Cultural Diversity in Contemporary British Society - Essay Example

I. Introduction By definition, Great Britain is a multinational multicultural and multiethnic; it is a place of diverse identities. The Acts of Union 1536, 1707 and 1800 established a state with six mother tongues and a broad array of customs and traditions. Nevertheless, while Great Britain was a thriving economic and political Union, the culture, traditions and identities of the component nations flourished (Hardill et al. 2001). As Brockliss and Eastwood (1997, 2-3) claimed, “Within the new United Kingdom the space for regional, ethnic, national, linguistic and religious identities was constantly contested.” However, a dynamic British State was established out of a manifold of economic, ethnic, religious commitments. This is due to the different Acts of Union, from 1536 to 1800 were formulated for political homogeneity rather than an actual unification of diverse cultures (ibid). In this paper, it will be argued that diversity and cultural differences in contemporary British society actually disrupt or weaken the cohesion of British community and its larger society. This argument will be supported by various allusions on historical and current developments in Britain through initially establishing a distinctive British culture and identity. Culture and identity are very intricate phenomena. Identity can come from various origins and show itself in various ways. An individual can feel a strong sense of distinctiveness as a person, as a member of a community interest group, or a social group, or a racial and ethnic group, or the same sex, through community bonding or through a shared national legacy. According to Linda Colley (1992) identities are not similar to hats. Most individuals can and do assume different identities simultaneously. Identity is frequently identified through allusion to others. As Cohen (1995) asserts, “You know who you are, only by knowing who you are not” (36). A sense of identity is rooted from and is strengthened through cultural features such as food, music and others that shape the unprocessed material for constructing identity symbols. Mackenzie (1978) believes that identity is based on diversity and can be rooted from state, race, religion and class. Culture and identity can be educated by history forming ancestral origins and by geography advancing a sense of membership. As Smith (2000) illustrates, a soon-to be Englishman requires two elements as identifiers, a football team and a tone of voice. People, hence, become conscious of their culture through their identities whereas identity is formed by culture. Identity can also be associated to politics. With hardly any to recognize the popular political parties now, a greater part of this is directed into nationalistic activities. Likewise, politics can influence culture. Observe how intimate new Labour demands to be recognized with contemporary cultural personalities from sport, popular music, movies and others. This was demonstrated in the setting up of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in England and Wales, derived from the former, more general Department of National Heritage (Hardill et al. 2001). Even though definitions of culture and identity are complex, there is no uncertainty that these influences from leisure through politics and wellbeing. Identities, specifically, may be elusive but their impacts, as Macdonald (1993) argues, can be “every bit as important as more readily grasped economic and social phenomena” (7). II. Challenges to British Culture and Identity There are several challenges to identity that have asserted their primacy in recent years. The divided Britain has attracted attention to the rethinking of identity, as has the progress of the European Union. As Marr (1995) stressed out, one of the foremost dilemmas of politics is “how to preserve small nationals identities within larger structures” (1). The spate of immigration of non-white peoples from various cultures, majority of whom settled in few English cities since the post-war has also confirmed to be as much a challenge to identity as an expansion of the UK’s entrenched multiculturalism. Identity, hence, is not without a hitch. For instance, British and English identity are frequently interchanged, basically since, for the majority of English, Great Britain is merely another concept for Greater England. Yet even something as apparently definite as Scottish identity is complicated to define (ibid). Myth also contributes considerably in identity and blowing up or creating myths can affect identity. One of the most discussed about, perplexing, and largest of identity dilemmas, which has potentially expansive repercussions for the prospect of the UK, is particularly that of the UK hegemon, England, and the surfacing concern of Englishness (Nairn 2000, 215). Observe the overabundance of literatures tackling Englishness and the predicament most authors have identifying Englishness, or, as Neal Ascherson (1999) refers to it, “Anglitude” (48). This is a perpetuated problem. One dilemma is that English identity has on no account been severely questioned. Another is the comparative diversity in such a small nation. The question regularly asked is “which England?” (Wright 2000, 96). It is the England of the Home Counties that is frequently cited as being characteristically English and indicative of English identity (Taylor 1991). However, this discriminatory, white, average-class dimension, falls short to embody the multiplicity in the country. It is England, nevertheless, or at least a number of segments of it, which is the emphasis of the “new post-Windrush multiculturalism” (Cohn 1999, 3), inhabited by those who reside in England, yet not by Englishness. Yet, the earliest race rebellions and the earliest documented intermarriage in Britain took place in Wales (ibid). The Union was specifically disturbing incident for English identity, because, according to Elton (1992), “the English experience the largest and most traumatic change