Patriotism takes off
by Max Wind-Cowie
Two weeks ago, Demos launched A Place for Pride, a report on patriotism in modern Britain. The findings – that patriotism is a frame many British people reject no matter how proud of their country they are, that higher levels of pride in Britain lead to higher levels of pro-social behaviour, that patriots are on average less xenophobic than those who are ambivalent about Britain – were almost of secondary importance.
We wanted to look at this issue because patriotism is a much discussed but under-analysed area of our public life. Throughout the research, in discussing the project with politicians, policy gurus and charitable organisations, people’s response to the very idea of looking at patriotism as an important and nuanced social issue ran the gamut from bemusement to outright hostility. Some felt it was irrelevant, others a nice-to-have but less than necessary sentiment – and for some, of course, patriotism was and would only ever be a gateway drug to the evils of racism and fascism.
That perception, slowly but surely, is changing. Today the IPPR have pre-released some of the findings of their own poll on patriotism, in the lead-up to the London Policy Conference – finding that Londoners are prouder of their city than they are of their country. Last night, The World Tonight discussed which historical narratives enhance patriotism and this evening, Demos’ Director David Goodhart will be taking part in a debate about whether we should be using our education system to teach patriotism, hosted by the IMPACT journal on philosophy and education.
The views may be divergent – I would argue that local patriotism enhances and encourages love of country rather than competing with it and that the best way to teach patriotism is to focus on the local and build out from there, rather than to preach our ‘island story’. But the conversations are happening and that is what matters. For too long patriotism has been the poor relation to more trendy social ideals – be it trust, aspiration or ‘civility’ – rather than being given its due respect as a peer to those ideals (and a factor in galvanising them in society). It appears that the tide is turning and that patriotism is being taken more seriously – we should all rejoice in that, even as we disagree about its impacts and the best routes to its creation.
PS
PS Were not the Nazi's 'Patriots'?
Mark Macho
Dear Max the crisis of our times is how to square our devotion
to our own with our duties to everyone else. Many, maybe even most,
are still convinced that forcing everyone else to benefit our own at
gunpoint is the most heroic thing we can do as it entails the risk of
getting killed by the others. In short patriotism. We have been doing this for centuries.
Millions die in wars. Laws favour some and damn others. The rich
waste what they do not need and curse the poor for complaining.
Most people spend their lives in fear of one sort or another. Self immolation for our own patch of earth or our friends and families
is the way of centuries. But it goes not far in solving our problem.
Patriotism the love of Patria first and foremost drove the Romans and the Nazis. it only gets us to where we already are. It's narcissism
writ large. I might add that helping others means asking not telling
and that is what soldiers, ministers and so many find so difficult!
People in cities get quite good at asking and knowing and liking
people not from their Patria. Now in that there is hope! But it's
not patriotism, it's making friends.
.
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Patently a day-to-day Snail mail, Day-to-day Show, Sun's rays viewer. Precisely how intellectually stunted could you are free to come across time for it to postulate this specific silliness. You'll want to undertake a number of critical looking at Greatest extent. Am i allowed to propose Brian Hume's 'Essays: Meaningful, Politics along with Literary'. And then, with luck ,, you'll be able to revisit people using a number of critical concepts as opposed to the just light and portable along with involving zero significance.
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Patriotism Conservative Style
From the New York Times
LONDON — No matter what happens at the European summit meeting on the euro in Brussels that begins Thursday, Britain is sure to lose.
Prime Minister David Cameron said that he would protect Britain's interests in Europe.
There is looming recognition at 10 Downing Street that if the euro falls, Britain will sink along with everyone else. But if Europe manages to pull itself together by forging closer unity among the 17 countries that use the euro, then Britain faces being ever more marginalized in decisions on the Continent.
Many Europeans have been irritated by British Conservatives’ quiet satisfaction throughout the crisis with the decision not to join the euro (the United Kingdom ostentatiously kept its currency, the pound), particularly when juxtaposed with the panic over Britain’s inability to have any significant impact on Europe’s biggest crisis since the end of the cold war.
“Germany is the unquestioned leader of Europe,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “France is definitely subordinate to Germany, and Britain has less influence than at any time I can recall.”
Of particular concern here is the health of Britain’s financial industry, a vital economic engine at a time of slowing growth and deep cuts in government spending, which is seen to be vulnerable to new European regulations that could hurt British competitiveness in global markets.
