England, Devolution, and Fictional Kingdoms

Abstract

In a recent interview with Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, the novelist Ian McEwan was reported as explaining that he was ‘an English writer, not a British one’, and that the ‘celebration of Britishness captured by Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games [… ] was the first experience of his life where a concept of Britishness was being celebrated’ (Carrell 2012, my italics). McEwan’s surprising statement comes at a time when the integrity of the United Kingdom is at issue and when the prospect of Scottish independence highlights again the problematic use of everyday terminology — England, Great Britain, United Kingdom — that is often used wrongly or interchangeably by the general public and cultural critics alike. ‘English, I mean British”, Krishan Kumar states at the beginning of The Making of English National Identity, and explains that ‘this familiar locution alerts us immediately to one of the enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate “English” from “British”?’ (Kumar 2003: 1). This conundrum is particularly apt given the current political climate. In the last decade there has been an insistent call for a restatement and a revaluation of a specifically English national identity. But what exactly is Englishness? Cultural and literary critics such as Simon Gikandi (1996), Ian Baucom (1999), Kumar (2003), Jed Esty (2004), Simon Featherstone (2009), and Michael Gardiner (2004; 2012) have convincingly argued that with the emergence of the United Kingdom as a world power in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the increasing conflation of British and English to the extent that ‘English and British became synonymous’ (Kumar 2004: 63).