Disunited Kingdom

UK/Europe

Disunited Kingdom 

The rise of English ethnonationalism heralds the coming collapse of the last vestiges of the imperial entity once known as Great Britain.

(HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images)

The clearest and subtlest sign of imperial power is a frontier which is placed in a different continent, and I was pondering that while crossing the USCBP border checkpoint—in Dublin. A porcine and visibly bored immigration agent was checking my passport and asking me the purpose of my Europe trip: “You lecture? As a researcher?” Yes, in national security, currently working on the emergence of multipolarity, I sheepishly replied. “So, like, computers?” “Actually, NATO, I coined the doctrine of dorma—” “Alright, here’s your passport.” 

Having a check in Dublin ensured that I could fly straight from there to Gatwick. Otherwise I’d have ended up in a place worse than Hell—Heathrow—and would have been stuck on the way for a daylong layover in London, and missed the secondary cause of my visit, the Social Democratic Party conference. This, incidentally, was to happen on the same day as Tommy Robinson’s (real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) “Unite the Kingdom” rally. 

The conference was in Church House, right next to Westminster Abbey. Whenever I am back in London, I try to see the statue of Canning outside the Parliament Square, or to visit the marble likeness of Palmerston in the Abbey. Not this time: It felt inappropriate and for some reason humiliating to them. When I saw an acquaintance from a Tufton Street magazine walk in the conference, there was an absurd juxtaposition. Inside, the party leader William Clouston, an impeccably well-mannered man, was giving a thoughtful speech about how Britain pioneered nuclear energy only to squander the technological legacy and simultaneously sell off state energy assets to be politically close to Europe, while engaging in misadventures abroad—nation-building in Iraq, unmentionably—to be close to the imperial core, the United States. 

Outside, loudspeakers from the Elon Musk–boosted and crypto-funded march barked, “We need our country back from foreigners!” and a grim-visaged demonstrator clutched a sign that said, “Freedom of speech is dead. RIP Charlie Kirk.”. 

Both of those sentiments were also heavily promoted by Tommy Robinson and at least tacitly supported by Elon Musk. In a video message, Musk said, “My message is to them: If this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice. You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth”—and then, with a brief introspective pause, he finished—“I think.” The event was entirely fueled by social media, which also gave it a vaguely Arab Spring cast, or a reminiscence of Europe immediately after the invention of the printing press. Of course, upon further contemplation, one invariably remembers the aftermath of the Reformation and of the Arab Spring.  

It doesn’t take a genius to point out that all any malevolent power needs to do is to add fuel to the fire to create more social media strife so there’s even more division based on race and gender, and the eventual fragmentation of the United Kingdom into tiny factions. For what it is worth, a similar situation is already developing in the United States. Democracy works when you know with whom you are debating and both sides adhere to the common norms; it is a little different when the richest man in  the world is running a social media platform that incorporates millions of anonymous accounts from across the world, including a significant number that are not even humans but bots solely designed to feed a toxic algorithm. 

But the sinister discursive context didn’t mean that the Robinson rally was devoid of merit or genuine grievances, despite its lack of intellectual heft. The Labour government does seem woefully out of ideas and originality. The all-devouring budget of the NHS has left a husk of a country—neglected military power, a shadow of the navy, and city councils that are more interested in celebrating the independence of India and Pakistan than providing a race-neutral policing. Rapes among the underclass, often committed by migrants, are so routine that they don’t make national headlines anymore. Mass migration has resulted in unrecognizable town squares, but the government is incapable of doing anything about it, neutered by human rights laws, devoid of disciplined manpower, unwilling to offend the abstract “international community.” For too long Labour politically encouraged nationalism in Scotland and Wales alongside the ethnocentrism and migration-fueled growth of Pakistani, Arab, and Somali communities unwilling to assimilate (all the while defending Ukraine’s borders from foreign invasion, of course). 

The natural reaction is now an inevitable, emergent, and hitherto unprecedented rise of English ethnonationalism, the only force capable and destructive enough to engulf the islands into actual warfare and dissolve the Union. England naturally is quite clearly having a moment. Yet it is full of contradictions. Just like the Arab Spring’s revolutionary fervor, everyone knows what they oppose—the current system, globalism, mass migration—but they have no idea what future or past they seek to return to.  

