If the name 'Bombay' was erased for being a relic of colonial rule, why do we still use 'India'?

Language Log

A short history, and the politics, of the many names of the country.

Image credit:  Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP

Jun 24, 2016 · 08:00 am   Updated Jun 24, 2016 · 11:17 am

Shoaib Daniyal

One of the last vestiges of “Bombay” is about to be wiped out. More than 20 years after Bombay was renamed as Mumbai, the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre is preparing to make the High Court located in the city follow suit. In the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament, legislation will be moved to rename Bombay High Court as Mumbai High Court. At the same time, Madras High Court will also get an identity that reflects the city’s current name, Chennai.

Language nationalism is an on-and-off factor in Indian politics. In the 1960s, Tamils rioted over concerns that the New Delhi was forcing Hindi down their throats. Mumbai frequently sees Marathi nationalists go on rampage against purported outsiders. The 1990s saw a spate of city renamings, with colonial names replaced by local language names.

Globally, language identity is the most common basis for nationalism. This means that renaming has been a common activity: Burma became Myanmar, Ceylon, Sri Lanka and Siam, Thailand.

What is interesting, however, is that Indian nationalism has never involved itself in matters of nomenclatural identity. But this is not for the lack of options. Like Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai, the country also has three names that are in popular use: India, Bhārata and Hindustan.

India as “Bhārata”

The oldest of these is Bhārata, a Sanskrit word dating to the Puranas, which would make it at least 2,000 years old. Now, Puranic geography isn’t the most accurate at describing the planet, but it makes up in imagination what is lost in accuracy. The Puranas envisage a land mass on which humans dwell called Jambudvipa – “jambu” being the Sanskrit name for the Indian blackberry and the origin of “jamun” in Hindi-Urdu. Jambudvipa, in turn, was divided into nine parts, one of which was Bhāratavarsa.

However, as Indologist Bimala Churn Law points out: “Bhāratavarsa is not our India of present geographical area." An exact mapping of the Pauranic Bhāratavarsa is difficult – and mostly moot given how different modern geography is from ancient myth – but it might have also included faraway Sumatra, now in modern-day Indonesia.

Bhārata, as a word for India, therefore, has far more modern origins. Nevertheless, given the prestige of Sanskrit, Bhārata has been borrowed into almost every Indian language as a name for India.

India as Hindustan

The other local language name for the country is Hindustan. It started off as an exonym – an external name for a geographical place (like Peking , the name given by foreigners, versus Beijing) – and is a Persian word. Hindu was the Persian name of the people who inhabited that land. In Sanskrit, it has the same origin as Sindhu. Like Bhārata, Hindustan was geographically ambiguous in ancient times (like any geographical name at the time). It referred to the area around the Indus (hence Sindh) or the entire area east of the river (a fairly good fit then with modern-day India).

Indians themselves would use this word only when Persian-speaking Turks established multiple sultanates in the subcontinent, starting with the Mamluk Sultanate in Delhi in 1206 AD.

In medieval India, while the word Hindustan was very popular, it didn’t refer to the entire subcontinent but only a part of it, which roughly corresponds to the modern-day cow belt. Thus, there is a town called Sirhind – Persian for “head of Hind” – close to the Punjab-Haryana border, and plundering Maratha armies would often talk of entering Hindustan from the Deccan as they crossed the river Tapi. This is also why, when the British encountered spoken Hindi-Urdu, they took to calling it Hindustani in much the same way as Bengali was the British name for the language spoken by people in Bengal.

Hindustan, the subcontinent

As the modern concept of nationalism took root during the British Raj, the name Hindustan started being used as a pars pro toto for the Indian subcontinent. This is not uncommon. The Holland and Netherlands phenomenon is another example of a single region overshadowing a larger geographical area. Nevertheless, shades of the old meaning survive today. Bengalis still refer to, say, people of Uttar Pradesh-origin as Hindustanis.

While the name Hindustan has no status in the eyes of the Indian state whose formal names remain Bhārata and India, it is the most popular, even natural, word in spoken Hindi-Urdu for the country. Consequently, Hindustan/Hindustani is a common word used by Bollywood for India across film titles and song lyrics, while Bhārat is rarer and only reserved for formal occasions.

Along with Bollywood, the Hindutva ideology is a great promoter of Hindustan as it is a key part of the alliterative slogan “Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan”. This trilogy of religion, language and region, as a defining aspect of Hindutva, was proposed by Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Savarkar, who was perhaps unaware of the common Persian origin of all three words, leading to the delicious irony of a chauvinist movement using a word of foreign origin to name itself.

India as India

The name given to the land by the ruling British owes its origin to the word “Hind”, which entered the Greek and Latin languages as “India”, literally the region of the river Indus. The name “India” was perhaps the first unambiguous, legal name for the whole subcontinent that was in common use. However, the name India as a synonym for the Indian subcontinent ended in 1947 with Partition.

Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted Pakistan and Hindustan to add up to “India” after Partition, objected to New Delhi's appropriation of the word “India”. In September 1947, eight weeks after Partition, Jinnah wrote to India’s governor general Louis Mountbatten: “It is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word “India” which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion”.

Anti-“India” nationalists

Nationalist movements usually dislike exonyms, doubly so when they are an outcome of colonialism. Thus, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Zimbabwe all replaced their colonial names – Ceylon, Burma and Rhodesia.

