Beyond patriotism (part 1 of 3)

Not being invited

Compass has a new collection of essays out (launched on Tuesday Feb 23rd), with various authors setting out their thoughts on the seemingly never-ending debate on how the ‘progressive left’ engages with nationalism and patriotism.

Weirdly, I was not invited to contribute to the publication, but if I had been, this is roughly what I would have written.

Imagined communities

I can see the attraction in Benedict Anderson notion of ‘imagined communities’ brought forward by both Francesca Foley and Simon Duffy in the collection as a way of reclaiming patriotism for progressives. The argument is pretty simple: if we imagine it hard enough, and work on ways to get other people to do so too, we can reimagine our communities, and thus our nation, to be inclusive of people who have been “racialized as something other than white” (Laura Basu’s usefully provocative term in the collection). By doing this, goes the argument, we can reclaim the concepts of patriotism and nationalism.

Beyond the collection, there’s support for this kind of approach from plenty of quite influential progressives. Sunder Katwala of British Futures, for example, is keen to emphasize historical precedent of the use of the flag by Labour leaders, and argues more broadly that a national pride, reflected in our ‘national symbols’ can coalesce with values of tolerance for the different ethnicities who now live in Britain.

As ever, Sunder marshals polling evidence in defence of his claims, suggesting that because three quarters of British people, both white and other-than-white and in similar proportions, say they are proud of being British, there is already a common ground on which to base a progressive and tolerant patriotism, which he regards as an essential underpinning if we are, collectively, to “secure a hearing for the next generation of arguments about what more needs to change”.

I admire hugely Sunder’s indefatigable optimism, and the force of his normative personal and political programme of calling out racial hatred where it is present while also emphasizing how out of kilter with overall public sentiment such open racial hatred is, but I am not convinced by the empirical data or the historical precedent he musters as an argument for this as the best way to “secure a hearing”. And by the same reasoning, I think it is wishful thinking to assume that, with the right encouragement, we’ll collectively re-imagine our way to a new national story, in which racial inequalities disappear under the sunlight of a new national pride in our own inclusiveness.

First, there’s the claim that Labour’s path to electoral victory has tended to rely on an effective appeal to an ‘imagined [national] community.

I’m not disputing that this may have been the case in 1945, when the war had necessarily forced a solidarity-or-conquered spirit upon us, and the linking of ‘winning the war’ to ‘winning the peace’ message was a very adroit way of drawing on that sentiment.

But there is a strong argument that Labour won in 1997 despite its use of national symbols, not because of it. What really won the election then, I would contend, is not the awkward, even then, appropriation by Labour of the British aspects of Cool Britannia and that loose movement’s own half-ironic turn to the flag (and we should remember that the Spice Girls were Tories), but an offering of the individual freedom that was supposed to come from modernity, juxtaposed with the stuffy Britishness of John Major’s underpants. For New Labour’s chief intellectual source, Anthony Giddens, this new modernity, at the end of history, was about us all having enough ontological security to be able to move past the politics of emancipation and onto personal life projects.

Modernity failed to deliver. Ontological security was ripped from millions and with it the change for personal psychological fulfilment by the financial crisis of 2008 and, for many people in the UK, the War on Terror that began with the destruction of the Twin Towers.

I’ll return in part II to what the War on Terror means for any hopes of a patriotic consensus in 2021, but for now I want to keep the focus on what did win the election for New Labour, because I think understand that actually shows us a (perhaps circuitous) route to the kind of society both I and Sunder want — a society in which a new generation gets to implement structural change in a way which might allow of a new kind of patriotism (should be wish to call it that) without relying on the bad old kind.

