Cultura e civilizzazione Inglese

Civiltà, cultura e istituzione - Inghilterra

Country and people

There are a different number of national teams which might be described as ‘British’; there are two large islands. The largest is called Great Britain; the origin of the adjective ‘great’ in the name Great Britain was not a piece of advertising like modern politicians tried to use. It was first used to distinguish it from the smaller area in France which is called ‘Brittany’. The other is called Ireland and there is no agreement about what to call all of them together, even if during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were generally called “The British Isles”; but most people in Ireland call to mind the time when Ireland was politically dominated by Britain.

Great Britain, Ireland and all those smaller islands belong together was named “The north-east Atlantic archipelago”, “the north-west European archipelago”, “IONA” (Islands of the North Atlantic) or “The Isles” but none of them was accepted. In truth the most common term “Great Britain and Ireland” is not strictly correct because it ignores all the smaller islands. There are two small parts, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which have special political arrangements and are ‘crown dependencies’, with self-government, own parliament and its own tax system so these are not officially part of the UK.

Politically speaking and four nations

Politically speaking there are two states, the island of Ireland called The Republic of Ireland known as “Eire” while The other state has authority over the rest of the area, its name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain shortened to “The UK”. The normal everyday adjective, when talking about something to do with the UK, is “British”. People often refer to Britain by “England” but it is not correct because England is only one of the four nations. The others are Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; their political unification was a gradual process that took several hundred years, it was completed in 1800 when the Irish parliament was joined with the parliament for England, Scotland, and Wales in Westminster, so that the whole area became a single state, even if in 1922, most of Ireland became a separate state.

Culture and lifestyle varied enormously across the four nations, for example, the dominant culture of Ireland, Wales and Highland Scotland was Celtic while people in England were Germanic (this difference was reflected in the languages they spoke, so people in the Celtic areas spoke Celtic languages and people in the Germanic areas spoke Germanic dialects). Moreover, the nations had different economic, social, and legal systems, and they were independent of each other. Today, these differences have become blurred but not completely disappeared because there is only one government for the whole of Britain and many aspects of government are organized separately in the four parts of the United Kingdom.

The dominance of England

There is an excuse for the people who use the word ‘England’ when they mean ‘Britain’; the dominant culture of Britain today is English. The system of politics that is used in all four nations today is of English origin, and English is the main language of all four nations. Many aspects of everyday life are organized according to English custom and practice. The political unification of Britain happened because England was able to assert her economic and military power over the other three nations.

Today, English domination can be detected in the way in which various aspects of British public life are described and it can also be detected in the way that many English people don’t bother to distinguish between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’; England does not make up the whole of the UK. There has been a long history of migration from Scotland, Wales and Ireland to England; there are millions of people who live in England but who would never describe themselves as English, for example, we can find the largest category called ‘white other’ to point out these people who are from a variety of places and many are only temporarily resident in Britain. This means that they do not form a single identifiable community.

Moreover, there are other ethnic groups formed by people whose ethnic roots are in the Indian subcontinent (2 million people) and the other established, recognizable ethnic group in Britain are black Caribbeans etc. Since the 1980s, more people immigrate to Britain than emigrate from it every year, at the same time, emigration is also very high. These categories of people who populate the UK do not mind being described as ‘British’ but many of them would not like to be called “English”. There is a complicated division of loyalties among many people in Britain, especially in England. This crossover of loyalties can work the other way as well. English people do not regard the Scottish, the Welsh or the Irish as “foreigners”.

Geography

The land and climate in Britain have a notable lack of extremes, for example, Britain has mountains, but none of them are very high, it also has flat land but with hills, it has no big rivers, it doesn’t usually get very cold in the winter or very hot in the summer.

The climate

The climate in Britain is more or less the same as that of the north-western part of the European mainland. The mild winters mean that snow is a regular feature of the higher areas only. The winters are in general slightly colder in the east of the country than they are in the west, while in summer the south is warmer and sunnier than the north. There is a saying that Britain doesn’t have a climate, it only has weather due to the bad reputation that England has about weather. The lack of extremes is the reason why, on the few occasions when it gets genuinely hot or freezing cold, the country seems to be totally unprepared for it.

