The nations, not so blest as thee

Basically because of Suez, surely? The land of Hope and Glory, birthplace of both Whiggery and jingoism, was not exactly backward in coming forward when we had something to boast about; it’s just that for the last fifty years we have been rather embarrassingly the little doggies of our mates the Yanks and don’t like to draw attention to the fact.

A hypothesis closely related to yours, Henry, would be that in the past the British didn’t have to boast, because their greatness was so obvious. The rest of us had to worry that if we didn’t raise a shout, no one would notice how great we were. The fact that Blair felt a need to holler suggests, ironically, that there has been a downward trend in Britain’s fortunes. Its greatness cannot any longer be taken as obvious.

I think it’s because we did believe we were the Greatest Nation on Earth, and probably were in the terms in which we defined it, which basically was Empire and Naval Power. Those who are prone to such declarations still believe it is to do with Empire and Naval Power, but aren’t delusional enough to believe we are still No.1.

This can be seen from the Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson Society, who really do still believe in Naval Power above all, and are left stirringly and ludicrously declaring that Britain is “unquestionably the second most powerful nation on earth”.

This is also reminiscent of the Flanders & Swann line:

“I think that the reason for this is that in the old days – you know, the good old days when I was a boy – people didn’t, we didn’t bother in England about nationalism. I mean, nationalism was on its way out. We’d got pretty well everything we wanted and we didn’t go around saying how marvelous we were – everybody knew that – any more than we bothered to put our names on our stamps. I mean, there’s only two kinds of stamps: English stamps in sets at the beginning of the album, and foreign stamps all mixed at the other end. Any Gibbon could tell you that.”

Though that is specifically about the English, not the British. Is Britain a nation, or merely a country?

Umm, it seems to me the answer is because Britain is not a nation. Rather, it is made up of the ‘four nations’ (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), as anyone who has watched the last night of the Proms will know. (There are live broadcasts and concerts in Belfast, Edinburgh, Cardiff and London.) This should be especially present in people’s minds after the Scottish National Party victory over Labour in last week’s regional elections.

For anyone in doubt over this, go and check out the far right in Britain – while they may claim to be British, like the British National Party, they in fact are very much English in their support. (I once attended a BNP rally in London for sociological reasons, and saw more English flags than British ones.)

Indeed, Colley’s point, as suggested above, is that British identity was formed in opposition to 1) the French and 2) Catholicism, which were two factors uniting the newly-created state of Great Britain (later to become the UK) and its consituent parts.

Picking up on no. 10, ‘British’ is generally the primary self-identifier for a) Ulster Unionists [1]; b) ethnic minorities; c) expats [2].

[1] See 2:25 onwards. And the comments on that link really do miss the point.

[2] At least, in some expat environments.

“Any Gibbon could tell you that.”

British GDP: $2.341 Trillion

Italian GDP:$1.78 Trillion

Relative decline, in the sense of being overtaken by a few other developing nations, is not the same thing as actual decline.

There’s a strange tendency among some british people, such as richard, to go beyond bashfulness about britain to believing and hoping for failure. Such people often invent a mental landscape of doom and gloom. Strangely, these people are often also somewhat left wing, or at least wet. Perhaps it justifies their agenda to leap into the dark and effect radical change? Who can say.

Relative decline, in the sense of being overtaken by a few other developing nations, is not the same thing as actual decline.

Quite so, although when the decline was relative to Germany at the beginning of the 20th century it seemed rather important to the government of the day. Try using this argument with Americans nervous about rising Chinese and Indian commerce, or (briefly) about the Euro as a competitor for the title of ‘world’s currency.’ Relative rather than actual decline might also describe Indian trade compared with British in the 18th century, or the Dutch East India Company against the English one: it seems to have been quite enough in each case. My point above was to try to summarise a mood, predicated mostly on a sense of political importance, rather than economic figures: I’m fairly convinced that the perceived trajectory of rise or fall is more important to morale than where one actually is on one’s path (within certain values: Afghan poverty probably breaks that model).

believing and hoping for failure

No, I deny that, and I really don’t see where you got hoping from. I may not care much about ‘Britain’ but I certainly want the people there to be comfortable, hopeful and successful; just like everywhere else.

Thanks for the GDP data BTW: I wonder if you can tell me whether the shift back is because of British growth or Italian decline? The last several years have been rough on many European economies, as I understand it from the news media.

Oh, and: left wing or at least wet
are we really still trading in this outdated model?

their agenda to leap into the dark and effect radical change
So am I a totalitarian modernist or a fundamentalist cultist? Who can say. You choose.

dr green, upcomments, invoked The Last Night of The Proms. Henry’s title comes from (a verse of) one of the standard fixtures of The Last Night, the chorus to which is enthusiastically sung: “Britannia rule the waves.” But perhaps the most full-throated response comes when the conductor turns to the audience for the reprise of Land of Hope and Glory: “How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?” There is an odd self-consciousness at work, here. One is safest expressing one’s sense of superiority through humour. Flanders & Swann, again: “The British, the British, the British are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.”

I’m waiting for Henry to ban John Emerson now.

