Today's society is one which has seen the rapid erosion, almost to the point of disappearance, over the last fifty years of the notion of authority. If anything, this is a phenomenon which accelerated rather than declined under the previous Conservative government. Yet authority is the vital cement for society. Our words derives from the Latin auctoritas. For the Romans, auctoritas was the embodiment of a society's values which naturally commanded respect from the population. Its opposite was potentia, or brute force. In modern parlance, the absence of authority means that we pass from civil society, where communal standards are accepted by consent, to the police state, where instead of collective values it is merely coercion which holds a community together. 

The reason for authority's decline and fall, like that of the Roman Empire, is not due to any one single reason. Nevertheless it has a core cause: the erosion of the concept of nationhood. It has become a cliché in political thought to speak of nation-states where the nation comprises the people of any one country and the state the apparatus that governs them. Nationhood, however, is not a mere aggregation of individuals, but exists only when those gathered together feel themselves part of a common body which possesses an extension in time as well as space. For conservatives, therefore, the statement that 'there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families' is a profoundly mistaken slogan: the idea it embodies belongs not to conservative thought, but that of its great rival, liberalism. For a conservative, the nation should be an extension of the family. The metaphor is apt. Nationality is ascriptive--one cannot choose one's nationality any more than one can choose one's parents--yet one's nationality, like one's parents, remains a vital, ineradicable part of personal identity. But for liberalism, centred as it is on individual rational choice, this is anathema. 

Families at their best, preserve individualism while providing an overarching sense of identity and obligation which provides a moral brake to violent assertions of individual claims--claims which without such restraint could be legitimately pushed to extremes or suppressed only by violence. Nations do the same. 

Unlike in liberalism, where the demand for rights is one way, conservative thought requires there to be a dialectic between the claims of the individual and those of the collectivities to which he belongs. Unfortunately, the intellectual tenor of the age is that of the individualist liberal. 'The right to choose' is the slogan, which, along with its handmaiden, the unreflecting acceptance of moral relativism, underlies virtually all political rhetoric of the present day. Nations, we are told, are artificial constructions and traditions mere inventions, often devised for sinister reasons. Both are idols to be at least denigrated or better still smashed, and smashed with a righteous sense of ideological duty. Burke's invisible chain of belonging which binds and enfranchises equally the quick, dead and those yet to be born is either vaporized in a puff of abstract logic or snapped and discarded. 

The diminution of authority is an inevitable consequence of this course of action. If those in power are no longer part of a project common to both them and the governed, and the governed have been continually told that they have every right to enforce their individual wishes against other groups, it is inevitable that clashes will ensue. The recent phenomenon of 'direct action' in political life is a symptom of this problem. Those taking part feel alienated from those enforcing the law; they sense no bond of commonality or reciprocity with others. In short, for them there is no nation, only a distant and hostile apparatus of power--the state: anonymous, faceless, and lacking all legitimacy. Instead of national loyalty, we are now faced with resentment towards the state. Yet man, as Aristotle noted, is a social animal. So group feeling has not evaporated, but simply been displaced from its natural home. The result is the rise of tribalism, sometimes based on regionalism, sometimes on 'free association' groups such as sexual deviancy. 

The consequences of such social fragmentation are severe. Democracy, 'the rule of the people', becomes impossible if there is no demos or people to rule. Ancient Athens, the most democratic of ancient states, was also the most jealous of its citizenship and a place where social pressure to conform to the norms of society was intense. This is not the paradox that it seems to those brought up in the tradition of liberalism, but perfectly natural. The Athenians recognised that if democracy was to work and to command authority, there needed to be and, as importantly, be perceived to be, a single people who could be said to possess power, not merely a section of the population enforcing its sectarian will and interests on others. 

When there is no acceptance of the legitimacy of law as the will of the community, its enforcement necessarily becomes more difficult and more brutal. The increase in the difficulty of enforcement leads to a twofold problem. On the one hand, there is a greater temptation to flout the law as scorn for its weakness increases; on the other, the necessary increase in legislation and the brutality needed for effective policing leads to the reinforcement of the sentiment of civic alienation. The outcome is a vicious downward spiral of not merely physical, but also spiritual lawlessness.

A substantial amount of blame for this state of affairs lies with the Conservative government of 1979-1997. Its attack on the previous Labour government was couched primarily in liberal, not conservative tones. Instead of presenting socialism as a sectarian dogma and hence hostile to the interests of the nation as a whole, state and nation were confused and Conservatives identified themselves as defenders of the individual and his rights against the predations of the state. The end outcome of this liberal rhetoric has been to leave Great Britain as a state lacking nationhood. This absurd 'all or nothing' approach has also deprived those who feel instinctively that the disintegration of the nation is wrong of an idiom through which they can articulate those feelings. 

