21 minute read
David Hayes
David Hayes
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Abstract
The central argument of this think piece is the need to develop a multi-heritage critical citizenship studies in post-compulsory education. It will begin by making a crucial distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism and examining different conceptions of citizenship education promoted by UK governments. There will be an analysis of the broader implications of the current UK state governance strategy of constructing ‘Britishness’, which arguably bases a politics of national identity, social solidarity and community cohesion on exclusionary practices (McLaughlin, 2009) linked to ‘fundamental British values’. Global capitalist networks and flows present a challenge to dominant conceptions and meanings of society, home, community, nation, culture, and social belonging. In response to this challenge, there have been various attempts in the early 21st Century to promote a sense of civic nationalism in the UK. It is argued that the current UK Conservative government’s construction of ‘fundamental British Values’, and related ‘prevent agenda’, represents a cultural supremacist and ethnic nationalist politics, aimed at culturally, politically and socially defining the limits of an ‘at-risk’ national identity. As a challenge to fundamental British values and the rise of ethnic nationalistic politics, an outline and possible theoretical basis for an alternative citizenship discourse will be explored – a discourse that promotes the development of the social, cultural, and political literacies of a multi-heritage, active and critical citizenry, providing individuals, institutions and communities with the necessary resources for building solidarity and respecting difference.
Introduction
The rise of ethnic nationalist politics has arguably served to highlight how urgent and necessary it is to develop political, social, historical, and cultural literacies to counteract socially divisive, right-wing populism and promote community cohesion. What has been conspicuously absent from the versions of citizenship education promoted in the 21st Century, has been a focus on social class and a rational critique of the socio-economic structure of capitalism. The aim of the critical citizenship education proposed here would be to capture and celebrate the narratives and discourses of multi-ethnic and multi-heritage communities. It is remarkable how many students in FE/HE lack even a basic knowledge of modern world history and the development of multi-heritage and multi-ethnic Britain. Without this knowledge, history is arguably doomed to repeat itself, both as tragedy and farce, and appears to be doing so with the rise of the political right and ethnic nationalism in the UK, Europe, North America and other nation-states around the world.
Civic and Ethnic Nationalism
Michael Ignatieff (1993) makes a useful distinction between two forms of nationalism – civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism - and identifies how both forms of nationalism vest political sovereignty in ‘the people’. The crucial difference between the two forms of nationalism is that, in the case of ethnic nationalism, not all ‘the
people’ are included in the definition of who constitutes the nation. This contrasts with the democratic conception of civic nationalism, which is inclusive of all of those who subscribe to the rule of law and the values of a liberal democracy. Civic nationalism sees the nation as diverse social democratic community based on equal rights and united by an attachment to shared values. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), writing at the turn of the 20th Century, identified one key role and purpose of education as being the production of nation-state citizens with a shared culture and heritage. This was viewed by Durkheim as essential for the maintenance of social order and for promoting community cohesion. As Durkheim argued, the breakdown of shared norms and values tends to occur during periods of rapid social change - times of great ontological insecurity, when people lack what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1998) call ‘contexts for living’, experiencing a crisis of meaning, identity and belonging. Late modernity arguably represents such a period, where global capitalist networks and flows present a challenge to dominant conceptions and meanings of society, home, community, nation, culture, and social belonging.
The ideal of civic nationalism was easier to realise in Durkheim’s mono-cultural times, as the societies he examined were largely characterised by ethnic homogeneity. Those who did not belong to the dominant class, gender and culture found themselves disenfranchised and excluded from citizenship and thus from the nation. The inclusive social democratic societies of the mid-20th Century defined their shared national identity and belonging in terms of common citizenship rather than ethnicity (Ignatieff, 1993). What we are arguably currently experiencing in the UK, and across Europe and the world, is a revolt against the idea of a sovereign nation-state based in civic rather than ethnic identity and belonging. This can be seen in the current UK Conservative construction of ‘Britishness’ through immigration policy and the basing of a politics of national identity and community cohesion on the cultural supremacism of fundamental British values linked to exclusionary practices and strategies of governance (Bowcott and Adams, 2016).
