Functional democratization: an idealized image of nation and empire While the previous section has detailed how changes in the social structure could

impact upon the personality structure of particular individuals/groups, it is important to highlight how the development of a new form of psychogenesis (national identity) can be attributed to the growing commercialisation of the nation-state and the rise of the bourgeoisie classes (Mennell and Goudsblom, 1998).

Indeed, corresponding with the Enlightenment movement across Europe,

‘the British people’s image of themselves as a sovereign collectivity, as a nation, was formed, as a matter of course, in accordance with the demand of a moral code’ (Elias, 1996: 165-66). Here:

Privatization and internalization … led to the transformation of private power, formerly held by individual rulers, into public power. In other words, the creation of a monopoly of power in the private person of the individual ruler was increasingly displaced by its investment and dispersal in the public institution of the state (Ju Kim, 2006: 59)

With regards to the parliamentization of British society, the habits and moral codes of both the aristocracy and the rising middle classes formed part of a wider process of functional democratization within Britain. Here, the emergence of an individual self-hood alongside the nation-state provided the context for an ideological framework of national identity based on the collective appeal of the nation (Ju Kim, 2006). Whereas a nation’s identity had previously been in the possession of the private person, such as, the royal monarch, the ‘awareness of self and other, which began to develop under medieval court society, was manifested in a new bourgeoisie sensibility’ (Ju Kim, 2006: 59). As a result:

The greater interpenetration of aristocratic and middle-class traditions from the eighteenth century on … and … the attempt of sections of the British middle class to combine the aristocratic code of norms in inter-state relations with the moralist and humanist code with which they had risen to the top, is only one of several instances of this basic sociological fact. In this case, that is, the greater interpenetration of neighbouring social strata facilitated a specific fusion of their codes of norms and a general inclination towards pragmatic compromises (Elias, 1996: 165)

In light of these social changes, national identity became inspired by an emphasis

on the civic rights and duties of the citizen (Gerasimov et al., 2005). In doing so:

Almost everywhere in Europe, the intellectual elites of the rising eighteenth century middle classes shared a general belief in moral principles, in the rights of human beings as such and in the natural progress of humanity … When, in one European country after another, men of middle class descent rose to power … [and] replaced aristocratic groups as the ruling groups of their countries … an idealized image of their nation moved into the centre of their self-image, their social beliefs and their scale of values (Elias, 1996:

134-135)

Here, functional democratization reflected a fundamental change in the total structure of national societies, which helped to consolidate social behaviour and national habitus within the individual (Dunning, 2004; Mennell and Goudsblom, 1998). Accordingly, ‘compared to their medieval predecessors, the members of European societies from the “Renaissance” on climbed to a new level of self-consciousness’ (Elias, 1998b: 275). These values had a decisive role in forming a political discourse of national sovereignty, which, in part, evolved around the balancing of state governance with moral values in state authority (Gerasimov et al., 2005).

Within Britain, the ‘nation was now regarded as the balanced combination of royal and parliamentary power’ (Breuilly, 1994: 86; see also Elias, 1996). Indeed, through processes of functional democratisation, the middle classes had become more numerous and powerful by the end of the nineteenth-century (Thompson, 2008). Whereas the parliamentization of British social life occurred much earlier compared to other European states (Elias, 1986; 1996), the monopoly of the English parliament was able to unite the three kingdoms, at least politically, from the eighteenth-century onwards, with Ireland joining the Union in 1801. Here, British power was ultimately organised and expressed through Parliament (Wellings, 2008) which provided both an ‘ideological and organisational function for the British state’ (Breuilly, 1994: 85). More importantly, however, in ‘an age to which the notion of natural rights was foreign … the constitutional rights of Parliament had to be based upon historical precedent’ (Breuilly, 1994: 85).

Therefore, middle class elites and its intellectual sections, increasingly founded an ideal image of themselves based not on family ancestry (a trait readily available for the aristocracy) but on the nation’s past (Elias, 1996). Here, in conjunction with the working classes, national pride and sentiment became rooted in a nation’s

ancestry and past achievement (Elias, 1996). In the case of Britain, however, such pride was also symbolically tied to its position as head of the a global empire (Elias, 1996; Howe, 2010; Kumar, 2003; ref)

Accordingly, the parliamentization of a predominantly middle class electorate was entwined with the national image of a modern monarchy and an industrial bourgeoisie morality of middle class values. More importantly, however, for Britain this process would also contain an important imperial dimension. That is, alongside ‘the emergence of a state in which aristocratic principles of governance increasingly gave way to professional ones’ (Thompson, 2008: 46) stood a ‘burgeoning bureaucratic and professional middle class [that]

saw the British imperial world as their oyster; and their increasingly prominent and powerful position in the state is to be explained as much by their achievements abroad as at home’ (Thompson, 2008: 48). Indeed, while ‘The contest between the aristocracy and the professions, as it manifested itself in the imperial sphere, was about where social authority ultimately lay’ (Thompson, 2008: 46), Devine (2011) notes that:

