Part I — Englishness, National Identity, and the Long Shadow of Nationalism
The question of Englishness has become strangely fraught in recent years. Other identities within the United Kingdom — Scottish, Welsh, Irish — seem to carry a settled clarity. But Englishness has become a site of tension, argument, and unease. It is pulled in different directions: cultural, civic, ancestral, political, historical. Each layer tells a different story, and the stories do not always agree.
1. The layers of Englishness
A cultural layer — the warm, familiar Englishness of cricket on summer lawns, pubs with low beams, dry humour, understatement, eccentricity, and a deep affection for landscape and place. This is the Englishness people love.
A civic layer — the inclusive idea that Englishness is about values, behaviour, participation, and belonging. This is the version most people instinctively believe in.
An ancestral layer — the claim that Englishness is tied to bloodlines, lineage, and centuries of heritage. This is the version that causes controversy, because it excludes.
A political layer — Englishness as a reaction to deindustrialisation, immigration debates, Brexit, cultural change, and a perceived loss of status. This is where the anger comes from.
A historical layer — England as the core of the UK, the empire, the establishment. Englishness feels “too big,” too entangled with power, too burdened by history to be simple.
These layers overlap, contradict, and compete. No wonder Englishness feels unsettled.
2. National identity: the story of “we”
Behind all this lies a deeper question: what is national identity?
It is not a passport.
It is not a bloodline.
It is not a flag.
National identity is a shared story — a sense of “we” that binds strangers together. It is emotional before it is political. It gives people:
- continuity
- belonging
- meaning
- a place in the world
But identity becomes dangerous when it hardens into ideology.
3. Why nationalism became so powerful
For most of human history, people did not have:
- democracy
- social mobility
- individual rights
- stable institutions
- welfare states
- global communication
Life was precarious. People needed something larger than themselves to hold onto. Nationalism filled the gap. It offered:
Belonging — a sense of being part of a people.
Purpose — a mission to build, defend, avenge, or expand.
Meaning — a story that made life feel significant.
Unity — a way to bind strangers into “the people.”
This is why the 19th and early 20th centuries were the great age of nationalism. It was the emotional glue of societies undergoing massive change.
4. Why nationalism became destructive
When the story becomes absolute, it becomes dangerous.
Radical nationalism says:
- our people are superior
- our destiny is sacred
- our suffering is unique
- our enemies must be defeated
- our borders must expand
- our purity must be protected
This is the nationalism that led to:
- the First World War
- the Second World War
- fascism
- ethnic cleansing
- genocide
- imperialism
- partition
- forced migrations
It is the nationalism of the 20th century — the one Europe is still recovering from.
Its destructiveness is exactly why it lost legitimacy.
5. Europe’s response: the EU as a peace‑project
After 1945, Europe learned the hard way that ultra‑nationalism leads to catastrophe. The European Union was built — not as a trading bloc, not as a bureaucracy, but as a peace‑project. Its purpose was simple:
Make war between European nations not only unthinkable, but impossible.
Shared institutions, shared laws, shared interests — all designed to prevent the old demons from returning.
This is why Brexit felt, to many, like a step backwards: not because of economics, but because it reopened questions of identity that Europe had spent decades trying to soften.
My own life has been shaped by these questions, though not in the dramatic way some might imagine. I was born in England to Ukrainian parents, but my childhood home was not a cultural battleground. I did not grow up feeling “Ukrainian at home” and “English outside.” I was simply my parents’ son. Home was stable, loving, and secure — a gift my parents themselves had never known in their own disrupted lives.
Part II — A Personal Journey: Growing Into Oneself
If anything marked me as different, it was my surname — unpronounceable to teachers, a source of mild embarrassment at school. But I did not feel alien or out of place. I was just another boy in Exeter, navigating childhood in the ordinary way children do.
It was only later, in adolescence and early adulthood, that the question of identity began to press on me. Not because anyone forced it upon me, but because I felt an inner need to understand who I was. Was I English? British? Ukrainian? Something in between? Something outside all categories? These questions felt urgent then, as if the answer would determine my place in the world.
The journey to Ukraine
Part of that search took me to Ukraine in 1982. I went hoping to find some missing piece of myself. And yet, in the great irony of my life, it was there — in the land of my parents — that I felt unmistakably English. Not just British, but English in a way I had never felt before. The distance clarified what proximity had obscured. I recognised myself not through ancestry, but through contrast.
The slow dissolving of the question
That moment was the beginning of a long, slow shift.
The urgency of the question softened.
Life did its quiet work.
I lived, worked, aged, reflected.
The need for a fixed identity dissolved, not through any dramatic revelation, but through the simple accumulation of years. I became, gradually and naturally, the man I am today.
British by citizenship.
English by temperament.
Ukrainian by heritage.
And entirely myself by character.
My temperament — and the Englishness I grew into
If Englishness were defined the way most people actually feel it — culturally, emotionally, behaviourally — I would fit perfectly:
- my humour
- my understatement
- my dry observations
- my sense of place
- my relationship with Exeter
- my attachment to the landscape
- my quiet civic involvement
- my reflective temperament
These are profoundly English traits.
But because the word “English” has been politicised, racialised, and argued over, I instinctively avoided it for much of my life. And that is entirely understandable.
The tragedy of those who never reached this stage
I cannot help thinking of the millions in the 20th century who never lived long enough to reach this stage. Young people swept into movements that promised belonging but delivered destruction. They were searching for themselves, as all young people do, and were caught by forces far larger than they could comprehend. Their lives were claimed by identities that were too rigid, too absolute, too unforgiving.
I was luckier. I lived long enough for identity to become gentle.
What you are matters more than where you belong
In the end, I have come to believe that what you are matters far more than where you belong. Identity is not a flag or a bloodline or a tribe. It is the slow accumulation of character, the habits of a lifetime, the way you move through the world when no one is watching.
My Mother’s wish
And so I think of my Mother, who once said she hoped I would grow up to be an “English gentleman.” At the time, I did not understand what she meant. Now, at the latter end of my life, I think I do. She was not speaking of ancestry or nationality. She was speaking of qualities — decency, restraint, courtesy, steadiness — the quiet virtues she admired in the people around her. And perhaps, without ever intending it, I have grown into exactly what she hoped.