The Imperial Habsburg historian František Palacký once wrote that the Austro-Hungarian Empire aimed to present itself “not as German but as a protection of the non-Germanic peoples from the Germans.” Empires, or imperial entities, are by logic progressive. They must incorporate the elites from other cultures they seek to rule over to operate on a grand scale; they are “progressive” in that they incorporate some form of meritocracy and ethnic neutrality, they rely on technological advancement, and they are maintained by checks and balances of power. Neutral legal enforcement is key to the survival of any such entity. Even Singapore, the closest one can get to a thriving multiethnic city-state, has a strict race-neutral imperial-style law enforcement, a key tool in maintaining intra-ethnic peace. Historically, every successful major polity, whether republican-colonial (France, USSR) or imperial (Rome, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Mughal, British), managed a combination of mixed-elite merging, strict imperial law enforcement, and some rudimentary form of meritocracy. 

Incidentally, the literature of the collapse of multi-ethnic great powers often misses a crucial variable: majoritarian resentment at this arrangement. In crude terms, after a long period of relative peace, there inevitably comes a moment when a significant section of the surplus elites and middle-class resentment leads to violence. It is at once both structural (that is, doomed to repeat itself as a cycle) and organic (with specific actors pushing for such violence). There is plenty of evidence in history to back up this hypothesis, and Britain appears to be an aspiring fresh case-study.  

England has never had to question herself on what constitutes the land. The English identity is itself a political one, acquired over an age and conditioned by centuries of European migration and invasion. The reason there has never been the rise of blood-quantum and skull-measuring phenomena in England is simply because it would be so difficult to do. England also ruled the world; the scale and size of her empire padded the sense of confidence and security. But the empire also worked in an otherwise undiscussed but hugely important way; it provided order in faraway lands in exchange for resources and productive manpower, and thus discouraged mass migration, (especially the mass migration of populations unwilling to assimilate) while providing jobs for British surplus elites. It was a system that worked well. In fact, the simple logic behind the Act of the Union was competition with greater powers such as France and Spain, both in search of their own empires under the same logic.  

The trouble is that everything got so diluted since at least 1707 that it came to be expected that you’d be called a member of a geographical country if you represented that country in a national sports team. Anything else is next to impossible. If one is trying to divide English identity purely by ethnicity, must the true “English” trace their descent back all the way to the Iceni? If not, is Bukayo Saka, Idris Elba, Rishi Sunak, or Emma Raducanu English? Ethnic qualifiers or mass migration notwithstanding, if a country cannot answer whether Ian Wright or Marcus Rashford, men who were born within the geographical boundaries of England and played in an English jersey, are in fact, English, then there are extreme challenges ahead. 

And that is only part of the problem. Where one stands on this is analytically irrelevant. Unchecked English ethnonationalism is also the biggest threat to the survivability of the Union, in a way similar to the Pan-Germans threatened the Habsburg Empire, the Russians nationalists the late USSR, the Turkish nationalists the Ottomans. Ultimately, it is a question of not just ethnicity, but of size and geopolitical heft in a fundamentally Darwinian, anarchic system that is unforgiving of former empires that voluntarily choose to shrink in size and power.  

What is an end vision of the future Union, one that satiates public passions and provides order, while not becoming tyrannical and ruinous to the Union itself? Ultimately, beyond rhetoric or rallies, that should be the starting point of every British political question. And yet there is no single political party willing to address that. Should the Union, the final paralytic part of the empire, then simply dissolve? Consider the fate of Hungary and Ireland, both facing a similar and inevitable dilemma. If you’re a country solely based on ethnic identity, the choice eventually comes to this: Either you’re alone and tiny in the face of predatory greater powers, or you become part of a larger empire and therefore subject to centralized whims and diktats. 

The advantage of the United States is that it is credal in nature, massive in size, federal, and historically has accepted only the cream from other societies. That is a good policy in assimilating newcomers and weeding out the undesirables. Britain and France had similar meritocratic empires, with intermixed intellectual and martial elites and extremely localised subalterns, but they lost that balance; since 1945 they have been in search of new one, because they don’t want to be squeezed by other large, often multiethnic imperial identities, such as India, Russia, China and the U.S. Ergo the continued interest in Francafrique, or in EU strategic autonomy, or in CANZUK. In politics and power, above all, size matters—a lesson forgotten by the elite so cooked in the white-hot guilt of imperialism that they have forgotten that imperial expansion was a reaction to the structural incentives of great power competition. Fear of conquest, ultimately, resulted in compromise initially with Scotland, and then with imperial expansion, and colonialism with the “consent of the governed” across the globe. 

