A new article by our colleague Nicholas Tate has been published today in The Daily Sceptic.
All the recent flag-waving has sent me back to one of the best attempts to define the concept of national identity: Ernest Renan’s famous essay ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ (‘What is a nation?’),
This is his 13th contribution to the magazine. His very first article for The Daily Sceptic was inspired by the Classical Education Conference held at MCC Budapest in early 2024, an event that explored the renewal of classical traditions in education and culture.
In his latest piece, Tate reflects on how mass immigration and other cultural and political developments have profoundly transformed English identity. Drawing on the ideas of French historian Ernest Renan and his seminal essay “What is a Nation?”, he examines what remains of a shared sense of belonging in England today, and what might be lost if cultural continuity weakens further.
While much of the data may already be familiar to British readers, the article carries a particularly important message for a Hungarian audience — as a warning from England about the long-term consequences of policy choices that undermine national identity and shared cultural values. Tate’s reflections invite readers to consider how a nation’s cohesion depends not only on institutions and laws, but also on the collective memory, language, and will of its people.