when they turned into the British” (233). Now, with the dissolution of Britain the English must remake themselves as they resurface from their British episode. As Nairn (2000) maintains, “a far deeper uncertainty attaches to post-British England than to any dilemmas currently experienced in Scotland, Wales or Ireland” (215). This is for the reason that in England the state and nation were much more intimately associated than in the other nations of the UK. Hence, while the Scot can feel “British and Scottish and the Welsh British and Welsh” (Hardill et al. 2001, 132), the notion of dual citizenship is exceptionally complicated for numerous English citizens to understand. No one has attempted or triumphed in establishing a plural English identity (ibid). This concern of Englishness and English identity is critical for the prospect of the UK. Several of the representations of English nationalism are pessimistic and linked with football hoodlums, chauvinism, racial intolerance, patriotism and militarism. The representation is rather primitive and is filled with melancholy and regrets. It is also patriarchal, mannish, and white. Since extremist right groups, like the British National Party and the National Front, have suited a number of the symbols of English, also British, nationalism, these is a hesitance among the English to flaunt their sense of identity in the same manner perhaps other groups will (Hardill et al. 2001). Hence, while the English explicitly make assertions to patriotism domestically and overseas, many are hesitant to recognize with English patriotism for worry of being stained with prejudice or Fascism. This is as expressed by the Brimson brothers, “the Scots have the advantage of being able to revel in their Scottishness without being branded racist, and that helps to bring them together in a way that is impossible for the English” (Brimson & Brimson 1996, 20). One dilemma of Englishness is that the greater part of English population never learned to discern Britishness from Englishness. England’s dominant status and relative diversity have implied that while the concepts, insulting or friendly depending on people’s opinion, ‘Jock or Mac’, ‘Paddy or Mick’ are applied to depict Scots, Irish and Welsh, no such names has connected itself to the English (Paxman 1998, 83), even though the labels “‘Sassenach’, in Ireland and Scotland, and ‘Saxon’ in Wales” (Hardill et al. 2001, 133), are applied as a joint mockery for English people. Furthermore, a greater part of the British history is as a matter of fact English history and there has been a letdown to assimilate into the majority of British culture a consciousness of both the multiplicity and the collective identity of the British history; a history which, at a time filled with the misrepresenting excesses of English national sentiment, can be better understood as a multifaceted experience of substantial repercussion not merely in the forming of the probing cultural collection of British identity but as well as in the constructing of the contemporary world (Hardill et al. 2001). A sense of identity of the British is complicated to understand and can only be identified in multinational means. In simple linguistic expressions, the Welsh are the only Britons. Hence people have allusions to British and English identity coming from bureaucrats, which illustrate this uncertainty (Storry & Childs 2002). For Earl Baldwin, who graphically described England, Britain, the nation is reminiscent of the panoramas and smells of a rural peaceful past: “The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England” (Baldwin 1937, 16). More currently, there was the perspective of the head of the Conservative Party, William Hague (1999), for whom the British are full-grown, open-minded, entrepreneurial, multicultural, openhanded, lawful and private citizens. British identity, he claimed, was greater than the overall, which are Welsh and Scottish and a one way or another distinctive English consciousness. He descends, however, into the British equals English misconception (ibid). And then even the Prime Minister, Tony Blair (2000), rode on the identity propaganda through claiming in much the similar stratum, that Britain is more fortified in unity than in diversity. British identity is not something that is distant and an intangible aspect but rests in people’s collective values not in static institutions. Tony Blair further argued that British people should not withdraw from an all-encompassing British identity to more limited identities. The attributes that contribute to British identity, as the Prime Minister maintain, are “creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self-improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history” (Hardill et al. 2001, 134). Even the legitimate characteristic of Britishness is unclear, formless and soft; the notions of nationality and citizenship have been regularly perplexed and the British Nationality Act (1981) accomplished insignificantly to make things more definite. As Linda Colley claims, Britishness founded on citizenship would be the one “with no necessary ethnic or cultural overtones” (cited in Young 2000, 22). This would also facilitate involve non-white racial and ethnic groups, “Britain in the final analysis is made up of the peoples who inhabit it. Once they were Celts, Romans, Angles, Normans, and Saxons. Now they include many people of African and Caribbean descent as well as Bengalis, Kurds, Sikhs, Indians, Turks and Greeks. This multicultural diversity has developed without any help from and despite politicians…Britain and ‘Britishness’ are, as always, a work in progress” (Tisdall 2000, 15). Most people have various identities, which assumed on a variety of shapes according to the milieu. People’s identities are engineered and formed by numerous cultural aspects, each of which consequently can become symbols and representations chosen, knowingly or unknowingly, as pillars of identity. III. Multiethnic Britain: Towards the Future The emergence of