Why labour won in 1997… and then lost

Labour won in 1997, not because it waved flags about, but because it tapped into a desire for the freedom to do “whatever I want”, as the great working class, non-flag waving anthem of Cool Britannia. Go back and see the quite brilliant original video, and you’ll see what I mean; the black & white reference to the 50 year wait for this ontologically secure liberation (alongside the Beatles feel), the ‘I don’t take any shit’ sense of personal agency, and more than anything an older generation (the string orchestra) being liberated in their turn as the Oasis boys put down their instruments. It’s all there, not least the titling of the song — not the ‘Free’ that you might have expected, but the dismissive ‘Whatever’, redolent of the idea that not giving a shit is as valid as giving a shit.

What Oasis and its video-makers were doing, in fact, was to reflect the new aspiration to personal freedom which, twenty-five years later, historian Jon Lawrence showed were prevalent in Britain from the late 1940s onwards. Lawrence, working from contemporaneous social survey and studies, finds that, in post-war England, what ‘ordinary’ people treasured most was, in contrast the collectivizing to which the ‘imagined communities’ ideal is prone, a modern world where “community instead became increasingly personal and voluntary based on genuine affection rather than proximity or need”.

But Labour lost its way. If it ever really got that its appeal was to this long repressed desire for individual freedom, by 2005 it had forgotten. It reverted to a vapid communitarianism as substitute for the kind of really radical change in economic ownership that might have embedded the new personal liberties to not give a shit that it had promised, and one crash later, it was gone. [1]

The people who make brilliant videos didn’t forget, mind. A quarter of a century after ‘Whatever’ the greatest car advert ever made used an Oasis song, this time a superb cover of ‘Wonderwall’.

The advert, which I’ve written about in detail, tells a tear-inducing story of personal liberation from older conventions, and again there’s a generational aspect, with the older male, whom I called Labour Dad, drawn reluctantly but ultimately joyfully into a new era of tolerance.

I called him Labour dad because his assumed story of personal liberation from past convention from the 1980s onwards, of the type that New Labour seemed to espouse in its earlier years. But I told this assumed story a few days before the General Election of 2019, when I knew Labour was going to lose, and knew it was going to lose because Labour dad left Labour for the Tories.

Labour Dad left Labour because Corbyn Labour did not give enough evidence that it could or even wanted to respect the personal freedom of voluntary association they cherished, and because the Tories — perhaps by mistake — were able to give that evidence to a large enough section of the Red Wall population.

Fifteen months later, Labour under Starmer has still not understood any Oasis-based videos, or the work of Jon Lawrence. It has failed to grasp the idea that people don’t really want a national story, of whatever kind, foisted upon them, because they are quite capable of storifying their own lives, ontological security permitting.

So by default, perhaps hankering for the entertaining but ill-judged ‘Olympic spirt’ displays of 2012, in which Danny Boyle sought to tie old Labour values to a flag and a parachuting Queen, Labour is pursuing the flag-waving ‘imagined communities’ strategy with vigour towards electoral disaster.

So, with a heavy heart, we must turn to the Tories, and their version of freedom; we need to understand why the enemy is successful if we are to develop successful alternative strategy.

Tories and the permanent minority

Space does not permit a potted history of how the Tories managed to sell its version of freedom to enough of the electorate to win (that’s in a forthcoming essay), so let me bring us right up to date with a snapshot of the their logic. Here’s mainstream Conservative commentator Daniel Finkelstein, in a piece setting out conservatives are the people best placed to foster racial harmony:

In fact conservative realism is why Tories can reject with confidence the idea (fashionable among the more activist parts of Black Lives Matter) that racism is the product of capitalism and Britain’s imperial history. Conservatives understand that it is much more serious and deep-rooted than that. Prejudice is a part of human nature and racism exists in all political systems: Soviet Russia, modern China and Rwanda, where the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis claimed approximately 600,000 lives.

We have an evolutionary instinct that leads us to co-operate with people who are like us and to reject or even fight those who seem unfamiliar. That is why creating multicultural societies is hard and why every one of them experiences racial tension. Recognition of this difficulty is why I’ve always been slightly more cautious about levels of immigration into this country than my liberal friends. I think it takes time for people to learn to live with each other.

