‘Britain isn’t an entity, it’s an argument.’ Initially voiced at a conference panel, David Baker’s assertion was not just a gut feeling worth publishing. How else, for instance, is one to interpret the peculiar pecking order governing British passports? Issued in no fewer than six classes, a British passport formalises one of the following ranks of belonging: British citizenship, British overseas citizenship, British overseas territories citizenship, British national (overseas), British protected person, and British subject. Connecting and separating these gradations is British nationality law, an intricate web of privileges and restrictions, which the Home Office openly acknowledges to be ‘complicated’. With six degrees of political affiliation to a British polity – some of which confer virtually no entitlements – how can Britain ever be objectively delimited as a viable ‘imagined community’ and Britishness hence defined as a national identity? Benedict Anderson perceives the nation-state as ‘an imagined political community’, one that is ‘imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. And he thinks of a nation-state as imagined

because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Anderson sets the bar too high for Britishness. Without a clear idea of what constitutes this communion, it is hard to see how all six classes of political Britons could share the same definition of what it is exactly that makes them come together. Communities, imagined and otherwise, need to know where they end to give their constituents a firm sense of belonging. But the idea of Britain isn’t such a community. Instead, contrastive features such as vestigial Governors General, political devolution, short-changed Gurkha pensioners, and the seemingly unstoppable process of European integration stimulate enough variance to ensure that the boundaries of Britishness will remain arguable in the near future. Yet the drawing and redrawing of physical or political boundaries is an essential activity for communities. Such boundaries define interests as much as they set expectations. Whether they are drafted under the Hobbesian pretence of self-preservation or give voice to expansive ambition (or both), borders and boundaries grow lives of their own: they are productive beyond their own instrumentality; they determine their content by encompassing and bounding it. Boundaries help communities make sense of themselves. For that reason any form of identity finding relies on exclusion: identities are demarcated, delimited, defined.

What has historically delimited and therefore defined insular Britons is the sea with its all-encircling boundary, the shoreline. Just as journeys of self-discovery traverse the surroundings of the self, so communities imagine their environment to understand themselves. Looking into requires one to be on the outside. Louis Althusser, in a celebrated reading of Brecht’s theatre, situates the crucial, radical moment of self-discovery in the encounter with the outside: ‘la conscience accède au réel, non par son développement interne mais par la découverte radicale de l’autre que soi’. As a marker of this environment and of the literature its dwellers have produced, the sea circumscribes insular identity as it delimits islands. And if the six classes of British nationality seem at first confusing, remarkably the sea continues to define them. It privileges the sense of insular Britishness that is conveyed by the first class of British nationality, British citizenship. (For ‘British citizenship’, read ‘of the archipelago’.) The remaining five classes all have ‘overseas’ as a distinguishing attribute, either as part of their classification label or embedded in the degree to which their insular rights are curtailed by overseas birth or residence. The sea separates inner from outer Britons. As if to remind its bearer of this division, the new design for the British passport, released on 25 August 2010, features the white cliffs of Dover – complete with tern, lighthouse, and the sea – on the biographical double-page. To adapt Baker’s assertion, then, Britain appears to be a maritime argument.