Edwin Jones' book (see last post) had got me thinking again about modern myths of Englishness. I did a piece on this in November, but his comments on the Whig view of history have given me a different take. Maybe what we have now in English mythology (especially in the right-wing newspapers) is essentially a truncated, secularised version of the Whig view. This no longer starts with Protestantism and the Spanish Armada (whose anniversary in 1988 had little contemporary resonance). Instead it is the myth of Britain resisting tyranny, essentially based round the twin poles of Napoleon and Hitler. (Even WW1 has no real resonance now - there's no nostalgic feeling of 'plucky little Belgium' to be tapped into). What is depressing about this mythology is not just that it is held to define our relationship with France and Germany forever more, but that it is essentially reactive. Unlike in the US, the Great World War Two myth is not the liberation of Europe, but the Battle of Britain, just as Trafalgar has more resonance than Waterloo. England's role in Europe is not to lead it to a better future, but to resist its encroachments. In this myth even concepts such as human rights have no real merit, since they're essentially just nasty French Revolutionary ideas (unless someone can re-popularise Tom Paine).

I don't see an easy way of getting from here to there (acceptance of the EU) and I don't think Jones has the answer. But I think it needs to be done, since the alternative is ever greater isolation. The isolationist tendency in right-wing thought is even more extreme than previously, since there's no longer any British Empire or even solidarity with Protestant bits of Europe. The Conservative Party may claim they want to be in the EU, but their policies towards it are the completely unrealistic ones of demanding that existing treaties are renegotiated. They won't get that, so will they then say the truth, which is that they want to get out? And then? Other than becoming the Fifty-First State (but we're too blue state to get accepted), the UK will exist in a strange world, seemingly comprised largely of Switzerland, Iceland and Singapore, and with about as much international influence.

More holiday reading, though of a rather more academic kind: Edwin Jones, The English Nation: the Great Myth (Sutton Publishing, 1998). This is an interesting but ultimately rather wrong-headed discussion of English history/historiography since the Reformation by a pro-European Welsh Catholic. Jones' argument is that the Reformation was a great breach in the tradition of England as a European nation, which was then disguised by Tudor and later propagandists/historians as a return to an 'original' Anglo-Saxon nation/church. This then fed into the Whig view of history about England's glorious isolation and inevitable progress, and still has potency today.

Jones is very keen to point out biases in other historians, but one irritating thing about him is his very Catholic take on the Middle Ages and Reformation. His great hero is Thomas More, which is dubious in itself. More may have made a heroic death (and was very lucky in having Robert Bolt's play to give him a good twentieth century press), but he was just as dubious a propagandist as Thomas Cromwell (he wrote one of the first hatchet jobs on Richard III) and so far from being an icon of tolerance, he was quite happy to persecute heretics. Jones also ignores the fact that there never was a Universal Church (Orthodoxy only gets a passing mention, despite its medieval significance, and Celtic Christianity is assumed just to be an offshoot of Catholicism) and he seems to presume that papal authority sprang into being in England ready-formed in 597 with Augustine of Canterbury. Whatever the papal claims, actual papal control of churches beyond Rome took a lot time to develop.

Despite these irritations, there is some interesting stuff in the book. I haven't got the background to know how sound it is on early modern English historiography, (see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/2glenn.html for a review), but he makes a plausible argument to a non-specialist. The problem is the political conclusions he draws from it. Jones implies that if Britons just realise their long past history as being part of Christian Europe then they'll come to love the EU. But he doesn't make it clear why people should pick that medieval phase of their past to identify with, rather than the isolated period (1533-1973) he sees as being created by Tudor propagandists. In the same way that earlier English historians wanted to erase the Middle Ages as an unenlightened blot in English history, so Jones seemingly wants to cut out 400 years of English/British history as irrelevant. This ignores the fact that even if English isolation started as myth, that myth then actually influenced policy/society and changed it.

I'm also dubious about the significance of the EU as 'Christian Europe'. Other than the exclusion in principle of Turkey, what does it mean? In the Middle Ages the most universal thing it stood for was persecution of the Jews. In the late twentieth century 'Christian' was often defined largely as being against communism (in the Christian Democrats etc). Jones wants to draw on Catholic ideas of social justice and human dignity, but he ignores the fact that historically the Catholic Church (and most other churches) were hostile to the concept of human rights. (It's not yet 150 years since Pius No-No (Pius IX) declared the church hostile to modernity as whole). There's also the fact that Britain (and probably several other countries) are no longer Christian nations in any meaningful sense. The EU as based on the ideals of liberal democracy might have resonance for a lot of people: Christian Europe isn't a positive or distinctive enough concept.