BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Scientific Revolution and humanistic reinterpretations of scripture. 3 Aligned with a traditional
antipathy to centralized and arbitrary governments, the English/British model of parliamentary
government, free trade and common law would inform the othering of all of these rival
continental powers, regardless of religious affiliation. 4 In the case of Germany, economic and
military expansion and the perceived threat to British commercial and imperial supremacy
overshadowed any supposed Anglo-German cultural, religious, dynastic or racial affinities.
From the unification of Germany up to the formation of the European Union, the German other
would provide for Britain in decline a contemporized version of the negative cohesiveness that
the French other supplied for the forging of British unity at the dawn of the eighteenth century.
F. M. L. Thompson illustrated the material dimensions of this continuity when he compared
pre-World War I British alarmism with post-World War II “declinism,” both linked to hysteria
concerning German economic and industrial advancement. 5
Anglo-German diplomatic estrangement during the late nineteenth century would also
diminish residual Teutonism and mitigate British ethnic divisions in English eyes, a process
already underway with influential cultural critic Matthew Arnold’s incorporation of Celtic and
3 Ibid., 117. See also Krishnan Kumar, “‘Englishness’ and English National Identity,” in
David Morley and Kevin Robins, eds., British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and
Identity (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 46-47.
4 See Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-century English Political
Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24, on the
perceived twin evils of popery and arbitrary government that spawned the crises of 1618-48,
1678-83 and 1688-89 in England. See also Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165, on problems linking British
identity with Protestantism without the othering of political despotism in Catholic realms.
5 Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain, 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 150.
2