US person here, colloquially known as "American," sharing that similar debates (or more accurately, similar lack of actual debates!) about what distinctions are relevant for "Us vs Them" exist here as well, and on so many fronts of the "Culture Wars."
A favorite thinker of mine, Greg Thomas, once shared an anecdote on the Jim Rutt Show of how a Black British colleague of his had made a pilgrimage to some part of Africa to explore his familial ancestry. Upon arriving, he was taken aback by the fact that his ancestral community treated him as an outsider, clearly someone who was "British first, with Black skin," while much of the progressive British population "back home" was being encouraged to see him as "Black first, raised British."
So fascinating how different contexts can variably allocate different identity components as more or less primary than others!
As long as British Moderation isn't cover or excuse for impotence in the face of danger. You were reluctant to face Hitler externally, and even worse to face the Islamist conquest you eagerly imported to displace you. What are we to make of your Moderation in light of those examples. I won't even mention your economic and national suicide by willful destruction of your energy infrastructure...
This is the underlying, unspoken reason there's so little uproar about certain "legals", citizens and/or people who "did it the right way" and have official permission to be in the United States, being detained by ICE. People assume we can't find the "illegals" without looking into a lot of Hispanic people, and their kids don't look Hispanic, so fine. Without that on the table it seems like they are saying it's fine to incarcerate first and figure out why later, due process be damned, and sure, their children have to risk it too, but it's worth it. But of course that is not what they are saying.
The fact that more people see themselves as British, but not English is perhaps a side-effect of the UK being a nation with such things as citizenship and passports.
My guess is that many are saying that someone is British and that if you asked them why or how they defined that, they'd say something like a person who is a citizen of the UK is British. And legally speaking that's correct.
There isn't the same thing for being English. You can't fulfill a specific list of requirements, send in an application, and thereafter be officially and legally English with an English passport.
I feel there's a missing element to this examination, specifically the omission of the concepts of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage. The USA heritage is of a genetically diverse population blending in the basis of shared values, not ethnic origins. To be American is not an ethnic issue, despite the Marxist's ceaseless, hateful efforts to force that lie down our throats. It is shared values and uniting principles, precisely those values that organically are the basis of my friendships with so many fine new Americans who immigrated here to benefit from and passionately support the defense of the blessings of Liberty. I suspect the countless blended-ethnicity families of Britain have no difficulty recognizing the distinction between what I've described and the Marxist-weaponized tribalist hordes they've trafficked into Europe to implement it's dissolution. The British of all skin tones are uniting against their common totalitarian enemy.
You talk a lot of sense Ms Pluckrose, as usual. But you’re missing one thing: we are no longer in the Age of Enlightenment. When Enlightenment values are dominant, people can accept the blurring around the edges of their native tribal drives. Rational ideas about politics, society and policy can be implemented, debated, etc.
This is the Age of Unreason. The Dumb Ages, The Age of Stupid, etc, I’ve seen articles and podcasts titled such, and many more along the same vein. People are not thinking, they are *feeling*. Under threat, we become less tolerant, less welcoming, less enlightened. You could probably argue that the threats aren’t actually all that bad, probably we live in the safest age, but it doesn’t *feel* like that. The safest place to be is, to our deepest natures, in the heart of our family, in the heart of our tribe. I’m not sure any reasoning or rationalising, nor any appeals to our other instincts can change our course. I’m not sure it should. Systems and governments have to work with our nature, not against it, or we unleash greater horror.
Suppose a person born and living in France or Denmark lauds the same list of values that you use to define Englishness (which is actually quite likely). Would that make them “English”?
No, of course not. These a feature of Enlightenment thought and liberal democracies. To want to preserve these values in one country is not to claim that is the only country that has them. I want all liberal. democracies to hold onto these values.
In the same way, people who want to preserve a Christian heritage as British values are not claiming that Christianity arose in and was confined to Britain.
Suppose a 20-yr-old, born in London, has lived in England all his life, and all of his grandparents and great grandparents were also born in England. But he’s a radical Marxist who has come to despise much of Britain’s history and culture, and wants a radically different Britain, including rejecting many of the liberal values that you list. Is he “English”?
