Up until very recently the vexations of a national identity crisis were reserved for those afflicted by colonial oppression or a short history; the Irish or the Australians, for example. England, along with France and Sweden, used to be cited as an exemplary case of continuity, self-confidence, and stability. To learn that the English, of all people, have begun to question the nature of Englishness and to perceive it as beleaguered and threatened comes as something of a puzzle. And yet the obsessive trope of intellectual inquiry rehearsed among colonized peoples, the question "what is my nation?", is now posed by the former colonists themselves.

The question is asked with a greater or lesser degree of hysteria in the context of three major shifts: the postwar decline of imperial Britain, the massive influx of colored immigrants, and the prospect of European integration. With regard to the first, the marginality and estrangement the British once imposed on others has now been imposed on them. With regard to the second, a multicultural community which seeks not assimilation but the assertion of separate national identities has become a disruptive force in the eyes of the conservative elite. David Lovibond's apocalyptic jeremiad "Will this be the death of England?" in The Sunday Telegraph (Aug. 13, 1989) is representative. Lovibond laments that foreigners and ethnic minorities have ceased being simply immigrants and become "colonists to whom England belongs as much and as undeniably as it does to the English." Finally, the perception of foreigners as contaminating and debilitating rather than enriching finds its most forceful expression in the Thatcherite fear of European integration.