Despite all that is at stake, Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government looks doomed to be cast in the role of impotent bystander, torn between anti-Europe forces and European leaders’ moves toward greater fiscal integration on the Continent — with or without Britain.
On Wednesday, Mr. Cameron told a fractious Parliament that his main goal in Brussels was to “seek safeguards for Britain” and “protect our own national interest” by resisting measures like a proposed financial transaction tax. But such Britain-centric rhetoric has annoyed the brokers of Europe’s future, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who are trying to find a way to save the euro while imposing legally binding fiscal discipline on the Continent’s floundering southern economies.
They have not been shy about expressing their frustration. Just six weeks ago, after Mr. Cameron tried to inject himself into talks about the euro, Mr. Sarkozy said bluntly, “You have lost a good opportunity to shut up.” He later added: “We are sick of you criticizing us and telling us what to do. You say you hate the euro and now you want to interfere in our meetings.”
Steven Fielding, director of the Center for British Politics at the University of Nottingham, said: “Cameron might sound off to look good to his backbenchers, but in Europe, he hasn’t got much to negotiate with. It’s been made clear that France and Germany can do whatever the hell they like and Britain can say yes or no, but it doesn’t matter, since they’ll do it anyway.”
The paradox of this is that plans for tighter integration among the 17 euro zone countries are at the same time destined to create greater divisions within Europe — divisions between countries that use the euro and those that do not, and divisions within the euro zone itself, depending on the health and importance of the various economies. A two-, three-, four- and even five-tier Europe could possibly emerge.
“The markets have defined who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and their interest rates are in many ways the manifestation of this,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s minister for European affairs. “When we look at future E.U. rules, it is the triple-A countries that are running the show.”
The political price of Britain’s self-proclaimed exceptionalism was made clear with a vengeance to Mr. Cameron on Wednesday, when he was pounded from all sides in a raucous session in the House of Commons. Fractious Europe-hating Conservative backbenchers called for him to stand firm on Europe, to “show bulldog spirit,” in a “resolute and uncompromising defense of British national interests,” as one legislator, Andrew Rosindell, put it.
Trying to placate them, the prime minister pledged not to sign anything that did not contain “British safeguards.”
Meanwhile, should the Europeans in the euro zone “go ahead with a separate treaty” that leaves out the noneuro countries, Mr. Cameron explained, “then clearly that is not a treaty that Britain would be signing or would be amending.” However, he said, he would still retain “some leverage” over the process.
“The more the euro zone countries ask for, the more we will ask for in return,” he said. But France and Germany have already made it abundantly clear that they will go ahead with their plans for the euro zone without regard to the needs or interests of Britain.
The explosive debate in Britain, while never welcome, comes at an unusually inopportune time for Mr. Cameron. The so-called special relationship with the United States is not looking all that special right now, and enormous cuts in defense spending are making it hard for the British military to maintain its status as America’s right hand.
The austerity budget is fraying at the edges, amid strikes and protests over layoffs and rising fees. Growth has been slowing, despite Mr. Cameron’s insistence that businesses would pick up the pace when it became clear that the government’s finances were sound. And now Britain looks to be in an unusually poor position to defend its interests in Europe.
Members of the Labour opposition lost no time exploiting what they saw as Mr. Cameron’s weakness on the issue.
“Six weeks ago, he was promising his backbenchers a handbagging for Europe, and now he’s just reduced to hand-wringing,” the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, told Parliament, as his party members whooped their approval. “The problem for Britain is that at that most important European summit for a generation, that matters hugely for businesses up and down the country, the prime minister is simply left on the sidelines.”
Even more worryingly for the government, several prominent Conservatives, including the cabinet minister in charge of Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson, broke ranks with the party line and said flatly that Mr. Cameron should make good on what they called his promise to hold a national referendum on any proposed European treaty changes. With much of Britain in the anti-Europe camp, the no side would surely prevail in such a vote.
Mrs. Merkel has said that she would like any treaty changes to be approved by the entire European Union, so in theory Britain could exercise a veto. But Germany and France have also said they will make changes in the way the euro zone alone operates, if that is the only way to defend the common currency.
Most dangerous to Mr. Cameron was the unwelcome intervention of the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, a potential wild-card rival for the Conservative leadership. Mr. Johnson, who is perhaps Britain’s most popular politician, enjoys injecting himself into questions of foreign policy when the spirit moves him.