There have been various attempts to promote a sense of civic nationalism and civic responsibility in the UK, attempts that have involved reclaiming national symbols from the political right, who have infused these symbols with racist, jingoistic, and xenophobic meaning. The UK New Labour government 1997-2010 attempted to change the political culture of the UK by actively promoting the universal liberal values of freedom, diversity, toleration, and human rights in their liberal conception of citizenship education. In 2007, a chief architect of the New Labour project, and soon to be Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said the following in a speech at a seminar on ‘Britishness’ at the Commonwealth club, London:
Now for years we didn’t think we needed to debate or even think in depth about what it was to be a British citizen. But I think more and more people are recognising not just how important their national identity is to them but how important it is to our country. A strong sense of being British helps unite and unify us; it builds stronger social cohesion among communities. We know that other countries have a strong sense of national purpose, even a sense of their own destiny. (Gordon Brown, 2007)
What Brown was attempting to invoke was a strong sense of civic nationalism. However, today, instead of this form of nationalism taking hold and root, there has been an upsurge of ethnic nationalist politics in the UK. What has often been missing in calls for civic nationalism and citizenship education, such as that of New Labour and Gordon Brown, is a focus on structural inequalities, social class and social justice. The MarxistJewish social philosopher, Max Horkheimer famously stated in 1939, ‘Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism’, which can serve as a critique of New Labour’s conception of civic nationalism and citizenship education. Following both Brexit, and the outcome of the UK General Election of 2019, there is an urgent need for a critical citizenship education that is prepared to talk about capitalism and the victims of global capitalism - locally, nationally, and internationally. The rise of ethnocentric
nationalist politics has made manifest deep seated and entrenched social divisions in the UK, with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook providing a platform for the expression of xenophobic and racial hate and prejudice.
‘Teachers should not be playing the role of fifth columnists in the ideological war currently being fought over national identity and our national sovereignty.’ (Chris McGovern, Campaign for Real Education)
If one wishes to destroy a nation and build a ‘brave new world’ you begin by indoctrinating and brainwashing the children. This process of re-education has started some years ago in our schools and we are now seeing its consequences in the suppression of free speech on our university campuses. (Chris McGovern, Campaign for Real Education)
The current UK Conservative government, including a recent Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, can be seen to be engaged in a series of hegemonic or ideological battles, which have been termed ‘culture wars’ (Cunliffe, 2021). In the 1980’s and 1990’s, New Right Conservatives in the UK were engaged in an ideological assault on the post-war liberal and social democratic consensus, which garnered public support for neoliberal educational reforms and the marketization of further and higher education. On the ideological battlefield, the ‘cultural Marxist’ and/or liberal-progressive multiculturalist educationalist were cumulatively constructed as a dangerous ‘internal enemy’, directly militating against national interests and undermining the economic, social and cultural reproduction of capitalist society through the propagation of ‘alien’ ideas that ran contrary to the values, beliefs, morality, customs and traditions of British culture and society (Levitas, 1986). New Right ideologues pointed to what they saw as the pernicious and subversive influence of radical enlightenment thought, personified by the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. The New Right were set on purging educational institutions of what were deemed ‘fifth columnists’ and their ‘loony left’ totalitarian political correctness (Levitas 1986). The present UK Conservative governments promotion of fundamental ‘British Values’, prevent strategy, and recent declaration of ‘culture war’, are aimed at new ‘risks’ and threats, linked in discourse to ‘pathological’, ‘alien’ cultures and ideologies, including Islamic fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism and ‘cultural Marxism’. In the run up to the UK General election of 2019, the then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was repeatedly depicted by the mainstream right-wing British media in the UK as a dangerous Marxist, anti-Semite and terrorist sympathiser (Allied to both ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorism) (Walker, 2019). Corbyn was characterised as being fundamentally unpatriotic, ‘un-British’ and an imminent threat to national security.
