Abstract
In the UK, the diversity of ‘national’ experiences provides a comparative framework for understanding the salience of national symbols. Using survey data, this article examines which symbols people in England and Scotland see as important to British culture, and to English/Scottish cultures; how their own national identity affects those choices; and the relationship between political and cultural aspects of their national identity. The English and the Scots agree broadly on what constitute important symbols of British culture, but their perceptions of English and Scottish culture differ considerably. The key finding, however, is that people’s sense of their own national identity makes little difference to their perceptions of the important symbols of British culture, whereas at the national level feeling strongly English or Scottish is associated with seeing the ‘national’ flag, the flag of St George and the Saltire respectively, as important. ‘Britain’ remains an important and meaningful concept in symbolic terms even though increasing numbers of English as well as Scots do not define themselves primarily as British.
The research questions
In this article, as the title makes clear, we explore aspects of national culture and symbols. Insufficient attention, arguably, has been given to how people relate to national culture; 1 that is, to the shared characteristics, ways of doing and thinking, that they believe they share with fellow nationals. Symbols, often taken for granted, help to ‘personalize’ the nation, to connect the institutional to the everyday (Billig, 1995; McCrone, 2001). Anthony Cohen points out that flags and other national symbols may provide us with the means by which to imagine the nation, but to assume they can make us do so in specifiable ways is a mistake, as it privileges culture over thinking and imagining selves (1996: 812). Empirical data on these topics is undoubtedly lacking and we shall present material that helps us better to understand how people make sense of symbols of national culture.
Our research interests for over a decade have been focused on a particular aspect of individual identity, that is, the balance between someone’s national identity and their state identity 2 and how this affects their attitude towards such diverse issues as constitutional change, voting, and who they will or will not accept when they claim a particular identity (see for instance; Bechhofer and McCrone, 2009a; McCrone and Bechhofer, 2008, 2010). These two related aspects of identity, the ‘national’ and the ‘state’ are often, somewhat confusingly, referred to together as a person’s national identity. We follow this convention, as in this article the context makes clear which usage is intended.
We shall examine three questions:
which symbols people in England and in Scotland see as important to British culture on the one hand, and to English/Scottish cultures on the other, and the differences between the two societies in this regard; how their own national identity affects those choices; and the relationship between the political and cultural aspects of their national identity.
Because there are considerable differences between the English and Scottish cultures as a result of their histories and the differing legal, educational, political and religious systems, and institutions of the two societies (McCrone, 2001; Paterson, 1994) one would expect differences in the importance attributed to various symbols of English and Scottish culture, differences that hypothetically might have been increased by devolution.
It is further reasonable, ex hypothesi, to expect that how an individual construes their own identity will affect this process of identifying particular symbols of the nation and state as important.
Finally, one might expect Scots to take a more ‘political’ and a less ‘cultural’ view of their national cultural symbols than the English do of theirs. After all, the last decade has seen a heightened ‘political’ emphasis on being Scottish with the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament and the election of Scottish Nationalist governments. On the other hand, research by Condor and Abell indicates that being English is much less overt, more implicit and diffuse, and in their words, ‘respondents in England almost always represented national identity as something worn lightly, and only partially inhabited’ (2006: 69).
Identity, culture and symbols of the nation and state
‘State’ identity, seeing oneself as ‘British’ is a matter of state and citizenship, whereas being English, Scottish or Welsh provides a framework for national identity that potentially may be at odds with being British. This is not to suggest that people have to choose between being ‘British’ (their state identity) and being English or Scottish (their national identity). Three-quarters of Scots 3 claim a predominantly Scottish identity (either ‘Scottish not British’, or ‘more Scottish than British’) compared with 37 percent of English nationals who opt for a predominantly English one. Only 3 percent in Scotland, and 13 percent in England give priority to being British (Bechhofer and McCrone, 2008).