Let us address the easy bit first.

Daniel Finkestein is flat wrong about Rwanda. Hutus did not massacre Tutsis because of racist human nature, but because German and Belgian imperialists created and institutionalized a racial distinction between Hutus and Tutsis, which did not exist before they arrived, for their own capitalist imperialist purpose of indirect rule.

Here’s Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani on the matter in his brand new book ‘Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities’:

In Rwanda, Belgian colonizers had classified the population into tow opposed groups, Tutis and Hutu (with a third residual group, Twa), even though the majority of the population was “mixed”…..[T]he colonial power set up the minority Tutsi as manager of a state that contained a Hutu majority……

The response of the human rights community was similarly blinkered. Many who wrote about the genocide in Rwanda treated the violence as a “senseless” expression of ethnic hatreds, a cultural tradition of timeless tribal enmities. Writers such as Philip Gourevitch and Samantha Power exceptionalized Rwanda’s violence of a form of “radical evil. They failed to join the likes of Hannah Arendt and Sven Lindqvist in recognizing that extreme violence has a history. (p.243–244)

Now I could go to plenty of other, more detailed sources for this history, including Mamdani’s own earlier book, specifically about the background to the Rwanda genocide, and the historical facts, including Belgian census records from the 1930s, are not really in doubt,. But I quote from Mamdani’s more recent work for two reasons.

First, it’s to point out that Finkelstein, while he really could have done better, is not alone in this tendency not to seek the reasons for things that may look like deeply embedded racial hatred. It’s a more widespread problem than with conservative commentators.

Second, it’s because this brief overview by Mamdani of the ‘construction’ of endogenous racial hatred is part of a wider exploration of its use for the creation of ‘permanent minorities’, of the type that Finkelstein’s logic leads us to.

This is an exploration by Mamdani taking place, as chance would have it, at exactly the same time as the Compass collection launch, in an online seminar hosted by Sussex University. This is apposite, because Mamdani’s argument that the nation state is the root cause of political violence is actually very close to that brought forward by Laura Basu in her contribution to the Compass collection:

[T]he modern concept of race — based around the idea of white supremacy — was part and parcel of the imperial project. Though we might think of race as something biological, it’s actually a social construct. As Paul Gilroy wrote, race is a product of racism, not the other way round. Race and racial hierarchy go hand in hand, and it is this racial hierarchy that enables conquest, plunder and death — the imperialist primitive accumulation that capitalism can’t live without. And as we have seen, nation-states were and continue to be the main agents of this imperialism……

Race is what greases the wheels of the international division of labour, in which those who produce most of the world’s wealth are shut out — by state borders — from reaping its benefits………This dynamic is repeated within state borders — as all those statistics about health and education outcomes, income disparities and prison populations that our governments keep ignoring tell us. (p.54)

For our domestic political purposes, Basu’s last point is vital. What she’s saying, in effect, is that the dynamics of imperial control by the creation of minorities can also develop within nation-states, including those nation states that did the imperial plundering.

In my forthcoming work, I’ll be setting out how this is become more of a danger as capital accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey’s term) replaces accumulation by conquest but. Because the initial strategy for dispossession through commodification of the social is now also running out of space and steam, dispossession mark II is likely to involve more direct dispossession from racialized (and other ‘undeserving’) minorities.

