Re: [Marxism] Could Socialists not use "Great" before Britain!

["Ed George" <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm encouraged by Greg McDonald's unease at using the term 'America' to
talk about the US, even if I do think that his proposed alternative of
'North America' leaves something to be desired, especially as far as
Canada and the Canadians are concerned. But I am astonished at his
statement that 'England is a geographical description and not a
political one', and for two reasons. First, because, from the context of
his remarks, he does somehow see 'England and Great Britain as synonyms
of  the UK'; and, second, because, like Lüko, he clearly wants to
maintain the fiction that 'geographical' names, being distinct from
'political' ones, are 'geographical' and not 'political'. 

To take these in reverse order, why is, for example, America called
America? Why does the continent bears the name of the pirate Amerigo
Vespucci? That is not geography; or, better put, it _is_ geography, but
geography, being a human science, is not _just_ 'geographical'. Why are
the 'British Isles' (sic) not called the 'Irish Isles', or the
'British-Irish (or Irish-British) Archipelago'? Etc., etc., etc. It is
clear that the idea that 'geographical' terms are 'merely' geographical
is just idiotic.

Why then is Britain called Britain?

The ancient Greeks knew the names of the two large islands that lay to
the north of the coast of present-day Brittany as Ierne and Albion,
words that must have been transformations of Celtic words. Pytheas of
Massilia, writing in the fourth century BCE, described the archipelago
as Pretanic, an unambiguously Celtic word that would have been used by
at least some of its inhabitants to refer to themselves (the word
survives in the modern Welsh Prydain). Mispronouncing, the Romans called
the largest island Britannia, and its people Brittani. After the Romans
left, the term fell into relative disuse, tending to be used to refer to
those south and western pre-Germanic peoples and their descendents (i.e.
the Welsh).

The word would be revived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries to refer to the new kingdom of 'Great Britain', incipient or
actual brought into being by the eventual union of the kingdoms of
Scotland and England. The point is that the term 'Britain' (plus
'Great') was a _resuscitation_ of an older term, a resuscitation that
gave it a _new_ ideological and political content (and why those who did
this - starting with James I of England - would want to do it is
obvious). The fact that this state, the Kingdom of Great Britain, then
juridically formalised its up to then de facto (through the Protestant
Ascendancy) colonisation of Ireland through the 1800 Acts of Union
(which formally created the 'United Kingdom of great Britain and
Northern Ireland)' indicates that the pedantic distinction some people
make between Great Britain and the United Kingdom - as referring to
different identities - is just that, pedantry (and a pedantry only made
easier by believing the field of toponomy to be apolitical).

What to do, then? Raymond Williams liked to call the country Yookay,
while Tom Nairn once used the form Ukania. Me, in normal speech, I just
say 'Britain', while in political contexts I tend (i.e. short of
pedantically) to the form 'the British state'. What I think must be
avoided, not only on political grounds, but on practical ones too, is
the conflation of 'England' and 'Britain'. It should be clear from the
above that these are distinct entities: 'English politics', i.e. what is
happening politically in England, and 'British politics', i.e. what is
happening politically in Britain, are simply not the same thing; and, as
it happens in the present period, increasingly not so. So I'm afraid
that my good and much respected friend Néstor is wrong in this case.
Being Welsh, I would love it to be the case that all that is perfidious
in Albion emanate from England, but the truth is that Wales and Scotland
are imperialist creations of the British state as much as England is,
and, having shared so gaily in the booty of empire, must now pay the
political price.


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