Competing constructions of British national identity: British newspaper comment on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony

British national identity

British national identity has been described as ‘thick’ (Farrington and Walker, 2009: 135) and comprised latticed layers, rendering narratives of British identity complex. For one, a unitary British identity is difficult to ascertain given the United Kingdom’s status as a sovereign nation comprised four constituent countries, each with distinct ethnic identities. Furthermore, Britain’s colonial legacy problematizes stable notions of national identity due to waves of ‘inward migration from the countries of the old Empire and Commonwealth, creating new pockets of people with different skin colors, and often different languages, religions, and customs as well’ (Kumar, 2000: 592–593). Black and Asian immigrants seldom achieve ‘Britishness’ even after several generations of having lived in the United Kingdom (Gilroy, 1991), reinforcing hierarchies of ‘Britishness’ among ethnic categories based on temporal perceptions of a group’s entry and chronology within the British nation. The modern British state is thus a messy conglomerate of pre-existing ethnic groups enmeshed through centuries of conquest, consolidation, and immigration. This begs the question: Is it even possible to articulate a coherent collective sentiment that binds these vastly different particulars under a common sense of belonging?

The 2012 summer Olympics in London offered the United Kingdom this opportunity to construct and project a vision of itself to a global audience. The ceremony, titled ‘Isles of Wonder’, was directed by award-winning film director Danny Boyle and cost approximately 27 million pounds, lasted 4 hours, and was watched by a global audience of 900 million people. The ceremony itself featured a narrative of British history, including segments praising Britain’s role in the industrial revolution and celebrating the ethic of the National Health Service (NHS), which provides health care to Britons free at the point of use. The ceremony also drew heavily on British popular culture icons, such as Mr Bean and James Bond. As a performance of national identity – and within the context of the press’ role in constructing nationhood – we examine national newspaper responses to the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony to identify how conflicting narratives are integrated to articulate a coherent conception of national identity. Our research question is thus: How did British press commentators construct British identity in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony?

Method

In keeping with our focus on national identity, we limited our analysis to national newspapers as these outlets, by virtue of their reach, address the nation as a whole rather than specific localities or communities. The opening ceremony occurred on 27 July 2012. We obtained press responses dating from 2 weeks from 28 July, searching the LexisNexis database using the keywords ‘Olympics’ and ‘opening ceremony’. We limited our analysis to editorials and opinion columns, which are more dialogic and reflective forms of newspaper discourse. Our final dataset consisted of 91 articles. ¹

Guided by qualitative inquiry, we approached the dataset without a pre-determined coding schema, allowing for themes to ‘emerge’ from the data through close analysis. The authors examined the dataset chronologically to establish familiarity and context and then undertook a more purposive analysis of the data using open coding to note recurring themes, trends, and motifs, followed by axial coding to consider where themes overlapped and intersected, thus refining preliminary themes and bringing ‘previously separate categories together under a principle of integration’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2002: 221).

The ‘greatness’ of Great Britain

Newspapers focused on the ‘great’ in Great Britain. The opening ceremony was an opportunity to project ‘the brilliance and beauty of our nation’ (Phillips, 2012) on the global stage. The Sunday Mirror wrote, ‘If ever there was any doubt, the opening of the London Olympics confirmed that this is still very much GREAT Britain’ (‘We show the world what’s Great about our nation’, 2012, capitals in original). For a Daily Mail columnist, ‘it might surprise many of us to admit it, but when all is said and done, we really do live in the greatest country in the world’ (Sandbrook, 2012). There were frequent references to Britain’s long and storied history, as typified by this elaborate narrative from the Daily Telegraph’s Graeme Archer (2012):

[The ceremony] went on to show that creativity has surged through our people and landscape just as the water in our rivers surges to our defining coastlines – and beyond, for those coastlines have never, in the end, defined or limited us, any more than the customs of their ages defined or limited the ambitions of men like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or women like Emmeline Pankhurst. The zeal of the great Britons transcended the limitations of their times. They burst their rivers’ banks.