The eighteenth century can, in retrospect, be seen as the classic period of British imperial expansion. The following one hundred years maintained the territorial momentum but at the same time saw unprecedented British influence expand across the globe, even over nations where the United Kingdom claimed no sovereign authority. (2011: 56)

Consequently, empire proved an important factor in creating a ‘Greater Britain’

outside the British Isles. Proposed plans to form an ‘Imperial Federation’ during the nineteenth-century aimed to forge a military, economic and political union between Britain and the colonies (Schumpeter, 1976) as well as revealing how the

‘imperial world’ (2008: 48) played an important part in notions of civilization and state identity.

Indeed, elsewhere Van Krieken (1999) has explored how processes of colonisation formed part of broader ‘civilizing processes’. In fact, Dunning and Hughes (2012) highlight that according to Elias:

the concept of ‘civilisation’ in French and English had … come to be a high-praise term that expresse[d] the national self-consciousness of colonising peoples who had enjoyed secure national boundaries and a corresponding sense of national identity for centuries. Together with this, went a tendency to want to ‘civilise barbarians’ in fact as well as in ideological justification

of their colonial exploitation of them. (Elias, 2012: 8)

Accordingly, ‘Civilisation’ and its accompanying personality and behavioural tendencies were to reflect a ‘hegemonic belief in a European cultural mission and the concept of the gradual “elevation” of backward societies’ (Conrad, 2013: 553).

Conrad (2013) notes:

As evolutionist ideas became widespread, such ideas became pre-dominant, supported as they were by liberal, Social Darwinist and racial world-views.

… All these initiatives, however, needed to engage with, and were frequently informed by, the hegemonic ideology of civilising mission and development. (2013: 553)

As can be seen, perceptions regarding Europe’s higher state of civilization can be seen as emerging from the gradual transformations that began with the absolutist state (Linklater and Mennell, 2010). Here, ‘Civilisation’, enacted through imperial nationalism, came to be the dominant mode of self-expression amongst Western states (of which the move from ruling class to state control had been achieved).

Conclusion

Through his theory of ‘civilizing processes’ Elias (2012) was able to highlight a number of underlying structural processes in the relationship between state formation and personality structures. Here, Elias (1982) argued that ‘civilization is very closely related to the growing interweaving and interdependence of people … this interweaving can be seen as it were in the process of becoming’ (1982: 52 [italics added]). To this extent, a process sociological approach to national identity formation can be used to explore how past and present changes within and outside the nation have served to underlie its discursive construction.

With this in mind, this chapter has drawn upon various theoretical discussions regarding national identity as well as popular orientations regarding the nation and the emergence of the nation-state. Indeed, when viewing the gradual emergence of the nation-state links can be drawn between the work of Gellner (1964; 1973; 2005;

2008), Smith (1986; 1991; 1995; 2005a; 2005b; 2010) and Elias (1996; 2010; 2012).

Indeed, while Gellner (1964; 1973; 2005; 2008) viewed nationalism as a political principle that emerged from within industrial societies, Elias’s approach viewed such processes as closely entwined with the gradual formation of the state, a process that was predicated on changes in the balance of power between the aristocracy and a

rising middle class (monopoly of taxation and violence/’taming of the warriors’).

From this, a collective national identification emerged, through which both the

‘imagining’ (Anderson, 2006) and ‘inventing’ (Hobsbawm, 1983; 1990) of the nation, its history, culture and identity (Elias, 1996; Maguire and Tuck, 2005) formed an important part of the construction of national identity.

Similarly, Elias’s attention towards the long-term developments (sociogenesis/psychogenesis) underpinning state formation and national identity corresponds with Smith’s (1986; 1991; 1995; 2005a; 2005b; 2010) work on national ethnie. Contrary to Smith however, is Elias’s ability to inter-relate socio-psychological transformations with the promulgation of an idealised national self-image (Maguire and Tuck, 2005). Here, transformations at the sociogenetic level can – over-time – have a gradual effect on identity and the emotional repertoire of individuals and collective groups.

Taking into consideration Elias’s work on state development processes and national habitus, it is possible to observe how civic and ethnic conceptions of the nation serve to analytically separate ‘ethno-linguistic layers of social habitus on the one side, and layers where the state has influenced the social habitus on the other’

(Kuzmics and Axtmann, 2007: 7). This dichotomy denies examinations of how

‘composite’ or ‘multi-layered states or empires’ are formed over time, and, more importantly, that ‘ethno-linguistic layers’ and state influences are fundamentally interdependent (Kuzmics and Axtmann, 2007: 7). In particular, by exploring

‘processes and change in figurations’ (Kaspersen and Gabriel, 2008: 374; see also Atkinson, 2003; Connolly and Dolan, 2012), studies of social habitus can go ‘beyond’

the nation-state in order to include broader processes of imperial expansion (Darwin, 2010; Rose-Greenland, 2013).