We have already pointed out that symbols help to ‘personalize’ the nation, to connect the institutional to the everyday. Emile Durkheim observed that collective ideals ‘can only become manifest and conscious by being concretely realised in objects that can be seen by all, understood by all and represented to all minds: figurative designs, emblems of all kinds, written or spoken formulas, animate or inanimate objects’ (cited in Lukes, 1973: 423). Durkheim argued that, once selected, objects serving as symbols acquire a unique prestige: ‘a rag of cloth becomes invested with sanctity and a tiny piece of paper can become a very precious thing’ (cited in Lukes, 1973: 424). The sign becomes the object, and the emotions it arouses are attached to that sign. ‘We forget that the flag is only a sign, that it has no intrinsic value but serves only to recall the reality it represents; we treat it as if it were that reality’ (Durkheim, 2005[1912]: 165). The national flag, a ‘symbolic container’ (Eriksen, 2007: 2), stands as a metonym for the nation: the object somehow becomes the nation by association. Flags are not the only symbols of belonging to the nation, but they capture and distil people’s national identification (Elgenius, 2011; Eriksen and Jenkins, 2007). Flags and anthems were deliberately created to evoke national identification in the 19th century, but there are other important cultural symbols: music and the arts, sport (peaceful competitions between nations), landscape or countryside, language, as well as what are deemed to be ‘national’ values – classically, in France, ‘liberté, fraternité, égalité’.
Benedict Anderson (1991) famously defined the nation as an ‘imagined community’, which captures this sense of having something in common: as imagined, limited, sovereign and a community. The nation as community is not ‘imaginary’ but ‘imagined’, a creation of the imagination that people deem they share with others like themselves. However, because it is ‘imagined’ it is also socially created, open to variation and dependent on context. Thus, and crucially for our analysis in this article, there is potential for conceptual distance between how people conceive of themselves as individuals in national terms and how they relate to sets of symbols that embody the nation(s) for the larger collectivity. Emile Durkheim’s term ‘représentations collectives’ captures this well, and throughout the article we use symbols in the sense of collective representations. They express ‘the way in which the group conceives of itself in its relations with the objects which affect it’ (cited in Lukes, 1973: 6).
Cultures can then be seen as ways of doing and understanding that are often expressed as symbols or ‘totems’ – ‘usually an object … which signifies shared identity, mutual obligations and certain exclusive norms’ (Eriksen, 2007: 3). Anthony Smith has observed: ‘By the use of symbols – flags, coinage, anthems, uniforms, monuments and ceremonies – members are reminded of their common heritage and cultural kinship and feel strengthened and exalted by their sense of common identity and belonging’ (1991: 16–17). Personifications – Uncle Sam, John Bull, Marianne – also symbolize the nation, appearing on postage stamps as national emblems. Such symbols ‘suture’ individuals to the collective of a ‘people’, and ‘their’ territory, and both to a ‘nation’ (Geisler, 2005: xix).
Symbols of this sort may, of course, emanate and be imposed from above, commissioned, selected and projected by the nation’s political elites. State leaders engage in symbolic nation building to foster a sense of national community, but emblems are often contested by various ethnic and political groups (Kolsto, 2006). As Cerulo observes: ‘since the inception of the nation-state, political leaders have created and used national symbols (flags, anthems, mottos, currencies, constitutions, holidays) to direct public attention, integrate citizens and motivate public action’ (Cerulo, 1989: 77). This, however, ‘says little about the meaning of the symbol to the collective, their usage of the symbol, or the collective’s level of attachment to the symbol. These issues are empirical questions requiring further study’ (1989: 95). As Durkheim pointed out, représentations collectives ‘become partially autonomous realities which live their own life’ (Lukes, 1973: 8), and he called for study of the ways ‘social représentations attract and exclude one another, fuse together or become distinct’ (1973: 8).