Sarah Crompton (2012), also of the Daily Telegraph, concurred, ‘It is quite clear that at the heart of the event was a depiction of the values that have made Britain a force to be reckoned with: Its innovation, its courage, its creativity, its imagination’. The Observer echoed these sentiments, noting how the ceremony ‘took in Shakespeare, Milton, Brunel, and Tim Berners-Lee. It sought to sum up a country – a very multicultural land manifestly – which had played a full part in world literature, world construction, [and] world invention’ (‘Let’s build on the triumph and hope of Danny Boyle’s night’, 2012). By foregrounding contributions to literature and invention, such discourses reminded readers of Britain’s role in the development of modernity, centralizing Britain as a force for good in the unfolding of human history.

Many commentators seized this opportunity to reflect on Britain’s achievements and natural beauty. For Graeme Archer (2012) of the Daily Telegraph, ‘our greenness and pleasantness are stitched into our industrial and post-industrial landscape: the definition of Britishness exists, finally, at the intersection of the minds of the geniuses the land has spawned’. The strategic use of ‘our’ invites readers to bask in a national community; Britain’s achievements are their achievements. For The Observer, the ceremony was a reminder that ‘this is a Britain that still makes great things’, (‘Let’s build on the triumph and hope of Danny Boyle’s night’, 2012). The Daily Mirror’s Alison Phillips (2012) described the ceremony as

big, brash, bubbling with confidence and national pride. We relaxed our stiff upper lip, let our natural reserve relax to show what we had to be proud of – and that we were indeed proud of it. It felt like the most valuable history lesson my children could have.

Although Britons were purported to seldom indulge in displays of spontaneous pride, the ceremony was an opportunity for reflection on the nation’s manifold achievements. Phillips (2012) went on to say that the ceremony was ‘better than any history book … we recounted our history with pride and unashamed acceptance that it has made us the country we are today’. Although the ceremony itself presented a complex and conflicting narrative of industrialization that acknowledged both those who triumphed and the subjugated in Britain’s colored past, these commentators preferred a comfortable interpretation that showcased British achievement.

A number of newspapers and their commentators situated the ceremony as a pivotal turning point in national reflection and renewal. For The Observer, the ceremony was ‘anxious to show us, in short, that we’d mattered – and hint that we could perhaps matter again’ (‘Let’s build on the triumph and hope of Danny Boyle’s night’, 2012). The People’s Carol Malone (2012) reminded her readers,

Britain was once – and can again – be Great … If these Olympics achieve anything it should be to remind us – and the rest of the world – that this little island and its people can do anything we want if we put our minds to it.

Drawing readers into the imagined community, this discourse also grants them agency in the nation’s revitalization. Malone suggests her readers consider the ceremony as a moment of catharsis, where contemporary weaknesses can be cast aside to forge a new ‘great’ future. The intentionally sentimental and slippery wording of this sentiment lacks a concrete referent, and it becomes an open symbol for readers to affix their own particular interpretation of ‘greatness’.

Some saw fit to contend and juxtapose Britain’s greatness against other nations, in particular, the 2008 Beijing Games. The Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson (2012) decried the collectivism of China in her response to the ceremony: ‘In Beijing, the opening ceremony featured 15,000 people. Not one stood out. London had individuals, their faces full of character; each one dancing to a different drummer’. For The People’s Dave Kidd (2012), while Beijing’s ceremony was ‘more awe-inspiring in … sheer scale and cost’, Britain’s ceremony was more purposeful in its ‘sense of history, humor, eccentricity, and self-deprecation’, taken to be inherently British values. For the Daily Telegraph, the London ceremony ‘countered the awesome scale and precision of Beijing with anarchic panache’ (‘What Britain has done for the Olympics’, 2012). The Sunday Mirror made a similar comparison:

How could this little island, beset by problems, even come close to the sensational ceremony in China witnessed by the world four years ago? But it did, by using its greatest resource … the creativity and inventiveness of the nation. This wasn’t just a spectacle. It had purpose and meaning which no other host country has even attempted. It told the world what the United Kingdom is about and, even more, what the Games mean. (‘We show the world what’s Great about our nation’, 2012)

These narratives imply, the Chinese aspiration to invention was eclipsed by British ingenuity, while also suggesting that China somehow missed the mark – its ostentatiousness elided the true celebratory spirit of the Games.

