Introduction
Memory plays a central role in nation-states’ attempts to establish a sense of ontological security, by anchoring understandings of social reality and self-identity narratives ‘through the use of historical signposts and careful curating of select events, setbacks and triumphs, myths, and symbols’.Footnote 1 In Britain, hegemonic narrations of the Second World War (WW2) as ‘the good war’ in which government and people stood united, ‘heroic and stoic … in the face of evil’ comprise Britain’s foundational myth, underpinning liberal, militarised citizenship ideals.Footnote 2 However, other experiences have more anxious legacies. Since the late 20th century, the First World War (WW1) has often been mythologised negatively in British imaginaries, being associated with futility, horror, and recklessness.Footnote 3 The WW1 soldier with whom the war is associated is correspondingly portrayed in popular culture such as the film Oh! What a Lovely War and the Blackadder television series as the victim of a ‘pointless, bloody and badly led [war]’, providing a cautionary tale of state violence and folly.Footnote 4
While WW2 has generally eclipsed WW1 in official narratives, commemorations can refocus attention on difficult events, with competing myths having the potential to disrupt and reinforce different ideologies and identities. Scholars have investigated the discursive strategies employed by stakeholders to influence the ideological trajectory of commemorations, not least elite efforts to rehabilitate dissonant pasts and recast their associated subjectivities for contemporary political purposes through the curation and securitisation of memory in discourse.Footnote 5 However, this literature has not yet considered vicarious identity promotion as such a strategy, despite the concept’s recent theorisation in Ontological Security Studies (OSS).Footnote 6 To address this lacuna, this article draws together scholarship on ontological (in)security, vicarious identity, and military subjectivity, exploring militarised vicarious identity promotion as a strategy through which national custodians seek to make difficult pasts usable for contemporary purposes.
I explore this through the case of the British 2014–18 WW1 centenary commemorations. Although its importance was widely affirmed, the centenary generated contrasting anxieties: while left-leaning commentators worried that the commemorations might glorify WW1 for nationalistic purposes, conservatives expressed concerns that political correctness might preclude sufficient celebration of righteous national triumph.Footnote 7 Recognising these sensitivities, the British government claimed neutrality, framing the centenary as an opportunity for remembrance and to ‘[say] something about who we are’.Footnote 8 While welcoming the opportunity to challenge the negative mythology’s oversimplifications and promote more nuanced interpretations, historians recognised that contemporary sensibilities might trump historical fidelity.Footnote 9 McCartney identified three aspects of WW1’s place in contemporary British culture that might perpetuate negative perceptions of the war. First was the tendency of genealogy (a popular method of public engagement with WW1) to promote an ‘empathetic individualized approach to family history’, emphasising the WW1 soldier’s non-agentic victimhood. Second, growing public interest in war’s ‘psychological costs’ had further solidified this WW1 ‘soldier-victim’ image. Finally, this image was central in efforts to distance modern veterans from Britain’s unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially through remembrance discourses linking these wars to WW1, thereby reinforcing the WW1 soldier-victim image. In this context, McCartney warned that the centenary may reinforce the negative mythology’s depiction of WW1 personnel as ‘brave but powerless victim[s]’.Footnote 10
In this article, I argue that the centenary gave rise to a very different narrative, not least due to the efforts of the Royal British Legion (RBL) to counter WW1’s negative mythology. As Britain’s largest veterans’ charity and ‘national custodian of remembrance’, founded after WW1 with close ties to the British state, the RBL is invested in the narration of both WW1 and modern veterans. Moreover, given the centenary’s political sensitivities, the RBL’s familiar place in national life – especially its annual Poppy Appeal raising money for veteran welfare – combined with its public image as ‘apolitical’ and trustworthy, made it one of the most influential centenary stakeholders.Footnote 11
Contrary to McCartney’s concerns that genealogy and remembrance might reinforce WW1’s ‘negative’ mythology, through a discourse analysis of its flagship ‘LIVE ON’ and ‘Every One Remembered’ centenary campaigns, I show how RBL efforts at militarised vicarious identity promotion used both phenomena to promote revisionist centenary engagement aligned with its contemporary priorities. Significantly, despite remembrance’s historic association with WW1 and victimhood, the centenary followed a period when remembrance was reframed in ebullient terms through increasingly homogenising discourses of heroic sacrifice blurring together Britain’s wars but centred on WW2, promoted as an avenue for public re-engagement with militarised nationalism; it also coincided with RBL attempts to challenge public perceptions of modern veterans as victims. Facing a centenary that might undermine these priorities and generate national ontological insecurity by prompting critical reflection on British militarism informed by WW1’s negative mythology, RBL initiatives used vicarious frames to rehabilitate WW1 soldiers as heroes of a worthy conflict by reincorporating them into discourses of heroic sacrifice. This was reinforced by campaigns deliberately stimulating anxieties regarding civilians’ debt to military personnel and the symbolic mortality of the dead, while encouraging subjects to vicariously identify with military ancestors or other ‘adopted’ connections to reinforce their own ontological security. Subjects were encouraged to take pride in their ancestors’ participation, cultivating vicarious military subjectivity by integrating the nation’s military history into their personal biographies, thus providing emotional reinforcement for identification with the RBL’s militarised revisionism.Footnote 12
Beyond offering a novel conceptual framework providing insights into the politics of memory and ontological security during Britain’s WW1 centenary, the article makes two further contributions. First, it develops nascent International Relations (IR) scholarship on vicarious identity by highlighting the vicarious politics of ‘symbolic immortality’ as a driving force behind commemoration. Moreover, whereas existing studies have predominantly focused on vicarious identification with/between nation-states,Footnote 13 I broaden this agenda by exploring the family as a complementary object of vicarious identity, thus answering recent calls for IR theorists to re-examine kinship relations.Footnote 14 Second, while primarily focusing on vicarious identity promotion, the article suggests why such efforts resonated by developing work on military subjectivity.Footnote 15 This scholarship shows how war commemoration calls upon citizens to participate in ‘communities of feeling’ situated around hyper-personalised frames promoting public support for the military by emphasising the good citizenship of individual personnel and the emotional needs of their families.Footnote 16 While enabling feelings of belonging, commemorations also reaffirm militarised citizenship hierarchies by deliberately activating ‘civilian anxiety’ that one is failing to live up to social expectations by not undertaking military service.Footnote 17 By highlighting how civilians are increasingly encouraged to develop a personal military backstory, however, I argue that vicarious military subjectivity constitutes an alternative strategy for mitigating civilian anxiety – one blurring civilian–military boundaries by signifying that subjects have already ‘done their bit’ by virtue of personal connections.
The article begins by theoretically explicating vicarious identity promotion and the politics of commemoration, before using this framework to make sense of WW1’s changing role in British discourse. I then theoretically parse the strategies used by the RBL to promote militarised centenary engagement. The subsequent sections explore how contemporary imperatives drove efforts to rehabilitate the image of WW1 and modern military personnel, analysing how ‘Every One Remembered’ promoted vicarious military subjectivity. I conclude by highlighting some ethical implications of militarised vicarious identity promotion and directions for future research.
