What is a Nation?
I remember years ago talking to several Greek acquaintances in a cafe in town. They were telling me about how while Cyprus was partially occupied by Turkey, Cyprus was historically a part of the Greek nation, because of the culture Greek people shared there and how historically the two countries had been linked. This got me thinking about what these things really were, and I came to the conclusion that a nation was a matter of opinion.
A country, you can define quite objectively. It’s a piece of land where a particular government has a monopoly on the use of force within its borders, where they can arrest people and the like. And culture you can also define with some level of objectivity, by looking at language and the way people interact with each other, and so on. Culture is more fuzzy because multiple cultures can exist within a population or even within a person, collections of cultural traits may not be universally practised by everyone who considers themselves part of that culture, and it bleeds across borders between countries. But still, it’s possible to measure it.
Nations are something else again. Two people can disagree about what borders constitute a nation; to some Turkish nationalists, parts of Hungary belong to Turkey by right, and Syria, and Cyprus and Greece as well. You can back this position up by arguing history but it really comes down to subjective opinion – how far back do you go? Do you go as far as the Ottoman Empire? Or further, to when the Greek-speaking Byzantines ruled Anatolia? Those opinions over where the borders stop, those attempts to make fuzzy culture into a hard national distinction, can conflict between people in a way that is irreconcilable.
Now, ideas of “nation” would be pretty uninteresting if people didn’t invest their identity in nationalism. Because if part of your self-image is defined by your nation and the idea of your nation is what makes you love things about yourself, then coming across someone who thinks differently provokes quite a strong personal response! We’ve all seen it.
But if someone like that says they love their country, what do they really love? For me, Britain is like a very large extended family – there’s the people I grew up closest to, who I like, and then there’s (say) the uncle who always gets drunk and starts fights at weddings, the second cousin who is in prison for molesting someone, you know the way it is with family. You don’t pick them, but you love them even knowing what some of them are like. But when a British person loves their country, most often they love an idea of it, sort of an edited history. I guess that’s natural; any country you could name has a complex history and is full of complex people who all did and believed different things. There’s too much variety to fit inside anyone’s head, so you’ve got to edit it down.
I’ve spent years of my life in Germany. Every German child learns in school about how Hitler took this country with all its scientific and cultural achievements and turned it into an ugly and cruel instrument of death. They learn about the White Rose, German heroes who tried to fight against that evil, and they learn about the Germans who committed the holocaust and left Europe in ruins. They’ve all looked their crimes straight in the eye. But they don’t feel guilt at all – when you go and visit their country, they can’t wait to show you things that they’ve achieved, pour you a glass of beer, teach you some words, take you for a walk through the mountains or the Weinachtsmarkt. Even the Germans I’ve met who don’t like their country very much still remind me of it in subtle ways.
We Brits have never looked our crimes straight in the eye. We’re taught about how we were the good guys in World War II, but that’s not the only war this country has fought. We had an empire, and we’re told that this massive empire was a big achievement for such a little country and we should be proud that we’re capable of such things. But you all know, or should know, about the crimes our empire committed. The Union Jack is known as the Butcher’s Apron in Ireland for good reason. Churchill, one of our greatest heroes, killed millions of Indians in the Bengal famine in 1943; what do you think it’s like for someone of Indian extraction to look at his face on the back of a fiver? How does the beautiful architecture in Liverpool city center look to someone whose ancestors were wrung through the transatlantic slave trade?
All this depravity and death, for what? The Empire was run for the benefit of the elite – about ten thousand psychos made out like bandits, but the majority of us Brits were coughing up our lungs in the coal mines or breaking our backs in the workhouses or being shot by Russians thousands of miles from home in the Crimean peninsula. What did it do for us ordinary people? Plenty of countries in Europe have done beautifully without any imperial possessions. I guess the idea of the Empire made us think we were a great nation – it’s become a part of the national narrative that the Empire was a great achievement for us. People are told that it’s a virtue to personally identify with it. Can you see how badly we were conned?
If you’ve got a mature attitude, you love and support your partner and your children, and you take care of the rest of your screw-up family as best you can, and you stay away from those people there you dislike that you’re related to and you certainly don’t feel bad about that. Britishness is innate to me – I drink gallons of tea a day and the gloriousness of the food here is a hill I’ve died on many times to the puzzlement (and amusement) of my European friends. The language and the music here are the parts of this family that I feel closest to. And I feel no conflict when I revile our nation’s shame and hypocrisy, I fight against our very classist society, just as I shun the tedious jackass who is always picking arguments at family get-togethers.
Loving some edited history of your country and letting it define you is the love of a stalker. The victim transforms in the stalker’s mind to become a receptacle of the stalker’s projected desires and image about themselves. Their obsessive love for something that isn’t real, that is painted onto a real person, is creepy and dehumanising, not to mention frequently dangerous.
Nationalism is the same. The nationalist myth that we’re most frequently taught is meant to paint the nation as valorous, so ordinary people who believe it can feel good about themselves for being a part of it, just like the stalker obsessively puts their victim on a pedestal. The biggest difference is that the nationalist story we’re told serves a political purpose, so it’s encouraged rather than being seen as a derangement. In this country, we’re taught the empire was benevolent, and look where that got us in Iraq? I’m willing to bet that most people who supported the war thought they were helping liberate this distant country from this nasty dictator.
Remember Hilary Benn’s soaring oratory about bombing Syria? He was so blinded by nationalism he didn’t countenance the idea that our leaders just wanted to feel powerful, and righteous, and our corporations just wanted to loot the economy of both our country and whoever we happen to be occupying.
Brits aren’t bad people in my experience. Most of us don’t like injustice and cruelty, so we have to tell ourselves a story to justify someone else getting a raw deal at “our” hands. It’s like making excuses for your friend whose wife keeps walking into doorframes. The nationalist myth that gets reinforced through the press is so effective at enabling war overseas and personal deference to these great men and women, these mighty families that know what’s best and run the country to everyone’s benefit. We’re told that we’re all pulling together with them, and together making the nation great.
It’s all very unnatural, of course, and the funniest thing is that we’re also taught that being a patriotic nationalist, with the stalker’s obsessive and entitled love, is the most natural thing in the world, and anyone who instead takes the country as it truly is, and treats it like a family are the ridiculous ones, or even that they’re bad and harmful people. It’s all nonsense, and like I said, it’s a con. I think that if you pay attention to the way our ruling classes work, to them there are maybe only a hundred thousand people in Britain, and everyone else are these dirty, mindless and uncultured prole-golems whose job is to do work and have to be herded and persuaded to do anything good at all.
So you see, for them too, we’ve ceased to be people in their minds with our own ideas, passions and goals. Their love for us is also a simulation. They’re just going through the motions, telling a story to themselves to drape noble intentions over their exploiting the wealth of the country and its people, and to make their superiority complex seem justified. The same nationalist narrative that they pump into our culture makes us easier for them to control, and makes us more likely to support whatever daft war they’ve embroiled us in.
I want to invite you all reading this to wake up, with me, and walk away from the simulation in your mind of the collective national character and will. You can love the place you are from for what it really, truly is! There are so many interesting and weird and wonderful things about Britain, you’re really missing out by obsessing over this fairy story. Stop feeling personally attacked when someone criticises the country, you know we’ve done a lot of bad shit and you’ll be happier without that personal investment in literally every mad thing the British ruling class has made us do. Stop identifying with this place on a personal level – you also well know that being British doesn’t make you a good person necessarily. Us ordinary people have got nothing to gain and everything to lose by being nationalistic – maybe even our lives. So stop being creepy. Stop stalking Britain.