Also consider another 20-yr-old, again a radical Marxist with the same opinions as above. This one was born in London, to parents who had migrated to Britain from Syria one year before he was born. Is that person “English”?
Yes. By saying that I want to preserve certain British values, I am not claiming that nobody British has different values. That’s what my last sentence is about.
Being of common nationality doesn't preclude also being an internal enemy and existential threat to the nation. It is Natural self-defense and a societal immune response, as well as duty and justification for addressing both foreign and domestic threats with the force of Law. There is no relevance or relation to ethnicity or heritage in that circumstance.
"The British values I most want to conserve are those developed in the modern era. They include Britain’s significant contributions to Enlightenment thought and liberal philosophy: individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, parliamentary democracy, equality under the law and respect for our common humanity."
Significant contributions to Englightenment thought - also true of France so not a defining value of Britishness
liberal philosophy - also true of France and others
individual liberty - constrained everywhere but least in America
freedom of belief and speech - mainly American now
parliamentary democracy - historically British but gifted to former colonises some of whom have retained it and taken up by other European nations
equality under the law - true of most common law systems and some code based European systems
respect for our common humanity - not sure who "our" refers to, but according ot the UN not definingly British.
Attempts to define Britishness by values does not succeed though I value the same things as the author. In fact the values listed excludes significant areas of baradari clan and other Muslim enclaves in the UK. Is it British to want to make Islam a dominant religion? For a growing number this is a dominant goal/value.
Mainstream media confuse multi-ethnicity with multi-culturalism. We have always been multi-ethnic with Angles and Saxon invaders, mixing with and coexisting with Celts (albeit by forcing many of them west initially) and now intemarrying with each other. The range of ethnicities has since increased as has institutional integration - Muslim immigrants control many councils and hold opening prayers in Urdu. They inhabit British institutions but not cuturally. Assimilation into the majority culture - as happened with Hugenots and others - has gone backwards. Inter-racial strife is no longer black and white e.g. Muslims v Hindus in Leicester in 2022. Many such examples exist.
This article rightly separates genetics and social constructs, but reference to values alone does not help identify Britishness. As Renaud Camus put it in relation to France:
"Can you join a people? Individuals who so wish can always join a people out of love for its language, literature, its art de vivre or its landscapes. But you can’t do this at scale: peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them. If a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais … 'I am just as French as you are', it follows that being French is nothing”.
Rapid, mass immigration is creating a problem that no-one has a real answer to. The Manchester bomber lived in an area of Manchester known as Little Libya, took holidays in Libya (the country they were allegedly fleeing) and instruction on values in a mosque. Was he British?
The problem is not that successive goverments failed to encourage assimilation. Large numbers of ethnically and culturally similar peoples will automatially reproduce inherited values. Rapid, mass immigration cannot be undone and its secondary consequences are here for generations. Listing values is not a solution.
I don’t know how or if this contributes to the debate but not all families who emigrate take on the culture and values (or even language) of their new homes. Many bring with them a bubble of values and norms from the country they supposedly left behind - ranging from the extremes of honour killing to speaking their own native tongue at home to observing practices such as dress codes from the old country and transmitting them to the younger generation. I don’t know that a Chinese person would describe himself or herself to friends as English regardless of how long they have been in the country.
Its when quantitative differences become qualitative. It seems to me mean-spirited if a well-educated, well-adjusted Indian or Nigerian is told you are not English and never will be. (Although I know 90% of Indians and Nigerians would never consider me to be Indian or Nigerian even if I was born there and worked there and lived there). But in the real world 60 million Nigerians would like to move to England or Ireland and 600 million Indians would like to move there to. Then it would be beyond crazy to consider them English or Irish because their own countries are so dreadful (because their own ancestors were so unable to create a decent society) and to consume the benefits of our society (the direct result of our ancestors labour and sacrifice). Well that to me is wrong. But that is the world we are living in.
