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    These Islands: A Letter to Britain
    These Islands: A Letter to Britain
    These Islands: A Letter to Britain
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    These Islands: A Letter to Britain

    By Ali M. Ansari

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    Following Brexit and the earlier referendum on Scottish independence, the debate about British identity has been given recent new prominence. Historically conceived to integrate conflicting nationalisms in an “ever more perfect union,” Britain has lately succumbed to particular resurgent nationalisms in a curious reversal of fortune.

    With These Islands, Ali M. Ansari considers the idea of Britain as a political entity. This idea of Britain considers some nationalists as suppressed minorities in need of attention, and others as bigoted throwbacks to a more divisive age. Arguing the case for Great Britain from the perspective of the political mythology of the British state—with an emphasis on culture, ideas and narrative constructions—Ansari makes the claim that Britain’s strength lies in its ability to shape the popular imagination, both at home and abroad. He concludes that an “excess of enthusiasm” may yet do untold damage to the fabric of a state and society that has been carefully constructed over the centuries and may not be easily repaired.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHaus Publishing
    Release dateSep 15, 2018
    ISBN9781912208142
    These Islands: A Letter to Britain

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      Book preview

      These Islands - Ali M. Ansari

      alone.

      Introduction

      Why me?

      A native of Iran and an historian of that country, I settled in the United Kingdom at the age of ten, from which time I developed an acute, if personal, appreciation of Britain. Born in Rome, educated in London, living and working in the Kingdom of Fife, I have long been comfortable with a multilayered identity that complements and informs. I self-identify as British-Iranian. This essay represents my first attempt to address the question(s) of the country of my adoption, and my view is of one who stands at the crossroads of cultures. I take encouragement, in this otherwise daunting task, from the fact that being on the ‘borderlands’ has not precluded others from presenting their assessments of their adopted countries,² nor indeed prevented many excellent histories of Iran from being written by Britons. To paraphrase Kipling, what should they know of Britain who only Britain know?

      Why do I write?³

      A few years back, in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence, I went to dinner at the house of some close friends. Inevitably the issue of the referendum was raised along with broader questions about the value or otherwise of the British state. All of us agreed that ‘Britain’ had problems, but I stressed that I still considered my greatest – most treasured – possession to be my British passport. It is still unclear to me who was more surprised: my colleagues, who reacted to my statement with a mixture of puzzlement and surprise, or myself, being nonplussed by my colleagues’ reaction. I quickly explained that the passport signified security and stability – a refuge, if you will, from an otherwise turbulent world – and that this in itself was an invaluable asset.

      There was a time when British ‘exceptionalism’ in this particular respect was widely acknowledged. Long before people got used to berating the British Empire, many applauded British stability, the ability of the people of these islands to govern and indeed regulate themselves with such skill and efficiency and the fact that they had established what appeared to be an organic political harmony that was the envy of their revolutionary neighbours. It may have been less interesting – even a tad boring – but who needed interesting when the consequences of revolution were so disruptive? So comfortable and confident had Britain become in its political skin that it in fact became a refuge for both those escaping persecution and turmoil and, with no hint of irony, to revolutionaries from other countries – the most famous perhaps being Karl Marx.

      The truth is that Britain has long been a refuge, even a sanctuary, for those fleeing persecution. Immigrants, and political refugees in particular, have long been part of the fabric of the British state and, one might add, the British sense of itself as the quintessentially ‘liberal’ state, both in its political definition and in terms of generosity of spirit. George Orwell considered the civilisation that characterised these islands as ‘gentle’ – a term that is ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation but is as good as any to convey the essence of a Britain that was comfortable, if not necessarily confident, in itself.⁴ It should come as no surprise that these immigrants have often had a more acute appreciation of that essence than those who are native born, for whom the contradictions are all too apparent and the failings all too real.⁵ Indeed, it is a fact that those who seek to define a community often come from its margins. It is at the political borders, the wider hinterland – the point of highest tension, if you will – that clarity can most easily be achieved, and is most enthusiastically

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