University of Oxford Alumni Weekend
Chancellor’s Lecture on Saturday, 9th September 2015
Politics and Identity: A troubled relationship
Last June I flew to New York for a board meeting and as usual woke up very early the morning after my flight. My hotel was on Madison Avenue, just behind St Patrick’s Cathedral, and after a rather desultory effort to read myself back to sleep and looking at the British papers on my iPad, I decided that it might be a rather better use of my time to go to early mass in the Cathedral.
I wandered across the road, into the great church and found a place among the New Yorkers who had slipped in for a few moments to say a prayer on the way to work. The mass was said by a middle-aged Vietnamese American priest, presumably a political refugee from the warfare of the 1960s or 70s. Vietnamese. American. Refugee. Catholic. Priest. Those were the main, obvious elements of his identity.
After mass, I went back to Madison Avenue and found a ‘deli’ for breakfast. I sat in the window with black coffee and a bagel, and watched New Yorkers streaming past on the way to work. Fat. Slim. Tall. Short. Black. Brown. White. Business-suits. Jeans. Overalls. Trainers. High heels. Lace-ups. Some looked – it was hot – as though they were dressed for the beach. I tried to guess their jobs, ages, and origins. Some were easy to identify. From the Asian sub-continent, or West Asia, or West Africa. Others were probably WASP – White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Their faces came from all around the world: America is after-all an immigrant community.
So who were they, all those New Yorkers? It has often been said that the first question in political science is who are ‘we’? What is our – or their – identity? Well, I suppose that the ‘we-ness’ of all those people on Madison Avenue is American. But is that the beginning and end of their identity. ‘We’ is after all a collection of ‘I’s. Maybe some of those whom I observed would not have regarded themselves primarily as American, and maybe some of them were not American at all. And would those who were born and bred in the USA have answered the question, ‘Who are you?’ by saying ‘I’m a New Yorker’. Or ‘I’m a Catholic’. Or ‘I’m an African American’. Or maybe all three, ‘I’m a Catholic, African American, New Yorker’.
Moreover, some of those who answered simply that they were American might not think that this trumped every other consideration. They might not agree with those who assert ‘my country, right or wrong’. The ‘stars and stripes’ might be part of their genetic code, but not to the exclusion of all else. Like the American senator over 100 years ago, they might contend that they would only accept that simple patriotic slogan on the understanding that ‘if right to be kept right, if wrong to be set right’. They might even go beyond that and agree with EM Forster, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.’ Loyalty can bind us to more than one simple over-arching definition of our identity.
When identity is defined simplistically, when what makes us different from everyone else – which is after all what identity amounts to – is turned into a singular and all-embracing aspect of our being, then the results can be, and often are, very dangerous. The gullible are frequently seduced into a self-definition which can easily turn to violence against an allegedly threatening and equally singular ‘Other’ identity – the enemy whose deemed characteristics are a vital part of our own opposing identity. We are above all what they are not.
While I was contemplating the identity of all those Madison Avenue pedestrians, a bus pulled up in front of my ‘deli’, with an advertisement on the side for a TV drama called ‘True Detective’. It read ‘We get the world we deserve’. That is probably true. Unfortunately that world is often more dangerous and flammable than it should be because of the manipulation of identity. And looking back at my past political life, I realize now how much of it has been spent dealing with the violent and disruptive aspects of identity politics.
My first ministerial job was in Northern Ireland. I am a Catholic married to a member of the Church of England. I remember the surprise I felt when quizzed about the challenges of being part of a ‘mixed marriage’, as the local journalists put the point when questioning me for the first time. I recall the not-so-polite tut-tutting when I made the sign of the cross after a Catholic bishop had said Grace before a municipal lunch in Derry or Londonderry – what you call it tells us about your identity. I remember the horror I felt at being told that even knee-cappings were demonstrations of identity – Catholic Republican or Protestant Unionist. The Catholic terrorists, I was informed by a young nurse, used a shotgun; the Protestants, a ‘Black and Decker’ drill.
Almost 15 years later, I went back to Northern Ireland following the Belfast Agreement to reorganise the police service, with the aim of taking identity politics out of policing, something the politicians had not been able to do. Despite the Agreement, the walls in Catholic areas still carried – and still carry today – the graffiti of Republicans, in Protestant areas, the kerbstones were and still are painted red, white and blue. New housing estates are still today divided by a high wall. There is peace, in the significant sense that bombs are not being detonated, policemen are not being shot every week. But harmony, forgiveness and solidarity still struggle for a place in civic life. Who knows, maybe give it another fifty years!?
What had shaped these notions of Catholic and Protestant identity which bore such a vestigial relationship to the contemporary political cultures of the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom? The list is a long one which includes history, colonialism, grievance, revenge, humiliation, economic hardship, land and even religion, though not in any sense that would be recognized by readers of St Matthew’s Gospel. All these potentially poisonous substances are whipped up into a noxious brew by political leaders who have too rarely shown much understanding of civic humanism.
From Belfast I went to Brussels as a European Commissioner, sent on my way by a thunderous farewell from the Daily Telegraph, which announced that I had turned my back on the British way of life: another example I suppose of identity politics. In Brussels, I spent a good deal of time working on the problems of the Balkans and of Palestine and Israel. Was there something inherent in being Serbian, Croatian or Bosniak, Orthodox, Catholic or Muslim; were the cultural differences between them so great that it was inevitable that they would want to kill those from a different tribe who had only recently lived side-by-side in Tito’s Yugoslavia? Identity politics brought ethnic cleansing, slaughter, the return of concentration camps, and the destruction of cities. Sarajevo bore the scars of bombardment, Dubrovnik too, and on the hill above ruined Bosniak Mostar stood a great crucifix looming over the ruins of urban Muslim life, a triumphalist sacrilege and a terrible distortion of the Christian message.
