The New Chauvinism
By George Monbiot
10 August , 2005
The
Guardian
Out
of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain
is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making
their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10
days they've been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram
Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone
who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity.
Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn't
loyal to this country should leave it. The way things are going, it
can't be long before I'm deported.
The argument runs
as follows: patriotic people don't turn on each other. If there are
codes of citizenship and a belief in Britain's virtues, acts of domestic
terrorism are unlikely to happen. As Jonathan Freedland writes, the
United States, in which "loyalty is instilled constantly",
has never "had a brush with home-grown Islamist terrorism".
This may be true
(though there have been plenty of attacks by non-Muslim terrorists in
the US). But while patriotism might make citizens less inclined to attack
each other, it makes the state more inclined to attack other countries,
for it knows it is likely to command the support of its people. If patriotism
were not such a powerful force in the US, could Bush have invaded Iraq?
To argue that national
allegiance reduces human suffering, you must assert that acts of domestic
terrorism cause more grievous harm than all the territorial and colonial
wars, ethnic cleansing and holocausts pursued in the name of the national
interest. To believe this, you need to be not just a patriot but a chauvinist.
Freedland and Hunt
and the leader writers of the New Statesman, of course, are nothing
of the kind. Hunt argues that Britishness should be about "values
rather than institutions": Britain has "a superb record of
political liberalism and intellectual inquiry, giving us a public sphere
open to ideas, religions and philosophy from across the world".
This is true, but these values are not peculiar to Britain, and it is
hard to see why we have to become patriots in order to invoke them.
Britain also has an appalling record of imperialism and pig-headed jingoism,
and when you wave the flag, no one can be sure which record you are
celebrating. If you want to defend liberalism, then defend it, but why
conflate your love for certain values with love for a certain country?
And what, exactly,
would a liberal patriotism look like? When confronted with a conflict
between the interests of your country and those of another, patriotism,
by definition, demands that you choose those of your own. Internationalism,
by contrast, means choosing the option that delivers most good or least
harm to people, regardless of where they live. It tells us that someone
living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington,
and that a policy which favours the interests of 100 British people
at the expense of 101 Congolese is one we should not pursue. Patriotism,
if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of the
100 British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism?
How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?
This is the point
at which every right-thinking person in Britain scrambles for his Orwell.
Did not the sage assert that "patriotism has nothing to do with
conservatism", and complain that "England is perhaps the only
great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality"?
He did. But he wrote this during the second world war. There was no
question that we had a duty to fight Hitler and, in so doing, to take
sides. And the sides were organised along national lines. If you failed
to support Britain, you were assisting the enemy. But today the people
trying to kill us are British citizens. They are divided from most of
those who live here by ideology, not nationality. To the extent that
the invasion of Iraq motivated the terrorists, and patriotism made Britain's
participation in the invasion possible, it was patriotism that got us
into this mess.
The allegiance that
most enthusiasts ask us to demonstrate is a selective one. The rightwing
press, owned by the great-grandson of a Nazi sympathiser, a pair of
tax exiles and an Australian with American citizenship, is fiercely
nationalistic when defending our institutions from Europe, but seeks
to surrender the lot of us to the US. It loves the Cotswolds and hates
Wales. It loves gaunt, aristocratic women and second homes, and hates
oiks, Gypsies, council estates and caravan parks.
Two weeks ago, the
Telegraph published a list of "10 core values of the British identity"
whose adoption, it argued, would help to prevent another terrorist attack.
These were not values we might choose to embrace, but "non-negotiable
components of our identity". Among them were "the sovereignty
of the crown in parliament" ("the Lords, the Commons and the
monarch constitute the supreme authority in the land"), "private
property", "the family", "history" ("British
children inherit ... a stupendous series of national achievements")
and "the English-speaking world" ("the atrocities of
September 11 2001 were not simply an attack on a foreign nation; they
were an attack on the Anglosphere"). These non-negotiable demands
are not so different to those of the terrorists. Instead of an eternal
caliphate, an eternal monarchy. Instead of an Islamic vision of history,
an Etonian one. Instead of the Ummah, the Anglosphere.
If there is one
thing that could make me hate this country, it is the Telegraph and
its "non-negotiable components". If there is one thing that
could make me hate America, it was the sight of the crowds at the Republican
convention standing up and shouting "USA, USA", while Zell
Miller informed them that "nothing makes this marine madder than
someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators".
As usual, we are being asked to do the job of the terrorists, by making
this country ugly on their behalf.
I don't hate Britain,
and I am not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should
love this country more than any other. There are some things I like
about it and some things I don't, and the same goes for everywhere else
I've visited. To become a patriot is to lie to yourself, to tell yourself
that whatever good you might perceive abroad, your own country is, on
balance, better than the others. It is impossible to reconcile this
with either the evidence of your own eyes or a belief in the equality
of humankind. Patriotism of the kind Orwell demanded in 1940 is necessary
only to confront the patriotism of other people: the second world war,
which demanded that the British close ranks, could not have happened
if Hitler hadn't exploited the national allegiance of the Germans. The
world will be a happier and safer place when we stop putting our own
countries first.
For more information
on the author, please go to www.monbiot.com
© 2005 Guardian
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