The literature on nationalism devotes considerable attention to cultural production and mobilizing national and nationalist meanings, but as Jon Fox points out, ‘its focus on the modalities of cultural production does not systematically attend to the actual ways in which such forms are popularly negotiated or understood by those in attendance’ (Fox, 2006: 219). Fox’s work shows how, in Cluj in Romania, sporting occasions and holidays are platforms for Romanian and Hungarian students to experience and express differential national belonging. Michael Herzfeld’s notion of ‘cultural intimacy’ helps to break down a crude conceptual separation of ‘state’ and ‘people’ that, he says, is so common in academic and popular writings alike. He points out that such ‘intimacy’ may also involve embarrassing or disreputable features of national culture (‘dirty laundry’). His approach, which we endorse, ‘is thus neither “top-down” nor “bottom-up”’; except in a narrow organizational sense there is neither a discrete ‘top’ nor a discrete ‘bottom’ (Herzfeld, 1997: 10).
Methodology
We have over many years studied national identity using both qualitative and quantitative data. Between 2000 and 2005, as part of a programme of research on National Identity and Constitutional Change funded by The Leverhulme Trust 4 we carried out semi-structured conversational interviews in Scotland, each lasting between one and two hours. 5 Colleagues at Lancaster University carried out similar interviews in England. The research involved four groups: people born in England and living in the country of their birth; people born in Scotland and living in the country of their birth, and people born in one of these countries but now resident in the other. 6
When people talked about the British state, or England and Scotland as nations, they regularly alluded to symbols of British, English and Scottish culture. Respondents mentioned national flags, sporting representation, cultural expressions (music, the arts, language), the countryside or landscape, as well as what they took to be ‘national’ values – a sense of community, fair play, equality, and so on. To give the flavour of these comments, here are some illustrative quotations. First, a rather conventional view of Scotland: I think Scottishness to me is where we stay. I just have to look out my back window and I’ve got the mountains and the hills and you’ve got the lochs and glens and whatever the case may be. … Then you’ve got the other side of Scotland as well. You’ve got the Highland Games. You’ve got the bagpipes. You’ve got the tartan … .
Next a comment on what a respondent associated with being British, the monarchy and democracy: Well, I think about er British erm sort of all the erm, (.) well it’s like establishments and what you’ve been brought up with and, like, the royal, family, erm, the Government the Conservatives, Labour and erm, everybody that you know, voting … .
And finally a quote illustrating the important point that people do not have to approve of something to be able to explain what they associate with the idea: I suppose I associate British with erm, with being sort of loyal and patriotic, which I’m not particularly, [laughter]
Subsequently, we designed a module on national identity as part of the British and Scottish Social Attitude Surveys, 2006. 7 We wanted to obtain a more rigorously quantitative grasp of the importance people attached to these various symbols. From the interviews we created lists of frequently mentioned symbols of British, English and Scottish culture, and our survey questions asked respondents to select which ones they thought most important to British culture on the one hand, and English/Scottish culture on the other. The same list of British symbols was presented to all the survey respondents, those of Scottish culture to people interviewed in Scotland, and those of English culture to people interviewed in England. The data in this article relate only to people born and currently living in the country of their birth.
The lists were as follows:
For British culture: British sporting achievements; The British Flag (The Union Jack); British Democracy; British Monarchy; British sense of fair play; British national anthem (God Save the Queen). For English culture: English sporting achievements;
8
The English flag (St George’s Cross); English music & arts; English sense of fair play; English language; English countryside. For Scottish culture: Scottish sporting achievements; The Scottish flag (St Andrew’s Cross); Scottish music & arts; Scottish sense of equality; Scottish language, i.e. Gaelic or Scots; Scottish landscape.
