To begin with, being the largest national group on an island off Europe gave the English a distinctive island mentality, similar to that which can be found in many island societies all over the world (Iceland is a striking case in point); self-sufficiency, distrust of and/or disinterest in outsiders, and a more socially self-contained world than that found on the Continent, where it seems always to havebeen more common to have bosom friends from other countries. (As with most generalisations about Englishness, however, we must insert a caveat here; perhaps the best English film ever made, Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, sketches a portrait of a close friendship between an English and a German officer across the lines of two World Wars). 

Unlike Continental peoples, the English have enjoyed a remarkably peaceful history.  The only major domestic conflagration, that of the 17^th century, and the protectorate which followed it, seem to have left a bad taste in the mouths of nearly everyone concerned, with the result that civil war has been viewed with horror ever since.  We are, by and large, not a revolutionary lot, even when the common people are made to suffer in a way that in other countries would provoke armed insurrection (for example, during our early industrial age).  Armed rebellion has only ever broken out in relatively small patches here and there, and never succeeded in catching on enough to cause a full-scale revolt. This has prolonged the status quo, of course, but it has also ensured stability and ultimately, perhaps, less suffering than would have been brought by the alternative, particularly when we consider that it made possible a more collaborative approach to social betterment than would otherwise have been possible.  Politically speaking, for centuries we have often associated Europe with lurid violence.

To the English the Continent has always been the source of the major wars and disasters from which they have suffered; to start with, of course, the Norman invasion.  Now that we know from new evidence just how ghastly it was, the recalcitrant attitude of the native population towards the Conquest is easier to understand. Furthermore, the self-conscious Frenchness of the wine-drinking, beer-eschewing Normans, which they tried, largely unsuccessfully, to impose on those they ruled, started the tradition of denigrating Anglo-Saxon culture which lasted until approximately the 1950s, feeding into the educated classes' general contempt for proletarian and middle-brow culture in England, and producing the insecurity about our own forms of high culture that is still with us today. Thus it could be argued that the Normans' brutality and cultural imperialism were the original source of English suspicion of Continental culture, because their behaviour helped to provoke hostile attitudes towards it.

The Napoleonic wars (which, as the historian Linda Colley has shown, were a general unifying influence, rallying the Scots and Welsh as well as the English to produce the first conscious stirrings of Britishness) raised the spectre of foreign domination. As a people who had already experienced it once and were, arguably, moulded by the experience, the English viewed this prospect with horror. The same fears were to resurface repeatedly, even during the apparently tranquil Victorian age, as France and Germany began acquiring colonies. (It could be argued that the acquisition of empire, on the few occasions when it was consciously directed by the central government --deliberate rather than 'absent-minded'--was an over-reactive defensive mechanism to protect England from foreign domination).

World War I reinforced Europhobia on a number of levels. The ravings of the Kaiser seemed, to an alarmed polity in England, conclusive proof that European power elites were demented and unbalanced. The violent revolutionary act which launched the conflagration reinforced the impression of Europe as a hotbed of political instability and violence, while the web of alliances which brought England into the conflict encouraged the idea that it would be safer in future to pursue a policy of isolationism. The actual experience of fighting the war made English people very uneasy about Europe, not only because the war itself was horrendous, but also because of geography. The front was in mainland Europe, so that, unlike the other major participants in the conflict, English soldiers had to cross water to get to it. The foreignness of the battlefields was thus powerfully underscored for them; they could not view the conflict as taking place on a common home ground, as some Europeans seem to have seen it. Blighty, by contrast with France, was quiet, far from the carnage, and a place of rest and relaxation in a way that France, with its churned-up earth, blighted forests and dead bodies could not be. This was just another dichotomy between the two nations to add to a growing English list that already included French political caprice versus the smooth evolutionary workings of the parliamentary system, impenetrable high culture rather than middle-brow culture, and an urban versus an essentially rural people.( Later on, the list was to gain existential gloominess versus a stoic determination not to grumble, and spinelessness contrasted with bulldog determination. On a more personal level, it was commonly believed that the English love and the French make love; the French live to eat and the English eat to live; all Frenchmen have mistresses, while Englishmen are monogamous. The French were seen as decadent and the English moderate in their approach to pleasure. The point is not to evaluate to what extent these attitudes were, or are, based in reality --the French also developed a list of their own, flattering to themselves and unflattering to us-- but what they tell us about English attitudes.)

