What Will it Mean in the Future to be English?

All the recent flag-waving has sent me back to one of the best attempts to define the concept of national identity: Ernest Renan’s famous essay ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ (‘What is a nation?’), originally delivered as a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882. This 24-page oration is a masterpiece of Cartesian reasoning, taking the reader point by point through what a nation is not to a definition of what it is in ways that throw light on the nature of English and British identity.

For Renan, what defines a nation is not its race, language, religion, economy or geography.  He does not say that these are of no significance, just that they are not essential elements of nationhood.

First, he has no truck with 19th-century biological ideas of race. He has only contempt for those who go around, as he put it,  measuring people’s skulls and then grabbing them by the throat, saying ‘you are one of our race, you belong to us’. As for ‘race’ in the common 19th-century non-biological sense of a group of people with similar historical and cultural identities, he finds that perfectly acceptable and, as we shall see, at the heart of his concept of a nation.   

Second, language both is not and should not be a determining factor. Speaking not long after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which Prussia captured Alsace-Lorraine, Renan was keen to combat German claims that because people in an area spoke German this meant it ought to become part of the new German Empire. He does not deny that language can be a unifying force, just that by itself it is not enough.

Third, practising a particular religion may have been obligatory in most previous societies, but from the perspective of France’s Third Republic those primitive days were now long past. Religion is therefore no longer at the centre of national identity, though once again he did not deny that it might be part of a homogeneous culture contributing to nationhood. 

Fourth, least important of all, is the idea that a community of economic interests might shape a sense of national identity. “A customs union is not a country,” Renan argues. One cannot imagine him relishing the ever more intrusive customs union that is the current EU. 

Finally, although Renan can see how geography may in some cases have influenced the shape of nation states it is not geography by itself that turns a piece of territory into a nation. A nation, he argued, is ‘a spiritual family, not a group of people determined by the configuration of the ground’. 

Renan’s overall conclusion therefore is that it is none of these five things but human beings who are everything in the formation of this ‘spiritual family’ or ‘soul’ he calls a nation.   

But what does the nation as a ‘soul’ mean? To Renan it means two things.

First, it refers to the past. A nation must be based on ‘a rich legacy of memories’ arising from a long past of shared efforts, sufferings, sacrifices, achievements and glories. Members of a nation must know about and revere the ancestors who created the world they have inherited, but also not ignore the regrets that nations usually have about things done badly.

Second, it refers to the present. For a nation to exist its members must consent to being a part of it and have a wish to live with each other as members of one community. What is needed is what Renan famously called un plébiscite de tous les jours (a plebiscite daily renewed). It is this phrase that has sometimes been seized upon by globalists suggesting that the whole idea of a nation is imaginary, fake, a chimera. It does no such thing. It is simply a reminder that any social entity is fragile and requires continual effort to ensure it is constantly renewed.

What do Renan’s two elements of nationhood – the ‘rich legacy of memories’ and the need for a daily plebiscite – tell us about the sense of English and British national identity as we find it today?

They tell us how far we now are from being a nation in Renan’s sense of the word. To Renan a nation must have a population linked to its ancestors, a pride in its past, a strong sense of belonging and a willingness to give the nation priority when it clashes with other loyalties. Despite still being hugely important for many people, all these qualities have been systematically undermined during the past 40 years through a combination of forces, including:

• mass migration on a scale never previously known, bringing into the country huge numbers of people from cultures very different from our own, giving us in particular a Muslim population of 6% predicted to rise to 10% by 2050 and 20% by 2100;
• the promotion of the idea of multiculturalism, which has been rapidly turning us into one of those plurally monocultural societies well-known for their bad track record for cohesion and effectiveness;
• the dominance of a radical progressive elite that prioritises individual rights over communal needs, identities of race, colour, sex and sexuality over the nation, and the interests of ‘oppressed’ minorities over those of the majority; and
• universities and schools that see the past as a bad place.

The signs that we are a nation beginning to lose some of Renan’s defining characteristics are a daily part of our lives. A survey of 15-18 year-olds shows 42% reporting that they had been taught at school that their country was racist. A survey of 18-27 year-olds shows only 41% feeling proud of their country and only 11% willing to fight for it. School census data earlier this year show white British pupils as a minority in one in four schools, with 72 schools without a single white British pupil and 454 schools where they make up less than 2% of the population. Whole areas of some cities now feel very different from other parts of the country, are run by people who put the Islamic Ummah before the nation, form their own political party, set up sharia councils, organise fun runs that exclude women and girls and  only offer halal meat at school meals.

Despite more and more people speaking out about these matters the term ‘racist’ (apparently as a matter of Labour Government policy) continues to be thrown at anyone departing from the orthodox narrative that ‘all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’. This was shown most strikingly by recent attacks on the Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin who, while using words carelessly that understandably caused offence, nonetheless made the valid point that there is something deeply concerning about a report showing that over 50% of all advertisements on British television channels include a black person when at the last census only 4.2% of the population in England, 0.8% in Wales, 1.2% in Scotland and 0.6% in Northern Ireland self-identified as such. Virtually no one rushed to the defence of her main point, with the honourable exception of the Associate Editor of the Daily Sceptic.

The report’s significance was that it highlighted how television is already presenting us daily with an image of where the country is predicted to be by 2063 when, on current trends and according to Matthew Goodwin’s recent estimates, those identifying as ‘white British’ will be in a minority. To describe as ‘racist’ anyone protesting about being daily reminded that they are living through the largest movement of peoples since the collapse of the Roman Empire, as the Prime Minister did, is displacement activity of the most pathological kind.

The Independent’s response to Goodwin’s study was to carry an article headed ‘Who cares that Britain is on course to be minority white?‘ The answer as seen through Renan’s characterisation of nations is loud and clear: the indigenous English and British (whatever their ethnicity) are fearful that the “rich tapestry of memories” about this country and the knowledge of all the “ancestors” who have lived in these islands will have been replaced for a majority of the population by a multiplicity of heritages.

Sadly, if immigration had been kept within strict limits, and a programme of integration pursued, Renan’s concept of a nation, which rejected anything based on ethnicity, would have permitted many new immigrants not just to become British through the grant of citizenship but also to feel English – as earlier ones already have and many current ones still do – through an identification with England and its customs and history. But what might work with small minorities making an important contribution to the country will not work with the levels of immigration successive governments have imposed on us. Even if major reductions could be achieved, much of the de-indigenisation predicted by Matthew Goodwin is already built into our future and may be irreversible.

Are we likely to be able to rebuild a Renan-type nation or save those bits of it that remain? Probably not. A policy of near zero immigration from countries with radically different cultures, a national plan to promote more integrated communities and a school system that fosters pride in national identity instead of undermining it – all these might help, but even if we had a government committed to doing all this, is it conceivable that currently we could find the people needed to put it into practice? I am not hopeful.

Dr Nicholas Tate was chief executive of England’s curriculum and assessment agencies 1994-2000 and adviser to French ministers of national education 2000-2005. He is currently Adviser to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. He is the author of Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.