If Britain was asked to sign a treaty creating “a very dominant economic government” across Europe, he told BBC radio, then Mr. Cameron should veto it. “And if we felt unable to veto it, I certainly think that it should be put to a referendum,” he said. He added that in rescuing the euro, there was a danger of “saving the cancer, not the patient.”
Mr. Cameron says he has pledged to call a referendum on any treaty that would transfer more power from Britain to Europe. None of the current possibilities features such a treaty, he said, so there is no cause for a referendum.
The other political pressure on Mr. Cameron, of course, comes from the unique challenge of a coalition government with partners who disagree on many issues, including Europe. This puts him and his deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat, in tough spots for equal but opposing reasons.
“Nick Clegg has party activists who don’t like the idea of the coalition and don’t like many of the things it has done, and they’re the most Europhile of the three main parties,” Mr. Fielding of the Center for British Politics said. “And David Cameron has on his back benches people who don’t like the idea of the coalition and don’t like many of the things it has done, and they’re the most Euroskeptic. It’s a tricky position for them all to be in.”
Conservative Patriotism
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0183l0t/Storyville_20112012_Inside_Job/
Edward Harkins
"Londoners are prouder of their city than they are of their country."
As found in the IPPR survey.
That serves to reinforce the growing perception that London, along with its myopic metro-elites, is becoming more and more a global metropolis and is more and more detached from the rest of the UK ( in common parlance, London is becoming ever 'less British')
Might not the logical outcome of this be that the resident London elites care more for themselves than for the rest of 'Britain'.
BIG Society
England 1. Rest of Europe 26.
Deeply Confused.com
A Tory Minister goes to a Nazi themed party and toasts Hitler (who killed hundreds of thousands of Brits). Mr Wind-Cowie above tells us patriotism is taking off. But then Elizabeth 2nd tells us in her Christmas speech she rules over 53 nations presumably each patriotic in their own way of their own countries). Confused?
What exactly does the modern Conservative Party stand for? Nazism on one side? British patriotism on the other? A Common-wealth of nations in-between. Progessive Conservatism? More like Deeply Confused.com And Mr Wind-Cowie calls himself a thinker!!!!!
Mark Macho
Doing good where one lives is good. But in a world where everyone wants to trade with everyone else, where people are delighted to study abroad, where even the most patriotic are happy to holiday abroad, where many of us live and retire abroad,, buy our goods from abroad and sell our goods abroad patriotism is not enough for a good life.
With centuries of mercantile and even colonial energy coupled with at least some conscience that people have a right to rule themselves Britain has helped to bring about the world we have.
Now Britain finds itself queasy in a world where blowing up third world countries and inserting itself into their infrastructure no
longer really works. It creates danger at home and spends treasure
rather than amasses it. It used to do the reverse!
A real appraisal of Britain's declining status in the world demands
some fancy footwork thinking that an admiring glance to the past will not supply. Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh, were they alive would be the first to tell you so. The internet has given us a different world. It is maybe for the first time a World and not just an assembly of countries. And a Briton invented it. Now we have to inhabit it. Prevailing , if that's what we want, where the whole world is our customer and constituency is a very different game.
Warm and fuzzy wooley patiotism is not enough to cut the mustard.
We can stay at home and count our blessings or we can get busy
in whole new ways. Anything less will deny our duties and aspirations for ourselves and others. This is the 21st century Max not the 19th.
Toby Porter
So Progressive Conservatism = a return to narrow minded patriotism. How truly cretinous.
When the world's lingua franca is English, when we learn that Brazil will soon overtake us and we will slip to number 9 in the GDP league table, when we have the opportunity to be nearer number 1 leading Europe, leading a globalised world along comes a so called Progressive Conservative wanting to turn us into a little nationalistic island. Very intelligent? Or very naive? Crawl back into your box Mr 'hot' Wind (who seriously has a doubled barralled surname in 2012; surely only narrow-minded snobs? You do not belong in the 21st century.
Wilfred Owen
"The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori"
George Bernard Shaw
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it"
Oscar Wilde
"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious"
Guy de Maupassant
"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched"
Albert Einstein
" Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of PATRIOTISM - how passionately I hate them"
George Bernard Shaw
"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race"..... especially the likes of the naive like Mr Cowie above
Malcolm Rasala
Patently a Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun reader. How intellectually challenged can you get to find time to postulate this silliness. You need to take up some serious reading Max. Can I suggest David Hume's 'Essays: Moral, Political and Literary'. Then, hopefully, you can come back to us with some serious ideas rather than the merely lightweight and of no import.