Vicarious identity and the politics of commemoration
This article explores the role of vicarious identity promotion in national custodians’ efforts to encourage militarised public engagement with the WW1 centenary. ‘Vicarious identity’ refers to ‘the appropriation of an other’s identity, experiences and actions as if they were one’s own’ – a phenomenon visible when sports fans claim ‘we won’ when their team triumphs, or when parents are perceived as ‘living through’ their children.Footnote 18 It is also central to (inter)national politics, with nation-states being constituted by bonds of ‘we’ feeling involving ‘identity fusion’.Footnote 19 ‘Vicarious identification’ – conscious and non-conscious ‘attempts to establish and legitimize a vicarious identity’ – is often indicated in discourse by the use of first-person pronouns (e.g. ‘I’, ‘we’) when describing others’ actions. However, it is also traceable in (auto)biographical narratives and routines emphasising ‘shared home, culture, community, history and parallel/equivalent experiences’, expressions of ‘detailed knowledge [and] … emotion’ signifying commitment to a vicarious identity and the invocation of familial ties.Footnote 20
Recent scholarship has theorised vicarious identity as a strategy for reinforcing a sense of ontological security. OSS scholars hold that to avoid being overwhelmed by existential anxieties – encompassing mortality and broader questions of (non-)being including existential meaning and social judgements about subjects’ relative moral standingFootnote 21 – subjects at different levels (e.g. individuals, nation-states) strive to establish a ‘sense of presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and … continuous person’.Footnote 22 This involves articulating (auto)biographical narratives and routines which locate the subject in time and space and provide a stable sense of self-identity and agency.Footnote 23 Subjects seek to have that ‘self recognized and affirmed by others’ through identification with intersubjective frameworks of reality.Footnote 24 By ‘bracket[ing] out questions about ourselves, others and the object-world’, these allow for a sense of social meaning, purpose, and self-esteem.Footnote 25
Because ontological security is intersubjective, societies engage in vicarious identity promotion, encouraging subjects to articulate their subjectivity through identification with pre-existing discourses and collectives, including the family and nation-state. Vicarious identification with nation-states is viewed as offering several ontological security resources. First, nationalism offers an ontological framework, condensing complex events into homogenising, easily communicable shorthand mythologies ‘convey[ing] a picture of security, stability, and simple answers’ and providing a moral framework conducive to pursuing full subjectivity and social discipline.Footnote 26 As Tarver notes, by subjecting themselves to a group, ‘individuals both subordinate themselves to a discipline and, by virtue of it, achieve a sense of their own identities’. Beyond cultivating fictive kinship among citizens, subjectivisation allows subjects to hierarchically distinguish themselves from other members through competition for social status around cherished signifiers (e.g. patriotism).Footnote 27 Second, ‘living through the achievements of the broader community’ (e.g. past military victories) allows subjects to ‘bask in reflected glory’, bolstering ontological security especially when subjects perceive their own subjectivity as lacking.Footnote 28 Finally, vicarious identification offers subjects ‘symbolic immortality’ – ‘the promise … of cheating death by contributing to and living on through the group even after one has worldly departed’.Footnote 29
While such frameworks help manage anxiety, its existential character means that all subjects and communities face periodic challenges to their ontological security. They can experience shame if their actions undermine self-identity claims or are negatively appraised by others.Footnote 30 Anxiety can also arise from crises such as natural or human-made disasters impinging on settled understandings of ourselves, others, and the world. Giddens argues that due to the ‘extreme dynamism’ facilitated by technological advances and globalised interconnection, ‘crises become endemic’ and apocalyptic in scope in late modernity – e.g. mass war.Footnote 31 The anxiety unleashed by crises is also shaped by late modernity’s particular configuration. First, unlike the religious frameworks upon which people previously depended for ontological security, which tamed death by promising heavenly salvation in return for good conduct, the nation-state that supplanted God as the ultimate sovereign is limited to pledging national resilience. Thus, rather than salvation, in late modernity mortality represents the anxious spectre of non-being. This is exacerbated by death’s ‘sequestration’ from social settings to mask the limits of state power – limits that are laid bare by mass death events.Footnote 32 Second, whereas tradition previously largely determined subjects’ social status, late modernity is characterised by neoliberal individualisation, with ‘enterprising selves’ compelled by the market-state to cultivate their own personal ‘brands’.Footnote 33 While late modern societies enforce social codes, then, they offer little existential guidance for navigating late modernity’s ‘morally arid environment’.Footnote 34 This can generate disorientation, dread, boredom, and desires for catharsis, with ontological security-seeking becoming increasingly fragmented.Footnote 35
Political actors are deeply invested in the management of such anxieties. While the nation-state is reliant upon channelling anxiety to promote social discipline, elites often fear the disruptive potential of ‘mass emotion’ and ‘emotional contagion’ unleashed by crises because anxiety may exceed elite control when it becomes a ‘public mood’.Footnote 36 Concerns that anxiety may undermine social cohesion or that political rivals may opportunistically fill the discursive vacuum prompt ‘elite, top-down efforts to prevent its outbreak, quarantine and calm its perceived fires, or direct its force towards desired targets’.Footnote 37 Such efforts typically promote national ontological security by ‘naming affect as emotion’, thus framing the range of appropriate responses.Footnote 38 Indeed, elites can experience public pressure to provide leadership during crises, with anxious moods providing enabling conditions for political strategies such as securitisation, which resonates because of its ability to transpose anxiety into fear of tangible threats.Footnote 39
Another important strategy in the context of mass death events is the promotion of symbolic immortality. Although the nation-state is unable to secure its citizens against death (and may compel mortal sacrifice in war) or replicate religion’s promise of eternal salvation, as Abulof argues, the promise of symbolic immortality can assuage death anxieties by transposing individual anxieties into collective ones, with the nation-state’s will to immortality standing in for individuals’ own unrealisable desire to endure.Footnote 40 This entails public commemoration of the dead, which effaces the limits of state power through performances of collective remembrance.Footnote 41 Of course, because symbolic immortality depends upon the living sustaining the legacy of the dead, it is inherently political, raising questions of who is remembered and how. Wars generate multiple emotions (e.g. grief, trauma, pride, anger) and divergent commemorative attempts to make sense of loss, including some dissonant with ‘official’ narrations. To tame the disruptive potential of dissonant narratives, elites promote public engagement with discourses and rituals that manage anxieties and grief through collective commemoration focused on national sacrifice. Such frameworks operate through homogenising and depoliticising commemorative vernaculars, framing mortal sacrifice for the nation – and commemoration upholding symbolic immortality – as virtuous, while being polysemic enough to provide catharsis for/neutralise broader sentiments.Footnote 42 Thus, national custodians use commemoration to reinvigorate national vicarious identification through renewed mythologising and performances of state-sanctioned emotion.