I believe the answer is given in this fine book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That

which ends when it becomes irrefutably clear that Britain is no longer Top Nation. The Brits take a wounded pride in their realism. It would give the lie to their centuries as a true lion to strut about as a bantam rooster now.

Surely talking about the greatest nation in the world is about as sensible as saying which is the greatest movie of all time. It is purely subjective – one person might rate the US highly because of its dominant military while another would find it morally repugnant to be paying tax just so that some political elite can play soldiers for fun. No doubt you can eliminate some countries from the running without much argument, just as you could probably eliminate Spiderman 3, but to try to narrow it down to a single candidate is largely meaningless to everyone else (however if you actually provided justification for it rather than a bald statement that could be of interest).

Flanders & Swann, again: “The British, the British, the British are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.”

Um, no. That’s English – the verses all denigrate the Welsh, Irish and Scots.

How long has it been since any German public figure attempted to remind us of their national greatness? 62 years?

How many months until the dirt nap of the American reputation?

Also, the Royal Society: can you name another (sizeable) English-speaking country that has a monarchy other than the British one?

Canada and Australia?

cheryl at #7: We are the best nation in the world at not being triumphalist.

That’s complete and utter bollocks, you know. There are countries beyond the one you see across the Channel and that other one across the pond. You surely have never talked to Spaniards, for instance. The aversion of Germans to boisterous patriotism has been already mentioned, but I guess that for many Britons, It’s Jerry and he just doesn’t mean it.

The thread is doing a pretty good job, but two things deserve to be stressed:

a) triumphalism and nationalism are not identic. The denizens of the Balkan countries are in general under no illusions about their place in the larger scheme of things. This doesn’t prevent the level of nationalism from being well above the European average (although the perception of this in Western Europe tends in turn to be quite exaggerated).

b) more importantly, there’s the issue of whether one thinks that the nation-state (or at least something that has been around for long enough to be often identified with one, like the UK) is the ultimate depositary of democratic legitimacy and such, whether one has an instinctive dislike of or distrust towards (some) international institutions, etc. In this regard, I’d say that nationalism in the UK, and in England in particular, is alive and well.

And it’s “identical”, of course.

To Sanbikinoraion at #30:

Your quibbles about (some) examples of my claim don’t refute the claim. To answer your question about The Royal Society: When The RS was founded in 1660, there WAS indeed another English-speaking monarchy in existence — in fact, just next door — in Scotland. The two kingdoms did not join in union till 1706.

After the Hanoverian accession to the British thrown the lack of a geographical identifier on the name of The Royal Society is even more noticeable, because each male Hanoverian monarch was both King of Britain and Elector of Hanover. Odd that the people running the Royal Society never felt they had to clarify exactly which royal it was whose society they were.

I’ve always been partial to German president Gustav Heinemann’s response when asked whether he loved his country:
“I love no states. I love my wife. That’s all.” (Ich liebe keine Staaten, ich liebe meine Frau, fertig!)

I suppose that’s a prominent example of a high-ranking Jerry who meant it :-)

I’d actually like to make a case for Sweden as being far less nationalistic than Britain.
In Sweden flagwaving is really only ever done by the far right, and as opposed to our neighbours in Denmark and Norway (who were of course bot occupied by the germans during WWII) we don’t celebrate national day (6th of June which is only an excuse for a day off work).
Britons in my experience are quite ethnocentric and do tend to think other countries are slightly underdeveloped without ever having visited them, and surely that must count for nationalism?

It’s the same reason that British stamps do not name their country,

They don’t name the country because they were the first to have stamps. They didn’t need to say “UK” on them, unlike everyone else.

Unfortunately, my country is not immune to nationalism. Fortunately, we channel it into fifteen men on a field beating the snot out of the Poms, Aussies and South Africans.

Gustavas Vasa: the Father of His Country — or a self-educated fugitive slave? Only the Swedes have to ask themselves that kind of question.

Quoting Malcolm Bradbury in Eating People is Wrong:

After all, there was one thing that every Englishman knew from his very soul, and that was that, for all experiences and all manners, in England lay the norm; England was the country that God had got to first, properly, and here life was taken to the point of purity, to it’s Platonic source, so that all ways elsewhere were underdeveloped, or impure, or overripe. Everyone in England knew this, and an occasion like the present one was not likely to prove that things had altered. I have lived in England, was the underlying statement, and I know what life is like

Handwaving here as usual…
It is interesting to compare John Major and Blair – Major’s prime legacy is grayness: the notion that the UK is ultimately middling and understated. Blair’s elevates the stakes but in declaiming his typical focused-group empty slogans he is applying the American hard sell to a country that has no need for Dr Feelgood. Everyone likes a little bit of nostalgia but there is no need to go overboard like he does.

as opposed to our neighbours in Denmark and Norway (who were of course bot occupied by the germans during WWII) we don’t celebrate national day

What? We Danes don’t even have a national day. What a typical ignorant, chauvinist, snooty Swedish comment.

It’s true that we’re big on flagwaving, though. The Muhammad cartoon crisis last year with Middle Easterners routinely torching the Danish flag only resulted in a brief lull in this. As best I can see we’re back to waving flags at every given occasion: Birthdays, home-comings, sports events, Sundays at the garden house.