BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

English literature in 1867 and his turn to Anglo-Saxoninsm from the Teutonism of his equally
influential educator father, Thomas Arnold. 6 Satirizing the wholesale conversion of English
journals from Anglo-German to Anglo-Celtic affinity during World War I, a Scottish writer cited
the “Hunnish” ancestry and imperialism of the fickle English whom he expected would
eventually realign themselves with Germanism in accordance with the dictates of racial kinship,
economic interest and faddish journalism. 7 Given such explicitly multiethnic and utilitarian
aspects of British identity, and with current trends toward devolution in mind, historians have
debated the extent to which an outwardly directed Britishness superseded an ethnic and
culturally-based Englishness and created an artificial and fragile civic unity. Krishnan Kumar,
while defending Colley’s thesis that Britishness inspired loyalty like any national identity,
nevertheless descried the late nineteenth-century rise of a separate racial and cultural English
national identity. 8 From the more mainstream point of view of those who argue an enduring
fusion of Britishness and Englishness, Robin Cohen wrote that, in lieu of any “essential
Britishness,” British/English identity took shape through interactions on six frontiers: with “the
United States, Europe, the former white Dominions, the wider Commonwealth, the internal
Celtic fringe and the body of ‘aliens’ seeking to acquire British citizenship.” 9 Cohen’s reflection
6 Robert J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, Blackwell Manifestos (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2008), 110, 141.
7 H. C. Mac Neacail, “Celt and Teuton in England,” Scottish Review 41, no. 90 (June
1918): 204-5, 213, 215, 239.
8 The Making of English National Identity, 146-47.
9 “The Incredible Vagueness of Being British/English,” International Affairs 76, no. 3
(July, 2000): 577. Cohen’s review article refers to his own work in Frontiers of Identity: the
British and the Others (London: Longman; New York: Addison Wesley, 1994).
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