Our aim was to produce matching lists for the two countries. Sport, the flag, music and the arts presented no problems. The English countryside and the Scottish landscape are broadly equivalent. 9 We preferred the term ‘landscape’ in Scotland to ‘countryside’ as it seemed a more commonly used phrase north of the border. Language is an important symbol in some nations, for instance France, and Catalunya, and English is so influential worldwide that we felt obliged to include it. The Scottish language 10 is the only appropriate ‘national’ match for the English language but it is not straightforward because, while Scots and Gaelic are specific to Scotland, English is also spoken in Scotland. The results for the individual countries are of sufficient interest to justify fully including this pair of symbols but were we to repeat the survey we would probably leave them out because we cannot compare the two countries directly across the entire list. We also wanted to include a pair of symbols of important underlying English and Scottish social values and the two sentiments of ‘a sense of fair play’ in England and ‘a sense of equality’ in Scotland do occur frequently in interviews. However, hindsight is a wonderful thing and our decision to include them as an equivalent pair has been questioned. While again producing interesting data for the individual countries, we accept that comparing them directly may be problematic, although in practice the two were given much the same weight providing some empirical justification.
The interviewers then showed respondents a card with the list of British symbols and asked: ‘Here are some things which people sometimes say are important to British culture. Which one do you feel is the most important? And the second most important?’
The questions relating to English and Scottish culture used the word English or Scottish in the preamble and the question, and the card showed the list of the corresponding symbols.
There is an important methodological point here. In principle, someone neither Scottish nor British, but living and working in Scotland, is able to judge what is important to Scottish and British culture although they would not have a personal sense of being British or being Scottish. Similarly, we were asking respondents what they saw as being the important symbols of these cultures. We were not asking them to relate their own personal sense of being British, English or Scottish to these symbols nor to say whether or not they approved of a particular symbol. For example, someone might think the monarchy is an important symbol of British culture, although they personally hold republican views and disapprove of it as an institution. Respondents were asked their views as to the perceived social importance of various symbols, and not how they themselves felt subjectively about such symbols.
We were thus asking people to choose symbols on the list they thought important to ‘national’ culture, from the ‘outside’, as it were. Respondents in both countries showed neither difficulty nor reluctance in answering this question. In survey work, of course, one can never be absolutely certain how a question is interpreted in the field. However, these were face-to-face interviews with highly skilled and experienced interviewers working for the foremost survey company, the National Centre for Social Research, with a unique track record in survey research including the British (and Scottish) Attitudes Surveys. The interviewers and their supervisors understood our intentions and reported no problems. Furthermore, the questions were satisfactorily piloted twice, reinforcing our confidence that the instruments were getting at what we wanted to measure.
Symbols of British culture
Symbols of British Culture among English and Scots.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
Those who did not answer the question, or said ‘don’t know’ or ‘can’t choose’ have been excluded. 12
The important findings are that the English and the Scots agree broadly on the ranking of the symbols of British culture and that a constitutional symbol, democracy, chosen by 61 percent, is the most popular symbol in both countries. The other constitutional symbol, the monarchy, which ranks second in England and third in Scotland, has a fairly high salience, even in Scotland. 13 The least chosen symbols are those of conventional cultural iconography (the anthem, sport and the flag). 14 There are some statistically significant 15 differences between the nations though they are small. The English are slightly more likely than the Scots to choose the symbols of union, the Union flag, and the monarchy. The Scots are more likely to value ‘fair play’ than the English in the list of British symbols.
Symbols of ‘national’ culture
National symbols in England and Scotland.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
Those who did not answer the question, or said ‘don’t know’ or ‘can’t choose’ have been excluded. 16
What is immediately striking is that language as the dominant symbol is mentioned by two-thirds of English respondents. We know of no research that has picked this up. 17 ‘English’ (the language) has become the lingua franca of the modern world, and not the exclusive property of the English (people) but is not any less important as an English symbol, because it can be seen as an aspect of English culture bequeathed to the world. 18 It is roughly twice as important in the eyes of English people as the next most important, an English sense of fair play. Sporting achievements, along with music and arts, are the least important, with the national flag of St George, and the English countryside, in between.
The Scots place ‘landscape’ at the top of their choices, followed on an equal par by ‘music and the arts’ and ‘sense of equality’. The national flag (the Saltire), and Scots or Gaelic language are broadly equal, and sporting achievements are, as in England, the least important. Language, while unsurprisingly less often mentioned than in England, is mentioned by three in every 10 Scottish respondents, a considerable proportion considering that only a minority of Scots speak Gaelic or the Scots language, though the vast majority speak with a Scottish accent.