While anxieties unleashed by crises can temporarily sustain the hegemony of national commemorative discourses and marginalise dissenting views, their discursive resonance and emotional sensitivity may decline as anxiety dissipates and the discourse’s original referent generation (often most emotionally invested in it due to their lived experience) passes away.Footnote 43 Moreover, successor generations may revise the historical record in light of subsequent events and changing social norms. As Steele notes, past actions that are a source of pride for some – e.g. war, empire – can lead others to ‘feel ashamed of the actions of their in-group even when they personally were not responsible for those actions’ when they undermine self-identity narratives, leading to the emergence of revisionist mythologies challenging ‘official’ ontological security narratives.Footnote 44 Accordingly, commemorations can become flashpoints for the anxious contestation of disputed historical events and figures at the heart of the shared national symbolic order.Footnote 45
The First World War and British war commemoration in perspective
These dynamics are visible in WW1’s changing place in the British national imagination. British culture has frequently mythologised WW1 negatively, emphasising its futility, horror, and hapless generals’ betrayal of the brave British ‘Tommy’ soldier. While divisive from the outset, however, the war was contemporaneously sustained by the widespread belief that the sacrifices entailed were just and necessary. Moreover, as the war’s human toll mounted, honouring the dead’s sacrifice became a key justification for its continuation.Footnote 46 Famously, John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ implored Britons to persevere with the war to uphold the symbolic immortality of the dead: the war must be won because so many lives had already been lost.Footnote 47 Rather than the deaths themselves, anxiety centred on the possibility that without victory, those deaths may lack meaning.
Similar logics were central to post-war commemorative culture, becoming hegemonic because they addressed multiple personal and political challenges arising from a conflict involving the mass mobilisation of a force from a wider social demographic than Britain’s previous wars and resulting in the deaths of 1.1 million British Empire personnel. The widespread bereavement and grief that this generated, coupled with Britain’s nascent democratisation during this period, led to unprecedented calls for the repatriation of the dead to facilitate individualised commemoration, reflecting the population’s increasingly diverse preferences.Footnote 48 While refusing these calls for reasons of cost, equality, and taste, the British government took their underlying sentiments seriously, particularly in the context of the social transformation and disorder that were generated by the war at home and abroad, with the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and the 1917 Russian Revolution looming large in policymakers’ minds. Against this backdrop, political elites became increasingly anxious about the collective emotions generated by the war, including the potential for grief and fragmented commemoration to induce social paralysis or be instrumentalised by political opponents to upend the existing social order through calls for change and revolution.Footnote 49
Such concerns prompted official efforts to channel the diverse emotional responses to WW1 through a unifying commemorative framework emphasising patriotic sacrifice for future peace.Footnote 50 While the war’s end and the Armistice’s anniversary were marked by military parades catering to the desires of government and many veterans to celebrate victory, it was memorialisation of the dead, including the Cenotaph, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, and the Two Minutes’ Silence, that resonated most with the public mood, providing sites of pilgrimage for the bereaved and rituals for the communal recognition of loss; they also transposed anxiety by making death meaningful while being simple enough to incorporate multiple sentiments.Footnote 51 Moreover, by sanctifying sacrifice and sequestering death through annual rituals promoting a return to the pre-war status quo the rest of the year, commemoration assuaged official concerns about order and the willingness of subjects to make future sacrifices.Footnote 52 And while some Cabinet members ‘perceived a tension between marking Britain’s victory and mourning her dead, with the risk that the latter might obscure the former’, the perception that remembrance discourse ‘[consoled] those bereaved by the war’ made questioning the war’s validity effectively taboo for several decades.Footnote 53
Significantly, remembrance’s dominant association with the dead occurred in the context of the growing need of the living. Despite being promised ‘homes fit for heroes’ by the government, veteran welfare was largely delegated to the numerous charities formed during the war. By 1921, this improvised social safety net was under significant strain against the background of economic recession, high veteran unemployment, and a shortfall in state welfare provision. Some veterans even disrupted the Cenotaph commemorations, protesting ‘perpetual homage to the dead veteran when surviving ones were receiving such little help’.Footnote 54 This context prompted the formation of the British Legion in the same year to provide veteran welfare and avert demands for social change by unifying veterans of different classes in one organisation ‘[inculcating] a sense of loyalty to the Crown, Community, State and Nation’.Footnote 55 Inspired by McCrae’s poem, the Legion sold red silk poppies as symbols of remembrance for British forces to raise funds for veterans and their families. The Legion subsequently became the ‘national custodian of remembrance’ (a key ontological security arbiter), with its annual Poppy Appeal reminding the public of its existential debt to soldiers and keeping ‘alive’ the memory of the dead and the living – a function that continues today.Footnote 56
Although WW1-era commemorative culture was subsequently extended to reflect WW2 (perhaps suggesting the equivalence of the wars), the wars soon diverged in the collective imagination. As McLeod and Inall argue, ‘the political relevance of remembering the “war to end all wars” was undermined by the renewal of conflict between 1939 and 1945’.Footnote 57 By contrast, from the 1950s onwards, a stream of ebullient cultural outputs cast WW2 as ‘the good war’ and the foundational experience of contemporary ‘Britishness’.Footnote 58 Concurrently, the passing of the generations that had experienced and depended upon affirmative narrations of WW1 meant that by the 1970s, subsequent generations inherited a commemorative framework whose emphasis on death contributed to WW1’s cultural association with waste and trauma becoming dominant.Footnote 59
The ‘memory boom’ of the late 1980s saw renewed public interest in WW1 commemoration and family history.Footnote 60 Driving this trend, Todman argues, was ‘the rapid pace of change’ of the modern world which led people ‘to seek stability and an affirmation of identity in the past’ by establishing ‘an imaginative connection with past people or events – particularly with members of our own families – [which] allows us to tell ourselves powerful stories about who we are and reinforce our sense of self’.Footnote 61 Thus, ontological insecurity generated a desire for vicarious identification with ancestors (a dynamic I return to later). But what stories did subjects tell about their ancestors, WW1, and themselves? The fascination with death during this period was motivated, Todman argues, by subjects seeking a meaningful connection with history: ‘Looking back on a century that seems particularly full of violence and tragedy, do we perhaps want a violent, tragic event in our own past? Is this a way to seek entry to a global community of suffering?’Footnote 62 Importantly, while ancestral links with WW1 offered subjects ‘a chance to participate in the national heritage’ and experience vicarious pride, for many Britons seeking to understand their place in modernity, an ancestral loss read through WW1’s negative mythology provided a cautionary tale of the violence that the liberal state could subject its own citizens to. Such readings, McCartney notes, were reinforced by the burgeoning family-history industry in the 21st century to foster emotional engagements with military ancestors.Footnote 63
While remembrance experienced renewed popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, practices such as the silence and poppy-wearing assumed more individualised meanings in the absence of imperatives for national unification.Footnote 64 And although the practices themselves remained associated with WW1, for younger generations the linguistic signifiers of remembrance discourse relating to ‘sacrifice’ in the name of ‘freedom’ were increasingly associated with WW2.