Not understanding this specific foreign policy dynamic leads to assertions that small-scale “social democracy” is simply sustainable in the long run. History, including Britain’s own history, just as much as those of the German, Austrian, Russian, and Turkish states, prove that the nature of big states is either to grow or to die; and that that is fundamentally driven by competition with rival powers. An emergent multipolarity coupled with technological revolution will inevitably fuel another era of conquest, spheres of influence, and great power “collusion”, as has been the historic norm. Mid-range states once again find themselves staring at an age of imperialism, and relearning that old lesson: Melos is an island and Athens controls the sea. 

Middle-tier powers such as the countries of Western Europe therefore face the impossible challenge. On one hand, they must evolve, expand, and incorporate the cream of other societies in order to survive in the long run. On the other hand, as Hans Morgenthau noted in the 1950s, they are finding out that it is the “democracy” part that is often incompatible with a coherent domestic polity as well as a rational foreign policy. British populism, funded by American oligarchs, is turning into fundamentally an anti-intellectual force, opposed to any notion of truth, reconciliation, or history itself. It is a movement so worried about dilution of ethnicity above the fundamental questions of politics, economy and foreign policy, that it is normatively Third-World–coded in ethno-chauvinism and anti-intellectualism. 

I met another friend for lunch, a staunch (former) royalist and “Kipper” (a supporter of UKIP), whom I haven’t seen for around nine years. He is now convinced that both the Royal Family and Nigel Farage are agents of “Islam”, and are responsible for turning over the UK to Koran-worshippers. Yet Nigel Farage, despite all the sniping from the sidelines from both his former comrades and the Tommy Robinson crowd, has realized that he has to moderate, or else he’ll end up as the Robespierre of his own movement. 

“I never wanted Tommy Robinson to join UKIP,” Farage said, immediately after the march, “I don’t want him to join Reform UK; and he won’t be.” Speaking of Elon Musk, Farage said, “Elon and I have a relationship, wouldn’t say a very good one. He’s generally rather rude about me…. You know, it would be nice to get some clarification of what fight meant in that context.” For what it is worth, even Tommy Robinson has moderated his stance, repeatedly trying to demonstrate that his movement has Hindus, Sikhs and black Britons in it, calling British Indians the most peace-loving of the communities in the UK. Immediately after the rally, he went on Twitter to talk about Muslim hate crimes, especially against Sikhs and Indians, in the UK, showing that whatever happened, the logic of balance of power and coalition-building is universal. One either moderates to grow or turns puritanical, resulting in others coalescing and counterbalancing. 

The underlying long-term issue remains that England is too small and weak, isolated, sclerotic, and alone, in a world that has suddenly returned to a pre–First World War form. England has unassimilated young men from various groups, rearing to fight for a cause without a unifying purpose and channel and leadership. It has surplus elites and thousands of bureaucratic-minded students, with no empire to administer. It has a manufacturing and production glut, a massive tech disparity with hegemonic poles such as China, the U.S., Russia, India, and even the EU, and increasingly fraught supply chains. If we are indeed going to see a return to pre–First World War multipolarity and massive tech disparity between great powers and smaller protectorates, different social and governing systems will inevitably follow. The recent bouts of global conquests are just a taste of the days to come. And the Crown remains the only body of functional Unionism. Foreign-funded, astroturfed, flag-waving Cromwellism can take many forms, but they are as much a danger to the Union as external threats and jihadism. After all, the last time England was a fanatical republic, it didn’t really go well for anyone, but least of all for England herself. Can the constituent states survive the collapse of the Union? Perhaps. But rarely in history has that led to an expansion of aggregate power or influence. Otherwise Russia, Turkey, and Austria wouldn’t be shadows of their former selves, or the Arab Spring would have been a success. 

“Without order as a foundation, the cry for freedom is nothing more than the attempt of some group or another to achieve its own ends. When actually carried out in practice, that cry for freedom will inevitably express itself in tyranny,” Metternich reportedly said as ethno-nationalist revolutions started to haunt Europe in 1848, permanently weakening the foundations of the the once-formidable empires that ruled three-fourths of the globe. I was on my way to a late flight from Gatwick to Mitteleuropa, reflecting on the revolutions of England, sharing the train compartment with a bunch of singing yobs returning from the rally. A few people suddenly began an impromptu rendition of “God Save the King.” Instantly, everyone around went quiet and stood straight, maybe for a brief moment reminded of all that is still good and salvageable that remains within a potentially stable and confident union—albeit with a mediocre, unoriginal, and risk-averse elite, failing to rise to the role of leadership among the fellow Anglosphere countries of the CANZUK. A union once simply known as Great Britain. 

The post Disunited Kingdom appeared first on The American Conservative.