Dear Helen, I've been mulling over your thoughtful article. You say:
"I wrote an essay specifically talking about ethnonationalist beliefs and the fact that they don't make arguments for them but assert that genetic lineage is the sole definition of British and English and the only people who should be here. If you want to engage with that at all, please do."
OK, here goes! I agree with you that how we (collectively) construe being "English" is a social construct, and thus the meaning can evolve. If I look up the Wikipedia article on "English people" it starts:
"The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language [...] and share a common ancestry, history, and culture."
That's in line with how I see it. I guess that makes me an "ethnonationalist". That, though, doesn't mean that I think that such people are "... the only people who should be here". I'm fine with some degree of migration, in relatively small numbers. Over time (a couple of generations perhaps), such migrants would assimilate and become English.
If some "ethnonationalists" are asserting to you that the above definition of "English" is the one and only allowable definition, then that might be because, until relatively recently, it was indeed the accepted meaning. Since then, within swathes of liberal thought, it has become the ultimate sin to ascribe any importance to ancestry, race or genes. Hence, many liberals today do indeed construe being "English" as being only about living in England and supporting certain aspects of English culture.
But shared ancestry seems to matter a lot more than supposed. Nations that are predominantly one ancestry group are more at ease with themselves, whereas multiple ancestry groups is nearly always a source of tension, particularly when exacerbated by religious differences. Culture seems to be anchored in ancestry to a large extent. When migration is in small numbers, such migrants do tend to adopt the local culture. Mass migration, however, seems to lead to enclaves where migrants group together (entirely understandably, since people generally seem happier in ancestry groups) and largely retain their own culture.
Where there are multiple ethnicities, people tend to identify more with their ethnicity group than with the state. People tend to be less civic minded, less trusting of others, they give less to charity (or only to charities serving their group), and they are less likely to see things like welfare fraud as wrong.
I don't agree that, where whole communities are now majority recent-migrants of different ethnicity, that they are now "English", even if their children are born in England and even if they adopt some aspects of British culture -- and particularly not if, as is often the case, they reject key aspects of British culture, such as "individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, ...".
[They might eventually become de facto English, after about 6 generations, much as the Viking migrants eventually did, but over those generations of tension and strife the difference certainly mattered.]
Of course you're entitled to construe this differently, and think that what matters is just living in Britain and supporting a list of liberal values. To me this hollows out English identity, turning it into an un-rooted flag of convenience. I suspect that you could also find your list of liberal values increasingly under threat. What matters is indeed culture, but I think that you're underestimating the extent to which culture and values are rooted in and derive from shared ancestry, history, and heritage.
Left-wing thought often reaches for ideals that fly against the realities of human nature and so don't work (e.g. communism). The Western liberal usually underestimates the degree to which the West's values derive from the West's people. Instead, people are seen as fully fungible. So, well-meaning liberal politicians (Tony Blair, David Cameron, etc) naively think: we'll go into Afghanistan, Libya or Iraq and turn them into liberal democracies with free elections and liberal values. This usually doesn't turn out well. Such politicians also think it'll work fine to simply import whole new populations of people from dysfunctional countries. Is this going to work any better?
“Over time (a couple of generations perhaps), such migrants would assimilate and become English.”
Then you don’t believe genetic lineage is the sole definition of English either. You also believe there are grounds to consider people who are well-assimilated and deeply embedded in the culture English. You are not an ethnonationalist. You’re a cultural conservative. Like me.
Ok, fair enough, though note the timescales I gave. The “couple of generations” was for small-number migration; for mass migration where migrants then live in enclaves I suggested six generations.
“It is not self-evident that people should be defined by the geographical location of their ancestors rather than their own.”
This unfairly narrows it down to just geography. Someone has the nationality of their parents not just based on the geography of where the parents are from, but the mother tongue they impart upon said child, the culture they raise them in, the family circle and community network they very likely will be a member of etc., etc.