The revival of the term ‘cultural Marxism’ is of interest. Historically, the term has been used by right-wing groups in North America in relation to the perceived destruction of Western civilisation, purportedly engineered by the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists, whose members were both Marxists and Jewish, and who are said to have been involved in a conspiracy to destroy the ‘natural’ conservative order of American society. The right in North America, argue that, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the ‘alien’ and ‘un-American’ ideas of these Marxist-Jewish scholars successfully infiltrated, permeated, and colonised University social science and humanities faculties and campuses, and that this culturally corrosive influence remains today. In a UK context, it is interesting how this recurrent conspiratorial narrative, espoused also by Nick Griffin, when he was the leader of the British National Party, has been revived by leading UK Conservative politicians in the instigation of a new ‘culture war’, and how it was intensified as Jeremy Corbyn began to touch the ideological nerve centre of neoliberalism. It remains staggering, though perhaps not unsurprising, how the right wing media were able to
successfully depict Corbyn, a principled politician who has consistently battled racism all his life, as a rabid anti-Semite. The successful portrayal of Corbyn and his social democratic agenda as dangerous, utopian, destructive and irrational, is testimony to the discursive power of the right-wing media in the UK. Notably, the socially divisive ‘culture wars’ have also been enacted in relation to the England football team, with the anti-racism gesture of England players collectively ‘taking of the knee’, in an attempt to express solidarity with marginalised BAME communities, met by criticism from Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has decried the act as “gesture politics” and defended the right of sections of the crowd to boo it (Stone, 2021). It was reported before one match that a small group of protestors were seen outside Wembley Stadium carrying a St George’s flag reading “Don’t Kneel For Marxism” (MacInnes, 2021). Perhaps unwittingly, the England Manager, Gareth Southgate, and his multi-ethnic and multi-heritage England team have found themselves at the very centre of the ‘culture wars’.
After ten years of Conservative austerity measures and structural violence (Cooper and Whyte, 2017), as leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn fought the General Election of 2019 on a manifesto informed by social democratic principles and policies. In the aftermath of a crushing electoral defeat, questions were again raised about the failure of the mainstream political left in the UK. Simon Winlow et al. (2017) argue that the traditional Labour vote of the white post-industrial proletariat has been neglected and left behind by politicians on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, not least by New Labour. The culpability for this neglect is also said to lie with middle class liberal academics, who have been more concerned with identitarian social movements formed around issues regarding race, ethnicity, gender and sexualities, than with class, structural inequality and networks of state and corporate power. Winlow et al. suggest that anxieties and concerns regarding rapid changes in post-industrial working-class communities have long been dismissed by liberal middle-class commentators as being simply irrational expressions of xenophobia and racism. The Cantle Report into the urban disorder of 2001, that took place in deprived, post-industrial towns in the North of England, suggested that these anxieties and concerns were not being expressed and addressed, due in part to a climate created by anti-racial and religious hatred legislation, which can be seen to have socially stigmatised such sentiments (Cantle, 2001).
Bosworth and Guild (2007) discuss how historically migrants tend to be spatially concentrated in densely populated areas of socio-economic deprivation and how these communities are more likely to experience the effects of changes resulting from migration as being beyond a ‘threshold of tolerance’. For Winlow et al., (2017), the white working class in these areas represent the existential embodiment of the uneven development of global capitalism - their voices and narratives marginalised from the dominant, largely middle-class discourse on multiculturalism and immigration. Right wing politicians, groups and parties have exploited the anger and resent felt in these communities, ‘giving a voice’ to those who feel chronically underrepresented and stifled by ‘political correctness’. Arguably, it was abandonment and neglect by the political left of its traditional base that contributed significantly to the Brexit vote and the incursions made into the so-called Labour ‘red wall’ by the Conservative party at the 2019 General Election. Alongside a deepening anger at political elites, sections of the electorate can be seen to have a cultural yearning for the secure identity of an earlier ‘imaginary’ civic order. These ‘imagined communities’ can be evoked by right-wing populist agendas which exploit anxieties and concerns surrounding immigration and local social control. Globalising capitalist processes can be felt and perceived as a threat to the survival of cultural traditions and ‘contexts of living’ (Negt and Kluge, 1993; Winlow, 2017) and ethnic nationalism forms a response to ontological and economic insecurity.
