Britain's Habsburg Question? Tom Nairn, Sir Ernest Barker and the Multi-national State

Abstract

It has become fashionable to define Britishness in terms of what it lacks. Norman Davies's influential The Isles: A History has helped to confirm the fashion (without actually being aware that it is an example of that fashion), arguing that Britishness is not the attribute of a nation state, that the British are confused about their identity and lack a clear sense of the state to which they belong (1999), One commentator has remarked that there has developed an 'almost German-style debate about British identity' which has alerted us to the political 'fragility* of the United Kingdom (Garton Ash 2001). Those matters which once appeared alien (or Germanic) in the context of (relative) historical stability - national identity, statehood, political legitimacy - have now moved closer to the centre of public debate. As a consequence, there has emerged a notable mood of fatalism about the survival of the Union and an anxiety about things falling apart. Here one may note a certain irony. As that now rather neglected political thinker, Sir Ernest Barker, once argued, German-style debates are a distinctly un-British thing. The British are not given to an 'indulgence in Weltschmerz' (1947, p. 558). Their solid pragmatic virtues, he believed, did not lend themselves to such soulful self-torment. Barker's reflections on this subject are worth noting because they illuminate not only an ideal of Britishness often neglected in recent commentary but also because they illustrate why that ideal is no longer so persuasive as it once was. Moreover, he helped to define the official character of British politics in that period described by one critic as the 'moment of British