An Irish-American person might not seem that Irish to someone from Dublin but that’s just because the Irish immigrated mostly 100+ years ago. This subject when discussed these days doesn’t have them in mind. It has recent immigrants who move to countries and have modern technology that keeps them in good contact with the culture they left and thereby retain it much more than previous generations of immigrants. That’s how you have lower rates of integration in say France Germany and Sweden of some immigrant communities. Dumbing it down to “geographical location of the ancestors” throws out a lot of baby with the bath water.
But there often is a blood/ethnic element to it though; that’s unavoidable.
It’s not Korean Americans that are saying they’re Irish, you know what I mean?
How do you define ethno nationalist if I may ask? Taken apart those words don’t have negative connotations but combined you’re using it as a pejorative term it seems.
Ethnonationalist is the accurate term for people who want belonging to a nation to be decided on ethnic grounds. It’s not a pejorative. They call themselves that. I oppose this.
But there’s a difference between nationality and citizenship. You can move to a place and be a citizen with full and equal rights and protections. Yet you are different than a fellow citizen who is 20 generations deep in that country. No?!
As I said in the piece, nearly everybody accepts that genetic ancestry is real. That is not the source of disagreement And it is obviously demonstrably true that we have migrants who have become citizens and have equal rights and protections. Ethnonationalists are the ones who say this shouldn't have happened and we need to remigrate them all because only genetic lineage matters. I am addressing their tendency to act as though this is obvious and everybody who says that people can become citizens of a country and be considered British or English because of it is in denial of biology. I'm sorry to be snapping at you, but I don't know how I could have set that out anymore clearly. Maybe read it again more slowly.
I wrote an essay specifically talking about ethnonationalist beliefs and the fact that they don't make arguments for them but assert that genetic lineage is the sole definition of British and English and the only people who should be here. If you want to engage with that at all, please do.
You can't just throw random speaking points from the broader debate at me and act as though anything I've said is relevant to them.
I did address the debates and different views on it more broadly in last week's piece and that's linked in the first sentence, but this is a piece about ethnonationalists style of argumentation and their refusal to accept that other people don't exclusively use ancestral DNA to define Britishness or Englishness.
I don’t know what you’re talking about? I am speaking of those who say they want Britain to be home only to those with ancestral DNA shows them to have been there for hundreds of years. That’s not an element, it’s the whole of it. They utterly reject the idea that people can be culturally English or. British if their ancestors came from somewhere else. See Premise 1. Those people
For starters, England is only one part of Britain, other parts being Scotland and Wales. (An additional complication is Northern Ireland.) Note that Britain has a government and a legislature, whereas England does not.
"Nevertheless, it is clear that humans commonly feel invested in their ancestry and history, and this tendency may be partly innate."
The feeling-of-investment-in-one's-ancestry's degree of innateness is not relevant. Many things people feel are innate to one degree or another--anger; jealousy; sexual attraction. What is important is how an individual manifests their investment in their sense of ancestry.
"Many people become deeply suspicious when anyone speaks of anything being ‘a social construct.’"
The universe is a construct. The material world is constructed of quarks, leptons, gluons, dark energy, etc. The social world is constructed of desires, thoughts, actions, etc. Both worlds are in a state of flux, since humans exist in a quantum universe.
Restore, MAGA, and similar ideologies are the ideologies of people who are shaken by flux/paradox, and crave essentials/essentialism.
"Therefore, it should be clear that there is no consensus on who should and should not be considered British or English"
But that does not matter to essentialists, since they crave a fixed ideology with definite parameters. Your respect for "common humanity" eludes them, since humanity is ever-changing, and, as a result, seems no safe harbor to them.
US person here, colloquially known as "American," sharing that similar debates (or more accurately, similar lack of actual debates!) about what distinctions are relevant for "Us vs Them" exist here as well, and on so many fronts of the "Culture Wars."
A favorite thinker of mine, Greg Thomas, once shared an anecdote on the Jim Rutt Show of how a Black British colleague of his had made a pilgrimage to some part of Africa to explore his familial ancestry. Upon arriving, he was taken aback by the fact that his ancestral community treated him as an outsider, clearly someone who was "British first, with Black skin," while much of the progressive British population "back home" was being encouraged to see him as "Black first, raised British."
