English nationalism – a peculiar thing?

It has been common to query English nationalism, even to deny it. Certainly the term sounds odd in English ears. Other nations have nationalism; the English, it has been conventional to say, have patriotism, royalism, jingoism, imperialism – but they do not know nationalism.

This disavowal has been matched, not unnaturally, by scholarly neglect of the subject. If there is no such thing as English nationalism, why bother to study it? Scholars are also human beings, members of cultures and national communities. If a culture denies nationalism, shows a marked indifference even to questions of national identity, it would be eccentric on the part of a scholar or intellectual to devote much time to their investigation. At most one notes the absence of nationalism, then moves on to more important matters. In his trawl through the periodical literature on nationalism written since 1972, Gerald Newman came up with two essays ‘in rather obscure journals’ dealing with English or British nationalism; for German or Irish nationalism there were more than seventy items apiece (Newman 1987: xviii). So far as books are concerned, there are a number of older volumes on patriotism, and some on ‘the English character’, but beyond that, especially in the recent period, virtually nothing. Indeed it has been common to remark that until recently there was, in the whole literature on nationalism, only one contribution that dealt squarely with the issue of English nationalism: a short article by Hans Kohn published in 1940.