Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity.pdfVIP

Published in Social Identities Vol 1. No. 1 1995, 35−62. Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity: The British Case ROBIN COHEN This article is concerned with the historical, social and political construction of a British identity the nature and contours of which are exceptionally difficult to analyse. The impenetrability of a specifically British (as opposed, for example, to an English) identity confronts us at many turns, and may indeed constitute one of its intrinsic elements. A good example of the opacity of my subject-matter is shown by the recognition of no less than six categories of British nationality in Acts passed during the 1980s – British citizenship, British Dependent Territories citizenship, British Overseas citizenship, British Subject status, British Protected Person status and British National (Overseas) status. Multiplicity and obscurity at the legal level is paralleled by confusion at the level of public discussion and private belief. Any attempts at greater definition appear to be strongly resisted by dominant political actors. Perhaps concealment of such matters is deliberate, or at least functional? In his vehement critique of the ‘blanketing English fog’ that obscures ‘any social and historical reality’, Perry Anderson (1992: 31) advances just such a suggestion: The hegemony of the dominant bloc in England is not articulated in any systematic major ideology, but is rather diffused in a miasma of commonplace prejudices and taboos. . . . Traditionalism and empiricism henceforward fuse as a single legitimating system: traditionalism sanctions the present by deriving it from the past, empiricism binds the future by fastening it to the present. A comprehensive conservatism is the result, covering society with the pall of simultaneous philistinism (towards ideas) and