WorldView/Paul Gillespie:England's progress through the World Cup has been marked with the now familiar outbreak of loud nationalism and conspicuous flag-waving. It will come to a crescendo today when the team plays Portugal.
Watching their game against Ecuador in a Dublin sailing club, a visiting English sailor was uneasy with this. In the middle of a group rooting for Ecuador, he wondered why the crowd in Stuttgart kept bursting into God Save the Queen - which stimulated even greater hostility among his drinking companions. Isn't that the British national anthem, not the English one, he asked.
The song, composed in the 1740s, does not mention England - and Britain only once. Several verses refer implicitly or explicitly to Scotland, where the Stuart uprising had just been put down. It is projected outwards, at enemies such as France or the Vatican who use internal disunity to subvert.
Thus the second verse goes: "O Lord our God arise/Scatter her enemies/And make them fall; /Confound their politics,/Frustrate their knavish [sometimes Popish] tricks/On Thee our hopes we fix,/Oh, save us all." This verse is not usually sung these days.
Beyond Scotland, France and the Vatican, the anthem became imperial, just as England's identity was closely bound up with Britain's imperial role. Rather than simply fusing state and nation, as did other state-nations or nation-states, it was projected outwards as an imperial civilising mission towards other, supposedly inferior or backward, peoples.
James Thomson's Rule Britannia encapsulated this attitude in its second verse: "The nations, not so blest as thee,/Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall:/While thou shalt flourish great and free,/The dread and envy of them all." These others saw this as an exclusionary imperial nationalism rather than a civic patriotism - a perception still resisted and challenged by many.
It was an exclusionary system for Irish people in particular.
Historically, Ireland has been the consistent issue on which Anglo-British nationalism was constructed, whether at the time of the Act of Union or in the Home Rule crises of 1885-6 or 1911-14. As a result, unionism became indelibly associated with sectarian, triumphalist Protestant and imperial British ethno-nationalism for most of nationalist Ireland.
With the English making up 85 per cent of the UK population, Englishness is challenged after the end of empire and Cold War by devolution within the United Kingdom, revived Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalism, by immigration and related multiculturalism and by European integration. It lacks a distinctive purchase historically or culturally because until recently it did not have to be asserted.
Unsurprisingly, the St George flag has become associated with right-wing and far-right movements, and with ethnic rather than civic identity. David McCrone, a Scottish political scientist, recalls how the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit corrected the (black) writer Darcus Howe when he spoke of "we English" in his documentary White Tribe in 2000: "No, Darcus. We are British, but I am English".
Public surveys consistently show non-white citizens prefer to describe themselves as British rather than English. Indeed some of them became hostile to constitutional change and devolution within the UK for fear of being left stranded within a reactionary ethnic definition of Englishness.
Those who describe themselves as English rather than British are more right-wing in their attitudes to immigration and the EU. One wonders what Tebbit makes of the English soccer team these days.
Thus the assertiveness of English identity on display through its soccer symbolism expresses a wider uncertainty about the nation's content and destiny. It taps into a widespread public discussion, of substantial political consequence.
This runs through Labour, in which both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have sought to redefine Englishness and Britishness as inclusive and forward-looking to ensure the Tories could not claim a monopoly over it. Much of the Conservatives' agonising over the issue is also coming to terms with pressure from constitutional change, immigration and Europe.
The peace process is part of this discourse, as Irish identities are also reconfigured. Official Irish attitudes towards Europe over the last generation have redefined integration as more inclusive and enlarging than a bilateral Anglo-Irish relationship. This continues the traditional "othering" relationship with Britain, but in a different register.
All identities are created by differentiation and othering, defining who "we" are not, and how we differ from "them". Sometimes the distinctions are arbitrary, with the content of difference subordinated to the boundary between us and them.
"Europe" plays that role in contemporary British discourse - notwithstanding Blair's efforts to argue that a true reading of British history reveals a nation committed as much to Europe as to empire.
In a speech in 2000 he put it like this: "England was a European power long before it became an imperial one ... Even in the days of Empire, Britain was first and foremost a European power, preserving the balance in Europe, opposing those who sought to dominate Europe".
Blair's commitments to Europe and Northern Ireland have been a distinctive feature of his time in office. The looming transfer of power, presumably to Brown, invites a judgment on how he has delivered on them.
He has certainly devoted more public effort to it than to bringing Britain to the centre of Europe. That objective is far from being achieved, partly because Blair has systematically run with British media Euroscepticism rather than tacking aggressively into it.
In consequence, one of his principal legacies will be an unresolved Anglo-British question, in which the ghost of English nationalism returns to haunt a changing United Kingdom.