Finally, the experience of World War II came as a shock from which we have apparently not yet recovered. Those highly civilised and humane modern Germans who express impatience with our World War II fixation seem to miss the fact that it was a deeply traumatic experience for a nation that, after the experience of World War I, was willing to pursue pacifism to the extent of committing to a policy of disarmament (and, less nobly, abandoning Czechoslovakia). The fact that England's very survival was touch-and-go for a while during World War II was especially disturbing to a country that had not been successfully invaded since 1066; during the Second World War the hermetic peace of the little English world was nearly destroyed. This scare, and the terrible experiences that accompanied it, will take a while longer to recover from, at least as long as they are still in living memory. (Because of our sense of the past's ever-presence, they could of course take much longer than that.) When a nation that views itself as quiet and somehow separated from the world (however strange this view may be considered in light of the British territorial empire) endures total war and feels that this was forced on it, it is extremely hard for it to forget, particularly when the experience is as universal as World War II was. There is practically no English family without memories of losses suffered during the war, and this experience cut across class barriers, although the urban working-class undoubtedly suffered most. Because of our rules of displayed emotion, discussion of the war is often more likely to focus on the heroism and the triumph rather than the tears shed in darkened rooms, but they form the undercurrent none the less. There is also, of course, the fact that we still feel that it was one of those great, rare occasions in history when we were unquestionably in the right, a view in which most of us persist, while acknowledging that there were aspects of the war, most notably the aerial bombardment of Germany in 1944-45, in which we behaved vengefully and inhumanely.  Not to put to fine a point on it, we don't have much incentive to forget the war.

Because the English, as an island race, have never really felt an integral part of the European family of nations ("interested and associated but not absorbed", as Churchill delicately phrased it), and because they feel that they demonstrably did not start these world wars, many are still reluctant to become full partners in the EU. They believe, whether this is justified or not, that it is those Continentals who have to watch themselves; they are the ones who need to join a massive club in order to avoid starting world wars, not us. (Of course, it goes without saying we ourselves are deeply divided on the issue.  Some on the left are willing to view the surrender of some sovereignty as a worthwhile sacrifice for more enlightened social and environmental legislation.) French attempts to keep Britain out of the Common Market in the first place probably spelled doom for any universal enthusiasm about it in England, and the sillier excesses of EU legislation now raise hackles in a country in which individual liberty in small matters has always been prized, and an attachment to all things idiosyncratic (such as our system of measurement) is a part of the air we breathe. Whatever the rights and wrongs of EU membership, there is no doubt that fears that it will destroy English cultural and constitutional distinctiveness ("our way of life") underly much opposition to it, and the spectre of the loss of this uniqueness has led many to ignore the positive changes that the EU has brought us. Those on the left who are suspicious of the EU also feel that it represents, perhaps, a return to Eurocentrism and a sense of European superiority over the rest of the world, an attitude which they feel, quite rightly, would be indefensible and also culturally confining. (England has historically managed to combine insularity with a tendency to act, and sometimes think, globally.)  Those members of the ruling class who have shown suspicion of Europe throughout the centuries in general have had a far less complicated reason: they have always been aware of possible threats to their power from that quarter.

It is true, of course, that the Continent has also brought us things that we have viewed with equanimity and even pleasure: the accession of the Dutch William and Mary, for example, after the Civil War.  This rather quiet event is called the Glorious Revolution because it safeguarded our rights from Popish domination, yet another historical 'evil' which came from the Continent. (It is important to bear in mind how important a role religion used to play in the English mindset).  The Continent has also thrust into our arms many gifted refugees over the centuries, who have contributed hugely to our economy and culture. The thing is, however, that our ability to assimilate new things and people, almost as if by some weird alchemy, means that the true origins of beneficial Continental influences are very soon forgotten. (To take a trivial example, chips are generally regarded as icons of Englishness, although they were originally a French invention. Mention that to a certain type of bloke after a few pints, and you'll have to take to your heels.) This is not, I think, a calculated attempt at cultural takeover but rather a manifestation of a certain vagueness or absentmindedness in English habits of thought, as well as the strange power of English culture to, as it were, engulf new things silently.

