Why the Nation Matters

With a General Election looming, Peter Ramsay spoke last week at the London School of Economics about why the survival of the British nation is in doubt and why the politics of culture war are an evasion of the problem rather than a solution. Here is an edited version of what he said.

Benedict Anderson defined a nation as an ‘imagined political community: limited and sovereign’. A nation has to be an imagined community because it is comprised of millions of individuals who will never personally know the vast majority of its other members. Those millions live in different families, in different localities, believing in different religions, experiencing life in different socio-economic classes, different ethnicities and cultural groups, and so on. To convert this multitude into a community is therefore an act of great imagination, and it is accomplished by political representation. 

To constitute a nation, this plural multitude must represent itself as a singular political community. We do this by recognising a set of public offices as our representatives. As a result of being our representatives, those who occupy these public offices possess the political right, the authority, to institutionalise a collective sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of freedom and servitude into binding laws to be enforced by state institutions, and into government policies to be pursued by those institutions. 

The nation is imagined as a political community through the authority of these sovereign institutions. And they have authority only within certain limits, only over a particular people in a particular territory. Without this sovereignty and its necessary limits, there can be no political community. 

How can we realistically imagine Britain as such a limited, self-governing political community?

If we start with its geographical limits, the British nation consists of the population of an island with clear and undisputed boundaries. On this island there are three nations joined together in a voluntary union from which all three have a right to secede. This voluntary union remains remarkably strong, as Brexit has proved by sinking the cause of Scottish secession.  

As to who can join us as part of our limited community, British citizenship may be too expensive and have too long a residency requirement, but it has no ethnic criteria. It does have an English language requirement because that is necessary to political participation as a citizen of Britain. When we imagine a British nation, therefore, its limits are very much political ones, not cultural or ethnic. A powerful example of this is the fact that for the past year, the continuing claims of Scottish separatists were led by Humza Yousaf, a practising Muslim of Pakistani heritage, while the unionist government in London opposing him has been led by a Rishi Sunak, a practising Hindu of Indian heritage. Our political culture is so little interested in these leaders’ ethnicity, as opposed to their politics, that this fittingly ironic echo of the imperial partition of India barely registered.

The way we imagine ourselves to be sovereign is through representing ourselves in a democratic constitution. That constitution is sometimes summarised as ‘the Crown in parliament is sovereign’. It’s a simplification but it draws attention to the political fact that in the final constitutional analysis, the Crown is subservient to our elected representatives in parliament. Members of parliament can collectively do anything subject to only one limitation. That limitation is that our representatives are accountable to us, the citizens in the form of their electoral mandates. If MPs betray their promises to the electorate they do so at risk, as the Lib Dems found out in 2015, Labour in 2019 and the Tories are about to find out later this year. 

Our system of parliamentary sovereignty leaves ultimate authority with Britain’s people through our right to stand for election and capacity to hold those we elect to account if they fail to do what they promise. Whatever our many flaws, it is this fundamentally democratic aspect of the British nation which makes it an achievement worth fighting for. We really do get the government we deserve. The high value we should put on our democratic sovereignty as a nation is all the more striking when we consider the alternative, the nature of the threat to its future. 

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To keep the nation in existence we have to keep imagining that it exists. And at the moment we have a serious difficulty with this precisely because this has to be done by political representation. The problem is that our actually existing political class, which is to say, those who represent us as a nation by occupying the sovereign offices of state, don’t believe in these institutions, and they can’t imagine the political community they claim to serve in either its limits or its sovereignty. This failure in the political class comes in two types.

The first type is made up of those who say they believe in the nation, maybe even believe they believe in it, but don’t in fact know what it is. This type is called the Conservative Party. We know that the Conservative Party does not really know what the nation is from the last five years of its government. Elected on a platform articulated in terms of national interest—withdrawal from the EU, controlling immigration, levelling up—they pulled out of the EU but forgot about the other commitments. 

The houses were not built, the public investment did not materialise. Instead they lazily pursued cosmopolitan policies: a growth model based on mass immigration instead of investment; lockdown; proxy war against Russia; road traffic repression; decarbonisation. All of these made Tory politicians more or less acceptable in global policy networks, and I dare say even feel comfortable at dinner parties in London and the Cotswolds. However, none of these policies is pursued because it is in the national interest. 

‘Global Britain’ has been the Tory slogan for a reason: it is a substitute for thinking about the British nation.

The second type of failure to imagine the nation is found in that section of the political class that knows that it doesn’t believe in the idea of a British nation. We call this section the Labour Party (together with the Lib Dems, the Greens and, of course, the SNP). And this section of the political class represents the most significant parts of what, for want of a better word, I will call the ruling class. 