multiethnic Britain has witnessed remarkable changes in areas such as cuisine and music. Yet again, food in Britain has been transformed through exposure to cuisine across the globe. Every marketplace nowadays has an Indian and Chinese take-out, and Thai fast foods are turning out to be almost as commonplace. This has not been single-handedly due to migrants coming to Britain but also due to the travel overseas has provided the British a taste for various foods (Storry & Childs 2002). However, as a contradiction to those assertions who predict the decline of Britishness in the future, there are those who regard culture and identity as diverse and multifaceted, while acknowledging the demands that are recently challenging the boundaries of Britain. Probably most significantly in these quarters, the upsetting of Britain has been comprehensively reported by the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain in 2000 (Hardill et al. 2001). The report sponsored by the Runnymede Trust views seven rationales why the notion of Britain is at its critical point: globalization, the nation’s collapse as a super power, its contribution in Europe, regression, the termination of empire, the widening of social diversity, and postwar movement of people. The Report’s finale is that Britain shall be recognized as the “community of communities” (Storry & Childs 2002, 284) it has now become and, for that concern, at all times was. Modifications in the appreciations of British culture and in the diffusion of appropriate national narratives, emblems and symbols, can tag along from this understanding of present and historical diversity. The Parekh Report was carried out in 1997 at a period when disputes over British identity were still recuperating from the involvement on the subject of Dr. Nick Tate, who is the adviser of the Conservative government’s Chief Curriculum. Tate appealed for schoolchildren to be educated what the meaning of being a British is (ibid). The recognizable perspective here is that multiculturalism leads to a heightening of shared identity; that cultural boost implies not addition but strength. Likewise, Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail simultaneously in 1995 claimed that, “The liberal believes a man, once stripped of his national and cultural identity, will become Everyman-citizen of the world. The conservative knows that, in fact, he will become bewildered, schizophrenic, unhappy and lonely” (Storry & Childs 2002, 285). Interchanging diversity and the wearing away of one’s ethnic origins, Roberts was in fact opposing the contemporary multiplicity of British identities, protesting against the acquired images of a national history whose people are more trouble free to homogenize. The backward-looking attitude underlying much of this expression was definitely a nostalgic one which regarded itself to be challenged in 1995 and has in the present day relocated its territory (ibid). Having mislaid a great part of the moral ascendancy, the conventionalist position on national identity has moved to a different stage in the latest present, leading to an increase in aggression among ethnic groups in a number of parts of Britain, particularly inner-city regions with sizable migrant or multiethnic populations. It is certain that a number of British people take into a account multicultural society to be a risk not merely to their knowledge of national identity but to the core of their wellbeing. The suicide bombing plane attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 carried over weeps of support and rage from the British media and politicians, but it was also obvious that for a number of British people these severe terrorists’ activities were difficult to detach from their belief of Muslims in the UK (ibid). The days after the U.S. catastrophe were highlighted not merely by appeal for a greater appreciation of religious and cultural diversity but also by verbal assaults and deeds of violence intended at Muslim individuals and families (Hardill et al 2001). IV. Conclusion The technological advancement has tremendously altered people’s lifestyle and their existence, questioning the notion of the family unit by encouraging its members into consumers of numerous domestic leisure doings, while postwar movement of people has significantly changed the ethnic demography on the streets, and the emergence of the European Union has indicated that British people have deliberated more profoundly regarding their national identities, some aspiring to refer to themselves Welsh, Scottish, Irish or even English, others British, and some Asian, African, Australian (Storry and Childs 2002). Contemporary British society is composed of several conflicting elements such as refuge seekers and wealthy gentry; sedentary suburban travelers and country growers; female priests and male caregivers; each enduring a different description and articulating a different perspective of the country when discussing about their connection to Britain (ibid). Experiences of being British is obviously an outcome of individual identity and awareness, shaped by an array of factors such as gender, age, region, education, religion and occupation, and each of there different perspectives would provide an image of Britain which can merely occur in a mixture of opinions. In the twenty-first century, it can be concluded then, that it is erroneous to think that there is a lone British disposition or character, rather than a diversity of cultural identities. References Ascherson, N. (1999) ‘England’s Lords prepare for another thousand years in fear of the mob’, The Observer, 18 July, p. 33. Baldwin, S. (1937) On England, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blair, T. (2000) ‘Britain and Britishness’, speech, 28 March. Brimson, D. and Brimson, E. (1996) England, My England: The Trouble with the National Team, London: Headline. Brockliss, L. and Eastwood, D. (1997) ‘A union of multiple identities’, in L. Brockliss and D. 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