British war commemoration during the war on terror
From 2001, the RBL assumed renewed relevance in the context of Britain’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Veterans and their families again required material support in the context of a perceived government shortfall in welfare provision.Footnote 65 But the smaller demographic of Britons affected directly by the wars, coupled with the conflicts’ unpopularity, generated significant elite anxiety around the possibility of a public failure to rally behind the military, thus prompting intensive efforts to promote support for ‘the troops’. These worked to discursively distance the armed forces from the conflicts through their sympathetic portrayal as heroic victims of misguided wars and political ineptitude.Footnote 66 They also emphasised that the burden of Britain’s safety was borne by a broader armed forces community, including ‘military families’, urging public support for those who had not themselves chosen war.Footnote 67
Absolving the military of responsibility by emphasising their passive victimhood, as McCartney argues, proved highly effective in bypassing war critics, with support for the armed forces undiminished even as the wars themselves became increasingly unpopular.Footnote 68 However, portrayals of the conflicts as ‘unnecessary’ and ‘badly prosecuted’ also invited problematic comparisons with WW1’s reputation as a ‘futile and mismanaged’ conflict, rendering the victimised figure of the WW1 ‘Tommy’ a reference point for understanding the plight of modern soldiers. For McCartney, the extension of remembrance to modern conflicts – whether through the addition of names from recent conflicts to WW1-era memorials or the prominence of modern veterans in ceremonies marking the passing of ‘the last Tommy’ Harry Patch in 2009 – served to ‘[link] recent military deaths symbolically with those of the First World War’.Footnote 69 While acknowledging that ‘commemorative rituals provide a space for multiple interpretations’, McCartney argued that WW1’s negative mythology meant that commemorative linkages between the past and present tended to ‘solidify the image of the soldier-victim in both conflicts’ and perpetuate negative interpretations of WW1.
While these concerns were certainly valid, however, the incorporation of modern veterans into remembrance frameworks also enabled a range of more affirmative associations which complicate the soldier-victim image. As Millar notes, remembrance discourse suggests ‘that the duty of commemoration … accrues from a more enduring, structural relationship’: one underpinned by ontological claims about the necessity of military sacrifice.Footnote 70 This ‘covenant’ between the armed forces, government, and public crucially inscribes military personnel with agency and motive, depicting them as having volunteered their lives for the nation. Beyond emphasising the need to remember veterans as objects of pity, remembrance discourse highlights their causal significance: that, but for ‘their’ actions, ‘we’ would not be safe, free, or even exist – thus activating ‘civilian anxiety’ (a concept to which I return later) and prompting citizen efforts to service their existential debt.Footnote 71 These associations were foregrounded by a tonal shift towards celebratory remembrance which, as Basham notes, ‘conjoined the long-standing narrative of the poppy as one of sacrifice … with the veneration of serving military personnel’.Footnote 72
This shift was consonant with ‘support the troops’ initiatives promoting greater public recognition of the armed forces’ contribution to national life. At a moment of significant anxiety around Britishness and Britain’s place in the world generated by successive crises including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, domestic terrorism, and the 2008 financial crisis, as well as a broader sense of ‘postcolonial melancholia’Footnote 73 and longing for greatness (later channelled through calls for Brexit),Footnote 74 militarism was perceived as reinforcing ontological security by recapturing lost greatness and remasculinising society, with supporting the troops presented as an apolitical blueprint for, and condition of, good citizenship.Footnote 75
However, at a time when only a minority of Britons believed that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were enhancing either those countries’ or Britain’s security,Footnote 76 claims of a military contribution to security were heavily dependent upon references to the past. The reference point for such invocations has typically been WW2, its hegemonic status as ‘the good war’ contrasting starkly with the cultural ambivalence around WW1.Footnote 77 Notably, however, attempts to rehabilitate the military by invoking the past have increasingly blurred the boundaries between specific wars. Tidy’s study of military-themed ‘vintage nostalgia’ products sold to support veterans’ causes, for example, notes that while WW2 is a key touchstone for such products, their branding reproduces a discourse in which ‘all wars – past, present, and future – are conflated within imaginations of a nostalgically omnipresent “good war”: a hybrid of World Wars One and Two’.Footnote 78 By compressing the participants of Britain’s wars into an homogenised and sanitised discourse of heroic military sacrifice, militarised mythology provides a seductive basis for ontological security-seeking.
The rehabilitating effects of homogenising discourses has been found in several aspects of commemoration. Trott identified a shift in attitudes towards WW1 soldiers around 2008 in online reviews of the autobiographies of the last British WW1 veterans, noting a tendency for reviewers to emphasise familiar contemporary militaristic tropes such as heroic sacrifice.Footnote 79 A 2013 British Future report on the centenary reached a similar conclusion when reflecting on a YouGov poll of public attitudes towards WW1. The survey found public ambivalence towards WW1, with 51 per cent of respondents refusing to castigate it as futile, while a narrow plurality of respondents (35 per cent) denied that it was a ‘just war’. In contrast were attitudes towards the war’s participants, with 82 per cent agreeing that ‘the centenary of the Great War is an important reminder that we are forever in the debt of those who died to protect the British way of life’, and 87 per cent viewing the war’s human toll as evidence that ‘the cost of peace and freedom is high’.Footnote 80 This cognitive dissonance, evident in the substantial numbers of respondents refusing to affirm the war’s worthiness but still attributing their freedom to the sacrifices of the soldiers themselves, was attributed by the report to respondents’ apparent lack of knowledge about the war – corroborating Trott’s suggestion that subjects often fill knowledge gaps about specific wars with remembrance scripts.
While this blurring of past and present might have paved the way for uncritical approaches to the WW1 centenary,Footnote 81 remembrance discourse’s invocation of a ‘hybrid’ war notably entails that WW1 is seldom invoked on its own terms, with its contentious meanings elided by its grouping with WW2. Moreover, while remembrance discourses are based in WW1 iconography, their extension to subsequent conflicts means that remembrance events are moments when the nation is ‘ReMembered’ from a variety of reference points, with no specific focus.Footnote 82 By contrast, the centenary was intriguing because it would ostensibly focus on a specific conflict with a difficult place in the national imaginary: one with the potential to disrupt homogenising remembrance narratives around the soldier figure upon which national ontological security was based. Given the RBL’s dependence on remembrance for its modern charity activities, a centenary reproducing WW1’s negative mythology threatened to undermine its aforementioned promotion of celebratory remembrance and positive public perceptions of veterans.
Militarised vicarious identity promotion
In what remains, I argue that the RBL’s centenary initiatives worked to rehabilitate WW1 and its veterans in a manner conducive to its modern charity activities. Such revisionism is perhaps unsurprising. As Mälksoo argues, contested memories often prompt elite efforts to reassert a singular, favourable memory narrative and marginalise rival narratives seen as destabilising collective ontological security, with the success of such efforts depending upon custodians’ ability to make them resonate with contemporary anxieties and priorities.Footnote 83 What is intriguing however, is how the RBL approached this. Before examining the initiatives, I consider how their underlying strategies sought to make the centenary relevant to Britons by instrumentalising contemporary dynamics mentioned in the previous section.