This process of what might be termed intellectual ethnic cleansing has been made worse by the constant assertion, contrary to any dispassionate contemplation of the facts, that Great Britain is a 'multicultural' society, akin, for example, to the artificial state of Yugoslavia. Here the slip of rhetoric amongst liberals from multiracial to multicultural is important. It is quite possible for a nation to be multiracial and yet be at an important level monocultural. The best example of this in the ancient world was the Roman Empire and in the modern world it is the United States with its motto of e pluribus unum, 'one out of many'. Immigrants came from around the world to the U.S.A. and were then given a unifying identity to which all could relate. Recently the trend has been to reverse this process of national integration. Americans now are hyphenated-Americans and loyalty to sectional grouplets rather than the nation as a whole is encouraged. The social disintegration this has caused is there for all to see. The same danger threatens here at home, for the natural conclusion to be drawn from the rhetoric of 'multiculturalism' is that Great Britain is not a nation, but merely a geographical container where the sole duty of government is to act as a value-free (non-judgmental would be the way enthusiasts would express the concept) referee negotiating a precarious peace between the warring factions within its area of jurisdiction. Not only does this leave our country vulnerable to implosion and a reversion to the Heptarchy or worse, but there are plenty of external forces willing to help the process of disintegration along. The most important of these is the European Union, ever eager to Balkanize into rootless 'regions' and hence dominate the historic nations of Europe. 

Permissable divergence

What is needed now therefore is the conquest of the state and the restoration of nationhood to unite our United Kingdom. The beginning of such a regeneration is to deny the platitude that this country is 'a multicultural society' and further to deny that small minority groupings have a right to enforce their views on society as a whole. In fact, those who shout loudest may well not represent anyone other than themselves. It is not even that the degree of total parity for all demanded by multiculturalists is necessary for minorities to flourish. Many groups who have not been discovered by the rights industry for whom, like witch-finders, detection of evil is necessary for their own survival, cheerfully continue their communal practices and traditions which lie happily beneath the umbrellas of the national project, rather than being set up in opposition to it. Divergence from the norms of society, provided it is not taken to excess, does not present a problem for a nation, provided that there is an acceptance that such norms do in fact exist and that they will rightly define the outlook of society as a whole. All that is required is to return to the idea that tolerance requires give and take on both sides (i.e., a realisation that majorities as well as minorities have rights) and is not simply a slogan which facilitates unending demands for 'recognition', and usually money, from small vocal groups. 

Other steps are also necessary. A major one would be to reclaim British history from those who wish to appropriate it for their own ends. In recent years two trends have been all too common in the teaching of history. One is the denigration of national achievements. Whereas we were once taught, and rightly, to be proud of our ancestors, now all too often we are informed that we should look on them with shame. Worse than this, though, is the consignment to oblivion of the mainstream historical events and figures who defined our nation in favour of the obscure and marginal. Increasingly we live in a land of forgotten heroes whose people have not so much rejected their past, but have never been given the facts to make a judgement. A nation oblivious of its history loses its very sense of being. It is not just an abstract notion that is lost when historical knowledge is absent. Those without it cannot see how the past reaches out in churches, castles and battlefields, and unites us to our forbears. Much of modern education is not merely malicious dogma, it is theft: our young people are being deprived, and deliberately, of their birthright. It should be a major conservative aim to restore it to them. 

Both these steps, like many others, demand a break with the individualist rhetoric which has come to infect Conservative thinking. They require, for one thing, that governments should not be mere referees, i.e. be simply the apparatus of a state, but take an active part in promoting the values of the majority. Without asserting that what is being defended is a nation, an entity with its own unique place in the universal scheme of things, criticisms of liberalism are in vain. It is only by appealing to a collective body with rights of its own that any attack on the liberal relativist status quo can avoid the charge that complaints against it are merely one more individual opinion worth as much, and as little, as any other. Such a riposte cuts at the heart of the neo-liberal rhetoric that Conservatives have been only too eager to use in recent years. 

If we want to save our nation, we must first have the courage to assert, and assert vigorously, that it exists. 

Dr. Andrew Fear writes from Staffordshire. 

This essay was first printed in Right NOW! magazine (January/March 1999). It is reprinted with kind permission.