Meantime on the Palestinian West Bank and in Gaza, horrors and indignities were heaped on men, women and children, which left Israel in the long-run less safe and secure than it has every right to be. The fact that anti-Semitism has been hateful and murderous does not justify the actions of right-wing nationalistic governments in Tel Aviv. Anti-Semitism has been one of the most atrocious examples of identity politics in European history, and that includes in the history of the church of which I am a member. Shylock’s speech in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ goes to the heart of identity politics. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter, as a Christian is.’ A speech you could, of course, make substituting the words Muslim and Palestinian for Jew.
My reflection on the political experience of confronting identity politics were magnified after my breakfast musings on Madison Avenue by reading two remarkable books. The first, titled ‘In the Name of Identity’, was written by a Lebanese-born novelist, Amin Maalouf, whose first language was Arabic but who now lives in France, and writes in French. One of his novels won the Goncourt Prize. Is he one half French and one half Lebanese Arab? No, he argues, you cannot be compartmentalised like that. His identity, unique to him, is a mixture of elements, whose hierarchy of importance and relevance can change from time to time according to circumstances, reason and his own choices. I was given the book years ago by a Jordanian intellectual who was intent on explaining the difficulties of being a moderate in the Middle East.
The other book, ‘Identity and Violence’, is by the Indian Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen. Professor Sen first experienced the violence of identity politics as a boy during the Muslim-Hindu riots that followed the partition of the sub-continent in 1947. As an Indian who has held some of the most prestigious academic posts in Britain and America, he writes about the complexities of the relationship – ethnic, religious, caste – that comprise one of the major challenges that faces India, and about the misuse and sheer ignorance of history and culture that allow identity bigotry to take hold of minds and political systems. He shows how reason and choice help to make up our identity, so that even when one characteristic may dominate the others it is not necessarily either permanent or exclusive.
Let me use myself as a laboratory experiment to further my argument: after all I should know myself better than anyone else does, particularly if I take the instruction of Socrates to heart and head: ‘Know thyself’. ‘Where to begin?’
Well, I have a British passport, but like 5 million British citizens I have a lot of (aspirin-thinned) Irish blood coursing through my veins. My father’s family came to the north-west of England from hungry and impoverished Ireland in the mid-19th century. So I am British with green edges. I was born in England – in Lancashire – but have lived for most of my life in London. I support English teams against all others, and when I was pressed as a politician to provide the name of a favourite football team, I plumped for a London club. As a boy I was a fan of the Lancashire cricket team, but that was largely because their fast bowler was my hero. So Lancastrian, Londoner, English, British with some Irish genes.
My religion has been an important part of my identity even when I have disagreed with parts of the Catholic Church’s magisterium. I was born and will die (I hope) a Catholic. I cannot conceive of being anything else. So am I a good Catholic? In his magnificent novel, ‘A Question of Loyalties’, Alan Massie has one of his characters ask the question ‘ … what after all is a good Catholic? One who keeps the observances of course, but then?... there are times, I must confess, when I think there can be too much faith. Faith excludes humanity… I have seen faith elevated and distorted, so that only the Church was remembered and Christ forgotten.’ As a Christian, not simply a Catholic, I believe in an after-life. I feel perfectly at home incidentally worshipping in other Christian denominations’ churches, especially in my wife’s Church of England. It is a matter of profound regret to me that my wife is not allowed to take Communion with me in a Catholic Church.
What else? I discovered in my early 20s, after university, that I was a Conservative, partly because I am deeply hostile to the notion that everything can be explained by a simple theory, whether that is socialism… or the market, come to think of it. I do not believe that life is a collection of clear-cut problems to which there are equally clear-cut solutions. The main task of government should be to maintain order and harmony without which civilised behaviour is very difficult. I have considerable sympathy for Burke’s views about ‘the small battalions’. The most profound political observation I know is Michael Oakshott’s view that life ‘is a predicament not a journey’.
As a Conservative politician, I was regarded by right-wing colleagues and the press as ‘a wet’, and rising like a trout to their expectations I strongly support Britain’s membership of the European Union. That is partly because as a patriot, but not a nationalist, I reckon that Britain – a medium sized though not insignificant country - is a lot better off as part of the EU than it would be outside it. I recall that when we determined to try to join the EU, we had already decided that the European Free Trade Area did not give us the clout and the cover internationally that we thought we needed. When we took that decision, our share of global trade was 8 per cent, today it is 3.4 per cent, and the competition from the emerging markets looks even fiercer. So to leave the EU would in my view be ‘very brave’ as Sir Humphrey might have put it, or as I would put it, downright foolhardy.
What else should I confess? My political opinions lie in the sort of catchment area you would expect from what I have said. They do not make me a natural reader of the Sun or the Daily Mail. Indeed, the only newspaper with which I really feel at home is the Financial Times. I mourn – see how old-fashioned I am – the fact that we no longer have an establishment daily paper of record. And, oh yes, I am a strong supporter of the BBC, one of our greatest national institutions of which we should feel proud, a point clearly lost on some in the government.
So there’s my identity, all wrapped up with a bit of cheerful pessimism and a touch of scepticism. Londoner, English, British, Tory, Catholic and a strong advocate of sharing sovereignty – a pretty slippery concept incidentally – in order to cope with regional and global problems. All that is infused with the notion that reason, firmness and decency provide the only effective way of dealing with desolate rage.