A member of our household recently received a new passport
from Her Majesty’s Passport Office, just in time for summer vacations. On the
front cover is the familiar coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland, the lion and the unicorn. Inside the back cover, the
bearer’s photo and a chip. But it’s the pages inbetween which caught my
attention – on each page, empty for future visas, there are different images of
the British Isles. There are picturesque beach huts looking very much as if
they are from Southwold Beach. There is a Durdle Door, the famous sea arch of
Dorset. There are pictures of moorland, and of rolling hills much like the South
Downs.
On this
quintessential identity document – there to confirm individual identity, but
also a statement of national identity and statehood – Great Britain is
presented therefore as a set of diverse, striking and unpopulated landscapes, mostly
coastal. Checking my own older passport, I found that its pages are adorned
with images of British birds: waders, eagles, herons. This is a striking way of
representing British identity, to its own citizens/subjects and to foreign
border officials the world over. It is reminiscent of the soft-focus images of
the United Kingdom adopted by British Airways on its in-flight crockery, on the
paper ties which adorn its plastic crockery, and on posters displayed in its planes…
misty, blue depictions of the Oxford skyline, or Brighton pier. The British
Airways images are at least of places of human habitation, references to a
human heritage. But the Passport Office offers us just landscape.
When the
euro was being launched in 2001-2, there was much debate as to which symbols to
put on coins and notes, national or European. Coins retained national symbols,
but the notes carried famous bridges, as a neutral image, and a helpful metaphor
perhaps for the European project. Bridges were clearly the compromise option.
It’s a sign, then, of how contested British identity is today that the Passport
Office judged that national identity was best expressed without any reference
to, e.g., famous British individuals, or buildings, or cities, but to something
as abstract and seemingly timeless as landscape. I once heard a folk singer in
concert perform a song about British identity – the basic jist was that, no
matter what your race, or place of origin, what united inhabitants of this
island was ultimately (only?) the landscape itself, which we could all agree to love. For
historians and nation-builders, nationalists and patriots in the 19th
and 20th centuries, national identity was all about history. Now
that we, in multicultural 21st century Britain can’t agree on a
universally palatable narrative of British history, the Passport
office at least has
junked history altogether in exchange for geography, or even geology. As
historians, on some level we are clearly failing to offer our fellow
citizens a useable narrative of their past.
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| This is the United Kingdom... Durdle Door, Wikipedia Commons |