Here, let it suffice to say that this structural shift to a next spatial fix of capitalism is made easier by the active agency of Tories like Daniel Finkelstein, who revise history in order then to be able to claim that “creating multicultural societies is hard”, when actually the evidence suggests not only that, left to their own devices, ordinary people don’t find it hard;

In fact, multiculturalism is only at base ‘hard’ because, in words from Mamdani that could as easily come from Basu:

[t]he relationship between state and nation produces a vicious cycle, whereby the nation imagines the state as its protector and aggrandizer, the state fulfills this role, and the nation’s investment in the state’s bestowals of privilege only intensifies. The nation-state is born to serve the nation, and in so doing makes itself indispensable to the nation, disabling he minority’s reform efforts (p.334)

The speed and intensity of this vicious cycle of exclusion is only enhanced by appeals to national tradition by the likes of Daniel Finkelstein, and now Keir Starmer, because they depend on the false idea that people living together in harmony can only happen if the state imposes restrictions on the freedom of minorities, from immigration to PREVENT, as a way of controlling supposedly in-built enmities.[2]

Towards an alternative to patriotism

So, for my own part, if I’d been invited to contribute to the collection, I’d have found myself standing full square with Laura Basu against the very possibility of ‘progressive’ appeals to the nation-state. More specifically, I’d have argued that Labour will continue to lose if it continues down this path, because logic dictates that the Tories, happy with the idea of permanent minorities who can only be assimilated through the right mix of patronage and punishment, will always do it better.

But such a historical and situational analysis is not enough. Progressives, including those in Labour, need to set forward an alternative strategy to undercut the Tories’ false promise of freedom for the majority (at the quiet expense of minorities).

In part II, I set about that task.

I start by taking seriously the stories of those who, the Tories (and the nation-state more broadly) have successfully established as ‘permanent minority’, with particular reference to the account of Yassir Morsi, in the essay collection ‘I Refuse to Condemn’, in which he works through for us how it is to be assigned a quote-mark ‘Muslim’ status, in opposition to his “own quoteless everydayness”, and how this impedes his own (Giddensian) life project of spiritual fulfilment, because the demands that he condemns, In order to be seen as a ‘good Muslim’ undercuts authentic identity.

Then, in a move a little similar to the “auto-ethnographic approach” that Yassir employs, with reflective reluctance, but which is also liberally strewn across the Compass collection, I turn to my own story — or rather — the story of my dad, a man for whom the phrase “quoteless everydayness” might have been invented by Yassir. In telling the story of (for?) of my dad, a world war II veteran who might now be seen as the antithesis of the media construction that is the late Captain Tom, I seek to draw the connection, again in line with Laura Basu, between race and class, and thus to start to develop some kind of route map for a solidarity between those racialized into minority status and forced to condemn, and those who are part of the majority, but whose agential aspirations to the right to not to have to give a shit (not a phrase my dad would have used, though he’d have liked Oasis) have been lost to progressives.

From there, I turn the thoughts of the much quoted, less read, Paul Gilroy, addressing the misconception that the way to remedy the lack of black in the Union Jack is try to paint some in. Rather, I will argue, Gilroy can be seen as in quiet solidarity with people like my dad, who — decorated war hero that he was, never war a poppy, and whom I only ever remember getting het up about one ‘political’ matter when he said that the campaign for turban-wearing Sikhs to be exempt from the Motorcycle Helmet Act s was absolutely fine with him because, you know, ‘live and let live’.

Ultimately, I’ll argue that the progressive way forward is not via patriotism, but in creating a Gilroy route, via the quiet separation of state and nation, towards a state form that embraces a casual conviviality, at the expense of a casual racism being made less casual by the day, and which allows you to support England at the football, or Pakistan in the cricket, or not give a shit about either.

I really should have been invited to contribute to the Compass collection.

Note

[1] As a silly aside, I wonder whether the decline of New Labour, sketched here, from semi-accidental affirmation of working class agency to vapid consumerist-communitarianism is reflected in the transition from Oasis’s ‘Whatever’ (1995ish) to ‘Vicky Pollard’s ‘Worrever’ (2005ish).

[2] As sure as night follows day, while I was writing this there appeared, in the same paper as Daniel Finkelstein’s argument for “realism” about non-white people, the argument for the direct marginalization and policing of Muslims on the basis that their culture is necessarily linked to extremism. both arguments stem from the same rewriting of imperial history.