National Symbols in England and Scotland excluding those in both countries who mention Language.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
Those in both countries who mention language, and those who did not answer the question, or said ‘don’t know’ or ‘can’t choose’ have been excluded.
While as we pointed out the differences in their views of ‘state’ symbols are small, the differences in Table 3, however, are quite striking. 19 A third of the English pick sport as opposed to a fifth of the Scots, and fair play is chosen more often than sense of equality. ‘Countryside /landscape’ is chosen more often by Scots. ‘Music and arts’ is chosen by 46 percent of the Scottish respondents but by only a third of the English. This may result from the greater salience in Scotland than in England of interest in traditional music, widely defined, as something to be enjoyed and appreciated, and in which to be involved.
National identity and the choice of symbols
Having described which symbols of state and national identities people choose, we turn now to the central issue. We suggested right at the start of this article that it is reasonable to hypothesize that how an individual construes their own identity will affect this process of identifying symbols as important. One might expect that those with a strong sense of national identity – being English or Scottish – would make different choices concerning the importance of symbols of British culture than those who had a much stronger personal sense of being British.
Symbols of British Culture by national identity.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
Those who did not answer the question, or said ‘don’t know’ or ‘can’t choose’ have been excluded, as have all respondents not choosing a national identity.
Looking first at the rankings, they are remarkably similar across all the columns. Both within each nation and across the nations the rankings differ very little. Within both Scotland and England, none of the differences are significant at the .01 level. The ‘mainly Scottish’ respondents are considerably more likely to choose fair play than the ‘mainly English’, and the gap lessens considerably across the categories. 21 The other differences between the ‘mainly English’ and the ‘mainly Scottish’ groups (a greater tendency to choose the Union Flag and a lesser tendency to choose Sport) are smaller. 22 Across the board, then, it seems that the expected relationship does not hold; a person’s sense of their own national identity makes little difference to their perceptions of the important symbols of British culture.
Because the results in the Table 4 may be affected by interactions between identity and other variables, we have controlled for age, sex, social class and education. 23 Does national identity still matter so little when this is done? Using binary logistic regression we modelled the effects of these variables and national identity on the choice of symbols. We discuss only the Beta coefficients for national identity that are given in the Appendix. 24 The figures given relate to the national identity effects remaining after controlling for the effects of education, social class, age and sex. In both countries state identity – placing an emphasis on being British – has very little systematic effect on how respondents rate ‘British’ symbols. People do not have to think of themselves as ‘British’ to rate ‘British’ symbols in a broadly similar way to other persons living in Britain. There are no statistically significant effects at all in England. In Scotland in the case of ‘British democracy’ and ‘British fair play’ there are significant differences. After controlling for education, social class, age and sex, those who say they are ‘only Scottish’ are less likely to choose these two symbols than those who are either ‘mainly Scottish’ or ‘equally Scottish and British’. With those exceptions, even if someone does not think of themselves as ‘British’ in any strong sense, they believe there are shared and important features associated with constitutional and institutional British symbols.
Symbols of English culture.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
Those who did not answer the question, or said ‘don’t know’ or ‘can’t choose’ have been excluded.
Comparing the ‘only or mainly English’ with those who say they are ‘only or mainly British’, the percentage choosing the national flag shows a sizeable and steady decline across the columns, a change that is also statistically significant. 26 The greater tendency of the ‘only or mainly English’ to choose the flag chimes well with the increasing visibility of the flag of St George at sporting events. The only or mainly British are also more likely to choose English music and arts; we return to this below. However, the three groups do reflect considerable consensus among the English about the importance to English culture of the various symbols regardless of national identity.
We have again controlled for age, sex, social class and education. The conclusion that national identity has little effect is sharpened. Only one strong national identity effect persists (the relevant figures are again given in the Appendix). The more ‘English’ the respondents are, the more they see the flag of St George as important to English culture. There is a steady gradient through the identity groups with some level of significance for each identity group.