Neoliberal economic restructuring and deindustrialisation in the 1980’s and 1990’s has broken apart traditional, industrial working-class cultures, estates and communities, and these processes have been accompanied by the
systematic dismantling of welfare. Post-industrial Working-class communities are angry, fearful, resentful, and dissatisfied with the political elites on both the left and right of the parliamentary system who have forgotten them. Dominant discourses on immigration are shared by both mainstream politicians and far right groups and serve to create fears and a sense of both downward and upward relative deprivation (Young, 2007; Winlow et al., 2017). Downward relative deprivation can be seen in the mounting resent towards migrants perceived as ‘parasitic’ on an over-generous welfare state, taking jobs from the ‘indigenous’ population, placing increasing strain on infrastructures, and perhaps most importantly posing a threat to ‘national culture’. Upward relative deprivation can be seen in the cumulative anger at the political class and their privilege, and the experience of economic marginalisation and meta-humiliation in a time of recession and austerity. There are sections of the post-industrial proletariat who can be said to have internalised cultural goals of ‘commodious living’, whilst concurrently experiencing structural exclusion without ontological security (Young, 1999). These conditions are a breeding ground for ethnocentric nationalist politics, with the ethnocentric nationalist also constituting another dangerous subpopulation subject to the UK Government’s prevent strategy. Winlow et al. argue that during the current crisis of capitalism, immigration and the figure of the immigrant provides a convenient scapegoat for the problems experienced by the white working class, who rather than viewing the economic and social failure of capitalism as the source of their problems, are mobilised by right-wing politicians and political groups to blame ethnic minority groups and immigration for their plight (Winlow et al., 2017).
Alternatives to fundamental British Values
‘Not everything that is irrational can be dismissed as stupidity’ (Ernst Bloch)
The white working class represent a section of the population who were neglected by a New Labour project more concerned with moral engineering, the governance of moral conduct and overcoming the perceived ‘cultural deficit’s’ of a cultural/ behavioural ‘underclass’. In an attempt to try and re-engage the working-class vote lost in the 2019 UK General Election, the UK Labour Party and other groups on the left have looked to contest the right on the ideological terrain of nationalism. This attempt can be seen in the emphasis on ‘progressive nationalism’ or ‘progressive patriotism’ by candidates during the Labour Party leadership campaign of 2020, candidates who were also keen to emphasise their working class heritage and credentials:
Over the next few years, our task is to rebuild the broad base of support that will get us into government and this work must begin immediately. From ex-miners in Blyth Valley to migrant cleaners in Brixton, from small businesses in Stoke-on-Trent to the self-employed in Salford, we have to unite our communities in all their diversity. Britain has a long history of patriotism rooted in working life, built on unity and pride in the common interests and shared life of everyone. This history is internationalist: as in 1862 when Lancashire’s mill workers supported Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery blockade of cotton from the American south. To win we must revive this progressive patriotism and solidarity in a form fit for modern Britain. While Boris Johnson criticises single mothers and likens Muslim women to bank robbers, we must stand for pride in our communities, dignity in our work and a common purpose that unites communities across the country. (Rebecca Long-Bailey, 2020)
Historically, the political left has neglected to adequately address issues concerning heritage, regarding nationalism as an ‘irrational’ position. The constructions of the populist political right on British culture, community and identity have not been effectively challenged. The UK Labour party’s response to right-wing populism in the General Election of 2019 was to create its own left-wing populist agenda, but this did not touch
upon issues of immigration and multiculturalism. The left arguably failed to effectively contest the terrain of the ‘irrational’, and to re-function the categories and concepts of community and heritage. It is this re-functioning that can form the basis for an alternative, multi-heritage, civic nationalism and critical citizenship education. In the Labour Party leadership campaign, the ‘progressive patriotism’ position represented an attempt to compete on this ground and reclaim the lost working-class vote. Recently, the new leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, has returned to this theme, attempting to outflank ethnic nationalism, by championing civic Britishness. This has been heavily criticised by many on the political left, including those on the left of the Labour Party. Clive Lewis (2021) has described it as ‘phony flag-waving’ aimed at winning back the ‘red wall:
… attempting to distil the complexity of national identity and patriotism into a “brand values” shorthand is not only dangerous but self-defeating. Dangerous, because patriotism has a side that touches on the darkest aspects of our humanity (one need only look at its relationship to the brutality of empire to understand this). Self-defeating, because it simply doesn’t speak to the multi-faceted reality of our lives … If our country is to prosper in an increasingly hostile century, we must face it together – as a unit. But before we can do that, we must confront our past – in all its goodness and, yes, all its darkness. And we must acknowledge that our present-day nation is so much more colourful than the red, white and blue cliches. Whether controversial statues, the teaching of our history, or how we relate to one another, the common theme is one of complexity. We cannot shy away from that. Trying to stuff patriotism and identity into a cheapened caricature from the 1950s is not the answer. Our party, our people and our country deserve more than that. (Lewis, 2021)
In seeking to analyse and explain the success of Nazism and failure of the left in the Germany of the 1930’s, Ernst Bloch wrote his ‘Heritage of our Times’ (1935; 1991). Here he discussed the social and cultural conditions and myths that he argues were appropriated and exploited in the service of National Socialism. Bloch believed that the success of the Nazi’s and their propaganda could be significantly attributed to the subjective and objective non-contemporaneity that existed in Germany. He argued that while people could be physically contemporaries, meaning that they inhabit the same space, they could also at the same time be non-contemporaneous in terms of being culturally and emotionally rooted in earlier times. Historically, the right seems highly adept at tapping into this yearning for community, identity and belonging, exploiting the vacuum created by ontological insecurity and a lack of contexts for living. Alienation and cultural memories can be fertile terrain for reactionary nostalgia. The ontological insecurity experienced by sections of the post-industrial working class in late modernity is a potential source of ‘paranoid nationalism’, which is arguably a legitimate adaptive response to a sense of anomie and crisis of meaning. Bloch would argue that the right exploits these yearnings to arrest social change, divide-and-rule, scapegoat and divert attention from the economic and social failure of capitalism: ‘it uses the antagonism of a still living past as a means of separation and combat against the future dialectically giving birth to itself in the capitalist antagonisms’ (Bloch, 1991:109). The Left has arguably failed to provide a coherent cultural discourse to effectively oppose the fetishism of the Nationalist collective self and anti-immigrant ideology, which has an affinity with sections of the post-industrial working class and has increasingly become a socio-political imperative and means for existential self-identification in a threatening world. A critical citizenship education would be an alternative discourse to fundamental British Values and its related ethos of surveillance, risk, exclusion, prevention, and control. A multi-heritage, multi-ethnic working class critical citizenship education would not only pay attention to human rights and human dignity, but also to promoting cultural, social and political literacies and a qualitatively different approach to history and heritage which works towards a future of social and environmental justice.
Rather than dismissing ‘patriotism’ as irrational, the left arguably needs to work towards an alternative cultural
discourse and the development of meaningful identities, ‘refunctioning’ unmet needs and yearnings and reclaiming them from their right-wing appropriation. Instead of nostalgic reconciliation with an imagined past and fixed identity, Bloch refers instead to an anticipated state of reconciliation with conditions that do not-yet exist and will not exist until present socio-economic conditions are radically changed. There is a need to salvage the utopian content of the multi-heritage past in a mobilisation of progressive forces, as an alternative to the regressive cultural synthesis of nationalism and national identity offered by fundamental British values and ethnic nationalism. This would entail sober and rigorous analysis of historical trends and tendencies, sensitivity to local conditions, and engagement with the complex plurality, messiness and lived experience of the lifeworld of communities. It will also crucially involve the ability to begin to reconcile the past and to imagine that another future is possible.
References
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