A key contextual touchstone in RBL attempts to encourage nationally affirming engagement with the WW1 centenary has been efforts to rally public support for unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the reinvigoration of the liberal civil–military contract with military personnel at their centre. Military subjectivities – especially the figure of the combat soldier – often serve as hegemonic symbols of good national citizenship because of their willingness to self-sacrifice for the nation,Footnote 84 being viewed as uniquely authoritative when testifying about what war and life is ‘really like’. Accordingly, Tidy argues that the ‘ground truth’ bestowed upon bereaved ‘Gold Star’ families of deceased US combat soldiers is especially valued by anti-war movements because their authoritative testimony is difficult for others to dispute.Footnote 85
This status makes the military a focal point for elite efforts at vicarious identity promotion to rally public support for wars and reinvigorate patriotism – efforts that depend upon channelling anxiety. While only a minority of Britons have first-hand military experience, liberal societies continue to be constituted by militarised and gendered expectations of ‘good citizenship’: that all citizens (especially men) should be ready to fight in wartime. Civilians concerned that they are falling short of such expectations can experience what Millar terms ‘civilian anxiety’, motivating them to show their contribution to national sacrifice by ‘supporting the troops’.Footnote 86 ‘Support’ initiatives simultaneously stimulate widespread civilian anxieties while ostensibly offering catharsis through vicarious practices such as wearing military-themed symbols and charitable giving, which allow civilians to experience belonging and pride. Another example is vicarious identification with the subjects of ‘military homecoming’ videos.Footnote 87 By testifying in comments sections to being moved and shedding tears, viewers seek to ‘prove’ authentic patriotism, thereby hierarchically distinguishing their commitment from others.
However, while civilian identification with military institutions is encouraged, identifications with specific esteemed subjects within national hierarchies are controversial. As Browning et al. note, subjects’ dependence upon a shared symbolic order means that some claims to vicarious subjectivity are rejected by targets of identification or ‘gatekeeper’ communities if they are seen to jeopardise the constituent identities of, and hierarchical ‘stability and ordering’ provided by, the ‘hegemonic moral, cultural and symbolic order … through which people gain a sense of ontological security’.Footnote 88 Identifications seen as undermining exclusive ‘telling rights’ conferred by lived experience are viewed as particularly egregious. Thus, while encouraging civilians to demonstrate patriotism, ‘support’ initiatives crucially reinforce the exclusivity of military subjectivities by discursively positioning civilians as hierarchically inferior and deferential to military subjects, thus leaving unresolved the possibility that support may fall short of citizenship expectations.Footnote 89 Such hierarchies are policed both by official attempts to outlaw military ‘passing’ and unofficial ‘Walter Mitty Hunting Clubs’ run by veterans seeking to expose those marching in military parades with no personal military experience or wearing unearned medals.Footnote 90 Thus, military subjectivities are tempting, yet off limits to civilians.
In parallel to the revival of militarised citizenship, public interest in family history has continued to grow. As mentioned, this trend’s popularity can be attributed partly to its contribution to ontological security in late modernity. Framed as a ‘journey of self-discovery’ around the question ‘who do you think you are?’, vicarious identification with ancestors can ‘anchor’ self-identity and bolster feelings of belonging and significance by providing tangible connections to historical events.Footnote 91 Such feelings are enabled by hegemonic heteronormative discourses around descendance which inscribe biological kinship as an especially authentic and ‘natural’ basis for vicarious identity.Footnote 92 Kinship confers both inherited ‘telling rights’ for ancestral exploits and responsibilities to sustain their legacy through the intergenerational ‘passing of the torch’. Descendants are also sometimes viewed as ‘living proof’ of past deeds, with the biological ‘essence’ behind those exploits residing in the descendant’s genes or character. Such associations can legitimise, and generate expectations of, expressions of vicarious emotion, conditioned by ‘mnemonic socialization’ into ‘sociobiographical memory’ encouraging subjects to feel certain things about ‘their’ past.Footnote 93 While we have seen already that the family-history industry has frequently promoted feelings of grief and tragedy around WW1 ancestors that create critical distance between the subject and state, when framed differently ancestral links can provide emotional reinforcement for subjects’ identification with official memory narratives.
I explore how the RBL’s ‘LIVE ON’ and ‘Every One Remembered’ initiatives combined these trends to make the centenary resonant. Through a discourse analysis of public-facing campaign materials issued between 2014 and 2018 including websites, posters, television/online adverts, as well as branding house texts explaining the campaigns’ underpinning logics, two strategies of militarised vicarious identity promotion become visible. Firstly, vicarious framing strategies worked to reincorporate WW1 into broader discourses of heroic sacrifice. Scholars have noted how efforts to galvanise public support for morally ambiguous wars often rely upon attempts to link present forces with reassuring mythologised pasts through discourses blurring the boundaries between temporally distinct military subjectivities.Footnote 94 Developing these insights, I explore how the initiatives used notably vicarious textual and visual frames including namesakes and antiqued visual mimicry to make different subjects ‘speak’ for one another in a way that rehabilitated WW1 and modern military subjects (and their wars), while promoting public empathy for them by encouraging modern subjects to put themselves in the shoes of WW1 soldiers.
This rehabilitation enabled a second strategy. I explore how the campaigns deliberately stimulated civilian anxieties and those around symbolic immortality, while promoting personalised vicarious identification with the WW1 war dead as a route to individual and national ontological security. By prompting people to find family connections to the war dead or develop personalised connections through ‘adopting’ individual WW1 military personnel (often namesakes or local connections), the campaigns encouraged Britons to cultivate vicarious military subjectivity – reflected pride derived from personal connection to military participation. Unlike ‘Gold Star’ families whose authority derives from societal recognition of the personal hardships experienced by direct family of the war dead, vicarious subjectivity here stems from identifications with personnel who identifying subjects have no first-hand relationship with. Moreover, whereas other forms of vicarious militarism (e.g. wearing military apparel) offer enhanced belonging, vicarious military subjectivity based on personal identifications offers distinctive ways of offsetting civilian anxiety and enhancing status and self-esteem. While ancestral connections imply that families have already ‘done their bit’, adoptive memorialisation can authenticate personal commitment to national sacrifice. While I primarily focus on how RBL initiatives instrumentalised vicarious military subjectivity to promote mnemonic socialisation into ‘official’ socio-biographical myth, emphasising the personal stake and pride people could have in the ‘national’ story,Footnote 95 Every One Remembered memorials also provide important traces of vicarious identification including narrations of shared identity, routinised memorialisation, and vicarious pride.Footnote 96 I now explore these strategies’ usage during the centenary.
‘LIVE ON’: The centenary and symbolic immortality
Collective anxieties around WW1’s contested legacy, which had hitherto largely been elided by homogenised remembrance discourse, were activated once more when prime minister David Cameron announced the 2014–18 centenary commemorations. Cameron argued that the war’s impact on Britain and the world and the ‘scale of sacrifice’ involved made it a ‘fundamental part of our national consciousness’, rendering the centenary a ‘matter of the heart’.Footnote 97 This echoed a survey finding that ‘nearly nine out of 10 of the British public … feel that we should mark it’.Footnote 98 However, exactly what would be commemorated proved more controversial. While some were concerned that the commemorations might glorify a war hitherto associated by many with horror and futility, others worried that ‘political correctness’ (especially deference to Germany) and the war’s mythology might preclude sufficiently patriotic commemoration. Cameron’s vision for ‘a truly national commemoration’ also prompted concerns that the centenary might be instrumentalised to influence the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, and in Ireland where the war has dissonant relevance.Footnote 99
These sensitivities complicated Cameron’s desire for government to ‘play a leading role’ in the commemorations. Besides funding an extensive educational programme, its broader strategy for navigating the centenary’s politics consisted of ‘provid[ing] leadership and encouragement in organising commemorative acts while not dictating the themes of commemoration itself’.Footnote 100 This strategy made remembrance ‘the hallmark of our commemorations’.Footnote 101 In justifying this focus, Cameron invoked words written by Second Lieutenant Eric Townsend a week before his death in September 1916: ‘But for this war I and all the others would have passed into oblivion like the countless myriads before us … but we shall live for ever in the results of our efforts.’Footnote 102 Cameron viewed preserving the symbolic immortality of the dead as ‘our duty’. The government’s special centenary representative, Andrew Murrison MP, maintained that remembrance would be apolitical, ‘making no judgment about fault, right or wrong, or indulging in any jingoistic sentiment’.Footnote 103 This framing allowed the government to take a back seat in the commemorations, delegating its mission to the custodian of national remembrance, the RBL.