Land and settlement

Britain has neither towering mountain ranges nor impressively large rivers, plains or forests. Overall, the south and east of the country are comparatively low-lying, consisting of either flat plains or rolling hills. Mountainous areas are found only in the north and west, although these regions also have flat areas. Human influence has been extensive, the forests that once covered the land have largely disappeared; even if Britain has a greater proportion of grassland than any other country in Europe except Ireland. At the same time, much of the land is used for human habitation and this is not only because Britain is densely populated in most areas but partly because of their habitual concern for privacy and their love of the countryside. As a result, cities in England and Wales have been built outwards rather than upwards; despite this, there are areas of completely open countryside everywhere and some of the mountainous areas remain virtually untouched.

The environment and pollution

It was in Britain that the word ‘smog’ was first used. As the world’s first industrialized country, its cities were the first to suffer this atmospheric condition. The situation in London reached its worst point in 1952 and water pollution was also considered a problem. For this, during the 1970s, laws were passed which forbade the heating of homes with open coal fires and which stopped much of the pollution from factories. However, as in the rest of Europe, the great increase in the use of the motor car caused an increase in a different kind of air pollution. This problem is serious enough for weather forecasts to have an “air quality section”.

Now that the reduction of greenhouse gases has become a pressing global need, how to provide for Britain’s energy needs and/or reduce its energy consumption has become a national issue, there is a possibility that new nuclear power stations will be built because they do not emit greenhouse gases. Also, various attempts at using ‘green’ energy sources are being made; one of these is solar power and others are tidal power, wave power and above all wind power (wind farms are now quite a common feature of the British landscape).

London

London, the largest city in Western Europe (seven times larger than any other city in the country and a fifth of the total population of the UK lives in the wider London area), dominates Britain; it is home to the headquarters of all government departments, the country’s parliament, its major legal institutions, and the monarch. Also, it is the country’s business and banking centre and the centre of its transport network, which contains the headquarters of the national television networks and all the national newspapers.

Two well-known areas of London are the West End, known for its many theatres, cinemas and expensive shops, and the East End known as the poorer residential area of central London. There are many other parts of central London, some of them quite distinctive in character, and central London itself makes up only a very small part of Greater London. The most recent trend has been an expansion of London to the east, down towards the Thames Estuary.

London is in some ways untypical of the rest of the country in that it is so cosmopolitan; although all of Britain’s cities have some degree of cultural and racial variety, the variety is by far the greatest in London (more than 300 languages are spoken there). In fact, nearly a third of the people in London were born outside Britain. This popularity is probably the result of its combination of apparently infinite cultural variety and a long history which has left intact many visible signs of its richness and drama.

Southern England

The area surrounding the outer suburbs of London has the reputation of being “commuter land”; so this is the most densely populated area in the UK which does not include a large city, and millions of its inhabitants travel into London to work every day. Further out from London the region has more of its own distinctive character, for example, we can find:

• The county of Kent known as “the garden of England” because of the many kinds of fruit and vegetables grown there.
• The Downs, a series of hills in the south of London, used for sheep farming. The southern side of the Downs reaches the sea in many places and forms the white cliffs of the south coast (many retired people live along this coast).
• "The West Country" has an attractive image of rural beauty in British people’s minds. Some parts of the West Country are well-known for their dairy produce and fruit.
• Exmoor and Dartmoor, the most popular holiday area in Britain, it’s in the south-west peninsula, with its rocky coast, numerous small bays.
• East Anglia, to the north-east of London, where there are large expanses of uniformly flat land where this flatness, together with the comparatively dry climate, has made it the main area in the country for the growing of wheat and other arable crops.

Employment in the south-east of England has always been mainly in trade, the provision of services and light manufacturing; so it did not suffer the slow economic decline that many other parts of England experienced during the twentieth century.

The Midlands of England

Birmingham is Britain’s second largest city; during the Industrial Revolution it developed into the country’s major engineering centre and despite the decline of heavy industry in the twentieth century, factories in the Birmingham area still convert iron and steel into a vast variety of goods. In the midland of England we can find:

• The Black Country and Manchester known as the Potteries
• Derby, Leicester, and Nottingham
• Grimsby, one of the world's greatest fishing ports, has become the country's major fish processing centre.

Northern England

The Pennine mountains run up the middle of northern England like a spine whose sides occupied by quantity of coal and iron ore enabled these areas to lead the Industrial Revolution. In the north we can find:

• The Manchester area which became, in the nineteenth century, the world's leading producer of cotton goods.
• Bradford and Leeds became the world's leading producers of woollen goods.
• Sheffield became a centre for the production of steel goods.
• Newcastle, shipbuilding was the major industry.