So fascinating how different contexts can variably allocate different identity components as more or less primary than others!
I know Greg a little! I love his approach to these issues.
Indeed, yes!
And moderation. Moderation has been one British value I have been most appreciative of in recent years.
As long as British Moderation isn't cover or excuse for impotence in the face of danger. You were reluctant to face Hitler externally, and even worse to face the Islamist conquest you eagerly imported to displace you. What are we to make of your Moderation in light of those examples. I won't even mention your economic and national suicide by willful destruction of your energy infrastructure...
This is the underlying, unspoken reason there's so little uproar about certain "legals", citizens and/or people who "did it the right way" and have official permission to be in the United States, being detained by ICE. People assume we can't find the "illegals" without looking into a lot of Hispanic people, and their kids don't look Hispanic, so fine. Without that on the table it seems like they are saying it's fine to incarcerate first and figure out why later, due process be damned, and sure, their children have to risk it too, but it's worth it. But of course that is not what they are saying.
The fact that more people see themselves as British, but not English is perhaps a side-effect of the UK being a nation with such things as citizenship and passports.
My guess is that many are saying that someone is British and that if you asked them why or how they defined that, they'd say something like a person who is a citizen of the UK is British. And legally speaking that's correct.
There isn't the same thing for being English. You can't fulfill a specific list of requirements, send in an application, and thereafter be officially and legally English with an English passport.
I feel there's a missing element to this examination, specifically the omission of the concepts of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage. The USA heritage is of a genetically diverse population blending in the basis of shared values, not ethnic origins. To be American is not an ethnic issue, despite the Marxist's ceaseless, hateful efforts to force that lie down our throats. It is shared values and uniting principles, precisely those values that organically are the basis of my friendships with so many fine new Americans who immigrated here to benefit from and passionately support the defense of the blessings of Liberty. I suspect the countless blended-ethnicity families of Britain have no difficulty recognizing the distinction between what I've described and the Marxist-weaponized tribalist hordes they've trafficked into Europe to implement it's dissolution. The British of all skin tones are uniting against their common totalitarian enemy.
Yea America doesn’t really fit in a discussion of nationality as it’s a post-national state. As is Canada, Australia, etc.
You talk a lot of sense Ms Pluckrose, as usual. But you’re missing one thing: we are no longer in the Age of Enlightenment. When Enlightenment values are dominant, people can accept the blurring around the edges of their native tribal drives. Rational ideas about politics, society and policy can be implemented, debated, etc.
This is the Age of Unreason. The Dumb Ages, The Age of Stupid, etc, I’ve seen articles and podcasts titled such, and many more along the same vein. People are not thinking, they are *feeling*. Under threat, we become less tolerant, less welcoming, less enlightened. You could probably argue that the threats aren’t actually all that bad, probably we live in the safest age, but it doesn’t *feel* like that. The safest place to be is, to our deepest natures, in the heart of our family, in the heart of our tribe. I’m not sure any reasoning or rationalising, nor any appeals to our other instincts can change our course. I’m not sure it should. Systems and governments have to work with our nature, not against it, or we unleash greater horror.
Well, I am not missing that. I’m fighting against it. I’ll be in Chicago in July arguing that we need a new Enlightenment!
I hope that’s possible.
Suppose a person born and living in France or Denmark lauds the same list of values that you use to define Englishness (which is actually quite likely). Would that make them “English”?
No, of course not. These a feature of Enlightenment thought and liberal democracies. To want to preserve these values in one country is not to claim that is the only country that has them. I want all liberal. democracies to hold onto these values.
In the same way, people who want to preserve a Christian heritage as British values are not claiming that Christianity arose in and was confined to Britain.
Suppose a 20-yr-old, born in London, has lived in England all his life, and all of his grandparents and great grandparents were also born in England. But he’s a radical Marxist who has come to despise much of Britain’s history and culture, and wants a radically different Britain, including rejecting many of the liberal values that you list. Is he “English”?
