Britain: rain, queuing and rubbish food or providing 'Plumpy'Nut' to undernourished children in the DRC?

National identity is not often considered a force for good by 'progressives' committed to internationalism and social justice. For many, national identity at best providing trite stereotypes, (as demonstrated by own father's assessment of France: 'only problem is the French'), at worst is an illogical, arbitrary and inconvenient psychological phenomenon to be managed as we try to support social and political change. Instinctively, I'd probably agree. It seems implausible if not slightly surreal that my 'Britishness,' i.e. the chance fact I was born in West London, connects me as a 21-year old student living in Madrid with, say, a 65-year old Northern Irish fisherman who has never left Ballycastle, or, perhaps, David Hume. Facetiousness aside, nationalism, a phenomenon based on the idea of creating distinctions between 'us' and 'them' has always made me feel slightly uncomfortable and certainly not appeared to me to provide a basis of progressive change and solidarity across borders with those facing poverty and disempowerment.

Is this what Britishness means? (Child being fed Plumpy'Nut), Unicef

Step forward Sunder Katwala from the thinktank 'British Future'. In the course of his eloquent contribution to the debate entitled, 'Is there a Progressive Case for National Identity?', he attempts to make just that case. The lecture itself focuses on British identity, drawing on some of his own experiences and exploring the challenges particularly for British (and Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English) national identity today but here I'm more interested in a couple of nice arguments he makes which challenge those 'post-national, cosmopolitan esperanto-progressives' as he puts it (like me I guess?) who reject national identity as a basis for the case for supporting development efforts in other countries.

1) He argues that there is a slight disingenuousness in those progressives (at least in Britain) who seek to reject national identity as a force for good, in that they tend to favour it as long as it's not their own. He refers to the support given to postcolonial national identities as a force for good and for unity, and cites Ignatieff's claim that cosmopolitanism is a privilege for those who can take a stable nation state for granted. The latter seems a fair point for me - for someone who had a stable, easy upbringing in London, a cosmopolitan city with a sense of self-confidence coming from being both the capital of the UK and perhaps one of the most famous and admired cities in the world, I can do without a strong sense of Englishness or Britishness.

2) Perhaps more importantly, Katwala shows how national identity can potentially provide a more powerful base for promoting change in development and international politics. In concrete terms, the reason why Denmark ensures it gets a kick-ass rating on the Centre for Global Development's commitment to development index is not because Denmark (personified) is a true world citizen and all-round nice gal committed to Kantian cosmopolitanism, but because it's part of Denmark's national identity to do their best to help other nations which might be in a worse off position and thereby create a more just world (to whatever extent). Likewise, like it or love it, Britain's post-imperial national identity helps explain why Amnesty International and Make Poverty History, for example, were babies born in Britain. The message is that those who care about international development don't need to strive to overcome national identity because we already have a commitment to engaging in world affairs for good as an inherent part of our identity as Britons. Just focusing on the aid debate (which is not everything or even the most important thing but that's another debate, see point 7 here), there's an interesting counterpoint to Daily Mail-type efforts to undermine the UK's aid contribution (of which here's an example and why it's wrong) or the broader argument that it's just not in our national interest at this point to be providing Plumpy-Nut to undernourished Congolese children. And this is the idea that it's part of our collective identity to do so, and to stress that some depersonalised portrayal of national interest is the only thing to consider is to miss a whole lot.

It's a nice point, but here are a few issues which spring to mind (and which Katwala also makes greater or lesser reference to):

A) Other parts of our national identity mean that we can't hi-jack Britishness to support whatever political position we might have. A commitment to involvement in world affairs is part of Britishness but so is democratic debate about the positives and negatives of such involvement. Too narrowly defining national identity along progressive lines risks suggesting that patriotism is only legitimate from certain political standpoints. We have to make the case for an identity who would maintain Britain's commitment to development abroad, through aid, migration policies, trade policies, arms sales and a whole host of other areas. And that's a difficult, contingent process.

B) Relying on that aspect of British identity which derives from our imperial past for generating support for development is tricky. Britain's engagement with the world in the last few hundred years has been both positive, and often negative; we need to bear in mind the need to avoid the colonial perspective and cede power and control as much as possible when we focus on that part of our identity connected with empire.

C) I still have issues with the fact that national identity or social identity is founded fundamentally on an in-out dynamic and so it presents problems for encouraging the idea of 'solidarity'. You can emphasise the tolerance and democratic debate aspect of British identity but if you push the inclusiveness aspect too far a) people will not buy in to it or even b) the whole idea of identity loses its significance. We might look at Nyers' ideas on the refugee concept (book here) as an example. According to his ‘humanitarian violence’ argument, the way that our political and ethical community is organised to coincide with the boundaries of the nation state ‘outsider’ allows us to situate refugees outside our own ethical rules. Basically it means that our own fellow citizens first then our moral obligations to everyone else comes through the nation state to rest of humanity. But it seems to me that being serious about development requires us to think directly beyond the confines of our own political community.

So there is potential for a progressive national identity, but whether it can take us all the way from queuing and rubbish food to Plumpy'Nut for undernourished children in the DRC I'm not sure. Comments very much welcome on this one (for those who are intrepid enough to have reached the bottom).