Conflicting political Agendas

Another prominent theme in newspaper discourse was the tendency to situate the opening ceremony as either a daring challenge to the prevailing political orthodoxy or as a political spectacle itself, with particular reference to economic austerity and controversial reforms of the NHS. For these commentators, the ceremony was a blatant and bold exercise in political theater, alternately a rebellious statement against austerity and privatization and a dangerous celebration of a misguided political doctrine. Both constructions of national identity and responses to it (which are, themselves, constructions) are not ideologically neutral but political interventions.

If, as The People suggested, ‘Britain is at her best when she is bold’ (‘Britain at her best’, 2012), attacking the government’s agenda when billions of people are watching was indeed a courageous move. Suzanne Moore (2012b), writing in the Mail on Sunday (one of the few left-leaning columnists working for the newspaper) described the ceremony as ‘stunning, radical and absolutely anti-conservative’. The Independent’s Steve Richards (2012) offered a theatrical analysis:

As the NHS was celebrated vividly with bright lights and hundreds of dancing nurses, I was reminded of Hamlet, the scene when Hamlet asks the players to act out his father’s murder. The murderer Claudius is in the audience when the play is subsequently performed. At the opening ceremony, David Cameron must have felt a little like Claudius as he watched Danny Boyle’s players: a Prime Minister who seeks to overhaul the NHS with contentious reforms, watching a jubilant portrayal of the NHS as it is and was. Danny Boyle was the mischievous Hamlet. The players performed. Cameron was the uneasy ruler. Boyle knew what he was doing, just as Hamlet did. Even those who support the [government’s] version of ‘reform’ in relation to the NHS must acknowledge the dramatic impact: the ruling ministers pursuing their haphazard revolution challenged before a global audience at a moment that should have been their triumph, the opening of London’s Olympics. Shakespeare would have loved it.

Richards saw the ceremony as a radical statement defending the NHS against government assault. This was an effort to assert a contesting perspective that confronted the preferred narrative projected by Cameron’s government: one that celebrates mutualism, the state, and socialized medicine. For The People’s Dave Kidd (2012), the ceremony ‘showed the world how we are, rather than how the old Etonian in Downing Street and the Tory peer at the head of the London Organizing Committee might have wished us to look’.

Other commentators corroborated this perspective. John Kampfner (2012), also of The Independent, argued that this was no coy celebration of the NHS but a calculated political move at a time when its public service ethos was being challenged by the presiding government:

The political intent of some of the sections was not hard to decipher. The praise for the National Health Service would have infuriated those of Tea Party persuasion who see our healthcare system as a Communist construct. It will have frustrated the more moderate Conservatives who would like the state system gradually dismantled.

The People took this further, arguing, ‘it was bold to rubbish David Cameron’s plans to wreck our NHS – and bolder still to do so right under his nose’ (‘Britain at her best’, 2012). Here, the NHS is positioned as a British birthright, prompting shared cultural identification and drawing battle lines on acceptable political conduct.