Continental culture, perhaps because of the high drama and tragedy of European history, is a lot more attuned to expressing extremes of emotion than our own. Our aversion to being stirred up unnecessarily means that we are inclined to feel, after listening to a crashy symphony or watching a fraught French film, that that was all very nice and profound, but where is a cup of tea and some Wallace and Gromit? Not all of us are like this, of course, and there have been some famous English commentators on European classical culture who have succeeded in presenting it to us in a manner that we find appealing. I am thinking in particular of the marvellous music critic and broadcaster Edward Greenfield, who has a way of introducing masterpieces of European classical music as though offering the listener another biscuit. During the sixties there was the monumentally successful BBC TV series Civilisation, presented by Kenneth Clark, who had a similar gift. Nevertheless, the really big players of European culture (Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, etc) are of such epic stature that, intimidated by the impossibility of ever satisfactorily domesticating them, many of us have a habit of simply ignoring them.

The English have often regarded foreign countries outside Europe with rather more positive feelings. This has to do partly with the imperial experience (which, by the by, was truly British; the Scots and to a lesser extent the Welsh share the credit for the Empire's successes as well as the blame for its failures). A feeling of proprietorship, along with an ethic of trusteeship and service, however irregularly applied and inconsistently felt, often produced warm, if paternalistic, attitudes on the part of the English towards British colonies all over the world, affections which sometimes seem to linger in mutated form in the post-imperial age (and are not always one-sided). The imperial phenomenon known as "going native" shows that there have always been English people willing to adapt to dramatically different cultures with extraordinary enthusiasm and completeness. Of course, Empire had a hideous side, as any student of British imperial history will know; the racial prejudices, exacerbated by cultural misunderstanding, the sometimes atrocious and bloody-minded actions of the administrator on the spot, the general sense of superiority common to most white middle-class Westerners at the time, and the often rapacious economic exploitation. But the point is that, from the English point of view, Empire required them to become engaged in the outside world more consistently and to a deeper extent than Europe ever has, and sometimes with a genuine feeling for humanitarian betterment. (Looking for consistency is the first mistake that most people make when looking at the Empire). This perhaps explains why some English people today, especially those with roots in the old administrative cadres, seem still perhaps more oriented towards Africa and Asia than towards Europe (the number of gap-year students who take off to build wells in drought-stricken regions indicates perhaps a sense of debt towards former colonial regions, as well as, in many cases a genuine interest in these countries). Furthermore, the number of people in England who are here now because of the Empire's legacy in some form or another (immigrants from former colonies, their children and grand-children, and of course those of mixed race, particularly Eurasians) means that there are people with ties to the former colonies all around us.  Their presence and influence cannot help but strengthen our psychological ties with the former Empire (consider, for example, how much less alien India now seems to us, because of our exposure to Asian cultures at home). It is possible, of course, that more of us may come to feel the same way about Europe in time, if we can be persuaded that it is not trying to obliterate our cultural identity.

Besides the Commonwealth, the other region which looms large in the English consciousness is, of course, the United States of America. The fascination and affinity for the US on the part of many (often, strangely, Tory) English people is truly baffling. If the French example is anything to go by, the English ought, logically, to disapprove of the States as much, if not more, for having a government based on violent revolution (against Britain, too), and a culture that many English people have viewed as based on the opposite of our ethic of understatement and moderation and a heartless attitude to the underdog (again, the question is not whether this is true, but what these attitudes say about our world-view). Moreover, it does not seem by and large, to be the civilised side of American culture that we are interested in these days, such as American ideas about citizenship, democracy, and civil rights, or even American music in its more vibrant forms, but American pop culture.  Interest in American culture was perfectly explicable during the Sixties, when America was a fascinating maelstrom of cultural and social change. For some reason, however, American celebrities and their sayings and doings remain a source of fascination to the English even in the Bush age.  American foreign policy has caused great anger in England, in some cases more visceral than that in France or Germany, since many of us bitterly resent being dragged us into the Iraq war, yet we still rush willy-nilly to adopt American popular culture, in the process running the risk of losing our own cultural distinctiveness and obscuring our national and regional characteristics. This eagerness can probably be explained in terms of the current English inferiority complex, but it is still odd.  Like other cultures, ours has to learn to resist the overweening influence of corporate McAmerica.  Trying to become anything than what we are not will not make us happy.