The RBL’s centenary initiatives were conditioned by several contextual factors around its remembrance and charity roles. The commemorations coincided with a period of reflection for the RBL regarding its public image, prompted by increased competition over donations resulting from the expansion of the military charity sector during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts and the challenging backdrop of the 2008/9 global recession.Footnote 104 Although the RBL remained the largest veterans’ charity over this period, its position relative to new charities such as Help for Heroes – formed for veterans of Britain’s latest wars – seemed unclear. One survey found that ‘the public most commonly associate Remembrance, the poppy and the Legion’s work with the First and Second World Wars and elderly veterans’ with only ‘just over a third’ of respondents associating remembrance with veterans of recent wars.Footnote 105 This recognition prompted attempts to engage younger generations who sometimes had a more distant relationship with remembrance. And the scheduled withdrawal of British forces from Afghanistan in 2014 added urgency to reminding the public that veterans’ needs would continue even as the war itself faded into memory.
In addition to challenging perceptions of who counted as veterans, by 2014 the RBL was aware of the pitfalls of the culturally pervasive image of the soldier-victim. While such representations insulated the armed forces from the unpopularity of Britain’s wars, the RBL’s 2014 Household Survey report noted that they had also generated the ‘pervading myth that most [veterans] suffer mental health problems, that many veterans end up in prison or sleeping rough on the streets, and that many are suicidal’ – impressions that ‘may harm the employment prospects of military personnel … in the civilian world’.Footnote 106 The concern was that the nation may be inadvertently stigmatising veterans rather than conferring appropriate recognition. Thus, the RBL recognised the need to discursively rehabilitate veterans and to ensure that fundraising campaigns did not hamper its welfare work. This imperative, coupled with the perceived need to update the RBL’s own image, resulted in a 2014 rebranding campaign promoting the RBL’s new ‘strapline’ – ‘LIVE ON – to the memory of the fallen and the future of the living’. This rebranding was intended to raise awareness of the RBL’s welfare provision for living veterans and to challenge remembrance’s association with death. Coinciding with the centenary’s commencement, the RBL’s own origin in the aftermath of WW1 featured prominently in the rebranding. It’s ‘Our Brand’ webpage stated: ‘The Legion was founded by veterans after the First World War. A century on from the start of that conflict, we’re still helping today’s Service men and women, veterans, and their families.’Footnote 107
The theme of continuity was similarly evident in a 2015 Poppy Appeal print and digital advertising campaign, ‘Portraits behind the Poppy’, consisting of monochrome photos of British veterans of WW1 taken in 1915, juxtaposed with monochrome photos of veterans of Britain’s recent conflicts created with the same camera technology used to make the originals and taken by the grandson of the original photographer.Footnote 108 The images, in their ‘still’ form and in several videos, received wide public exposure, becoming the subject of an art exhibition. While ‘reminding audiences that [the RBL’s] Poppy Appeal supports both the Armed Forces men and women of the past, and those of today’, the use of vintage photos of relatively youthful WW1 soldiers was also aimed at challenging public associations of veterans with elderly, white men.Footnote 109 The ‘antique’ photos imbued both figures with a sense of historical continuity, the juxtaposition of past and present serving to confer authenticity upon modern veterans through vicarious association with WW1 veterans. The 2016 Poppy Appeal similarly encouraged the public to ‘Rethink Remembrance’ with a series of videos telling ‘a story of conflict or injury … through the eyes of a Second World War veteran, but at the end a twist is revealed’.Footnote 110 The ‘twist’ revealed by captions following the testimonies was that these were not WW2 experiences, but those of younger veterans (subsequently revealed to the viewer).Footnote 111 Again, public preconceptions regarding veterans were perceived to necessitate that authentic WW2 veterans initially speak for modern ones, with the affective weight of the former helping to paper over the controversies surrounding recent wars.
Significantly, the juxtaposition of modern and WW1 veterans in ‘Portraits’ also disconnected both figures from their historical contexts, suggesting their equivalence and blurring their distinct motivations and experiences of war. Not only was the present historicised in these images, but understandings of the past were altered in the process. This, of course, was the crux of McCartney’s concern that using the mythologised image of the WW1 Tommy as a template for casting modern veterans as similarly tragic non-agentic victims might perpetuate the negative mythology of WW1.Footnote 112 As illustrated above, however, it was precisely this passive victim trope that the RBL was attempting to eschew in 2014. Thus, by folding WW1 soldiers into a homogenised account of soldiering, the RBL’s ‘Portraits’ risked problematically reinscribing the WW1 soldier figure with agency and the war itself with positive meaning compatible with contemporary militarism.
Crucially, casting WW1 and modern figures as equivalently agentic encouraged the modern photographic subjects to identify with the WW1 veterans in a way that enabled vicarious pride. In a ‘behind the scenes’ video about the creation of the images, upon seeing his own photo one of the modern participants remarked that it ‘makes me feel like part of British military history – it’s just a privilege to be able to be a part of something like that’.Footnote 113 Vicariously identifying with WW1 veterans allowed modern veterans to newly perceive their military identities as part of a long-standing tradition. No longer synonymous with victimhood, the WW1 soldier was now a viable object for militarised vicarious identification.
‘Every One Remembered’
Vicarious connections were central in the RBL’s flagship centenary project, ‘Every One Remembered’ (EOR).Footnote 114 Launched in 2014 using data provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), EOR encouraged Britons to commemorate the 1.1 million British and Empire military personnel killed during WW1, through an online database and memorial. The inspiration for the project was ‘14-year-old Gemma’ who, after visiting a war cemetery in Belgium, wrote to the RBL, ‘I know that not everyone can be remembered as individuals, but I felt it was a shame for some people to have dozens of poppies and crosses while others had no one left to remember them’.Footnote 115 Accordingly, the project sought to ‘ensure every fallen hero from across the Commonwealth is remembered individually’, with memorialisation intended ‘to keep alive the memory of those who died’.Footnote 116 Here, the symbolic immortality of the dead was portrayed as requiring the British public’s support, without which the dead may die a second symbolic death.
