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Pilgrim, priest and ponderer. European living in North East England. Retired parish priest, theological educator, cathedral precentor and dean.

Monday 27 November 2017

Am I Being Unpatriotic?

Dear Michael, I begin to feel that your negativity is bordering on the unpatriotic! Don't you think that our leaders deserve our support?

That was an intriguing tweet to receive yesterday, not as a personal message but publicly. She (it was from someone I know) was responding to a tweet I'd posted that contained a link to an article in The Guardian. It was lamenting our political leaders' lack of imagination and sense of history in their handling of the Brexit negotiations, specifically the matter of the Irish border.

In the two years I've been blogging about the EU, I've been accused of many things: being intemperate, ignorant, theologically inept (yes!), and over-confident about being a Remainer. But this is the first time my patriotism has been called into question (though it's a common jibe from people who should know better that Europhiles collectively are not acting patriotically).

So let's go there. First, we need to disentangle patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism means a love of and loyalty to your homeland. In Roman thought, you owe your homeland that much simply because it bore you and nurtured you. It's an act of piety (pietas) to acknowledge your debt to the people and institutions that have formed you. This is not at all the same as saying that your homeland is better than anyone else's. It's simply yours. It's part of your identity as a human being. That's why it's precious to you. At its best, patriotism is a virtue that is liberal, humane, peaceable and beneficent.

Nationalism is different. "Hard" nationalisms survive and flourish because of an innate conviction that somehow, your nation is superior to others. This can be on the grounds of almost anything you care to name, your proud history for example, or your race, religion, intellectual enlightenment, military prowess or wealth. "Soft" nationalisms are more subtle, and not always conscious. But they are expressed by aims and behaviours such as pursuing political or economic purposes that benefit your own nation in preference to, or at the expense of, others. This tends to foster national autonomy and self-determination, where the good of a nation state is no longer understood in the setting of the wider human family. It's hard not to think that agressive flag-waving, hostility to immigrants and rigorous border controls encourage a kind of national egoism that owes more to a romantic notion of "blood and soil" than to a rational idea of what it means to be good citizens.ii

I've often written about my late mother's side of our family. She was a German Jewess who escaped from the Third Reich before the war and was welcomed as a refugee in the UK. She settled here permanently, married my (gentile) father and wanted nothing else than to live out her days in domestic tranquility. She absorbed British ways, learned to speak English free of any German accent, brought her children up to love this country as the civilised, generous nation she had found it to be when she needed rescuing. She became, I think it's fair to say, a patriotic British citizen (she would never have said "English") and encouraged us to be the same. But her keenly attuned antennae abhorred the slightest whiff of self-regarding nationalism. She was a citizen of the world and of her continent, and for this reason was appalled that her adopted country opted to leave the EU just before she died.

For me, this is the nub of Brexit. What was the patriotic thing to do when we voted in last year's Referendum? Part of the answer is surely, to think about what would be in our country's best interests, what would enable it to flourish in the future. I'm sure that most people voted in that way, whether they were Brexiters or Remainers.

But patriotism (precisely because it is not nationalism) doesn't restrict that question only to "what's best for Britain" (to quote the tiresome rhetoric of David Cameron when he tried to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU). It asks how the welfare of our nation sits alongside the welfare of all the nations and of the world as a whole. It plays with the conjecture that what's best for Britain in the long run will also turn out to be best not only for Europe but for the worldwide human family. What if we even entertained the thought that we should start at the other end of the question, so to speak, and begin by asking what's best for others, especially those a lot less privileged than we are? I want to say that that option, too, is a patriotic one because it sees flourishing as mutual. We only prosper in any profound sense when everyone else does as well. It's what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. That Golden Rule should have been right at the heart of the Referendum debate. It grieved me that it wasn't.

So I see patriotism as inextricably linked to our belonging, our citizenship, not only in a national sense but in a global one. Patriotism is certainly not less than loving your country (and why not also your region, your locality, the city, town or village where you live?). If wherever we call "home" is important to us, then we should love it and everyone else whose home it also is. But belonging has concentric circles. I love my European homeland and am proud to carry a passport that announces me to be an EU citizen as well as a British one. I love the planet I have been born on, so broken and divided and carrying infinite burdens of pain, yet for all that still full of beauty and goodness, so rich in the diversity of its peoples with whom it's a joyful mystery of life that we share this globe together. Theresa May was quite wrong to say that if you are a citizen of everywhere, "a citizen of the world", you are a citizen of nowhere. Patriotism means we can be glad and grateful to be citizens of many different "somewheres", all of which we can be loyal to and love, whether it's the world we live in, the nation of our origins, or the particular place that we call "home".

This is why I believe that my vote to remain in the EU was profoundly patriotic. A patriotism for today means that we must continue to strive for a peaceable commonwealth of nations and peoples that transcends national boundaries, in which our own flourishing is part of everyone else's. So was it "bordering on the unpatriotic" to question the leadership of those who are trying to negotiate a Brexit settlement with the EU? I don't think so. A grown-up democracy doesn't blindly follow its leaders, least of all when it fears it may be heading for disaster. Yes, there is a loyalty to democratic choices that is required of all citizens, whether it is the outcome of a referendum or the government we have elected.

