Why it’s so hard to define English identity, and the importance of the infrastructure of belonging
In 2010, Team England ran into a small problem as they headed to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi: England does not have a national anthem. For most sports fixtures, the England team uses the British national anthem, “God Save the Queen”. But the Commonwealth Games is one of the few occasions when England also competes against Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
So, the question was put to a public vote. The shortlist featured “God Save the Queen”, which underlined rather than solved the problem; “Land of Hope and Glory”, a hymn to imperial expansion; and “Jerusalem”, the scathing critique of industrial Britain and call for radical social change by William Blake, who was once arrested for treason. Jerusalem won, with 52% of the vote.
This episode pointed to something larger: asked to step out from behind “Britain” and say what it distinctively is, England struggles to define itself positively.
A Very British Problem
Ask people living in Scotland whether they identify as Scottish or British, and the majority will opt for the first. The same happens with the Welsh. But people living in England are more split: only about 10% identify solely as English, another 10% say more English than British, but the rest say they’re both, or identify more with British.
There are clear historical reasons for this, which Krishan Kumar explores in The Making of English National Identity (2003). Kumar argues that the English developed an “imperial” or “missionary” kind of nationalism – first as the dominant nation in a multinational state, and then in a multinational empire, like the Russians, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans. In such empires, Kumar suggests, the nation identifies itself with a kind of project rather than ethno-cultural celebration.
England’s project was a blend of empire, Protestantism, parliamentary liberty and “British civilisation”, and through it Englishness was exported to the world: the language, the legal system, Anglicanism, the public schools, the sports.
Kumar observes that asserting a narrowly English nationalism would have destabilised the multinational state and empire on which English dominance rested. So, it avoided doing so.
Much of the difficulty in pinning down Englishness, then, is a by-product of that project’s success. Where writing in Scots or Gaelic plainly belongs to Scotland, and Welsh to Wales, English is shared with the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and beyond, so the culture it carries is never purely English.
Most of England’s institutions are likewise British or UK-wide: the monarchy, the BBC, Parliament, the armed forces, the NHS, the National Trust, even the national anthem. Almost the only major institution specific to England is the Church of England (more on which shortly). England’s borders have also long been porous: industrialisation drew millions from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, so many English people have roots elsewhere in the UK quite apart from more recent migration.
And because England was the dominant partner rather than a colonised one, it never went through the occupation or liberation struggle that tends to forge an emotionally unified nationalism.
When “English” does get invoked as a specific identity, it tends to fall back on tropes from period dramas: stately homes, stiff upper lips, rolling countryside, and afternoon tea. But these have geographic (largely southern) and class (mainly upper-class) associations that fail to make them representative of England in all its fullness.
Although debates about Englishness and protecting English identity have become louder, we find that they rarely avoid addressing the question, what actually sustains a sense of national belonging in the first place?
Drawing on the work of political theorists David Miller and Benedict Anderson, we think that question, how a society builds and renews the infrastructure of belonging, is particularly significant because some of the loudest voices arguing for English patriotism actively oppose some of the infrastructure through which that identity could be most readily be built, or benefit from some of the forces which are fragmenting our shared reality.
Shared public culture and imagined community
In On Nationality (1995) and a series of works since, David Miller argued that nations – as distinct from states – are sustained by what he calls a shared public culture: a thin but real set of common reference points, narratives, civic practices and political vocabularies that allow strangers within a territory to recognise one another as part of the same community.
Miller distinguishes this from ethnic or cultural homogeneity: a shared public culture is not a shared religion, ethnicity, set of tastes, or way of life. It is closer to a shared political-cultural inheritance: a sense of the country’s past, its institutions, its self-understanding – a stock of common references one can draw on, across individual differences.
And, importantly, Miller emphasises that national culture is active. The inheritance any generation receives is partial and distorted in places. So, each one is involved in an ongoing project of working out, together, what a national tradition means and how it should develop. The ‘content’ of what defines the identity flows from the participation, rather than pre-determining it.
What follows from this is a need for venues in which a national culture can continually be made, and which are accessible to all citizens – public broadcasters, newspapers, museums, schools, universities, and so on.
The importance of this also comes through from Benedict Andersons’s Imagined Communities (1983), which is the standard starting point for thinking about the origins of modern nationhood. Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” By ‘imagined’, he means that members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow members, and yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” A nation is a community of strangers who think of themselves as connected despite a lack of personal relationship.