In spite of the island mentality, the English have always been cultural magpies, sincerely admiring of foreign cultural achievements and eager imitators and assimilators of them. We have always been adding new layers to our culture. It has often been noted, most notably by Peter Ackroyd, that there are times when our greatest creative gifts seem to lie not in outright invention but in adoption, synthesis and reinvention of outside influences, often reflected back as if through a fun-house mirror. Black American culture, in particular, was a source of great inspiration to our musicians throughout the twentieth century, and it is worth remarking on the affection and reverence in which many African-American artists have been held in England by musicians, critics and fans alike.  This affection so overwhelmed one of the Four Tops when confronted by it at Heathrow Airport that he burst into tears. The greatest and most obvious example of the mixing of English with African-American influences is of course the development of English rock n'roll in large English cities during the sixties, by a plethora of bands such as the Beatles and the Kinks. They streamlined the rock beat, added quirky  instrumentation, and made rock deal with subjects far removed from its original preoccupations: DIY, lazy Sunday afternoons, kites, well-respected men, Waterloo sunsets, sellers of dubious cure-alls, even mining. Rock was imbued with a peculiarly English type of energy, sexiness, and eccentricity, drawing on native folk and music-hall traditions to help create a new sound as heady, in its own way, as the old one. In the English folk revival, much the same interaction between English culture and Black American culture occurred in microcosm; the apparently quintessentially English melodic, thumpy style of guitar accompaniment for folk songs evolved by Martin Carthy, one of the leading figures of the folk movement, owes a debt to the great American bluesman Big Bill Broonzy's percussive playing, a debt which Carthy himself has always been proud to acknowledge. Skiffle, commonly mistaken for one of the most English forms of English working-class music, was also imported from the States.  There are many other examples of cultural borrowings and reinvention of this sort, of course; the influence of the French New Wave on the kitchen-sink films of the sixties is obvious, but the films remain uniquely English. We are now even starting to produce distinctively English-sounding rappers, rapping about distinctively English subjects. This dynamic has been going on for centuries. The literary form which lends itself most readily to the English gift of social observation, the novel, was invented originally by Cervantes in Spain. The Gothic form of architecture, with its characteristic spires and steeples, was imported from France to England, where highly creative liberties were taken with it. In practically every field, the native instinct for play and whimsy, and the urge to evoke the telling details of a particular English social milieu, have asserted themselves, making even the most foreign of foreign imports acquire a distinctly English flavour. If there is a psychological core to Englishness, it may in fact be this spirit of play and ability to think unconventionally, combined with a reluctance to be altogether in earnest.