It is true that with an election looming, Labour’s leadership knows it must genuflect to the national interest in order to get elected. ‘National renewal’ is therefore the watchword of their policy stance now. For Labour the foundations of this national renewal are: economic stability; strong national defence; and border control. 

But when you look at what they mean by this, it turns out that economic stability means fiscal austerity and counter-inflation which doesn’t bode well for any real economic change. Strong national defence includes the commitment to NATO – a commitment that indicates the continuation of existing defence policy, better described as ‘forever war’ policy. And border control means Labour, like the Tories, will talk tough on small numbers of asylum-seekers while saying nothing about very high legal migration and the low productivity economy that it enables. When you start looking in any detail, Labour’s ‘national renewal’ looks like more of the same. Labour are trying on the old Tory trick of wrapping themselves in the flag while doing the bidding of big business.

And you don’t have to dig far to see that the part of the ruling class that Labour speaks for does not really imagine that it is in the business of representing a national political community. For our civil service, corporate elite, legal system, journalists, public sector managers, and for the academia that trained them, the idea that our sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, might be determined by the British nation, according to its own lights as a sovereign political community, is anathema. They understand these questions of right and wrong as matters of universal human rights, matters that are really the province of moral philosophers, international lawyers and international courts, the UN, charities and NGOs rather than of democratic choice. The dominant tendency imagines itself as accountable to this cosmopolitan political community – not to the limited political community that is the nation.

What’s more, this dominant section of the ruling class imagines the nation primarily as the site of hatred. This was demonstrated very publicly and decisively by the visceral reaction in June 2016 to the electorate’s decision to leave the EU. Confronted with the question of why most voters had rejected their advice, and decided instead to reassert national sovereignty, the only answer most of our ruling class could come up with was racism, imperial nostalgia, stupidity and the evil influence of Vladimir Putin. It was an astonishingly inadequate and prejudicial explanation of the vote. But the reason why that is all they could come up with is not hard to divine. 

For a governing class that does not derive its authority from its relation to a national political community, the charge of racism and subsequently of white privilege (and of other identity-based privileges and phobias) serves a very specific political function. To paraphrase Matthew Crawford, if the nation is fundamentally racist and transphobic then we owe it nothing. Indeed, a good person will repudiate such a hateful ‘community’. In this way the intersectional outlook frees whoever holds it of the burdensome demands of the national community. That is why it is so attractive to the rich and the very rich.  The discourse of intersectional privilege allows that class to repudiate the demands of the nation without appearing selfish. 

The professional middle classes buy into this ruling class outlook because these are the beliefs required to prosper in corporate human resources, government bureaucracies, NGOs, mainstream media and, of course, in universities. Walter Benn Michaels called this outlook ‘left neoliberalism’. In the left neoliberal, intersectional outlook, it is the attitudes and habits of the population that are a threat to all that is good and true in the universe of the cosmopolitans. Collectively we are a threat to our own survival, and in a society characterised by a morass of cross-cutting relations of privilege and marginalisation, we are all a threat to each other, requiring constant policing of the disinformation and the hate that we allegedly revel in.

In this neoliberal worldview, rather than the state being the institutional form through which the nation solves its problems, the nation is the problem that the state exists to solve. This is not so much an imagined political community: limited and sovereign, more an imagined state of nature: cosmopolitan but vulnerable.

This cosmopolitan outlook probably peaked with lockdown: when everybody was falsely constructed as a threat to everyone else, civil liberties were suspended, and our so-called representatives in parliament walked away from their responsibility to hold the executive to account, declaring themselves to belong to the category of ‘inessential’ workers. 

Those whose task is to represent us, so that we can imagine ourselves to be a nation, do not know how to do it or worse don’t want to do it; and this is because they fear the nation and its demands, and prefer to escape it or fragment it. As a consequence, the institutions of the nation-state are failing politically, and cosmopolitan neoliberalism is bringing decay and fragmentation at home, and forever war abroad. 

If the nation is to have a future it will be because we, its citizens, find a way to discipline or to replace this governing class. To do that we will need to challenge and transform the preoccupations of our expert class or replace it. But that will in turn require us to come up with an inspiring politics to offer young people, and here we get to the heart of the problem for the nation. 

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There are plenty of people who can see the decay of the nation, who can see that the problem lies with our ruling class. Polling data suggests that a significant majority do not feel represented by the mainstream political parties – they know only too well that our representative institutions have failed. But awareness of the fragmentation and decay of the nation is only articulated politically in a conservative or even atavistic form.

