy reserves and a briskly growing economy, it is sheltered from the energy shocks and mass migration triggered by its adventures in the Middle East, consequences instead suffered by a Europe terribly exposed to a world that has long since slipped out of its control.

Split off from one another, but as English-speakers most closely exposed to American cultural exports, Britain, Ireland, Ca≈ada, New Zealand and Australia have awkwardly remade themselves in the image of the USA, following Washington rather than Westminster. We are all, with differing degrees of plausibility, seeking to become “nations of immigrants” with no special link to English identity, a far cry certainly from the White Australia of the post-war period, but just as much a departure from Canada’s distinctive early to mid 20th century cultural pluralism. 

The idea of national identity founded in rights, individual autonomy, and engineered egalitarianism is a development of US culture, but also a profound distortion of it. The republican ideal of a fellowship of citizens, working together in voluntary associations, that Tocqueville once observed, still exists to a degree in America, but it is not a model America has done enough to conserve domestically let alone export overseas. Automobiles, racial conflict, and unrestrained capitalism has destroyed much of the web of dense inner city neighborhoods and small towns, exploding them into suburbs, shopping centres and slums. That it is this model, rather than Jeffersonian Democracy and individual enterprise, that America is exporting to the world is an uncomfortable truth most American leaders and commentators are loath to confront. 

The fracturing of both an internal fellowship of citizens, and a worldwide fraternity of English-speaking nations in the context of US hegemony has had a starling effect, stunting and distorting the development of national identities across the Anglosphere. Former participants in Empire seek to collapse the entire project symbolically back into the hands of England, rejecting the old homeland in favour of a new national identity that leaves England and Empire behind. Yet in the process, each country makes itself an image of America, and its new multicultural orthodoxy. Contemporary “anti-Americanism” in the English-speaking world is almost without exception a reflection of America’s own polarisation and internal dynamics. Whilst European populists can deal with Trump pragmatically, Anglosphere populists and conservatives are drawn directly into the American culture wars. 

Looked at with a coldly objective eye, the apparent fragmentation of the Anglosphere starts to look like a kind of collective self-delusion. Hysterical negations of the British past or American present seem like the most pathos-filled gestures against present realities. In Canada, Mark Carney, a former Governor of the Bank of England, defeated French Canadian Pierre Poilievre because of bellicose remarks made by Donald Trump, a Scottish American populist who regularly golfs in Aberdeenshire. Carney is married to an Englishwoman he met at Oxford, has held Irish, Canadian and British citizenship, worked for a US Bank, and supports Everton. It does not matter if Canada throws off the British monarchy one day whilst retaining the Westminster system of government, or if most of the English-speaking world makes demonstrative declarations of anti-American sentiment whilst wearing jeans and drinking coca-cola — we are part of a common culture, regardless. 

Which brings us back to national angst. Having globalised distinctive English ideas about liberty, the rule of law, toleration and democracy, we now profoundly struggle to particularise them again. England was once “mother of parliaments”, and the US founding fathers demanded not simply freedom, but the “liberty and privileges of Englishmen”. This shamelessly Euro- and Anglo-centric conception of democratic life is now seen as exclusionary, and dangerously flattering to ethnic and cultural sentiments. Yet the result of this rupture is not good news for modern day liberals — putting nationalism on a collision course with liberal ideas and institutions. 

Our culture cannot be disentangled from either the Anglosphere, America, or modernity

Yet there is no post-imperial, hobbit-like cul-de-sac down which Britain, or even just England can retreat. The fact that our national tongue, national authors and national philosophy has circumnavigated the globe is not a reality that can be undone. Modernity — in the form of industrial and commercial civilisation — is in no small part a British invention. Even if we wish to qualify, reject or transform modernity, the one thing we cannot do is ignore or circumvent it. 

Our culture cannot be disentangled from either the Anglosphere, America, or modernity. Whilst some nations’ can begin with some inherited premodern narrative, to access our own, we have to first address our relationship with America, the Anglosphere and modernity. A British national movement that does not know how it will relate to the USA, Europe, and globalisation is simply doomed to irrelevance and incoherence. 

If you doubt this, look at how Scotland and Ireland have seen the EU as their route to nationhood, or the way that Brexit has been so deeply implicated on the path to a British populism. Consider how much proponents of leaving pointed towards the Anglosphere and America, and to what degree British politicians of all stripes are forced to define themselves for or against Donald Trump. 

None of these complexities changes or problematises the simple, intuitive love of ordinary people for place, home and country. It doesn’t take away the joy of England fans on Wednesday, or the common decency and sense of ordinary Britons bedeviled by a crooked establishment. But as issues of social breakdown, migration and deindustrialisation put immense pressure on traditional communities and shared loves, these are questions that cannot be avoided or evaded. We are heirs to a world culture as much as we are heirs to the local and particular, and one flows from the other.