Our Nation State and citizenship

In this brief communication I am going to try to describe how I have rolled around in my mind a particular pillar in our identity as citizens of the United Kingdom. United may be a contentious term, given the way Scotland and Wales have been thinking for some time; not to mention Cornwall, Yorkshire and parts of the North West of England. Therefore, United Kingdom and the nation state may be two contradictory terms. Leaving that thorny issue to one side, nevertheless I am using the term nation state to suggest a polity. As I am thinking about it here nation state is an attempt to find an organising concept that acts as a backdrop for the political drama called Westminster politics, within an audience country of citizens. This concept rolls from one part of my mind to another, and with each turn I find more to concern me about what I see as an extremely dangerous disconnect between We, the people, and what can only be called They, the (successive) governments. This disconnect is actually between us as citizens, with a right to expect to be contained, and our nation state as a political establishment with a duty to provide containment.

Non- independent Nation state

For all that is said on the right and far right of politics, our country is not self-sufficient and never has been. We have always imported and exported. The one difference now is that the ideology of globalisation has made us dependent upon outside providers for our consumer goods and mainstream news media (other than the BBC). We may have our own national media and jurisdiction, but both of these are under pressure from neoliberal politicians, themselves under pressure from neoliberal corporations (whether or not their CEOs and owners fund our political parties). Whatever is going on within ours, the idea of the nation state gives boundaries to a polity and often then allows the idea of society to fit within it. The state of our nation state should therefore give an indication of how much of a container it may be, and correspondingly, how contained we as citizens feel. 

Emotional containment

I have to agree with the right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton that our bond with society should deeply provide “a feeling of primal safety” (1999.291). This is containment of our primitive anxieties through the various institutions, processes, relationships and symbols we find ourselves part of in society. In order to understand how much of a container a nation state is being I think we need to look at two aspects of it. These are the state/country itself, which is geographically boundaried, and the nation state as socio-cultural community. Our containment as individual citizens comes from how much we feel we can identify with the socio-cultural community boundaried by the nation state (the society fitting inside the polity). Erik Erikson’s (1959) construction of the concept identity sees “core identities” as being those with deep emotional and mental roots within us. He divided these into personal and group identities. Core group identities are those based upon our involvement as members of whichever large group we feel part of and take into ourselves as part of a core aspect of our identity. The sociologist Norbert Elias (1989) recognised just how powerful the nation state is as a container. Our identity as citizens of our nation state gives us what he terms a “we-feeling.” Volkan (2004) sees such a feeling as also found in ethnicity and religious group memberships. If we subscribe to the psychoanalytic view that our we-feeling is a shield against psychotic fears of fragmentation, then the existence of ethnic, racial, and religious tensions within the United Kingdom surely presents a challenge to this shield, behind which we must be reaching to reinforce it. For those with a strong collective identity as British, but also as members of an ethnic, racial or religious group, this challenge must in addition bring a strong sense of dissonance. For all of us it brings the feeling of threat that our primitive anxieties will become uncontained.

Our containment by the reality of a nation state relies upon our projecting our fears of disintegration into it (its institutions and symbols) and reintrojecting a feeling of safety. To feel this safety, our projecting has to have included other projections into the state as external object - meaning, reassurance, and superior strength to our own. In other words, to feel contained by it we have to see the nation state as an object of endurance.

Idealisation and denigration

Something rather obvious about Hitler and Nazi Germany was given away by the expression the “fatherland.” Using this term, Hitler sought to convey that all within Germany and the Nazi project was good and containing. This idealisation was inevitably accompanied by a denigration of everything outside the German boundaries. Hitler’s main idea of good within them was based upon an ethnic idea of the superiority of the Aryans. Non-Aryans were seen as the denigrated enemy within, despite also being seen as outside by this definition. Consequently, they met the criminal fate of the holocaust. In 2016 British citizens very narrowly voted in favour of leaving the European Union. In the run-up to that referendum and since, many senior politicians in favour of leaving have used jingoistic expressions, idioms and language to denigrate polities outside of the United Kingdom whilst idealising this country’s potential. Trade deals, Covid track and trace systems, and vaccination roll-outs are “world beating”. The levelling up agenda promises to “take us light years ahead of our competitors” as, supposedly, we produce a high-skilled, high-paid workforce. All this whilst there is a systematic attack on the power of the Supreme Court; a running down of the judiciary and all other public services. Leaving to one side that such statements are revealed to be wild when fact checked, the idealisation and denigration of our nation state feels like an attack on it by the very people (the government) we would expect to safeguard it in order to protect us.

Such protection in the past usually translated as gunboat diplomacy and the like. Nowadays citizens’ sense of protection relies upon safety from both physical and mental threats (from each other and from outside the polity). Mental threats are in the form of attacks on a sense of identity, and upon truth (which may sometimes be one and the same).  We find constant references, however, to our politicians’ gross use of cant and dissimilitude as part of their hypocrisy and lies. We find that they are overly close to the captains of commerce and industry, are persuasively lobbied by interested parties that do not always have the public good in mind. Politicians also allow access to them by tycoons, many of whom have much to answer concerning the origins of their wealth. In a famously tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecatory, remark Groucho Marx said that any club which accepted him as a member was one he didn’t want to belong to. When we now think of our core identity as citizens, surely we have to ask whether this is the sort of nation we want to belong to. The trouble is Groucho was talking about a small group identity. If we leave to one side that our nation may be possible as an act of ridding ourselves of a large group identity, we are then left with nowhere to go. We would exist within the geographical boundary and have to look from outside whilst within.

