A nation apart. Why is British exceptionalism so exceptional?

A nation apart: why is British exceptionalism so exceptional?

Alessandro Giacometto

The forty months since June 2016 have figured in the national media and consciousness as unprecedented times in UK history. In substance, indeed, our politics have never been quite as they are now. In its nature, however, the bombastic Europhobia presently vitiating the liberal establishment is but a variation on a ritual theme in this country’s past: that of British exceptionality. Hallowed in its hymns and verse as the “dread and envy”¹ of all nations, as a land “of hope and glory,”² and an “other Eden,” a “demi-paradise”³ on which “the countenance divine”⁴ exclusively shines, the United Kingdom and its British and English progenitors have a long and sustained tradition of self-apotheosis. As, in fairness, do most other modern polities. The United States national anthem hails its continental empire as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the Italian salutes its capital as the enslaver of victory, and the first two lines of the German Deutschlandlied are “Germany, Germany above all, / Above all in the world.” In light of this, it becomes clear that the peculiarity of British exceptionalism is not its simple existence but rather—and this is increasingly the case—its signal exclusiveness. Incompetent to accommodate broader or narrower identifications such as Europeanness and Scottish nationalism, as the In/Out dichotomies of the recent corresponding referenda demonstrate, the inbuilt superiority complex of this “scepter’d isle”⁵ is exceptional in its very exceptionality.

Viewed from below, the notions of alterity—though not those of superiority—of which so many Britons are possessed with regard to Europe are, if not fully factually substantiated, then at least understandable. Geographically, monetarily, constitutionally, the United Kingdom is an entity distinct from much of continental Europe. Its cosmopolitan metropolis is the largest and, in terms of air traffic, busiest in the European Union. Its universities and its interminable and iconic monarchy are among the most prestigious in the world, and its premier football league the most profitable. Its dominant language has subjected all others (a subjection presented by Churchill as its “birthright”)⁶ to the global imperium once exerted by its military and economy, whose tacit reinvention as the Commonwealth of Nations is an abiding reminder of its former preponderance in the domain of global affairs. ‘They need us more than we need them,’ as the old Lie goes. Its cars drive on the left, and its politics have never (as yet) veered cataclysmically to the right.

Whether this makes the United Kingdom ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other sovereign state is a question immaterial, irresponsible and ultimately unanswerable. Yet it is one posed persistently in print, politics and the press, by professors, populist propagandists and in the popular imagination. Repeatedly and remorselessly, the purveyed response appears to be, ‘yes—we do things better here.’ And Euroscepticism, on a synchronised survey of the two, can be deconstructed to reveal its intricate association with the postcolonial hangover. Asked in January 2016 whether their country’s colonial legacy was regrettable, only 21% of a sample of 1733 Brits replied affirmatively. Only 19% thought the bad outweighed the good.⁷ Five months later, this same people voted 51.9% in favour of leaving the European Union. The anti-immigrant sentiment so brazenly inflamed by the Leave campaign was both real and of consequence, as any analysis of the recent spike in racial hatred will verify.⁸ Given this, a sizeable share of the 17.4 million Leavers were doubtless swayed on the one hand by a fear of human and cultural invasion from territories only informally influenced by or unsuccessfully integrated into the erstwhile British Empire, chiefly Turkey and Iraq. On the other, in order to offset a politically unpalatable xenophobia, Brexiters promised the electorate strictly skilled labour imported from those regions that were fully assimilated under and invaluable to British imperial supremacy (India, Singapore, Australia, …). Such arguments are merely a pride of empire reincarnated, a fixation with reinterring its remains on fertile, modern ground: dominion preserved in death through immortal interlinkages between the seat of empire and its dependencies. With the forfeiture of that self-same dominion, British self-definition was divested of conceivably its most crucial component. Euroscepticism, and manufactured promises of an empire of profit resurrected on a more consensual basis, are therefore succour to a nation nursing what little of its identity remains following the amputation of its colonies and a one-time worldwide ascendancy. Hence British exceptionalism, as seen through a Eurocentric lens, is in large part a product of that most exceptional of British enterprises: its Empire.