Also consider another 20-yr-old, again a radical Marxist with the same opinions as above. This one was born in London, to parents who had migrated to Britain from Syria one year before he was born. Is that person “English”?
Yes. By saying that I want to preserve certain British values, I am not claiming that nobody British has different values. That’s what my last sentence is about.
Being of common nationality doesn't preclude also being an internal enemy and existential threat to the nation. It is Natural self-defense and a societal immune response, as well as duty and justification for addressing both foreign and domestic threats with the force of Law. There is no relevance or relation to ethnicity or heritage in that circumstance.
"The British values I most want to conserve are those developed in the modern era. They include Britain’s significant contributions to Enlightenment thought and liberal philosophy: individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, parliamentary democracy, equality under the law and respect for our common humanity."
Significant contributions to Englightenment thought - also true of France so not a defining value of Britishness
liberal philosophy - also true of France and others
individual liberty - constrained everywhere but least in America
freedom of belief and speech - mainly American now
parliamentary democracy - historically British but gifted to former colonises some of whom have retained it and taken up by other European nations
equality under the law - true of most common law systems and some code based European systems
respect for our common humanity - not sure who "our" refers to, but according ot the UN not definingly British.
Attempts to define Britishness by values does not succeed though I value the same things as the author. In fact the values listed excludes significant areas of baradari clan and other Muslim enclaves in the UK. Is it British to want to make Islam a dominant religion? For a growing number this is a dominant goal/value.
Mainstream media confuse multi-ethnicity with multi-culturalism. We have always been multi-ethnic with Angles and Saxon invaders, mixing with and coexisting with Celts (albeit by forcing many of them west initially) and now intemarrying with each other. The range of ethnicities has since increased as has institutional integration - Muslim immigrants control many councils and hold opening prayers in Urdu. They inhabit British institutions but not cuturally. Assimilation into the majority culture - as happened with Hugenots and others - has gone backwards. Inter-racial strife is no longer black and white e.g. Muslims v Hindus in Leicester in 2022. Many such examples exist.
This article rightly separates genetics and social constructs, but reference to values alone does not help identify Britishness. As Renaud Camus put it in relation to France:
"Can you join a people? Individuals who so wish can always join a people out of love for its language, literature, its art de vivre or its landscapes. But you can’t do this at scale: peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them. If a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture can say to a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais … 'I am just as French as you are', it follows that being French is nothing”.
Rapid, mass immigration is creating a problem that no-one has a real answer to. The Manchester bomber lived in an area of Manchester known as Little Libya, took holidays in Libya (the country they were allegedly fleeing) and instruction on values in a mosque. Was he British?
The problem is not that successive goverments failed to encourage assimilation. Large numbers of ethnically and culturally similar peoples will automatially reproduce inherited values. Rapid, mass immigration cannot be undone and its secondary consequences are here for generations. Listing values is not a solution.
I don’t know how or if this contributes to the debate but not all families who emigrate take on the culture and values (or even language) of their new homes. Many bring with them a bubble of values and norms from the country they supposedly left behind - ranging from the extremes of honour killing to speaking their own native tongue at home to observing practices such as dress codes from the old country and transmitting them to the younger generation. I don’t know that a Chinese person would describe himself or herself to friends as English regardless of how long they have been in the country.
Its when quantitative differences become qualitative. It seems to me mean-spirited if a well-educated, well-adjusted Indian or Nigerian is told you are not English and never will be. (Although I know 90% of Indians and Nigerians would never consider me to be Indian or Nigerian even if I was born there and worked there and lived there). But in the real world 60 million Nigerians would like to move to England or Ireland and 600 million Indians would like to move there to. Then it would be beyond crazy to consider them English or Irish because their own countries are so dreadful (because their own ancestors were so unable to create a decent society) and to consume the benefits of our society (the direct result of our ancestors labour and sacrifice). Well that to me is wrong. But that is the world we are living in.
