What is English?

A ramble on national identity. You don’t need to be English or a football fan.

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“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

— George Orwell

“We select certain things and separate them from others – for convenience, at first. Later we give this separation great importance. We set up separate nations, which is entirely the result of our thinking, and then we begin to give them supreme importance.”

— David Bohm

On my way to drop my son off on Tuesday morning, I bumped into a German friend whose two boys go to the same kita. She struck up a conversation about the World Cup. We exchanged chit chat about England’s quarter-final win on Saturday, and then she asked if I was aware that there was, amongst the fans of other nations, a united front in supporting England’s opponents and a hope they wouldn’t win it.

This was news to me, and she was surprised I wasn’t aware of it. I, however, was not particularly surprised to hear it, and I told her so with a shrug. “Our fans have been going all over Europe, fighting and smashing places up for decades now. So, fair enough.”

I told her how I arrived in Marseille for the European Championships in 2016, just after England fans had rioted and smashed up the port. The footage is horrible, violent pitched battles with police and locals all around the historic old port. I told her how one restaurant owner in the port refused to serve us once he realised we were English. I told her England fans had rioted there before, during the 1998 World Cup.

I told her too, how I arrived in Lisbon with friends for the 2004 European Championships a few days before the England v France game, and immediately witnessed a mass riot in Rossio Square sparked by drunken England fans attacking a Portuguese family carnival parade.

What I didn’t get a chance to tell her is that this perverted sense of national identity has followed England fans around for my entire life, always enmeshed with a need to create enemies of other nations and establish a sense of nationalistic and racial superiority. Every major opponent the England football team has faced over the last 50 years has become the object of xenophobic sentiment: Germany (especially), France, Argentina, Italy, Portugal.

This is always reliably and relentlessly stoked up by the English newspapers, who will hark back to some historic grievance (the World Wars, the Falkland Islands) or fall back on lazy stereotypes (cheating Latin cultures).

In 2020, even Denmark fans (Denmark!) became a focus for violence, with families attacked by England fans at Wembley before and after England won the game.

Now, before any England supporters get agitated about my use of ‘fans’, yes it’s a small minority I’m describing here who travel for organised violence - but, having been amongst it, it’s not as small as you think, and it is certainly large enough to create damage of all sorts, including for many people around the world, a lasting distrust and animosity towards England fans.

Football fans and violence isn’t really what I want to talk about, though. What I want to explore is where all this emerges from and what it represents.

My interest in this goes back at least as far as high school, when I wrote an essay on the history of British football and became fascinated by its origins in industrial towns and cities, and the deep roots it has in working-class culture. I was inevitably interested in 1980s hooligan culture too, given how closely aligned it was with nationalist and racist ideology at the time: football fans were fertile recruiting territory for the National Front, BNP and Combat 18, whose racist ideologies I experienced on the streets.

At university, my undergraduate thesis about the commercialisation of modern football explored how this was excluding and alienating those supporters for whom the sport is much more than a spectacle and has deep social significance. This was not a new idea but remains underappreciated in the discourse about our current society, namely that there few better examples than modern football of the rampant enclosure and commodification of our culture.

Football in England is, perhaps uniquely and certainly uncommonly, a microcosm of national identity; it reflects how many English people see themselves and see others. Even now, one of the most popular chants amongst England fans speaks of ‘not surrendering to the IRA’, reflecting an underlying animosity towards the Irish and a sense of exceptionalism which itself is rooted in British colonialism. Most of the fans singing it were probably not born when the IRA were last active on the British mainland.

What I propose is this: this strangely angry sense of national identity stems from two places, and both are key to making sense of it. The first source is the historic narratives and mythology that are necessary for any collective sense of identity based on nationality, many of which are embellished, partially or wholly untrue. In England, this is rooted in stories around the two World Wars, being the birthplace of football and steam engines, and the power of the British Empire (although in a selective way).

The second influence on national identity is, I would argue, more important but much harder to notice. It is what is not there: the hidden narratives, the artefacts buried in the collective unconscious, the historic facts that are taboo.

Psychoanalyst Samuel Kimbles described these as “phantom narratives”, the invisible and obscured experiences that shape a shared culture - intergenerational trauma for example.

In England, I’d suggest these phantom narratives include the unrecognised deep trauma from ‘winning’ the World Wars, the unprocessed grief from the decline of the British Empire, and the denial of the harm that has been inflicted on others: colonialism, inventing concentration camps, participation in slavery. There is a reason why some people get so furious at attempts to surface these narratives - they puncture the carefully maintained but increasingly fragile national ego.

These two sources, the national myths and the phantom narratives, overlap. To take World War II, for example, I grew up with the idea that the British alone defeated Nazi Germany, a notion I gained not only from history lessons but also from mainstream culture, with films that portrayed British heroism whilst lampooning or diminishing other nations. It was only in early adulthood that I learned the full extent of US involvement, without which the war would have been lost.

It was later still that I learned the extent of resistance forces across Europe and that the Soviet Union suffered more casualties than any other in defeating the Nazis, with 25 million people perishing. It was even later still, fully into my 30s, that I learned that Commonwealth soldiers were crucial to the war effort, including somewhere around 2.5 million soldiers from India, the largest volunteer army ever assembled, which included my ancestors.