Indeed, the imperial motif is equally exportable to one of the great paradoxes of this culture of exceptionalism. The British Empire, though unsurpassed in scope, was also unparalleled in atrocity. In the metropole, meanwhile, the premature politicisation of the masses in the early nineteenth century soon ossified into institutional inertia among the ruling classes. Freedom to select the leaders of this self-professed Jerusalem remained uncompromisingly the preserve of the elect until some way into the next century. Yet in 1833 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had poetically evoked his mother country as a land that “sober-suited Freedom chose,” a sanctum of free speech, governmental concord and ancient convention, where “Freedom broadens slowly down / From precedent to precedent.”⁹ The composition in full is in fact far from unequivocally patriotic. But it does feed into a wider truth about British exceptionalism—that is, that its variegated strands are frequently focussed, through the prism of nationalist histories, into a narrative that compulsively stresses the nation’s peculiar acquaintance with liberty, or rather the somewhat imprecise conceptions of the same. The irony that at the time of writing, 80% of adult men and 100% of women living in Britain and Ireland were debarred from the ballot box, and that the few who had been privileged with democratic rights were not spared that of secrecy in exercising them, was apparently lost on Tennyson. He himself was a peer of the realm, and accordingly uninhibited by such impediments to citizenship. His judgement was also likely obscured by the momentary nationwide euphoria that greeted the emancipative passage of the Great Reform Act a year earlier. Nonetheless, by 1918 the fog had long cleared: the United Kingdom was manifestly less ‘free,’ if we take universal manhood suffrage as an indicator, than Greece, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Argentina, Germany, Serbia, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Italy, Estonia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and, most embarrassingly, even some of its own imperial dominions. And this is not even a definitive list. An alike mist must have descended over the eyes of the British delegate in the US, John Balfour, caught up in postwar transports of relief when he pompously proclaimed in January 1946 that his country’s experience of liberty was “without equal in human history.”¹⁰ 1945 was the highpoint of the Second British Empire’s hitherto unrelenting expansion across the face of the earth, whose upkeep, to reference but the most salient of numerous analogous horrors, was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 800,000¹¹ natives of the Asian subcontinent in the suppression of anticolonial resistance in 1857–8. And yet that adjective, British, which according to a 1913 poster was synonymous with being “fair” and “just,”¹² describes a people which as we have seen by and large celebrates the empire that perpetrated this and many more crimes. A similar collective national amnesia has warped our understanding of slavery. It is often forgotten on this side of the Channel that both Spain (1542)¹³ and revolutionary France (1794) prohibited the commodification of humans in advance of the United Kingdom, and that British trafficking accounted for about 60% of the slave trade (or nearly 45,000 slaves a year) in the decade prior to that in which parliament illegalised it.¹⁴

At surface level, this last paragraph may come across as little more than an extravagant display of self-loathing. Very well. But, however belaboured, the point I am endeavouring to make cannot be overlooked: that the myth of Britannia as the “mother of the free,”¹⁵ as the primary trailblazer of Enlightened liberty, is exactly that—a myth. Accounting only for a partial truth, it is, as any historical school of thought, subject to criticism and reinterpretation, and there is plenty of evidence to support a thoroughly more damning reading of the United Kingdom’s protracted progress towards the political freedoms of today. Of course, the position becomes indefensible as it tends towards either extreme. My contention is simply that no political community—not even the United Kingdom—can claim a monopoly on democratic liberties.

Furthermore, valid though arguments emphasising Britain’s precocious and exemplary parliamentarism are, they cannot be deployed as political justifications for the excellence of British parliamentary democracy in opposition to the institutions of the European Union. First of all, the doctrine of the UK parliament’s legislative supremacy is demonstrably not incompatible with full participation in the European Parliament and its governmental procedures. Second, as highlighted earlier, the chronicles of civic enfranchisement are younger, and in fact more incomplete, in the United Kingdom than in many other parts of Europe. The dated first-past-the-post system is one of the least representative and thus undemocratically skewed of any of its equivalents elsewhere in the EU, and it is possible for a permanent UK resident to spend their entire adult life on these shores without once being entitled to vote in a general election. Lastly, the disingenuity of those making the case that the sovereignty of the UK parliament, supposedly superior and unique, is undercut by supranational organisation descends into farce when a Prime Minister presumes to prorogue the Westminster legislature in the very effort to secede from the EU. And this is why scrutinising the folklore of British liberty is so pertinent not just among academic circles, but directly to the contemporary political context. The facts of the achievements in this sphere witnessed on either side of the Irish Sea are embellished, and its fictions so widely diffused that both the historian and the voter risk being led astray by such a brand of British exceptionalism.

But we are yet to conclusively explain the exceptional essence, inasmuch as it is conspicuously potent and pervasive, of this exceptionalism. I now venture to propose that the unabashed chauvinism of current political debate in the United Kingdom (if we can dignify demagoguery with such a name) is a curious concoction of antitheses: a blend of complacency vis-à-vis the past, and insecurity apropos the present and future of the union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The psychosis of Brexit is in this respect a self-perpetuating evil. Originating, as I cursorily sought to establish above, in a postwar, post-imperial, and, additionally, secular crisis of identity, it has both foregrounded preexisting divides and spawned divisions within the union that are now exacerbating the said identity crisis. Will Scotland decide in favour of independence? Will Northern Ireland stick out like the proverbial sore thumb in its relationship with the EU 27 and, more pressingly, the Republic of Ireland? The reflex reaction of unionist nationalists on these islands has been to crank up the rhetoric of UK singularity—the very same rhetoric (largely empty, it must be reiterated) that condemned the Remain camp to defeat, now an agent of union rather than separation. In its turn, Scotland is to the United Kingdom what the United Kingdom is to the European Union. A schematic representation of this political disintegration might be: British exceptionalism → Brexit → Scottish nationalism → British exceptionalism. Otherwise put, exceptionalism is such a significant feature of the United Kingdom’s political life because it is both the initiator and the necessary effect of the interaction of its competing interests.