The achievements of these new industrial towns induced a feeling of civic pride in their inhabitants and an energetic realism even if the decline in heavy industry in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century hit the industrial north of England hard; for this, for a long time, the region as a whole had a level of unemployment significantly above the national average. The pattern of settlement in the north of England is often different from that in the south; the typically industrial landscape and the very rural landscape interlock. Further away from the main industrial areas, the north of England is sparsely populated.

Scotland

Scotland has three fairly clearly marked regions. Just north of the border with England are the southern uplands, which consists of small towns, quite far apart from each other, whose economy depends to a large extent on sheep farming. Further north, there is the central plain. Finally, there are the highlands, consisting of mountains and deep valleys and including numerous small islands off the west coast. It is in the central plain and the strip of east coast extending northwards from it that more than 80% of the population of Scotland lives.

Scotland’s two major cities have very different reputations:

• Glasgow, the larger, is associated with heavy industry and some of the worst housing conditions in Britain but it has a strong artistic heritage.
• Edinburgh, smaller than Glasgow, has a middle-class image; it is the capital of Scotland and the seat of its parliament. It's called “the Athens of the north”.

Tourism is important in the local economy, and so is the production of whisky.

Wales

Despite its industry, no really large cities have emerged in this area; it is the only part of Britain with a high proportion of industrial villages. Most of the rest of Wales is mountainous. As a result, each part of Wales has closer contact with its neighbouring part of England than it does with other parts of Wales.

Northern Ireland

Here, we can find:

• Belfast, which is famous for the manufacture of linen and like the rest of Ireland, largely agricultural.

Identity

Ethnic identity: the four nations

National (‘ethnic’) loyalties can be strong among the people in Britain whose ancestors were not English. For many people living in England who call themselves Scottish, Welsh or Irish, this loyalty is little more than a matter of emotional attachment. For people living in Scotland, there are constant reminders of their distinctiveness like several important aspects of public life, such as education and the legal and welfare systems, are organized separately, and differently, from the rest of Britain. It has many features which are different from other forms of English and cannot usually be understood by English or Welsh people; this is partly because of the historical cultural split between highland and lowland Scotland.

While people of Wales do not have as many reminders of their “welshness” in everyday life and the organization of public life is similar to that of England. In addition, a large minority of the people in Wales probably do not consider themselves to be especially Welsh at all. As a result, a feeling of loyalty to Wales is often similar in nature to the fairly weak loyalties to particular geographical areas found throughout England; it is regional rather than nationalistic.

The question of identity in Northern Ireland is a much more complex issue while regarding to the English identity most people who describe themselves as English have made little distinction in their minds between 'English’ and “British”. However, as part of the growing profile of ethnic identity generally the English part, distinct from British, is becoming clearer. Nevertheless, exactly what makes English and British distinct from each other is not at all clear.

Other ethnic identities

The peoples of the four nations have been in contact for centuries. As a result, there is a limit to their significant differences while the situation for the several million people in Britain whose family roots lie elsewhere in the world is different (there are hundreds of different ethnicities represented in Britain). Two major groupings may be identified:

• The black Caribbeans in which most members of this community were born in Britain and his cultural practices are nearest to those of the white majority (the Notting Hill Carnival, was started by Caribbean immigrants). Black Caribbeans today often take pride in their cultural roots. Like the children and grandchildren of Irish, Scottish and Welsh immigrants to England before them, this pride seems to be increasing as their cultural practices, their everyday habits and attitudes, gradually become less distinctive.
• Those whose cultural roots lie in and around the Indian subcontinent, known in Britain like “Asians” that masks some significant cultural differences. Indian origin are above the British average, and many fill professional roles in society.

The family

With regard to family life, Britain is overall a fairly typical northern European country; in comparison with most other places in the world, family identity is rather weak and the notion of family has a generally low profile. In fact, family gatherings of any kind beyond the household unit are rare or it is unusual for adults of different generations within the family to live together (the average number of people living in each household in Britain is lower than the European average). The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen dramatically and now accounts for more than 40% of births. There is much talk in Britain of “single-parent families” as a social problem.

Geographical identity

A sense of identity based on place of birth is, like family identity, not very common.