What progressives get wrong about nationalism.
Some on the British centre-left ought to stop shrinking the meaning of nationalism. Others need to stop pining after an as-yet uncreated progressive nationalism. If Joe Biden shows us anything — it’s that it’s already here.
An internal Labour report leaked this week confirmed the conscious logic of what we could have already inferred about Sir Kier Starmer — he wants to wrap his attempt at a Labour resurrection in the flag, talking in more explicit terms about “progressive nationalism”. In the Liberal Democrats there’s been a concurrent shift, with Sir Ed Davey making a point of establishing better relations with more conventionally nationalist media outlets like The Sun, and Layla Moran being unambiguous in calling out the EU’s terrible decision to briefly invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Predictably, these trends have sparked heated discussion across the divided and weary progressive wing of British politics. It’s fair to characterise a substantial part of that discussion as a “backlash” against the idea that the road back to power runs through reclaiming nationalism. To some extent, this is obviously right — not because the approach of the two progressive knights is wrong — but because the risk of focusing on a cosmetic adoption of nationalism that leads nowhere is severe if not married with an updated and bolder agenda for progressive reformist change in Britain.
That said, a large cohort of the “backlash” voices are quite seriously wrong about nationalism. For many (relative to the size of party membership, not the electorate) nationalism has been the bogeyman of centre-left politics, a term that has been used exclusively to describe the opposition to progressive internationalism, much like populism has been to liberalism, during the long wars over Brexit (and the proxy war over Covid lockdowns). This shrinking of the meaning of nationalism has left no space for it in our thinking, with disastrous consequences.
We should instead remember that nationalism, like any “ism”, is a broad and diverse thing. Michael Freeden, the great academic on ideology, says ideologies have “complex morphologies”, and so can be understood as broad systems of thought with different users of the system emphasising their own particular remix of the concepts inherent within it. When many talk of ideologies as “traditions” of thought or action they are inherently alluding to this.
The first modern “Nationalists” as we might label them were deeply aligned with what was then 19th century Liberalism — an often-cited example is Italian risorgimento figure Giuseppe Mazzini. For these nationalists, values of democracy and civic rights were concurrent with the assertion of the sense of a “nation”. Nationalism skews into the kind of abhorrent evils that progressivism seeks to stamp out when it is a clothing used by authoritarians, racial supremacists and religious fanatics — not when it is linguistically and intrinsically linked to rights, justice, democracy and — crucially — inclusiveness. Indeed much of the case that nationalism is incongruous with the liberal left rests on the idea that it must always be a racist ethnonationalism, defining and victimising an “other” through colonialism and war abroad and racial jingoism at home. If we only allow nationalism to refer to that kind of politics, we preclude the idea that there can be an inclusive nationalism despite the fact that we clearly need one.
But we needn’t go looking too far within for it either, nor try to distil it from some academic paper. When some rush to say they are an internationalist they are already demonstrating it:
A proud, modern nationalism understands Britain not as a fallen Empire in need of restoration but rather as a land whose story is the slow and arduous march towards freedom and opportunity for all. Understood like this, Britain can take stock of its past as both the seat of a historically oppressive Empire and as the meeting place, before but mostly after its fall, of oppressed peoples from every corner of the globe, writing a new and common history and forging an identity that is stronger for the wide range of cultures, traditions and histories that shaped it, not weaker.
In his successful fight to defeat Donald Trump, President Biden insisted over and over again on defining himself as a liberal nationalist with an inclusive belief in what America’s defining qualities were, pitted in stark opposition to Trump’s exclusive and reactionary nationalism. In his inaugural address he stated
“Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal, that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism and fear have torn us apart”
Crucially, he emphasised that ideals, acting like venerated symbols in themselves, hold a modern nation together.
“What are the common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans? I think we know. Opportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honour, and yes, the truth.”
To address the all-too-common critique; no, the U.K. and the U.S.A. are not all that different. Our divergences of policy and our specific cultural histories mask a reality that our common language has drawn our political traditions closely together. Their venerated founding beliefs branched off from the same lineage as our political world, and that tension that Biden describes as “a constant struggle between the American ideal… and the harsh ugly reality” can be understood as a cousin of our analogous historical struggle that pits inclusion, progressivism and liberalism against nativism, elitism and conservatism.
The framework is clearly already within us. What we just don’t do is allow it the conceptual space to be defined as a kind of nationalism, limiting our ability to explore that part of ourselves further. If we did, we could do the important work of homing in on the emotive symbols of that inclusive British nationalism. Nothing would be more effective at reminding people in clear terms what we stand for because for so many of them they will find that it speaks to their belief system too.
We talk lazily about the “Spirit of 2012” but almost a decade on from those heady days we rarely mobilise the actual meaning of that great festival — that our common bonds are in such values as equal opportunity (“local kid done good”), the global soft power of art (“from The Beatles to One Direction”) and the powerful irony, and occasional eccentricity, of our comedy (2012’s The Last Leg, still going strong all these years later, sums this up well). Perhaps the legacy of our ongoing national effort against Covid-19 will be a similar sense of strength through shared experience (particularly after such a polarising era), creating precisely the right moment to reassert those values that form a widespread but softly spoken progressive nationalism. Britain needs a narrative of the direction of the nation, grounded in the idea of the nation as a whole and not just its component classes or groups, and if we do not tell people ours then we will cede that ground to conservatives yet again.
So as we have seen, there is already a strong and emotive narrative of progressive and liberal British history, and we have displayed that common values central to the progressive mission are actually core tenets of our national identity (think of our current rallying behind the NHS as the symbol of the national struggle against Coronavirus, and how quickly the rainbow has become such a national symbol). What remains to be addressed is the role of venerated symbols of the kind of conservative nationalism that we allowed to dominate the discourse for decades. These are the “hot” issues that have stirred this controversy in the first place, such as the prominent use of the Union Flag and the veneration of certain statues.
Simply put, these are hot issues for a reason. They clearly get to the crux of the contestation over the meaning of nationalism. But we would respond to them well, and actually achieve something by engaging with them, if we were having the right kind of fight over them. Instead of representing a legitimate (indeed, more legitimate) reading of our history than the conservative case, far too often progressives argue these matters from the point of view that such symbols cannot be redeemed, leading to the all-too-easy characterisation from the right of iconoclasm.
Instead we should argue, as American progressives do, that the flag can represent more than one set of values and one reading of history, indeed it always has. If a given progressive wants to win the case for removal of statues, or at least win a wider consent than at present, they ought to appeal to the more common-sense position that for a nation to venerate statues that represent values whose morality is beneath that of even most contemporary racial supremacists is for a nation to give a bad account of itself and its people.
It isn’t hard, nor is it abstract, to make the case that you can find belonging and identity through symbols of Britain and at the same time reject a one-sided history of Britain. Nor is it hard to point out that the actual fabric of society that binds us together nowadays is more the legacy of the post-war 20th century, in which Britain became a confluence of classes, races and ideas, and that we ought to take pride in and do justice to that history as much as any other.
I am the child of immigrants from two of Britain’s historic global engagements — the Commonwealth and the European project. Like so many others I have never known another home but Britain, and although my history isn’t rooted in any one place, it is interwoven with the story of Britain and its place in the world. That history, its darkness and its light, belongs to those whose ancestors were always living on these isles and those whose ancestors were caught up in it. Only when we start talking in more direct terms about it — embracing it as a nationalism of its own — can we mobilise a progressive nationalism, win hearts and minds, and inspire a future.