Dear Helen, I've been mulling over your thoughtful article. You say:
"I wrote an essay specifically talking about ethnonationalist beliefs and the fact that they don't make arguments for them but assert that genetic lineage is the sole definition of British and English and the only people who should be here. If you want to engage with that at all, please do."
OK, here goes! I agree with you that how we (collectively) construe being "English" is a social construct, and thus the meaning can evolve. If I look up the Wikipedia article on "English people" it starts:
"The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language [...] and share a common ancestry, history, and culture."
That's in line with how I see it. I guess that makes me an "ethnonationalist". That, though, doesn't mean that I think that such people are "... the only people who should be here". I'm fine with some degree of migration, in relatively small numbers. Over time (a couple of generations perhaps), such migrants would assimilate and become English.
If some "ethnonationalists" are asserting to you that the above definition of "English" is the one and only allowable definition, then that might be because, until relatively recently, it was indeed the accepted meaning. Since then, within swathes of liberal thought, it has become the ultimate sin to ascribe any importance to ancestry, race or genes. Hence, many liberals today do indeed construe being "English" as being only about living in England and supporting certain aspects of English culture.
But shared ancestry seems to matter a lot more than supposed. Nations that are predominantly one ancestry group are more at ease with themselves, whereas multiple ancestry groups is nearly always a source of tension, particularly when exacerbated by religious differences. Culture seems to be anchored in ancestry to a large extent. When migration is in small numbers, such migrants do tend to adopt the local culture. Mass migration, however, seems to lead to enclaves where migrants group together (entirely understandably, since people generally seem happier in ancestry groups) and largely retain their own culture.
Where there are multiple ethnicities, people tend to identify more with their ethnicity group than with the state. People tend to be less civic minded, less trusting of others, they give less to charity (or only to charities serving their group), and they are less likely to see things like welfare fraud as wrong.
I don't agree that, where whole communities are now majority recent-migrants of different ethnicity, that they are now "English", even if their children are born in England and even if they adopt some aspects of British culture -- and particularly not if, as is often the case, they reject key aspects of British culture, such as "individual liberty, freedom of belief and speech, ...".
[They might eventually become de facto English, after about 6 generations, much as the Viking migrants eventually did, but over those generations of tension and strife the difference certainly mattered.]
Of course you're entitled to construe this differently, and think that what matters is just living in Britain and supporting a list of liberal values. To me this hollows out English identity, turning it into an un-rooted flag of convenience. I suspect that you could also find your list of liberal values increasingly under threat. What matters is indeed culture, but I think that you're underestimating the extent to which culture and values are rooted in and derive from shared ancestry, history, and heritage.
Left-wing thought often reaches for ideals that fly against the realities of human nature and so don't work (e.g. communism). The Western liberal usually underestimates the degree to which the West's values derive from the West's people. Instead, people are seen as fully fungible. So, well-meaning liberal politicians (Tony Blair, David Cameron, etc) naively think: we'll go into Afghanistan, Libya or Iraq and turn them into liberal democracies with free elections and liberal values. This usually doesn't turn out well. Such politicians also think it'll work fine to simply import whole new populations of people from dysfunctional countries. Is this going to work any better?
“Over time (a couple of generations perhaps), such migrants would assimilate and become English.”
Then you don’t believe genetic lineage is the sole definition of English either. You also believe there are grounds to consider people who are well-assimilated and deeply embedded in the culture English. You are not an ethnonationalist. You’re a cultural conservative. Like me.
Ok, fair enough, though note the timescales I gave. The “couple of generations” was for small-number migration; for mass migration where migrants then live in enclaves I suggested six generations.
Yep, still a cultural stance, not an ethnonationalist one.
“It is not self-evident that people should be defined by the geographical location of their ancestors rather than their own.”
This unfairly narrows it down to just geography. Someone has the nationality of their parents not just based on the geography of where the parents are from, but the mother tongue they impart upon said child, the culture they raise them in, the family circle and community network they very likely will be a member of etc., etc.