Symbols of Scottish culture.*
The figures given first are the percentage of respondents mentioning the item as one of their two choices; those in brackets are the ranking within the column.
The logistic regression broadly confirms the above findings. 29 The groups with some element of being British in their identity are less likely to see the Saltire as important to Scottish culture. Thus in both Scotland and England seeing the ‘national’ flag as important is associated with a stronger sense of being national. There is a modest tendency for the more British to choose a sense of equality as important to Scottish culture but it is only statistically significant among the ‘equally Scottish and British’ group and there is no clear gradient. A clearer gradient is found with regard to landscape but again the effect is only significant in the ‘equally Scottish and British’ group. There is also a propensity, only significant in the same group, for those Scots who include some sense of being British in their identity to downplay the importance of language.
One finding shown in the full models is worthy of special mention. They show that in England, music and arts are clearly and significantly associated with levels of education. As the level of education increases up to those with degrees, music and arts are regarded as more important symbols of English culture. There is a similar, but very shallow gradient, in Scotland only statistically significant at degree level. In contrast there are effects by social class in Scotland that are considerably weaker in England. In neither society is national identity a factor. In England seeing music and arts as important symbols is then a matter of social status, a characteristic of a particular social group, the educated, whereas in Scotland the importance of music and arts is more widely shared although class effects do exist.
Perceptions of national symbols: Cultural or political
We included in the surveys two questions that asked respondents whether being English or Scottish was a cultural or political aspect of the various symbols. This question differs from those we have so far discussed. The emphasis is now on how respondents themselves saw the symbols of the nation. The question asked English respondents: Some people say that being English is mainly about England’s countryside and music, English sporting teams, English language and literature and so on. Others say that being English is mainly about, for example, the way England is governed, the Westminster Parliament, and how England runs its affairs. Whereabouts would you put yourself on a scale between these two positions?
An equivalent question was asked of Scottish respondents. The scale ran between 1 and 7, where 1 is ‘cultural’ and 7 ‘political’. A follow-up question asked how important respondents thought cultural and political matters were. 30 Both English and Scots thought that cultural and political matters were very or quite important; respectively, 89 percent and 92 percent on cultural matters, and 72 percent and 65 percent on political matters, suggesting that they would have given serious thought to the previous question. The distributions on that scale are broadly similar, and most English and Scottish natives cluster around the mid-points (72 percent of English and 62 percent of Scots are at points 3, 4 or 5). While both means are on the cultural side of the mid-point (4.0), the English distribution is slightly more skewed towards the political end with a mean of 3.54 compared with 3.17 in Scotland. 31
If we relate respondents’ subjective position on the cultural–political scale to what they believe are the most important Scottish, English and British symbols, we find that differences exist but are relatively few. Those people in England who said that the monarchy and the flag are the most important symbols of British culture tend to be less ‘cultural’ in their personal outlook (a mean score of 3.41 on the monarchy, and 3.24 on the flag) than their equivalents in Scotland (respectively, 2.97 and 2.96). In Scotland it is those who choose ‘sense of fair play’ and ‘democracy’ who are less ‘cultural’ in their outlook (mean scores of 3.55 and 3.36 respectively) compared with 2.80 and 2.95 in England.
As regards national symbols, we see fairly modest differences. In England the flag is chosen as most important by the most ‘political’ by a very small margin (3.48) with an (English) sense of fair play coming a close second (3.39). In Scotland, a (Scottish) sense of equality is the most ‘political’ (3.56). This analysis of cultural–political dimensions suggests that, contrary to expectations, Scots do not take an overtly ‘political’ view of national or state symbols. Neither do the English take a straightforwardly ‘cultural’ view, preferring perhaps to see national identity as defined by its external institutional shape than its cultural substance (Condor, 2010).
Conclusion
The data we present in this article give us, for the first time, a good comparative sense of how people in England and Scotland, and those in the two countries with greater and less attachment to a ‘national’ as opposed to a state identity, rate the importance of a broad range of national and state symbols in a period of constitutional change, past and continuing.