The result of all this cultural mixing means that Englishness cannot be defined ethnically.  It is not a monolithic entity. Although the various cultural expressions of it share certain similarities, the thread that winds through them is, like our constitution, notoriously elusive and may, perhaps, never be satisfactorily delineated. (Given the room we have always allowed ourselves for irrational and intuitive thought, it is perhaps possible that it can never be pinned down, at least not in any rational, linear way.) Englishness is, in fact, instead a cultural identity with many regional and class permutations. We have never really an idea similar to the German notion of the Volk. Instead, in spite of the class system, we have developed an idea of community based around a sense of family, as noted by Orwell (bearing in mind the English idea of family as a cross to be borne as well a source of love and support, and Orwell's own remark that the wrong members of this family have always been the ones in control). This means that attempts by some people to define English identity in terms of whiteness, or, in some extreme cases, of white Anglo-Saxonness, is fundamentally misguided. It is also inhumane, in an age in which there are more and more biracial and non-white people in England than ever before, some of whom are immigrants, some of whom were born and grew up here. Are we to tell those of them who want to be accepted as English that you can only qualify by having white parents, preferably of Anglo-Saxon extraction, being born and brought up here yourself, and oh, I don't know, being christened Egbert or Ethelberta or something similar? This is of course an exaggeration, but it was done to highlight the ridiculousness of ethnic conceptions of national identity, which are often not too far removed from spurious and dangerous ideas of racial purity. Any ethnic concept identity must, of its nature, be arbitrary as well as dangerous. How, after all, is white Anglo-Saxonness to be defined, particularly with reference to a mongrel race such as ours? (The "white Anglo-Saxon" litmus paper test for Englishness also has the effect of making Anglo-Saxon culture itself seem suspect to many civilised English people, alienating them from an important part of their heritage.  Worse, it discredits any English movement tainted by it, however indirectly, from the off-go, making it an easy target for accusations of racism.) Our culture is perfectly capable of expanding to incorporate immigrant cultural influences without losing its shape, and our society should be equally flexible. It is, after all, pretty shoddy to be willing to benefit from foreign cultural influences while trying to exclude their bearers who live among us from the 'family'.  Given the general acceptance of the fact that there can be non-white Brummies and Cockneys, why can't there also be, by extension, non-white English people, since regional identities are local variations on a national theme? Nor should we demand, as we jealously tend to do, exclusive allegiance; after all, we ourselves have dallied with many foreign cultural influences and are a mixture of many different races.  In the modern age, there are many people with more than one nationality.

Finally, we should consider how foreigners view us. I can testify from personal experience that it is not always easy being an English person abroad. Although we rarely encounter vicious or blatant prejudice, there is still a fair amount of casual Anglophobia floating about that we must be prepared to face when living in a foreign country. There is also some Anglophilia, which in its more extreme forms can be almost as uncomfortable to cope with as Anglophobia. However odd this may strike us, many people seem to view us as exotic, and treat us with the same combination of fascination and tactlessness that they reserve for other foreigners. However, some also (a few Americans and Continental Europeans in particular, it must be said) seem to base their attitudes towards us on a very odd idea of our society, expecting us to all be upper-class, fox-hunting Hooray Henries and Henriettas, with haughty attitudes, no emotional or sex life, and a tendency to say "jolly good" like a needle stuck in a groove. Alternatively (and this one is gaining in popularity), we are all foul-mouthed lager louts who never stop drinking. Some people even seem to expect us to conform to a sort of monstrous amalgam of the two. While all this may seem funny after the fact, it is unpleasant to have these sorts of stereotypes suddenly thrown at you, particularly in social situations. There seems to be no easy way of dealing with it, and in certain cases it is perhaps best not to even try. However, we do not do ourselves any favours either when we run England and English people down while abroad. Foreigners, not understanding (how could they be expected to?) that self-criticism is a national pastime and does not mean that we really see ourselves as monsters and/or failures, seem to take this as a justification for thinking the worst of us. Nevertheless, I can also say from personal experience that there are always people willing to accept others as normal human beings, and that friendships with foreigners can be extraordinarily enriching, particularly when we go to the trouble of learning their languages. We can even learn from what the more open-minded ones think of us.

Where, then, does all this leave an ordinary, well-meaning English person with a love for their own culture but an interest in those of others? Although our history and culture may be extremely complex, it does not follow that our way of living in the world need be. It has seemed to me in the past -and this pronouncement has always brought down howls of rage from those have not stopped to think about it—that there need not be a conflict between being a Little Englander and a Big Worlder. There is nothing wrong with loving and existing happily within England and English culture, as long as they are not defined in narrowly ethnic terms (or, if you must, being passionately absorbed by and conflicted about England and English culture and living ambivalently within them, which is the tack that some of the more intense among us seem to take), venturing outside from time to time to sniff the air and see what the neighbours are up to, and whether they need a hand with something in the garden. They, for their part, should be confident that in a crisis, they can bang on the door and somebody will be in.

There is no contradiction between being English and being a world citizen (one of those useful and hopeful concepts of the 1950s and 60s which seem to have slipped out of the general consciousness since). It is perfectly possible to be internationally-minded without denigrating one's own culture or sacrificing one iota of self-respect.  It is also worth bearing in mind that no nation is without its faults and past crimes, not even those who voice the most cutting criticisms of us. --Isabel Taylor

 
Copyright © Isabel Taylor 2006.