The project invited visitors to engage with the website on different levels, including by creating a memorial for a suggested ‘unremembered’ individual, and ‘planting’ a virtual poppy on an interactive map. On a deeper level, visitors were encouraged to remember someone connected to them by searching the integrated database for names, places of residency, and occupations. They were also encouraged to contribute to the database by uploading pertinent documents and biographical details. This complemented the project’s emphasis on ‘helping future generations to remember’ so that they could keep the memory of the dead, alive.Footnote 117 The campaign television advert notably featured a young girl poignantly asking, ‘if I don’t remember him, who will?’.Footnote 118 Finally, fundraising featured prominently with visitors encouraged to leave optional donations – for which they would receive a personalised commemorative certificate.Footnote 119
As one advertising agency behind the project recognised, however, the war’s historical distance posed challenges for engagement: ‘how do you help people in the 21st century connect to those who lived in such different times, so long ago?’.Footnote 120 The chosen strategy was a national advertising campaign emphasising different ways of identifying with the war dead. One aspect sought to engage younger generations through several print and digital adverts which ‘killed’ several prominent British celebrities by featuring their names above birth and death dates.Footnote 121 The ‘twist’ was that these ‘obituary’ adverts actually commemorated their WW1 namesakes, encouraging people to ‘relate to soldiers even if they are not directly related to someone’.Footnote 122 Each advert was strategically placed for maximum impact: ‘Andy Murray, for example, alongside a Wimbledon story and Harry Styles in the online Entertainment … pages’.Footnote 123 Vicarious identity promotion featured prominently, with the campaign asking the public to put themselves in their own namesakes’ shoes. One article about the campaign declared, ‘You’re dead. You died a hundred years ago in world war 1!’ The effect was that people – including some of the celebrities – ‘shared the stories [on social media] as though they were their own’, encouraging others to engage in vicarious identification: ‘by asking people to find their namesakes who fell in world war 1, we created powerful emotional connections between people who had no real connection’.Footnote 124
Another campaign strand featured images of celebrities such as West Ham United Chairperson Karren Brady and screenwriter and actor Julian Fellowes holding photos of WW1 soldiers personally connected to them (Baroness Brady and Lord Fellowes held photos of a former West Ham player and a family relative respectively).Footnote 125 The television advert featuring modern subjects in everyday settings holding sepia photos of British WW1 veterans similarly promoted engagement through personal commonalities. Each person’s connection to the photographic subject was conveyed by a voiceover (‘he was the same age as me when he died’/‘she was from my village’/‘my great-uncle’), emphasising that everyone could emotionally connect with the WW1 dead through different forms of vicarious identification.Footnote 126
Militarised genealogy and vicarious military subjectivity
The EOR advertising campaign attracted ‘4 million website page views’, prompting over ‘300,000 acts of Remembrance with more than 60% of those from people below 24 years old’.Footnote 127 This success was attributed to the campaign’s effectiveness in making WW1’s military participants emotionally resonant for younger generations. However, as implied by McCartney’s observation that genealogy projects prior to the centenary channelled emotional engagement with ancestors through WW1’s dominant framing as a futile and horrific war,Footnote 128 there was nothing inevitable about the emotional content of this connection. Notably, although the campaign avoided making normative claims about the war (perhaps mindful of the commemorations’ public sensitivity), it deployed a different tonal palette to influence users’ emotional engagement, commensurate with the RBL’s rehabilitation of military service and promotion of militarised vicarious identification. As one PR website remarked: ‘the adverts are not in the slightest bit gloomy, and the biography given at the bottom of the advert gives the feeling of a celebration of the soldiers’ efforts’.Footnote 129
The project website, however, more assertively framed the meaning of the war and its participants: ‘More than one million Service men and women gave their lives in the First World War so that future generations could live theirs.’Footnote 130 Similar framing was evident in the memorial interface, which restricted unregistered visitors to choosing from a drop-down menu of six pro-forma messages:
• ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.’
• ‘We will remember them. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.’
• ‘May you live in our hearts forever.’
• ‘Thank you to all who lost their lives to save our countries. You will always be remembered.’
• ‘Thank you for serving our country. We appreciate your efforts and bravery to keep us safe.’
• ‘I wish I had known you and had a chance to thank you for everything you gave to us who survive you.’Footnote 131
While the first three messages relied upon empty signifier-laden remembrance discourse, the latter messages framed the war dead’s agency in militarised terms, with the words ‘serving’ and ‘gave’ implying that their lives were given freely. Furthermore, the phrases inscribed veterans’ motivations: ‘to save our countries’/‘to keep us safe’. WW1 itself was also portrayed as a necessary conflict to which visitors could ostensibly trace ‘our’ security. Together, these moves conveyed the debt owed by modern generations to the WW1 dead whose lives, far from being wasted in a futile war, were ostensibly the ‘price’ of freedom.
Of course, these agentic and causal claims are contestable. Absent from this framing is any acknowledgement of conscription or the coercive social pressure to perform militarised masculinities.Footnote 132 Problematic, too, is this framework’s application to the participation of colonial subjects, with the language of ‘contribution’, as Ware argues, frequently obfuscating the legacies of colonial oppression underpinning such participation.Footnote 133 Moreover, Todman questions whether British soldiers really died for ‘our’ freedom, noting that while some ‘joined up to defend a set of liberal values’, others regarded ‘gender and racial equality as potentially dangerous side effects of the conflict rather than desirable outcomes’.Footnote 134 Furthermore, Watson and Porter note that the language of heroic sacrifice was often deployed to ‘paper over’ alternative urges (e.g. revenge) regarded as less compatible with hegemonic narrations of the national war effort.Footnote 135 The application of homogenising language reinscribes the figure of the soldier with agency that conforms to contemporary expectations but is potentially as misleading as the victimhood trope. The causal narrative of remembrance discourse (i.e. that the war delivered security and freedom) was likewise contested during the centenary.Footnote 136
Nevertheless, portraying the military dead as willing contributors to a just war encouraged expressions of national gratitude and vicarious pride. Particularly where the person commemorated was a family relative, visitors were encouraged to feel pride in their family’s contribution to the national story. Accordingly, one message read: ‘[r]emembering our great uncle […] [a] true hero to all his family’.Footnote 137 Some visitors alluded to a broader family military contribution. One commemorator noted on their relative’s profile (as if in dialogue with him) that ‘your son also gave his life in a later war’, adding that ‘[f]ather & son both died in the service of their country […], we are proud of them both’. While subjects are increasingly unlikely to have first-hand military subjectivity, then, ancestral military contributions may provide them with the resources to claim vicarious military subjectivity. This does not necessarily mean that identifications with ancestors are consciously instrumentalised for such purposes. Many such identifications occur non-consciously and are accordingly recognised as genuine by others.
Other memorials integrated the remembered into (auto)biographical narratives and routines. Some, for example, used the virtual map to plant poppies for distant relatives in places of personal significance: ‘[I] linked it with an important place in my life’. And some provided insights into real-world practices, including ritualised family pilgrimages: ‘[w]e are proud to have had as many close relatives as possible visit the […] memorial where he is remembered’. Such practices sometimes extended to the ‘adoption’ of non-related personnel. On the profile of another soldier, one commemorator wrote:
I discovered his grave at our local cemetery, adopted him as family, and often put flowers on his grave. It’s the least I can do. After all, he made the ultimate sacrifice for everyone, dying at a young age and not marrying or having children of his own.