So much for insecurity. As to complacency, I would point the reader in the direction of that unsavoury favourite among English football chants of the more belligerently inclined among its followers: “Two World Wars and One World Cup.” Needless to say, it is the first half of this borderline anti-German slur that carries most of the historical weight. Setting aside for reasons of coherence and clarity the specificities of English and Scottish parochialism, the boastful chorus of their island’s military unassailability can be heard resonating across the land on either side of Hadrian’s Wall. The legend of 1066—namely, the failure of all adventitious attempts to seize control of the English or British state by force since that date—is emotively conducive to the glory, the hubris, the arrogance finetuned and fortified over the ages and in the retrospective taking of stock by the desolation of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the succession of triumphant wars with France in the eighteenth century. Its hands and military record emerging pristine from the long nineteenth century when those of rivals on the European mainland were bloodied by revolutionary insurrection and debacles on the battlefield, British exceptionalism only received a further fillip from the nation’s refusal to roll over under pressure from fascism and its armies, from its holding firm against German ambitions of a European empire on not one but two occasions in the first half of the twentieth century. No matter that fact has given way to factoid, that Britain never truly stood alone at Dunkirk or Waterloo, nor at Blenheim and the Somme. The fortuitous stability and prosperity of the isle—from a general and relative perspective—since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the mid-1600s has succeeded in convincing us that we are a nation apart.

Drawing together these interrelated threads, we might conclude that the United Kingdom has over the generations developed a propensity for simultaneously terrifying and self-assuring counterfactual thinking. What if Philip II had overthrown the Elizabethan monarchy, or Napoleon subjugated Nelson and his navies? What if the plucky Brits had cowered under the yoke of Hitler? Haunted by the spectres of violence, lawlessness and conquest that stalked it as it proceeded through the modern era, intensely relieved and proud in itself that such visions of Armageddon failed ever to materialise at their most apocalyptic, the United Kingdom has been invited by history to reject out of hand too close an alignment with those European hotbeds of sedition and tyranny (or, in their modern translations, immigration and bureaucracy) in contradistinction with which its identity was forged. It is hardwired, in other words, to disassociate from and elevate itself above those whom such misfortunes have befallen. Thus the germ of exceptionalism is incubated; thus the trifles which distinguish this island nation from its fellow bodies politic are located, hyperbolised, acclaimed and cast as virtues by the mere fact of setting the UK apart from the rest. One such is the unwritten constitution so facilitative of British amour propre. Indeed, if the United Kingdom were to draft its own “paper constitution” for international consumption, it might simply read thus: We are not like you, nor you like us.

[...]

¹ From the lyrics to Rule, Britannia!, set to music by Thomas Arne in 1740.

² From the lyrics to Land of Hope and Glory, set to music by Edward Elgar in 1901.

³ Spoken by John of Gaunt in Act 2, scene 1 of Richard II, William Shakespeare, c. 1595.

⁴ From the lyrics to Jerusalem, set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916.

⁵ Shakespeare, Richard II.

⁶ Winston Churchill, ‘The Gift of a Common Tongue,’ speech at Harvard, 6 September 1943, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1941-1945-war-leader/the-price-of-greatness-is-responsibility/ (accessed 17 September 2019).

⁷ W. Dahlgreen, ‘Rhodes must not fall,’ YouGov, 18 January 2016, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articlesreports/2016/01/18/rhodes-must-not-fall (accessed 17 September 2019).

⁸ ‘Brexit “major influence” in racism and hate crime rise,’ BBC News, 20 June 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48692863 (accessed 17 September 2019). Cf. M. Weaver, ‘Hate crime surge linked to Brexit and 2017 terrorist attacks,’ The Guardian, 16 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/hate-crime-brexit-terrorist-attacks-england-wales (accessed 17 September 2019).

⁹ ‘You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,’ in J. C. Collins (ed.), The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 2005. Available from: Project Gutenberg (accessed 17 September 2019).

¹⁰ Quoted in L. Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion, London, Profile Books, 2014, p. 37.

¹¹ D. M. Peers, India Under Colonial Rule, 1700–1885, Routledge, 2013, p. 64.

¹² Colley, Acts of Union and Disunion, p. 36.

¹³ B. Kuklick, A Political History of the USA: One Nation Under God, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 27.

¹⁴ S. Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh, 1977, p. 27.

¹⁵ Land of Hope and Glory, music by Elgar.