CITIZENSHIP MUSINGS

For here have we no continuing city.

                                                                            Hebrews 13:14

                                                                                                             

The heart searching that followed the end of World War II included the desire – as after the first Great War – that such a conflict should never happen again.  One reason for it all was seen as nationalism; ergo, to get rid of nationalism, you need to get rid of nations.  It’s John Lennon’s ‘Imagine there’s no countries’ made political policy.  No countries, no nations.  No nations, no nationalism.  No nationalism, no war. 

            The problem with this sort of thing is like the typical school anti-bullying policy.  The people who sign up to it are the victims, and those who would never bully any one anyway.  The ones who ignore it, and carry on as before, are the bullies.  In the same way, serious nationalists aren’t going to give up on nationalism: they will simply take over the territory of those who do, and thus have more space in which to be nationalistic. (Especially if they eliminate those they have conquered.)

            Be that as it may, Britain since the War has made a valiant attempt to stop itself from being a nation state: even if it still says ‘UK’ on the Internet when you call up a list of countries  to make a credit-card payment, or find a postal rate.

            It has stopped teaching its history, and, increasingly, its literature. 

Give Northern Ireland back to Ireland.   That’s actually something I approve of: not because I have anything against the Northern Irish, but it sort of makes sense for them to be linked to an island of which they are a geographical part, rather than to one of which they are not.  Give Wales, back to Wales, Scotland back to Scotland, and England back to England.  It might be argued that this strategy doesn’t get rid of nations, it only creates four where there had been one; but what it does ensure is that they become too small to be a threat to anybody.  (And hence reduce the threat of war.)

Eventually, anyway, if the European super state becomes a reality, new administrative lines will be drawn, and southern coastal England will become linked to its northern French equivalent across the Channel in some new-style Eurocounty.

 

In the meantime, what had once been Great Britain now becomes, as far as possible, just a geographical area: a sort of world in microcosm, and inhabited by all the world’s nations. 

But however admirable this global-village/world-in-miniature philosophy, one must have leave to doubt if it has taken account of the actual history of the world.  Nations have tended to fight their neighbours, even within recent history, quite as often as they have lived in peace. And if you put the nations side by side in a confined space, and then tell them to retain their own identities,  aren’t you potentially creating an opportunity for them to war against each other without even having to cross the sea, or invade another territory to do it?

It might be said that Britain – or whatever we like to call it – is merely emulating America, which has successfully integrated different nationalities.  But America – historically, anyway – hasn’t been as rigorously multicultural as we have:  keep your identity and national traditions in private, sure, but also merge into the general melting pot.   Keep your own language, but also learn American English.  And America, even if now as multiculturally-committed as Britain, has a lot more space in which to get away from other people if you want to. 

            In 1997, British Airways abandoned the Union Jack on the tailfins of some of some of its planes, in favour of ten ethnic designs.   The project foundered when air traffic controllers raised safety concerns.  There was uncertainty about whether they would be identified as British planes: an unconscious irony about Britain’s new role in the world.

In the last decade or so, there have been indications that the British – or whatever it is – idyll may be somewhat under strain: a bombing on the London Underground by home-grown terrorists, riots in northern cities, a growth (its actual size difficult to assess, and perhaps nothing more than a protest vote) in support for the BNP and EDL, curbs on immigration as a key election issue that not even a party in power can afford to ignore.  When an asylum seeker reported the immigration officer who would have allowed her entry into Britain in exchange for sex, he himself turned out to be an illegal immigrant, calling existing procedures into question.  And so on.  A report about a school with 158 different languages from all five continents suggests an educational challenge even for the most committed of multiculturalists. 

            The net result of all this has been something of a sea change amongst those who make the decisions on our behalf.  There have even been surveys about what it means to be British; and a points system to ensure that new batches of immigrants are able to speak some English (especially important in the case of medical staff, where misunderstandings resulting from imperfect language grasp have resulted in death).

            And then, in the wake of 7/7 came the compulsory citizenship initiative for schools: all students – for a moment, I nearly said pupils – must be made to feel they belonged to one common community. 

            If I understand the spirit behind this right, it’s rather like the reassurance given  to the new marines in the film Full Metal Jacket.   “Most of you will be sent to Vietnam.  Some of you will die.  But the Marine Corps will live for ever.  Through the Marine Corps,  you live forever.”

            This is ostensibly very good advice: you get your meaning and identity by belonging to some larger unit like the corps, or the nation state.  But there are two  problems with it.    

            For a start, it is a lie.  The Marine Corps won’t last forever, any more than did the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman or British Empires.  Secondly, it is a solution for secularists.  Religious believers – or, at any rate, the types who bother officialdom – believe that their individual identities will outlast the nation state.

 

When Locke wrote his pamphlet about religious toleration, he felt obliged to exclude Roman Catholics: Catholics had another centre of loyalty outside Britain.  But that must be true, too, for every serious Protestant, no less than for any serious Muslim.

             Many who are Muslim in name only are probably happy to leave Britain as it is: provided it leaves them alone to get on with their lives in peace.  But for a serious Muslim, first loyalty cannot be to Britain, but to the Umma, the worldwide community.   Except for that bit of Britain which is now effectively Muslim, Britain is still Dar ul Harb.  That is to say, the zone of war: even if the jihad to turn Britain Muslim is  achieved by example through quality of life, or by the power of peaceful persuasion, rather than by violence.   What can the educational ideal of citizenship, unless I have misunderstood it, say to such as these?    

And the Christian, although living in the earthly Babylon of whatever country he or she happens to inhabit, belongs rather to the Heavenly Jerusalem, with a membership made up of fellow citizens who are believers, but also of fellow believers in all nations across the world, those believers who have gone before, and those who are yet to come.  In this sort of context, and whatever one’s duties to the state in which one finds oneself, to be a Christian matters more than to be a Briton.

Christ said there would be no marriage in heaven, for it was an earthly thing that would no longer be necessary.  Does our nationality fall into the same provisional category?  Perhaps, then, we should not mourn if the nationality we have now does vanish in a European or global identity; for it may be simply another of those earthly things that are destined, in any case, to pass away.  

On the other hand, since the promise is that we shall be more ourselves, not less, it may be that in the afterlife we shall retain some of the national characteristics of the citizenship we had in this life: insofar as it has been responsible for shaping  an individual personality.  Voltaire could never have been anything other than French, nor Dr Johnson other than English.