Provider state

Whilst in that outside within (limbo) state we would have to bear silent witness to the continued erosion of the nation by governments who did not fully grasp (or wilfully dismissed) their duty of care to protect its institutions and symbolic structures, and doubt their continued ability to provide for and protect its citizens. That is actually what we seem to have seen over the past fifty years, and it is tantamount to an erosion of the maternal function of the state. If one thinks that there are things a state can do to keep society functioning and, in the process, enable a sense of well-being in its citizens, then we have seen a shrinking in the provision of things in the common good. Tertiary education now has to be paid for by the individual. Secondary education paid for by parents produces a 93% increase in school facilities and future opportunities than afforded children in State schools.  Dentistry is provided at a rock bottom price and service, so it is best to go privately. The utilities - communications, electricity, gas, and water - are all shareholder-owned. Trains are franchised and the cost of travel on them is prohibitive for many people. The state has now become the provider of last resort. Recently, a train company has been taken into public ownership. Food and shelter were provided by a just adequate benefits system, but now that has also been cut back, despite the growing number of homeless people and those (from all walks of life) relying on food banks. There is a strong sense of abandonment in all this. Years ago I had a sense of integration within the large group of the state when I felt reassured by seeing state provision of food and shelter for those in need (largely when they lost their jobs). I felt my own fears of being destitute (annihilation anxiety) were mitigated by observing such provision. Now - watching the treatment of child poverty and refugees, the safety of women in our society, the plight of the old and the chronically mentally or physically unwell - I feel a huge sense of abandonment, and with it primitive annihilation anxiety.  Other citizens and their needs are abandoned. Through the consequent challenge to my large group identity, I feel the custodians of the nation state have abandoned me. Because the fundamental duty of care for our safety (including remedial provision for it) has been abandoned, we as citizens effectively no longer exist in the eyes of these new custodians.

Flawed container

We rely upon the nation state to be a good parental object: The authoritative paternal with the nurturing maternal. This object is therefore one we turn to for protection and to provide for us. As with any good object, we should be able to rely upon and trust it to work in our best interests as we develop our lives. Since the second world war our infrastructure has firstly grown like protective and providing hands around us ……. and then shrunk. If we take the start of the period of shrinkage as 1979 (the beginning of the first Thatcher government) this is far longer than the period of growth. State-funded tertiary education and safe welfare provision for those in need are both now very distant memories.  As memories they stayed in my mind as markers of a moment when the nation state seemed to be an overarching presence that linked all of us through the social goods of:  the interconnectivity of communities and industries, the division of labour in the workplace, statutory sick and holiday pay for all employees, cordial relationships with countries friendly to us, a protection of us through not conceding to President Johnson’s request that we join his war in Vietnam.

This sense of containment has become eroded because our state as container has shown it cannot protect us from the demands of the neo-liberal agenda. Globalisation of capital is not the internationalism of citizens joined together as a global village. The market rules, and the state has to stand back and let it. The neo-liberalisation of the nation state has been a project of big corporations since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It was then that what were to become the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were set-up; organisations that tied loans to post-war governments that ensured their policies allowed for an unleashed version of capitalism to dominate their economies. Accompanying this came the ‘revolving-door’ policy, which promoted the dominance of decision making by a small group of business people and politicians shifting their careers back and forth through this door.  Since then, conservative and labour administrations have simply and slowly done the work required to convert the nation state into a market place running on rules determined outside of it by global organisations seeking to exploit it. The world is interconnected, but not by citizens and notions of common human good. Our container has allowed itself to be breached from outside, and that has left us inside feeling less attached to it. Its diminution as a container - through the attack on protection, provision and trust - has left us needing a new core home identity. For some citizens this is being found in nationalism. In this there is no nation state for those deemed outside of what nationalism defines the structure and function of the nation state to be. National pride looks desperately like national arrogance. Hope is a thing for the weak, not those buoyed up by being included within the defined parameters of nation statehood.  And, of course, as we are beginning to see with the AKUS deal, those outside our perceived national interests (in this case the French), outside the boundary of nationalism, are seen as inferior in some way (The Prime Minister’s public ridicule of the French response to being dropped from the AKUS deal). Our nation state he says is world-beating no matter the cost to being trusted by its own citizens and foreign allies. But those of us who see the infantile paranoid-schizoid position, that nationalism always resides in, cannot currently find a home in the nation state. That the container has always been flawed seems true when we think of the way neo-liberalism has moved against it since 1944. The problem for us now is that we need a container with depressive position functioning in order to retain our own sanity; in order not to be the only adults in the room. Sadly, we may have a long wait!

Andrew Briggs

October 2021