One thing we Brits (sic) like to do (see this blog and many others) is to pore over the ethnic and other divisions in countries beyond our fog-bound shores and try to come up with ingenious outcomes for them.

See eg Bosnia/Afghanistan/Kashmir/Cprus and so on and on. You name a conflict or problem – somewhere whirring away in the background will be a clever Brit trying to work up a ‘possible solution’.

My recent postings on Bosnia have this flavour – look at the gruesome divisions in this so-called state, and how even the most basic national symbols such as flags are disputed.

Partly this is habit, drawn from the days of our imperial reach round the globe. Plus there is UK membership of the UN Security Council and many other groupings which have leadership roles in global affairs.

And, I think, we are quite good at it – British superciliousness and know-it-all attitudes are damn annoying to everyone else on Earth, but we do bring along too our unique traditions of pragmatic yet sophisticated fairness and process which help make a positive difference in many contexts.

What we are 200% Utterly Hopeless about is looking at our own divisions and contradictions in any coherent fashion.

And maybe this is itself a source of collective British genius. An ability to accept all manner of divisions and contradictions and let them play themselves out in an unplanned, improvised, quirky evolutionary sort of way.

Rather than plunge into open conflict and institutional collapse, we have all sorts of mechanisms (some formal/explicit, some informal and even unconscious) which lead us into new compromises which set new precedents and guide a way in future disputes.

All of which is a convoluted way of urging readers to read this piece and plenty more from the Britology blog if you want to see just how confused and baffling our own ideas and procedures and nomenclature are when it comes to defining ‘national’ issues.

Thus a demolition job on Gordon Brown’s resounding defences of Britishness:

Brown refers to Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland and England (let’s get the order right) as ‘nationalities’, not explicitly as nations. This implies that there aren’t four nations in the UK but just four distinct national identities that have fused to form a single British nation.

But, ironically, this bizarre coinage makes the indigenous peoples of these islands seem like uprooted immigrants to Britain: having a nationality distinct from the nation (Britain) in which they now live. In fact, ‘nationality’ is more commonly used to refer to a person’s official national identity: their citizenship. We talk of ‘British nationality’ but of the ‘nations’ and national identities of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (and Cornwall, for some). 

This linguistic confusion marks out the way Brown turns the realities of British national identities on their head: ‘British’ is in reality the name of a ‘mere nationality’ (citizenship, statehood).

But Brown wants to make Britain out to be a nation and the core national identity of its citizens. If Britain becomes a nation, then the ‘lesser’ term of ‘nationality’ can be applied to the UK’s historic national communities.

… The state as nation; and the nations as superseded, nationalistic ‘nationalities’. 

If that is not enough, look at the row over the National Health Service. What exactly are we talking about, folks?

And I thought Yugoslavia and its narodi and narodnosti were complicated…