A tiny example of how phantom narratives operate can be seen in the Imperial War Museum web page ‘India in the Second World War’. Not only are the details very brief, you also will not see the total number of Indian soldiers anywhere. The main article concludes that the Indian war effort was a “key argument for securing independence in 1947”.

Independence from whom? From what?

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald.”

— George Orwell

To understand what English or any national identity is, we need to look for what is not there - we need to sense what is absent and lurking in the shadows, what has not been properly recognised and acknowledged, what is notable by its absence.

Sometime in the early 1990s, in the small English market town I lived in, a McDonald’s opened on the high street. I can vividly remember the buzz of excitement around the town, particularly heightened amongst us teenagers. The local newspaper made it front-page news. It was as if we’d been connected to the outside world, our little Midlands backwater somehow magically twinned with the great bastions of American culture we’d seen on TV. The arrival of McDonald’s represented progress in our minds.

The town now has four McDonald’s, and several other similar franchises: Burger King, KFC, Subway and so on. The high street, once the busiest area in the town, is ghostly with the now usual array of fast food outlets, charity shops and empty units. It has been in decline since the large retail park was built on the other side of the town, close to the dual carriageway and centred around a series of huge retail outlets, a supermarket and the town’s first multiplex cinema.

The old town centre suffered another blow when the weekend markets closed down, the death of the very reason the town came into existence. Family-run fruit and vegetable sellers could not compete with the mass volumes and discounts offered by the large supermarkets. And so it has continued there, and thousands of other towns and cities like it.

All of this - fast food chains, retail parks, multiplex cinemas - could be summarised as one single force that has changed English identity: Americanisation.

This is the most powerful foreign invasion that has influenced English culture, and it was largely embraced without question. Even as a child, I noticed how much we seemed to look across the Atlantic longingly, as if envious of our rich cousins, and I watched as more and more English culture seemed to emulate American culture.

It seems that on the flimsy assumption that America, being majority white and historically Christian, is therefore just like England, we have adopted almost without hesitation their economics, their political ideologies, their consumer culture and their individualistic sense of what it means to be a citizen.

But perhaps I am being unfair and inaccurate to label it as American. What I’m describing really is the voracious and rampant consumer culture that has completely taken hold of the country in the last 50 years; the centrality of the idea that we in England are what we buy and own, rather than the strength of our relationships, communities and human values.

What I’m also describing is the capture of English society by capital: the privatisation of the commons, the purchase of land and enclosure of public spaces, the atomisation of human experience into segments that can be outsourced, monopolised and exploited.

It’s the ravaging of a nation by the interests of corporations and private capital owners, the financialisation of the English mindset that has been so effective that we consider nurses overpaid and public libraries a waste of money.

One of the effects of this has been to push the rich indigenous culture of England to the margins: folk traditions, rituals and connection to land, local food and music, even our agriculture. Some of it was buried long ago, and much of it has been supplanted by the endless supply of glitzy, postmodern and rootless transatlantic culture.

What, after all of that, does it actually mean to be English?

This, I believe, is the underlying question that is so loaded with anxiety and anger. Many people talk of the loss of community with a grief and longing they cannot fully express; they know something is missing but cannot understand what and why. They intuitively recognise a society that has an absence of care, which has no tangible profit or gain for the owners of capital. There is a deep despair, a sense in many places, of having been walked away from by those in power.

And this has truth to it. The country has been sold off, and the citizens left to deal with not just the practical consequences of this deprivation, but also the social and spiritual wounds. This fabric of social cohesion has been so thoroughly worn down that it becomes easy to exploit national identity as a solution.

And then of course, it is easy to point fingers at who is to blame: those people who have arrived here whose culture is different to ours.

The English lament of the loss of community now cheaply blames immigrants and minority groups and their lack of integration, rather than recognising the economic forces over decades that have entrenched an ‘every man for himself’ attitude in the English psyche. I’ve heard it suggested that part of the anger towards immigrants is, in fact, a deep envy of their community cohesion and a sense of self and identity larger than the boundaries of their individual bodies. I can believe this.

In this sense, it should not be a surprise that there is a great deal of anger inherent in national identity, not just in England but also in so many other nations that have experienced these same forces. And football, of course, especially the national team, becomes an acutely focused arena in which to place and express all of this emotional energy: a shirt to wear, a flag to gather behind, symbols that briefly hold some meaning and energy, however transient and thin.

If nation-states are to persist, and we believe that national identity, loyalty to land boundaries, is an essential construct, then we might begin by asking what it actually means to be a citizen of any country. What is English? What is American? What is French? What were these identities before so much was stripped away by financial and political interests?

I suspect that any inquiry of this nature, done for long enough, would arrive in similar places: a unique sense of connection to the particular land we inhabit, a realisation that this ecological relationship is shared with many others, and that we are, therefore, indelibly connected to each other and much more alike than different.

“An adult human is someone who experiences their membership in the larger Earth community as their primary membership. That's primary, that’s where they’re most deeply rooted. Not in nation or ethnicity or religion or even family, recognising that those things like family, culture, religion, spirituality, and so on, add immeasurably to the colour and flavour and style of our lives. It’s some of the most beautiful parts of who we are. But for a true adult, their first and foremost membership is in the larger earth community.”

— Bill Plotkin

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

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