The decline in British self-identification in recent years in Scotland as well as in England is well-documented (Bechhofer and McCrone, 2008), and in the absence of data it is easy to believe that this has an effect on the importance people attach to symbols of national culture. Indeed, there is a long and valuable tradition in sociology of showing that what is taken for granted often turns out not to be the case (Lazarsfeld, 1949). It would seem ‘obvious’, for example, to think that English and Scottish people would differ in the way they rank state and national symbols, and especially that national identity would be an important discriminator. 32 Some British politicians, for example, believe that emphasizing British symbols will halt or reverse what they see as the decline in ‘Britishness’ 33 and in turn strengthen the British state. Our research reported here, however, shows that this is misguided; the importance both the English and the Scots attach to symbols of British culture is not associated with their own self-identification. People are well able to identify such state symbols even though fewer than ever identify with them, that is, choose to say they themselves are British. The finding that people rate symbols of British culture independently of their own national identity is reinforced when we model specific symbols of British culture; people’s own national identity is, by and large, unimportant when it comes to choosing which British symbols are important.
Even more striking is that we find a similar picture for symbols of national, rather than state, identity. Again, in the absence of data it would seem obvious that self-described national identity must be related to how people rate symbols of English and Scottish cultures. This is not so either. Our data show, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, that both national and state symbols are mainly judged independently of respondents’ own national identity.
It is the symbolic content of Britishness that is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of our work. Both the Scots and the English have no difficulty assessing British symbolism and they do it in very similar ways. The political theorist Bernard Crick once observed that ‘in Scotland, Britishness … has a far narrower if strong political sense of recent common history, parliamentary government, constitutional law, and the crown as an abstract symbol of unity’ (2010: 12). Our research shows that this is a shared and common conception of being British among the English also. Our data further show that ‘Britain’ remains an important and meaningful frame of reference, even though more and more people in England and Scotland do not define their national identity primarily as British. If then they choose not to define themselves as British, this is a positive decision, not because they think Britishness is an empty concept lacking content or meaning. Being British does have content and meaning in terms of important symbols of British culture that are widely and normatively held. Furthermore, in both countries it takes an institutional and constitutional form: the institutions of democracy and a (constitutional) monarchy together with a sense of fair play, rather than a narrowly ‘cultural’ form, associated with orthodox icons of flag and anthem.
What are the implications of our findings for the constitutional future of the British state? On the one hand, the fact that even if people do not think of themselves as ‘British’ in any strong sense, they are still able to identify shared and important symbols of British culture might be taken to indicate that the idea of being British is fairly secure. Agreement on the symbolic meaning of Britishness, however, only points to the strength of the concept rather than an attachment to the reality of the British state. Such symbols are almost certainly less important in sustaining the British state than broader economic and political factors. This view is strengthened both because there is dissociation between people’s own sense of national identity and what they see as the important British symbols, and because they are seen rather more in cultural rather than political terms. As political events unfold over the next few years, notably a referendum on Scottish independence during the lifetime of the present Scottish government, we are likely to hear much more than hitherto about what it means to be British, as well as Scottish, and even English. Whatever their stance on constitutional change, politicians would be well advised to take account of what scholarship has discovered about these issues rather than what they may believe to be the case. To coin a phrase, if one wishes to change the (constitutional) world, first it is necessary to understand it, and above all, the identity terms and symbols which are part of our common currency.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The article is the product of a collegiate form of working in which the data, the analysis and the drafts have been discussed by both authors throughout, and they are equally responsible for it. The authors are grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for supporting their research since 1999, and in particular for their most recent grant enabling them to commission the National and the Scottish Centre for Social Research to ask the questions in the 2006 surveys. We are also grateful to Lindsay Paterson for his generosity with statistical expertise, and to Michael Rosie, as well as to three anonymous referees for very helpful and insightful comments on an earlier version.