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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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The UK and USA are both explicitly not nation-states from their foundings - that is why they have "United" in their names. (FWIW, Belgium doesn't work as a nation-state either and the Flemish-speaking Belgians who talk like it is one are somewhat ambivalent about including French-speaking Belgians in their project)

You can have a concept of Britishness as a civic identity shared by a closed class of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish (or Northern Irish) people, although there isn't an attempt to actually do that until modern right-populist movements, and it goes down like a lead balloon with the Scottish and Welsh. But the idea that an Englishman and a Scot are part of the same blood-and-soil folk community is offensive to both of us.

The US just is a nation of immigrants as a matter of historical fact. The de facto leader of the anti-immigration movement in American is the grandson and husband of immigrants.

The UK and USA are both explicitly not nation-states from their foundings - that is why they have "United" in their names.

In the sense used here, the US was, from founding, intended to be such -- but without the ethnic purity, since it was mongrel at the foundation.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

So, "one people".

The "United" was about states with different interests, not about different peoples.

You can have a concept of Britishness as a civic identity shared by a closed class of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish (or Northern Irish) people, although there isn't an attempt to actually do that until modern right-populist movements, and it goes down like a lead balloon with the Scottish and Welsh.

I think the one shared identity of those peoples was empire-building.

In so far as there was a real attempt at British nation-building after 1603, it was mostly based on anti-Catholicism in general and anti-Frenchness in particular. Hence the difficulty of including Ireland.

Empire-building as a national project was an example of civic nationalism, not ethno-nationalism. Upward mobility was always (in theory) and frequently (in practice) open to colonials who displayed the characteristics of an English or Scottish gentleman, starting with loyalty to the Crown and not being Catholic. No ethno-nationalistic society would have elected Benjamin Disraeli Prime Minister.

I was observing the whole thing from a more practical point of view. Apart from building and maintaining a world empire, what else did unite the English, Scots and Welsh? What else did they agree on?

Contra @MadMonzer I would say that Britain isn't a proposition nation any more than England/Scots/Wales is. It's an ethnic one with multiple very similar ethnicities. There doesn't have to be a lot we agree on (though there are certain serious disagreements especially around religion) but we are used to each other. You don't need shared memes with your brother for him to be your brother. You don't even have to like him. You just have to dislike him for long enough.

Apart from building and maintaining a world empire, what else did unite the English, Scots and Welsh?

@Botond173 - it really was the Frogs. After the Scottish Reformation, the Scots hated the French (who had attempted to prop up Catholicism in Scotland) as much as the English did.

I would say that Britain isn't a proposition nation any more than England/Scots/Wales is. It's an ethnic one with multiple very similar ethnicities.

I think "ethnic nation with multiple ethnicities" is a contradiction in terms. The non-propositional view that makes sense given the history is that the Britain (or the UK - if you are doing this type of analysis the Irish Question matters) is a multinational state based on an alliance between friendly nations. And in the modern age they don't work (with Czechoslovakia as the textbook example).

Empirically, the folk nationalism of the British nations agrees. Scottish ethno-nationalism has, in fact, defined itself as anti-English first and foremost. Welsh ethno-nationalism is fundamentally pro-Welsh rather than anti-anyone (it focusses on preservation of Welsh language and Welsh-speaking culture). And in England, polling shows that self-identification as English is a proxy for ethno-nationalism and self-identification as British is a proxy for civic nationalism. And "British" nationalists based in England (like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage) see suppressing Scottish (but not English) nationhood as part of their British national project. English nationalism isn't anti-Scottish per se, but it wants to reduce Scottishness to a cuisine and a costume.

Germany also was originally a non-nation of immigrants, circa AD 400-700. And yet, in 1900, it clearly wasn't anymore - at some point the melting pot cools and you get something solid. And I don't think it took all of 1200 years; the migrations stopped in the first millenium AD, and from then on local and regional populations took root and it's IMO fair to see a connection of blood to soil from there on out. Well, until urbanization, the World Wars, the Gastarbeiter, the Spätaussiedler and finally the "lol whatever" mass migrations of the third millenium.

Just ruminating. I have no point.

Germany coalesces as a stateless (because the Holy Roman Empire is both over-inclusive and not really a state) nation surprisingly early - certainly before 1600, and in my read by 1400. (The academic politics of the University of Prague - now Charles University - up to and including the Hussite crisis make most sense understood as a conflict between Germans and Czechs as national groups). Post-Reformation, there is an issue to resolve about whether the German nation is Lutheran (with Catholic Austria excluded) or biconfessional, but nothing as fundamental as the Breton and Occitan issues in France.

Despite being a state, France coalesces as a nation later than Germany. Perhaps because of being a state - from the point of view of a feudal dynastic monarch national identity among your subjects is potentially awkward.

In my opinion, the 1924 immigration restriction act should have been the beginning of that sort of thing for the US: the gradual melding of the European ethnic groups into a single White American entity. (Scottish, as perceived as a separate ethnicity in the US, actually did vanish sometime in the early postwar era).

But the Hart-Cellar act, by neglecting to set hard, very low annual caps on non-European immigration, blew up the chance to have a single ethnic group composing 90% of the population.

When did Catholic-Protestant intermarriage become socially acceptable in America? You cant combine Anglos and Italians into a single "white American" ethnicity without it.

Sometime in the forties or fifties.

Depends on your circles. In parts of the rust belt different kinds of ethnic Catholics wouldn’t have intermarried with each other, let alone Protestants, before ~1950. Protestant anti Catholicism was a fringe phenomenon by the nineties, but before that it was common in the south- even as the Catholic taboo on intermarriage took serious beatings with Vatican II(northern Protestant anti-Catholicism went into a tailspin at around the same time, for different reasons).

Inter generational Italian language transmission largely stopped happening in the 50’s and sixties, but deliberate government policy was as responsible as changing social norms. The last native French speaking Cajuns were born in the fifties, for another example. German declined earlier for war related reasons.

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