There are many approaches to nation-building, but none is ever successful without a compelling foundation myth, with vividly drawn heroes and villains. For the most part, the story is one of rebellion against the yoke of the tyrant. Sometimes the despot is homegrown; France’s self-image rests in the furious revolt against aristocracy by a Paris mob that sent Marie Antoinette (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”) to the guillotine. It is no accident that one of Marianne’s first claims is to égalité.
But more often the foe is a familiar (even familial) near-neighbour. According to legend, Switzerland’s cantons escaped Habsburg domination after William Tell’s crossbow bolt pierced the apple balanced on the head of his son. The Swiss hero then turned his second dart on Albrecht Gessler, the brutal bailiff who enforced Austrian rule, triggering a revolt across several provinces. Hardly surprising that Switzerland’s national motto is a call to unity: “One for all, all for one.”
By this test, if the Kremlin’s brutal mugging of Ukraine had the aim of creating a single Russian nation, it is destined to fail. This invasion has provided President Zelensky and his successors with raw material for the story Ukrainians will tell themselves for generations, one of a nation reborn in resistance.
Our own — largely English — origins story lies in the determined resistance to Norman rule by a small band of English yeomen hiding in Sherwood Forest. There have been more than 70 film adaptations of the Robin Hood story, plus countless TV series and books, never mind the spin-offs, such as Sir Walter Scott’s Saxon noble Ivanhoe. Nit-pickers may cavil that rescue comes with the return of the decidedly French Richard Coeur de Lion, but collective memory is an infinitely flexible thing. As the great historian AJP Taylor said, the past is what actually happened, but history is what we tell ourselves.
Tomorrow, our future King William and Queen Catherine come face to face with an origins story in which we play a less noble role. Jamaica’s foundation myth is born out of the trauma of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. The island even has its own resistance cult, the Maroons; the name comes from the Spanish cimarrón, untamed. In the 18th century, bands of rebel African slaves fought a heroic guerrilla war in Jamaica’s mountainous Cockpit Country, seeing off the Spanish and fighting the British to a standstill.
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Kate and William make unlikely doubles for the Sheriff of Nottingham, and agitation for Jamaica to dispense with its monarchy is muted. Despite a hiccup on the first leg of the tour in Belize, the signs are they will be welcomed in Kingston. They have already done the right thing by lining up an event to honour Bob Marley. It may even help that a weak Windies cricket team were holding England to a draw in the current Test series.
Significantly, the Prince of Wales’s decision to appear at the ceremony declaring Barbados a republic suggests a reversion to a traditional British strategy: if you can’t beat them, join them. In 1740 we made a peace deal with the Maroons, granting them 500 acres on which to build an independent settlement under the leadership of Jamaica’s first female national hero, Queen Nanny. In Charles’s speech in Bridgetown, he made clear it is not rule by the crown that matters to him, but attachment to the values of the Commonwealth which he will one day lead.
This is the right call. In the end, the foundation myths of nations tell us less about who they have been and more about who they want to be. And we want them to choose our ways over those of the autocracies. However, it is not immediately obvious why they should turn down the cheap oil, shiny new roads and bridges funded by billions in loans from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia in favour of the intangible values of democracies who fuss about territorial integrity and the rights of minorities and women. Caribbean and African nations are unlikely to end up in President Putin’s bad books for criminalising homosexuality.
It does not help that we spend far more time lamenting the failings of our democracy than boasting about its virtues. This week the government responded positively to last year’s Sewell report on race; opposition MPs grumbled that ministers failed to declare this country and pretty much everyone in it racist, an accusation that will be gleefully repeated by Mr Lavrov’s team at the UN. Frequently we shoot ourselves in the foot. The media regulator Ofcom has effectively closed down the Putin-backed broadcaster RT. In Moscow and Beijing they will be delighted; they can now point to state censorship in the West.
Bluntly, Britain should be making the case boldly that we really are better than them. Whilst Asian-heritage people are beaten in Moscow subways and Uighurs are hunted to extinction in Xinjiang, we have the most significant mixed-race population in the world. Rather than silencing Putin’s emissaries we should be showering brilliant satirists like Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin) with money to ridicule the despots and tyrants to the point that no nation wants to be seen with them.
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Lately, Putin has taken to posing as a Christian, sickeningly mangling Jesus’s words: “Greater love hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.” He, of course, has no friends in Ukraine, or anywhere much outside Beijing or Riyadh. Maybe, as Easter approaches, someone needs to read him that bit in Handel’s Messiah about the nations raging and remind him that if he’s lucky and backs off now, “He that sitteth in heaven shall laugh”; but if he continues to push his luck, the next bit of the prophecy involves being dashed into pieces like a potter’s vessel.