But it can never be an uncritical loyalty. To go on questioning, exploring, doubting, challenging, being open to change in the light of new evidence or arguments - these are both the privileges and duties of all of us in a democratic society. When it comes to Brexit, the national conversation was not suddenly closed off on 23 June 2016. On the contrary, each new step forward requires that conversation to be shifted and reconfigured in the light of altered circumstances or newly understood realities. It's patriotic to want the best out of each iteration. And it would be patriotic as well as democratic if, in the light of circumstances, we decided as a nation to change our minds about Brexit. (The "will of the people" refrain trotted out by some of our elected members including many who voted Remain doesn't advance intelligent discourse in any way that I can see.)

So you can call me a member of Her Majesty's loyal "Brexit Opposition" if you like. A twenty-first century recusant even, as Tony Dickinson suggested in response to the first version of this blog. For I believe that it's not only allowable but positively necessary to monitor how such a major decision is being worked out in practice, interrogate it closely, scrutinise the performance of those who are steering it so that we can hold them to account. If I say that I just don't believe that the case has been made for Brexit, and that this year has felt like a catalogue of mistakes, unintended consequences and muddled aims, is that unpatriotic? Not if it's said out of a genuine care for the welfare of my nation. On the contrary, maybe it's those who won't engage any further in the Brexit conversation who don't care enough about what happens to our nation.

I don't accuse the good person (whose tweet started this whole thing off) of not caring. Far from it. But I did think I needed to explain myself and defend what I want to describe as a liberal global patriotism. In these times, we have to learn to construe patriotism in the largest, most international way we can. Our world is simply too small for any of us to imagine that supposedly sacrosanct national borders can still define the limits of our concern. We urgently need to cultivate a good patriotism if all life on the planet is going to be respected and conserved. Nations and peoples need to act together to solve the world’s problems. In partnerships, we can achieve vastly more than we ever can on our own.

As I see it, Brexit is propelling the nation in completely the wrong direction, towards isolationism and disintegration. That’s dangerous. It’s not unpatriotic to say so.

2 comments:

  1. Somehow, most of us find the Brexit topic now has become totally boring. It has dominated the political agenda for so long, with the constant nagging and back biting between politicians and the carping of the media. In a sense, while I am concerned about the future, I am just wishing that it was all over, one way or another.

    Yes, it's an important issue, which will shape the future of the UK and in many ways, Ireland for the forseeable future, but there is no sense of historic events, as the rhetoric and divisive nature of the wrangling between us in the UK and Europe and with Ireland in particular makes it sound more like a spiteful argument between neighbors.

    I don't believe for one moment that you are talking down the country, you are expressing your views as a convinced European, and probably many, even those who voted out, will agree with the points that you are making - but it all gets lost in the noise that comes out of the political wrangling which is putting so many of us off.

    There are many (in my view) issues that Brexit is masking, particularly the wars that continue to be waged globally and the suffering that entails, which receive scant attention in the media. Our support of the Saudi regime's actions in the Yemen for one. The ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq and how that will pan out, particularly as the Syrian leader, looks likely to continue in power, despite the war crimes committed in his name.

    Than we have Climate Change, with a US President being a denier and doing his best to wreck the good hard work, done over so many years by many concerned about the damage to our planet and even the future of the human race. Climate change is already damaging the environment in places where the least able to deal with it live, and this will continue, unless we get a grip, Arguably, we could do this better within a United Europe, but Brexit is causing more division, particularly in those countries that were formerly considered to be strong advocates of protecting the environment.

    And domestically, we are increasingly divided. Before Brexit, this was perhaps masked, but an undercurrent of resentment between the 'haves and have nots' but is now increasingly evident when Austerity and Nationalism is driving wedges even in the wealthier communities, where I live, we have increasing deprivation and people being excluded from social care, youth services due to cuts in local authority services, and a crisis in health services, which is a national scandal.

    This disaffection is weaponising the disaffection leading to internal and external radicalisation to terrorism or the sort of activities we're seeing from the right wing, groups, who see an opportunity to vent their spite on society, whether we want it or not.

    These issues existed before Brexit and we should have dealt wit them before we went down the suicide route of Brexit, but no politician, had the moral courage to face them, and it seems, still do not.

    Where is the Church's prophetic voice? A bit like 'crying in the wilderness' perhaps.
    For all of the good intentions of the Bishops and other Church Leaders, their voices are drowned out by the political noise.

    Time for it to become a radical voice to call for change to the social and divisions in our society to be dealt with, before we go down the route of creating further division, which is already so evident in the life of our country.

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  2. "Don't you think that our leaders deserve our support?" Not when they have allowed internal party politics to sour and sharply divide our national life, to compound a latent (albeit minority) little island xenophobia that makes us a laughing stock among our near neighbours. Is this not part of what inspired the Old Testament prophets to speak out against the promotion of national and ethnic self-interest when the needs of the poor, the stranger, and 'neighbours' were put on the back burner? That peace in Norther Ireland could yet unravel is unthinkable. I am so relieved to have dual citizenship with another European state. I am so uncomfortable that the leadership of the Church of England is being so silent at such a critical time - but that takes us back to another form of preoccupation with self-interest!

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