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Being British*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Bhikhu Parekh
Bhikhu Parekh*
Affiliation:
The London School of Economics
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Extract

In This Article I Do Two Things. I Begin With A Brief Discussion of the nature of political community in general, and argue that a political community is defined and constituted by the common public commitments of its citizens. Its identity is political not ethnic or cultural in nature, an important distinction that is obscured by the term ‘national identity’ and often ignored in much of the discussion of it. Its identity has an inescapable moral content. Although the latter is often shared with other communities, what distinguishes a political community is the way in which it interprets and institutionally articulates these moral principles. I then apply this general analysis to Britain and suggest how we might best define its identity.

Type
Politics of Identity — I
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 301 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2002

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Footnotes

*

The author is grateful to the Series editor, Richard Bellamy, for his helpful critical comments.

References

1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, Part 2, ch. XVIIGoogle Scholar.

2 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 3–17.Google Scholar

3 Habermas, Jurgen, ‘Struggles for Recognition in Constitutional States’, European Journal of Philosophy 1:2 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a fuller discussion of the nature of identity, see my ‘Defining British National Identity’. Political Quarterly, 71:1 (2000).

5 Andrew Mason distinguishes between ‘belonging to a polity’ and ‘belonging together’. See his Community, Solidarity and Belonging, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 127 ff. Since a polity does not exist independently of its members, I find the distinction unpersuasive. The better way of formulating the important distinction he has in mind is to distinguish between the political and ethno-cultural forms of belonging to a polity. Although David Miller appreciates the differences between these two forms of common belonging, he sometimes tends to fuse the two. See his On Nationality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995, Introduction and ch. 1.

6 For a fuller discussion of Margaret Thatcher and the New Right, see my ‘National Identity and the Ontological Regeneration of Britain’, in Paul Gilbert and Paul Gregory (eds), Nations, Cultures and Markets, Aldershot, Avebury, 1994, pp. 93–109. See also Skidelsky, Robert (ed.), Thatcherism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.Google Scholar

7 In Britain as in any other liberal society, there are people who do not share some or even many of its basic values. Some are highly critical of democracy, and others of liberalism. It would be strange to say that they are therefore not British. Although they do not share or believe in these values, they are expected to respect them, partly out of respect for the overwhelming number of their fellow-citizens who deeply cherish them, and partly because the values are an integral part of their community’s moral and political structure to which they are bound as citizens.

8 See his On Human Conduct, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 321 ff and Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London, Methuen, 1962, pp. 49 ff.

9 See The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, The Runnymede Report, London, Profile Books, 2000, pp. 36–9. Since the term ‘British’ has long been associated with whiteness, the Report argued that it has in this limited sense a ‘racial’ connotation. This was interpreted by some to mean that the term ‘British’ itself is ‘racist’ and should not be used! For a critique of such an absurd reading, born partly out of misunderstanding and partly out of political mischief, see my ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Reporting on a Report’, The Round Table, 10 2001.