The commemorator’s ‘adoption’ of the soldier was an expression of the need to attend to ‘our’ existential debt. Visitors were encouraged to treat these stories as resources for vicarious identification providing lessons about who ‘we’ are. Memorials frequently interwove family and national biographies, with vicarious identification providing an extended narrative of who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ came from, injecting a sense of the extraordinary into the mundanity of late modern life.
The ethics of militarised vicarious identity promotion
The promotion of vicarious military subjectivity is problematic in several ways. One is the project’s selective focus: while ostensibly also memorialising women, EOR (originally launched as Every Man Remembered in 2014) overwhelmingly centred on male WW1 personnel, with all the WW1 personnel featured in adverts being male, thereby problematically reproducing patrilineal citizenship ideals, with claims to vicarious military subjectivity being based predominantly on male ancestral connections. Moreover, although the WW1 generation had already passed into memory by 2014 (giving the RBL unprecedented freedom to speak for them without consent), the RBL’s decision to focus remembrance on those who died during the war allowed it to circumvent the more dissonant accounts of veterans who survived, such as Harry Patch, who famously described the war as ‘organised murder’.Footnote 138
This symbolic resurrection of the dead (particularly the reincorporation of WW1 veterans into homogenised remembrance discourse) risks replacing one simplistic mythology emphasising futility and tragedy with another depicting a straightforwardly just war – a mythology conforming with a general tendency of Centenary initiatives to sidestep the violent politics of colonialism underpinning the British Empire’s war effort, instead telling a ‘happy story of hands across the ocean’ emphasising nation and commonwealth.Footnote 139 Such risks are compounded by EOR’s promotion of emotional vicarious identification. By priming visitors on how to feel about the dead, EOR provides emotional reinforcement for broader efforts to recast WW1 as an origins story compatible with Britain’s contemporary self-image as a liberal, multiethnic society, with military ancestors becoming the basis for decontextualised claims to national belonging. Of course, the excerpts above are illustrative of the kinds of engagements on display in EOR rather than evidence sufficient to make causal claims about the project’s influence upon visitors, or representational claims regarding how most visitors engaged with it. I am not arguing that there is no diversity or resistance in the memorials. Some did question the war’s value: ‘[A] life wasted […] We salute you for your sacrifice but not the war’. Nor am I suggesting that family history necessarily precludes nuanced historical engagement, only that it was discouraged by the project’s emotional framing which circumscribed acceptable forms of engagement.
Another concern is that the compression of WW1 military personnel into homogenising remembrance scripts may discourage meaningful reflection upon WW1 altogether. This becomes clearer when considering memorials to war poet Wilfred Owen, whose work depicting WW1’s horror and explicitly rejecting the logic of patriotic blood sacrifice is a mainstay of British education. While some messages acknowledged Owen’s work, approvingly quoting his most famous anti-war lyric, ‘The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori’, other memorials slipped into invoking the sacrificial language that Owen repudiated. For example, several commemorations read, ‘[t]he honesty of your poetry is what makes it so incredible. Thank you for your work and your sacrifice.’Footnote 140 The memorial thus acknowledged his poetry while affirming sacrificial logics. This slippage perhaps exemplifies ‘unthinking remembrance’,Footnote 141 which becomes a seductive way for subjects to compensate for knowledge gaps through affective rather than critical engagement.
Finally, such homogenising scripts may circumscribe critical reflection on war more generally. WW1’s society-wide impact was emphasised by the RBL to suggest the universal relevance and accessibility of remembrance through personal connections. EOR encouraged visitors to view their ancestors as willing contributors to national sacrifice, and their families as military families. When combined with a cultural reluctance to question the dead, such framings may generate depoliticising empathy for the modern ‘military family’, which has been instrumentalised to deflect critique of modern wars,Footnote 142 with visitors adhering to remembrance scripts. Homogenised remembrance exacerbates this, with support for modern personnel often presumed to be a logical consequence of support for WW1 veterans. The project’s fundraising aspect relied upon this connection: donations were unequivocally about helping modern veterans. While some may wish to pay their respects without endorsing WW1 and subsequent wars, blurring the past and present renders remembrance discourse increasingly brittle: if criticising any war is seen as denigrating ‘the troops’, the scope for critical engagement with war is drastically narrowed.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the RBL’s centenary initiatives encouraged Britons to vicariously identify with WW1 military personnel to emotionally connect with the nation’s history and, in so doing, assuage late modern civilian anxieties. These campaigns played a central role in avoiding ontologically destabilising critiques of British militarism, building on the implicit rehabilitation of the WW1 soldier performed by ‘support the troops’ discourses since 2006. By incorporating WW1 and modern soldiers into a decontextualised, homogenised discourse of heroic military sacrifice emphasising their shared lineage, the RBL framed the centenary primarily as an opportunity to express gratitude to, and uphold the symbolic immortality of, the British WW1 dead. Such moves relied upon militarised framings discouraging critical reflection upon WW1, and war more broadly.
By the centenary’s end in 2018, the theme of gratitude was so embedded that when the RBL urged Britons to say ‘Thank You’ to the ‘First World War generation’ with an advert rhetorically asking ‘what else is there to say?’,Footnote 143 it sparked no significant controversy. While there was always a lot more to say about such a complex event, this suggests that the war’s ‘negative’ mythology has been partially displaced by a militarised framing conducive to contemporary militarised nationalism. This is not to say that negative readings of the war have disappeared; rather, positive readings have become normalised across British society, not least because a range of subjects have staked their ontological security upon them. Some might argue, of course, that one unsatisfactorily simplistic mythology has simply been replaced by another, with nothing being lost or gained. However, as Todman notes, myths provide valuable shorthand ontological reference points in national life for understanding the world and war.Footnote 144 If, as he argues, the negative mythology of WW1 played an important restraining role in national discourse, providing a sobering counterpoint to the more stridently jingoistic attitudes towards WW2, Britons might come to regret both the loss of an important discursive resource and a missed opportunity for an honest reckoning with the colonial underpinnings of British militarism.
Finally, having predominantly focused on the political functions of militarised vicarious identity promotion throughout the centenary, the argument also raises questions about the broader socio-political functions of the resulting vicarious military subjectivities themselves. If the conventional military subjectivities explored by Tidy confer authority and authenticity upon their bearers to speak truth about war, it raises questions about how the invocation of vicarious military subjectivity might affect power dynamics in debates around war commemoration. Conceivably, living vicariously through an ancestral subject’s military service may confer social capital which is (non-)consciously deployed by bearers to bolster truth claims about war(s). Given that such dynamics frequently pass unnoticed in everyday life and have been overlooked by IR scholars, future research is therefore required to explore the parameters governing vicarious military subjectivities and their political orientations.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000160.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the outgoing and incoming RIS editorial teams and the three anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback, which has helped to make the article much stronger. I would also like to thank Victoria Basham, Christopher Browning, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Trevor McCrisken, Julia Welland, and the participants of the 2017 European International Studies Association Conference in Barcelona, all of whom provided valuable feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts. Finally, I owe special thanks to Victoria Haicox, who read every draft and provided vital encouragement through smooth and turbulent times – it is to her that I dedicate this article.
Funding statement
The research for this article was funded by the Institute of Advanced Study (University of Warwick) and the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/W006782/1, awarded to Joseph Haigh).
Open access
