2 - New Ethnicities

Summary

[C]ultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Of course, it is not a mere phantasm either. It is something – not a trick of the imagination … If identity does not proceed in a straight, unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation? (Hall 1990: 226)

The previous chapter suggested that the United Kingdom was less united, and perhaps less of a kingdom, in 1999 than 1990, partly the result of the redistribution of political power via the different acts of devolution that opened up new forms of self-determination to the constituent nations of Britain. That chapter also argued that these political and bureaucratic changes reflected complex and often subtle changes in the ways that Britons understood themselves as Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English. These developments were not solely the product of the decade, but were accelerated by some of the cultural energies and arguments that came to the fore in the 1990s. Within the national subgroups were other divisions and distinctions that complicated individual and group senses of identity and relationship, particularly in terms of perceived colonial power imbalances. While the notion of English colonial control was a critical element in the ways in which people understood themselves and worked towards new forms of organisation, the idea of internal colonialism was problematic given that Scotland, Wales and Ireland had in various ways prospered mightily from being part of the British imperial project. This complicated history was made more intricate still by the ways in which, as Britain's colonial power waned after the Second World War, former members of the Empire were encouraged to participate in the reconstruction of what they saw, and were actively encouraged to see, as the ‘Mother Country’, as ‘Home’.

The British Nationality Act of 1948 had reconfigured citizenship within the single category of ‘British subject: citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’, allowing people from those colonies to migrate to the Imperial centre.