All of what we might call the challenger parties or tendencies in the electoral process illustrate this. ‘National Conservatism’ among the Tories, Blue Labour, Reform, the SDP: all in one way or another articulate a defence of ‘British culture, identity and values’, as Reform puts it. These political forces imagine the nation as a matter of culture and identity, and seek a return to an old Britain that has passed away. And this radically limits their political influence, because we can never go back.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the most basic aspect of national integrity, the real territorial limits of Britain’s sovereignty as state. If Brexit has proved that Scotland is an integral part of Britain, it also proved that Northern Ireland is not part of Britain. Following Brexit there is a trade border in the Irish Sea and the EU regulates Northern Ireland’s economy. The effect of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and Sunak’s deal with the DUP to revive devolved government, is to prevent significant regulatory divergence from Single Market regulations for the whole of the UK. This has arisen because Northern Ireland cannot be ruled without the cooperation of another state, the Irish Republic. Yet there is not the slightest recognition of this reality among the challenger tendencies who lay claim to a patriotic intent to revive the nation. Britain’s continuing incorporation of that territory is a ball and chain on our self-government, on our national sovereignty. Those who say they want to revive British nationhood while persisting with this redundant vestige of the Empire are faking it. 

And the political imagination of the challengers is not only cramped by vestiges of the Empire but by the equally paralysing vestiges of the Second World War and anti-fascism. Very few of those concerned to promote the idea of the nation are able to escape the grip on their political ideas of Britain’s heroic role in defeating Nazi Germany. This old conceit that Britain stands up to foreign tyrants leads conservative nationalists to imagine that we should be interfering in the affairs of the people of the Black Sea and the Donbass, and fighting a proxy war with Russia, at significant cost to our national interest. 

The unwillingness to let go of these vestiges of Britain’s long-vanished global power preserves a fantasy version of Britain, one that the Americans ruthlessly exploit to our disadvantage, not least in the form of NATO. Trailing along behind a reckless American foreign policy actually undermines the geopolitical security of the nation. Moreover, we are not going to inspire the people of Britain, especially its young people or its now 16 per cent of ethnic minorities with such a backward-looking approach. We need to reimagine Britain for the future, not try to recreate a Britain that no longer exists. 

The dead end of the atavistic, conservative version of the nation is also apparent in the culture war approach to politics. The problem is that conservatives respond to the left’s culture war in its own terms without being willing or able to explain why it is occurring or whose interests it serves. National conservatism’s invocation of Western values or Reform’s defence of British values, or the SDP’s invocation of ‘tradition’ all treat the nation as if it were primarily a cultural matter rather than a political one; as a vague and arguable collection of values rather than a definite system of self-governing democratic institutions. But Britain is hugely diverse and open culturally, above all our young people are highly Americanised. We cannot pretend away generations of cultural change. What we can do is use our democratic institutions to reimagine the common purposes that could unite us as the people we are now.

Certainly, the war of left neoliberalism against the nation – and against women’s rights and working people’s living standards – needs to be defeated. The conservative opposition to the divisive and authoritarian demands of left neoliberalism draws a veil over the political function of left neoliberalism. Culture war  conservatism avoids exposing the political effects of the culture war against the nation: particularly the permission it gives to big business and the upper middle classes to evade responsibility for the political community.  

Without exposing the political exploitation of these questions to shore up the cosmopolitan status quo, the culture war is just a struggle between irreconcilable values or identities, preserving the feelings of victimisation of the parties on both sides and reducing politics to a culture of complaint. Ethnic and other minorities can complain about their victimisation by the imperial white patriarchy while the spokespersons for the majority can complain about their victimisation by the censorious globalist liberal blob. The fragmentation of the nation continues; the problem of the state’s waning authority is never addressed, let alone resolved, by this contest of victims. 

By restricting culture war conflicts to their own terms, and not politicising them, conservative culture warriors avoid the more difficult problem of how to build a nation out of the actual society we have now. And this is why conservatives are so fond of the culture war. As soon as neoliberalism’s attempted cultural revolution is exposed as the political means to devalue and discount the nation as a political community, it becomes much harder to avoid the question of the political economy that we need if a British nation is to be rebuilt. It is only by exposing race-mongering, identity politics and green global doomerism as the political means of preserving our cosmopolitan ancien regime that we could begin to inspire the kind of national effort required to revive our economy (or indeed to address our actual problems of communal integration).

National revival is the work of millions, and it cannot be achieved by cultural atavism. It requires us to imagine a political nation mobilised to pursue its interests through a revived national democratic life; to imagine a nation that is adequately grounded in the reality of who Britain’s citizenry are now and our real position in the world. Doing that is a political task, and its first step will be to break the death grip of our cosmopolitan political parties on the institutions that represent us.