BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

of a more inclusive civic redefinition of Britishness compatible with regional and multicultural
identities, Paul Ward associates the Labour Party’s contained devolution policy with long-term
Liberal support for Home Rule in the various British subnationalities. 20 Scottish historians, on
the other hand, have brooded about the deleterious effects of an imposed Anglo-British identity,
Cairns Craig having seen in the absence of the Scottish realist novel a negation or denial of core
culture narrative history with its modernizing elements. The resulting embrace of myth and
geological time in Scottish literature, Craig contended, evokes a barbaric past and paints Scottish
identity as lawless. 21
The more optimistic scholars of a revived Britishness take their cue from earlier studies
that center identity in political, commercial and maritime developments; less rosy scenarios arise
from notions of a culturally derived identity linked to race, ethnicity, class, gender or religion.
One obvious reason for this discrepancy arises from the inherent divisiveness of these latter
social and cultural categories, but another derives from the fact that national identity itself
depends upon a viable dominant political consensus. Gerald Newman’s study of eighteenth-
century Anglo-French cultural relations makes this point in a curiously roundabout way.
Newman asserts the cultural origins of English nationalism, labeling it a moral reaction to an
alien cultural invasion and a “creation of writers” that provoked the transition from aristocratic
20 Britishness since 1870 (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 97, 110, 168-69.
21 See Out of History, 41, 46, 57. Nairn considers Anglo-Britishness problematic for both
English and Scottish identity. See also, Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig
Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-C.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
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