Dissenting conservative commentators sought to present a different view of the NHS. Ian Birrell of the Daily Mail argued, ‘True, the health service is an invaluable institution that has saved many lives. But we should stop and ask ourselves why, if it is quite so wonderful, no other major nation has adopted our system’, going on to describe the NHS as ‘a relic of a bygone age in dire need of life-saving surgery’ (Birrell, 2012). Meanwhile, Richard Littlejohn (2012), also of the Mail, described the NHS as the ‘nearest thing the Brits have got to a national religion, apart from Islam’. Stephen Glover complained that Boyle offered ‘a strictly Marxist interpretation of British history’ (Glover, 2012). The Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens bemoaned the ‘universal praise lavished on the Olympic opening ceremony, recognized by many Leftists as a triumph for their version of truth’. Hitchens described the event as ‘the founding ceremony of a new age in which our proud past is ridiculed and our history rewritten’ (Hitchens, 2012). However, another writer for a conservative newspaper, the Daily Mail’s Dominic Sandbrook (2012), rejected such criticism: ‘I fail to see what is so left-wing or multicultural about celebrating William Shakespeare … James Bond, the Queen and Winston Churchill’. While ostensibly an evocative narrative of British history and national identity, the ceremony cannot be separated from constructions of history that are themselves ideological and subject to political interpretation. History is not value-neutral but ideologically contested ground, where one person’s celebration of national culture is another’s assault on a more conservative national imaginary.

Several commentators decried the declining quality of life in contemporary Britain, where the combination of a sluggish economy and austere political agenda threatens civic vitality. The ceremony, against this backdrop, is an attempt to boost sagging spirits in challenging economic times. The Observer, for example, referenced Britain ‘lollop[ing] along, double-dipping through recession’ (‘Let’s build on the triumph and hope of Danny Boyle’s night’, 2012). Mark Austin (2012) of The Sunday Mirror argued that economic strife must not dampen this momentous occasion:

It doesn’t help that we’re in the worst recession for 50 years. It doesn’t help that up and down this country families are struggling to get by. It doesn’t help that a million school-leavers across Britain are unemployed. None of that helps, none of that encourages a mood of joy and celebration. And none of that is a reason to party. But celebrate we should, for the Olympics … have begun and this is a big chance for Britain.

Charles Moore (2012a) of The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, pointed out that although London was ‘busy, active, and bustling’, this was not true of other parts of the country, where ‘our big cities are shadows of their former selves, and the pace of change is glacial’. Readers were thus reminded that while Britain had a storied past, it had a troubled present.

Definitional complexities

Given Britain’s long history, complex ethnic and cultural make-up, and competing traditions, can it rightfully lay claim to a definitive British identity? The opening ceremony could be perceived as an attempt to grapple with this question, presenting a narrative of British identity that alternately suggested pride and uneasiness with Britain’s past, and challenging the notion of a linear history. Members of the journalistic community paralleled this effort with allusions either to the United Kingdom’s constituent members or multiculturalism in contemporary Britain, attempting to crystallize British identity into a coherent bloc. For The Daily Telegraph’s Graeme Archer (2012),

An understanding of the nation requires more than simple acceptance of its many traditions. It requires an acceptance of the majesty of the ideas produced by those traditions, of the conflicts and resolutions present in our island’s long historical tail (or our long historical tale). Each is important. It is their synthesis which defines us.

Here, it is the amalgamation of identities and the tension between them that defines Britishness and enables the fluidity of British identity. Britain’s ethnic diversity was celebrated in remarks such as ‘a diverse country of many cultures united by pride in our nation’ (‘Britain at her best’, 2012). For the Daily Mirror’s Alison Phillips (2012), the ceremony was a reminder that the country was able to ‘welcome visitors from around the world with open arms, and importantly, with open minds’. The Independent wrote of ‘the shared national experience’ (‘Only three days gone – but we’re off to a flier’, 2012) that connected all peoples of the British Isles.

Commentators also acknowledged the mammoth task of attempts to cohere British identity around a set of static nodal points. The Daily Telegraph’s Graeme Archer (2012) emphasized this difficulty by way of historical context:

Whenever an attempt has been made to outline the axioms for that system known as ‘Britain’, it has deflated under the lacerating cynicism of a nation whose elusive definition contains this contradiction: you will not define me by your words. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we lack a written constitution: it’s just the political manifestation of a country that refuses to be defined by any one person’s sentences. Until now, possibly.

