Event Title
Session 2
Location
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Start Date
10-3-2013 12:00 PM
Description
Professor Murray Pittock FRSE: “Being British: Will we ever recover?”
Respondent Professor Ali Behdad
ABSTRACT
‘Being British: Will we ever recover ?’examines the limitations of theories of national formation and development in explaining the British case. It argues that ‘Britain’ as a nation and ‘Britishness’ as concept of belonging have always been sustained by an international set of constitutional and cultural practices reinforced by local diversities rather than by nation-state homogeneity. Both the formation and the current crisis of the British state are marked by traumatic events: the warfare and revolts of 1745-1815 and the incessant claim for international influence and particularist entitlement of the era from 1956 to the current EU budget round. The simultaneous need to create a new homogenous Britishness internally to sustain the projection of the more traditional aggrandizing Britishness abroad is a paradoxical feature of the modern era, and one which marks out the difficulty of ‘recovering’ nationality from the imperial formula of British particularism.
Session 2
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Professor Murray Pittock FRSE: “Being British: Will we ever recover?”
Respondent Professor Ali Behdad
ABSTRACT
‘Being British: Will we ever recover ?’examines the limitations of theories of national formation and development in explaining the British case. It argues that ‘Britain’ as a nation and ‘Britishness’ as concept of belonging have always been sustained by an international set of constitutional and cultural practices reinforced by local diversities rather than by nation-state homogeneity. Both the formation and the current crisis of the British state are marked by traumatic events: the warfare and revolts of 1745-1815 and the incessant claim for international influence and particularist entitlement of the era from 1956 to the current EU budget round. The simultaneous need to create a new homogenous Britishness internally to sustain the projection of the more traditional aggrandizing Britishness abroad is a paradoxical feature of the modern era, and one which marks out the difficulty of ‘recovering’ nationality from the imperial formula of British particularism.