An Irish-American person might not seem that Irish to someone from Dublin but that’s just because the Irish immigrated mostly 100+ years ago. This subject when discussed these days doesn’t have them in mind. It has recent immigrants who move to countries and have modern technology that keeps them in good contact with the culture they left and thereby retain it much more than previous generations of immigrants. That’s how you have lower rates of integration in say France Germany and Sweden of some immigrant communities. Dumbing it down to “geographical location of the ancestors” throws out a lot of baby with the bath water.
Well, it’s not me doing that. I want people to think culturally. It’s the ethnonationalists who are all “blood and soil.”
But there often is a blood/ethnic element to it though; that’s unavoidable.
It’s not Korean Americans that are saying they’re Irish, you know what I mean?
How do you define ethno nationalist if I may ask? Taken apart those words don’t have negative connotations but combined you’re using it as a pejorative term it seems.
Ethnonationalist is the accurate term for people who want belonging to a nation to be decided on ethnic grounds. It’s not a pejorative. They call themselves that. I oppose this.
But there’s a difference between nationality and citizenship. You can move to a place and be a citizen with full and equal rights and protections. Yet you are different than a fellow citizen who is 20 generations deep in that country. No?!
As I said in the piece, nearly everybody accepts that genetic ancestry is real. That is not the source of disagreement And it is obviously demonstrably true that we have migrants who have become citizens and have equal rights and protections. Ethnonationalists are the ones who say this shouldn't have happened and we need to remigrate them all because only genetic lineage matters. I am addressing their tendency to act as though this is obvious and everybody who says that people can become citizens of a country and be considered British or English because of it is in denial of biology. I'm sorry to be snapping at you, but I don't know how I could have set that out anymore clearly. Maybe read it again more slowly.
Fair enough. I appreciate the clarification.
I wrote an essay specifically talking about ethnonationalist beliefs and the fact that they don't make arguments for them but assert that genetic lineage is the sole definition of British and English and the only people who should be here. If you want to engage with that at all, please do.
You can't just throw random speaking points from the broader debate at me and act as though anything I've said is relevant to them.
I did address the debates and different views on it more broadly in last week's piece and that's linked in the first sentence, but this is a piece about ethnonationalists style of argumentation and their refusal to accept that other people don't exclusively use ancestral DNA to define Britishness or Englishness.
But Paris is the capital of France!!! No?!!!
I don’t know what you’re talking about? I am speaking of those who say they want Britain to be home only to those with ancestral DNA shows them to have been there for hundreds of years. That’s not an element, it’s the whole of it. They utterly reject the idea that people can be culturally English or. British if their ancestors came from somewhere else. See Premise 1. Those people
@Helen Pluckrose
Yank, aka American here
What is the difference between British and English? I regard the labels as being synonyms.
England is one of countries of Britain. The other two are Scotland and Wales.
I see
Thank you for your prompt response
For starters, England is only one part of Britain, other parts being Scotland and Wales. (An additional complication is Northern Ireland.) Note that Britain has a government and a legislature, whereas England does not.
I see
Thank you for your prompt response
"Nevertheless, it is clear that humans commonly feel invested in their ancestry and history, and this tendency may be partly innate."
The feeling-of-investment-in-one's-ancestry's degree of innateness is not relevant. Many things people feel are innate to one degree or another--anger; jealousy; sexual attraction. What is important is how an individual manifests their investment in their sense of ancestry.
"Many people become deeply suspicious when anyone speaks of anything being ‘a social construct.’"
The universe is a construct. The material world is constructed of quarks, leptons, gluons, dark energy, etc. The social world is constructed of desires, thoughts, actions, etc. Both worlds are in a state of flux, since humans exist in a quantum universe.
Restore, MAGA, and similar ideologies are the ideologies of people who are shaken by flux/paradox, and crave essentials/essentialism.
"Therefore, it should be clear that there is no consensus on who should and should not be considered British or English"
But that does not matter to essentialists, since they crave a fixed ideology with definite parameters. Your respect for "common humanity" eludes them, since humanity is ever-changing, and, as a result, seems no safe harbor to them.