Following this, Archer (2012) asserted that the ceremony can be read as an attempt to cohere complex, competing, and disparate narratives of British identity into a unified whole:

I think [Danny] Boyle achieved that which had until now seemed impossible … maybe he didn’t ‘define Britishness’ so much as show us a representation of what that concept entails. He inadvertently made obvious why previous attempts had failed: their unidimensionality was their undoing.

In other words, a linear narrative of British identity is both impossible and misrepresentative. Rather, Boyle’s effort unflinchingly celebrates the complexity of British national identity.

By contrast, others opted for a precisely opposite reading and maintained that the ceremony comprised a linear narrative. The Daily Star’s Steve Hughes (2012) wrote of how, ‘in terms of capturing Britishness, no stone was left unturned’ while, according to The Independent,

It has become impossible to sum up a coherent idea of Britishness – but Boyle pulled it off with energetic but somehow effortless-seeming panache, weaving ancient history, lines from Shakespeare, the story of the Industrial Revolution, the beginnings of post-war immigration and characters from JK Rowling’s children’s stories … into a single, seamless whole. (‘A vision of Britain that unites us’, 2012)

Was the opening ceremony a ‘single, seamless whole’, or was it an effort to reject such ‘unidimensionality’? With so many contending factors – a history that was wrought in both suffering and bounty; a present that has no coherent, singular narrative; an ethnic and national populace that comprises various tribes flung together through conquest and circumstance – it is difficult to assess what it actually means to be British.

Conclusion

Attempting to corral history, culture, race, ethnicity, imperialism, sport, arts, technology, economics, and other spheres into a unitary package is a difficult, if not impossible, task. These competing ‘identities’ prompted by a single event speak volumes about the polysemic nature of identity and the multivocal nature of the British press. While the ceremony was on the one hand an opportunity to fondly reflect on Britain’s past legacy and greatness, it was also perceived as an attempt to challenge the political orthodoxy of the day (for better or for ill, according to the subjectivities and political proclivities of the commentators in question).

Olympic Games are exclusive events that provide host nations the opportunity to construct a national narrative to project to the wider world. Australia utilized the 2004 ceremony to erase and undermine a problematic past (Housel, 2007), while the 2008 Games provided China a strategic opportunity to (symbolically) pivot away from its dire human rights record (Brady, 2009). In Britain, we see a ceremony that, arguably, attempted to render a nuanced, sensitive, and perhaps even radical account of British history, paying heed to the perils of industrialization and celebrating the socialist NHS. Our analysis reveals, however, that this ‘official’ construction is subject to and contested by a second-order construction, where newspapers project their own sense of nationhood. Some diverged from the ceremony’s narrative, whereas others cheered it. Some perceived a linear narrative; others did not.

Our analysis reveals how various newspapers rendered kaleidoscopic visions of Britain and Britishness. Stuart Hall (1992) once wrote, ‘the fully unified, completed, secure and coherent identity is a fantasy’ (p. 277). As evidenced by our analysis, there is no single British identity, but multiple British identities and multiple British histories, subject to the interpretive position of both source and audience. The opening ceremony can be understood as an attempt to cohere these contradictory identities into a somewhat official narrative. However, our analysis reveals it is but one construction among others.

The Olympic Games opening ceremony offers a unique forum to engage in competitive juxtaposition of which opening ceremony – and corresponding national identity – best reflects the transcendental spirit of the Games. Britain’s past is insinuated in imperialism-laced discourses and snide jabs that deprecate and mock other countries’ aspirations of grandeur. National identity, in this sense, derives from one-upmanship, through disparaging other ceremonies – and by extension, their corresponding identities. It would be interesting to ascertain the extent to which subsequent coverage of Olympic Games indulge in this global one-upmanship, where national identity – vis-à-vis its construction in the ceremony – is appropriated as a referent to cultural superiority, or whether this phenomenon was particular to the British press. Theorists should continue to unravel the contradictory discourses surrounding national identity, as dominant, peripheral, and subaltern voices confront and reinforce one another in varying constructions of nation and nationhood located across time, place, and context.