Why Scots should support England Tonight

A personal reflection.

This is a short post for anyone interested in the weird and wonderful political entity known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and what it does to people who live there when it comes to watching football tournaments. The main argument is stated for everyone, with further details and reflections for paid subscribers in the second half.

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Tonight England faces Spain in the final of the Euros.

I’m Scottish, and it’s traditional to support the team England is playing against. England is at once our closest neighbour and ally, but also our ‘auld enemy’. With some nuances and particularities, the same applies to the Irish and the Welsh. The internet is full of memes of people in the nations adjacent to England painting their houses with the Spanish flag, or crying at the prospect of England winning because “we’ll never hear the end of it.” All that talk about “football coming home” can induce nausea in anyone who isn’t English.

From colonialism to Brexit, from the misuse of the Union Jack by England’s fans to the conflation of England and Britain by commentators, there are lots of reasons to want England to lose. Mostly this is in the spirit of a kind of fraternal camaraderie, but not always, and it can sometimes feel nasty.

I feel differently.

For many, a Scot supporting England is a simple matter of solidarity with another ‘home nation’ of the UK and a recognition that our lives, cultures and politics are intertwined, and I get that. But for me, something deeper is at stake. Supporting England is a way of conferring legitimacy to each of the distinct nations of the UK, especially the dominant one that knows itself least well as a nation and acts out that lack of self-awareness on the others.

Nations are historically contingent and culturally constructed, but they also have a significant reality. As a general rule, nations should govern themselves. It’s never that simple, of course. The world is interdependent, national identity is messy and contested and there is a planetary dimension that obliges some rethinking of the preeminence of the nation-state.

Even so, nations matter, and they need to be given political and cultural expression. I wrote about how I came to my views on Scotland in the context of the UK in a post shared by Scotland’s First Minister at the time, Nicola Sturgeon. I wrote a subsequent post on the idea of nations, and how it applies to the UK and Ireland where I wrote this:

In 1882 Ernest Renan said: “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present.” Also well-known is Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities’ which suggests that we either receive or seek out collective identity for ourselves; and we can feel a kind of solidarity and fraternity with people in our imagined community that we don’t actually know. In Honey from the Lion, Doug Gay extends on this idea to say that nationalism is ‘a claim to identity on behalf of a population’ and quotes Oliver Donovan, “to see ourselves as a people is an act of moral imagination”. For these reasons, Rogers Brubaker’s contention “Nation is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) of analysis”, is a critical thing to grasp. Brubaker goes on: “To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of the category ‘nation’, the ways in which it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organise discourse and political action.”

With those brisk thoughts on nations in mind, and with the full understanding that the map is not the territory, I believe the future vitality and coherence of the British and Irish Isles depends upon England knowing itself as England, in a way that allows the other home nations to be themselves too.

I will be supporting the English team then, not as a sporting proxy for crypto-colonial British nationalism, but rather as a major cultural asset of a medium-sized European nation that lacks political institutions. I believe Anthony Barnett was right when he said that the root cause of Brexit was a distorted and misdirected English nationalism based on its lack of political expression. Sadly, I believe that distortion lives on. I am glad that Caroline Lucas located her recent book in Another England: Reclaiming our National Story, rather than, for instance, ‘Another UK’.

In essence, I believe the national story that created and defines the UK has run its course, and there is no healthy future for British nationalism. England knowing itself as England is part of the antidote to that, and Scotland supporting them in that endeavour is part of it too.