Anderson argues that these “imagined communities” are comparatively recent, and he identified two of the most important forces which made this kind of imagining possible in early-modern Europe. The first was the decline of older forms of legitimacy. Dynastic monarchies and religious cosmologies – in which authority was tied to royal bloodlines and divine ordination, and identity to one’s position in a sacred or feudal order – lost their grip in most countries in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The second was the rise of what Anderson called print capitalism: the technological capacity to print books and newspapers in large quantities, combined with commercial pressure to do so in vernacular languages rather than Latin, in order to reach a mass market. Where Latin, Anderson argues, had held literate Europe together as a single, elite community, vernacular printing fragmented that community into language-shaped audiences.
Newspapers occupy a particularly important place in Anderson’s argument. The rise of the print newspaper, he said, created a particular kind of experience, where you could imagine countless others reading the same paper at roughly the same hour, thinking about the same events. That habit of imagining oneself as part of a vast, simultaneous, anonymous public is, on Anderson’s account, central to the feeling of national identity.
The upshot of this for our purposes is that if a sense of nationhood is a product of specific technological and economic conditions, then if those conditions shift, so could the sense of an imagined community.
That is, in our view, broadly where we are today. The conditions that produced the modern national imagination have shifted dramatically over the past half-century, and even more so in the past twenty years. The shifts are not unique to England, but their effects here are particularly visible – partly because English identity was already more diffuse than that of its neighbours.
In 1980, three quarters of households bought a daily national newspaper, and there were three television channels to choose from. This meant substantial majorities of the country were exposed to broadly the same stories, the same images, the same set of national arguments, at broadly the same time.
Today, no single piece of media reaches even a third of the population – as well as hundreds of channels, there are billions of videos, podcasts, TikToks, and livestreams with new ones being added every second. And the most-used platforms offer personalised feeds whose entire purpose is to show different things to different people based on their pre-existing preferences.
As a result, depending on our personal tastes, we might feel more connected to creators and digital communities based elsewhere in the world, and have very little shared cultural reference points with our neighbours. The ‘communal simultaneity’ Anderson identified as crucial to the national imagination is hard to come by.
At the same time, the civic and public spaces which offered shared experiences or a sense of identity – the high street, the local pub, the parish church, the public library, the youth club, the workplace itself – have reduced in number or changed in shape. And, some of the big nationally-rooted employers – British Rail, British Steel, the National Coal Board, British Telecom – are gone or transformed beyond recognition. Many people used to have a direct link between their livelihood and their country, but for many that no longer feels to be the case.
None of these shifts can be easily addressed, and almost certainly cannot be reversed. The technological and economic forces that produced them are global – they can be softened in places, but not done away with. But what is notable is how little attention this infrastructural question receives even amongst the voices most insistent that England is in danger of losing itself.
Indeed, when patriotism becomes principally a matter of symbols rather than substance, it can crowd out the harder, less satisfying work of asking what would actually make people feel more connected to one another and to where they live.
Pride without the prejudice
This is part of why we want to suggest that one of the institutions which could play a meaningful role here is the Church of England. Not, of course, at the expense of any other denominations or faith groups. And nor as a spiritual arm of a nationalistic project – we are an expression of a global religion, serving a Kingdom that is not coterminous with any nation. But, rather, as a recognition of the responsibility we have as one of England’s only England-specific institutions, and one which is committed to serving everyone in the communities where we are present.
Practically speaking, this means the Church is one of the few institutions that could plausibly host the kind of inclusive English celebration that, on the polling evidence, most of the country actually wants. In British Future’s England United research, for instance, three quarters of people want leaders and organisations to proudly celebrate an inclusive English identity that is opposed to prejudice; and a similar proportion would welcome efforts to mark St George’s Day in ways that show people from different ethnic backgrounds are invited to be involved.
Although there are exclusionary ethno-cultural expressions of English identity, and these can often seem the loudest, British Future’s research consistently shows that they are far from representative. Overwhelming majorities of people, both white and of Global Majority Heritage backgrounds, believe that you can be English whatever your ethnicity. So, the risk of letting those marginal voices define the debate is that they go uncontested.
In this work, the Church of England can also plausibly inspire a kind of patriotism that looks outward as well as inward – partly because we recognise ourselves as part of a global communion, but also having learned from the times when we served power more clearly than the Kingdom of God. The Church of England cannot, in good conscience, encourage a patriotism that pretends England is alone or ultimate in the world or owes nothing to those beyond its borders. It has, in this sense, a built-in corrective to the more inward-looking varieties of national feeling.
Of course, by ourselves, we cannot unpick the deep shifts we have been describing. But part of what is missing in contemporary English public life is simply a worked example of what an inclusive English patriotism looks like in practice — one which is rooted in place, confident in its tradition, but also generous to newcomers and connected to a story larger than itself. If the Church of England, is one of the few institutions in the country which has both the reach and the longevity to offer that, then it would be a waste of its inheritance not to try.
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