The threat of ethnonationalism is a progressive fantasy
In The Return of the Native, Hardy observes of the mummers’ St George play that the proof it is a genuine folk tradition lies in the sullen joylessness with which it is carried out, “which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all”. And yet, Hardy observes, “the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no”. Much of the same could be said of today’s annual St George ritual, in which Twitter liberals set out to slay the dragon of xenophobic nationalism, and their conservative opponents the equivalent monster of oikophobic deracination. No other European nation behaves like this. Even within our home archipelago, the Irish do not do this on St Patrick’s Day, nor the Welsh and Scots on St David’s or St Andrew’s Days: it is no doubt a marker of my fundamental un-Englishness that I find this trait strange and maladaptive. In this hysteric faux-cosmopolitanism, so distinct from the national consciousness of our neighbouring Dutch or Danes or Norwegians, the English prove themselves the very weirdest of the weird. But then: “What should they know of England, who only England know?”