With this in mind, the following chapter will explore how ties of interdependence, both within the UK and the British Empire, formed an important part of Britain’s state formation and imperial expansion. Specifically, it will consider the effects of these processes in relation to the emergence of the British ‘domestic’, and, later, ‘imperial’ figurations.

Chapter Two: Britain – From State to Empire Introduction

This chapter will develop upon the conclusions presented in chapter one by exploring how the complexity of international relationships can effect national identity formation. Consequently, it will be argued that national identity ‘never signifies anything static, unchanging, or substantial, but rather is always an element situated in the flow of time, ever changing, something involved in a process’ (Wodak et al., 1999: 11 [italics added]). With this in mind, a process sociological perspective will be used to examine the relational complexities surrounding identification processes.

In particular, this will be used to examine how state formation processes (‘taming of the warriors’/monopoly of taxation and violence) are related to, and, affected by, expanding webs of international interdependency.

Furthermore, this chapter will be underpinned by an Eliasian appreciation that our ‘whole outlook on life continues to be psychologically tied to yesterday’s social reality’ (Elias, 1986: 35 cited in Van Krieken, 1998: 58). Often, the ‘baggage handed down through the generations’ contains ‘a range of possible roles available to a given generation at a given time’ (Duffy, 2008: 62). As a result, in the decades following the American Revolution, both the United States and British Canada (Upper Canada) were shaped by the imperial experiences of both Thomas Jefferson (third President of the United States, 1801-09) and John Graves Simcoe (first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, 1792-98). Hatter (2012) notes:

The common trans-continental ambitions of Jefferson and Simcoe and their similar prescriptions for empire reflect their shared experience as citizens of the British Atlantic world. The shared past of Jefferson and Simcoe, as subjects of the British Empire, shaped the way both thought about governance, politics and economics (2012: 139)

Both Jefferson and Simcoe’s visions of empire would reflect their own common experience of Anglo-American relations (Hatter, 2012). In the case of Britain, this reveals the important role-played by its imperial history and how this can be utilised in order to examine contemporary forms of national identification. Specifically, how do historical interrelations between former imperial and colonial nations allow us to make sense of national identifications?

The following sections will attempt to answer this question by examining the

dynamic complexities surrounding both national and imperial identifications across multinational, imperial units such as Britain and the former British Empire.

Consequently, developing upon the arguments presented in the previous chapter, this chapter will serve to elaborate upon the entwined complexities involved in both state formation (sociogenesis) and national identification (psychogenesis) processes. Maguire (1999) has commented upon the complexity of identity with regards to multi-national state systems, noting that, ‘people in complex nation-states, have multiple identities that are many-layered – local, regional, national [and] global’ (1999: 185). Elsewhere, Elias (1996) also argues that ‘a multi-party parliamentary system is a considerably more complex and difficult governmental form which requires a correspondingly more complex and more differentiated personality structure’ (1996: 292). Subsequently, while ‘national identities in the United Kingdom are highly complex and ambiguous’ (McCrone, 1992:

208), a process sociological approach can provide a critical examination of the complex relations and multi-national dynamics underpinning British identity.

With this in mind, sections 2.0 to 2.1.1. will seek to draw upon a range of process sociological concepts and theories in order to examine how Britain’s domestic and imperial relations have been shaped by processes of functional democratization, expanding ties of state and imperial interdependence and the ‘figurational relationships and changing dynamics of “I”, “we” and “they” pronouns’ (Moore, 2010: 3.3). More importantly, however, this discussion will be supplemented with an examination of the historical development of British identity both within Britain and the former British Empire (Goudsblom, 1977).

Indeed, studies of British identity have often focused upon the social and cultural context of the British Isles. Rarely are the old dominions of the former empire given equal consideration. Here, a historical analysis of the literature on the British Empire can expose the complex nature of British identity across the UK and the former British Empire. In particular, by focusing on the imperial interdependences between Britain and the former dominions, an investigation of the structural processes underlying Britain’s state-formation as well as its imperial expansion and decline, can be considered.

Moreover, this can provide a socio-historical analysis of the social processes that have served to shape the British national consciousness (Mennell, 1994). To this extent, sections 2.3 and 2.3.1. will draw upon available literature regarding the British Empire, focusing in particular on Britain and the white dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Central to this understanding will be a consideration of the social, cultural and

political relations between Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales.

Importantly, however, this chapter is not intended to offer a complete history of the British Empire. Instead, the following sections will draw upon specific elements of the literature on British history that focuses specifically on British identity. Consequently, the focus will be on the long-term developments in British identity and how this has impacted upon British social habitus (Elias, 1996). For this to suceed, a closer look at Elias’s (1978) concept of the ‘figuration’ is required.