In much the same way, there were quite a few political formations within India, which, for reasons of their own, agreed with Jinnah that India wasn’t a suitable name for the newly-partitioned county. These came to the fore in the Constituent Assembly, as the body discussed the very first article of the Constitution which read: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. The pro-Bharat constituency was a mixed group of Hindu and Hindi nationalists. Seth Govind Das, a Congressmen from Madhya Pradesh and head of the All India Cow Protection League, attacked the name India as a colonial imposition with some non-partisan help from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The word India does not occur in our ancient books. It began to be used when the Greeks came to India. They named our Sindhu river as Indus and India was derived from Indus. There is a mention of this in Encyclopedia Britannica. On the contrary, if we look up the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas and our great and ancient book the Mahabharat, we find a mention of the name “Bharat”.

In the end, the name India was retained, a rare example of a colonial exonym being used in a post-colonial state. In 1950, this was a strategic decision since the name India carried with it international prestige and provided a stable link with 200 years of the British Raj – an advantage Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two other successor states of the Raj did not have.

Opposing and accepting 'India'

Nevertheless, historical movements to expel the name “India” keep resurfacing. The Samajwadi Party, using Hindi rather than Hindu nationalism, asked to rename India as “Bharat” in its manifesto for the 2004 General Elections.

Hindutva ideologues, repeating Savarkar’s etymological confusion, still continue to ask for “Hindustan” to be brought back. In 2003, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, part of the Sangh Parivar, made the demand for Hindustan as did Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, in 2013.

Unlike, say Tamil or Kannada identity, language is hardly central to Hindu nationalism, so the movement for Hindustan has remained rather listless. Hindi nationalism was a major force till 1947, mostly in opposition to its Siamese twin Urdu, but the distributed nature of the language means its politics is quite different from, say, Marathi. Hindi, even in its home states, is mostly an urban language and states like Uttar Pradesh have vast rural swathes where languages like Awadhi or Bhojpuri, and not Hindi, are native tongues.

Additionally, after 200 years of India being the official name of the land, it is slowly ceasing to be an exonym and is being absorbed into Indian languages. The name “India” is now used by non-Anglophones quite easily, and is so common that it is even entering written forms. This represents an interesting contrast with regional exonyms such as West Bengal (Paschim Banga), Madras (Chennai) and Bangalore (Bengaluru), amongst others, which have followed the globally more common option of reasserting local language names.

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Source: scrollin

Farewell to the Benghazi farce: Trey Gowdy’s investigation concludes not with a bang but a whimper

Wednesday, Jun 29, 2016 05:30 AM EST

To the surprise of no one, the House Select Committee's eighth report is expected to contain no major revelations

Eric Boehlert, Media Matters

Trey Gowdy (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

This article originally appeared on Media Matters.

To the surprise of no one, the Republicans’ four-year partisan inquisition surrounding the terrorist attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, is likely ending with a whimper. With the House Select Committee on Benghazi finally releasing its findings, and the report representing the eighth and (likely) final government investigation into the deadly event, the Benghazi hoax, as sponsored by Fox News for four years, finally comes to an impotent and ignominious end.

Early indications are that the report, as expected, provides no major revelations. Already undercut by a report from Democratic members of the Benghazi committee that further debunked right-wing myths about the attack, the GOP’s long-awaited Benghazi report is in danger of being met with collective shoulder shrugs.

Even Donald Trump seems relatively uninterested in kicking the Benghazi can around the campaign trail this year. Yes, he’s made a couple passing references to it and implied grave misdeeds by Hillary Clinton. But there’s been no serious push on his part to highlight the GOP’s endless pursuit. (Last year, Trump actuallycriticized the Republicans’ investigations as being incompetent.)

So if Benghazi isn’t being used as an election year battering ram against the Democrats, what has been the point of committee chairman Trey Gowdy’s comically extended inquiry? Anybody with a pulse and a political calendar realized that the final GOP Benghazi report, with its 2016 summertime release, was designed to disrupt Clinton’s White House run. Why else would the committee’s work be extended for two-plus years when it likely could have been completed in six or seven months? (Two years to hold four hearings?)

Unsure they could defeat Clinton at the ballot box, and lately even more unsure that Trump is competent enough to run a White House campaign, Republicans were hoping and praying for an investigative intervention to stop Clinton.

It ain’t happening with Benghazi. But anyone who followed the facts, or who reads Media Matters, knew that a very long time ago.

The whole mindless, partisan endeavor shines a light on what’s gone completely wrong with the Republican Party and the right-wing media. It’s about how shallow, endlessly debunked conspiracies and money-sucking investigations have replaced any attempt to govern and legislate.

The fact that the GOP’s Benghazi gotcha pursuits have stretched through the entirety of Obama’s second term, and that Obama stands poised to leave office with surging approval ratings, tells you all need to know about the crippling disconnect between the right-wing media and the real world today. (Fox’s Eric Bolling: “I think Benghazi’s a much bigger scandal than Watergate.”)

But let’s never forget that the Beltway press claims partial ownership of this slow-motion fiasco, too. The press certainly owns the first three years of the Benghazi charade when journalists breathlessly amplified every slipshod allegation leaked from Republicans on Capitol Hill, or followed Fox News’ lead in hyping an endless series of supposed revelations about the attacks. Sometimes we couldn’t tell who was more anxious to uncover an Obama or Clinton-related “scandal,” the press or partisan conservatives.

If I had to estimate, I’d say it took until October 2015 — three entire years of Benghazi news dead ends — before the D.C. press mostly conceded there’s no there there with regards to this so-called scandal. It took Hillary Clinton testifying for 11 hours on Capitol Hill and Republicans completely unable to advance, let alone confirm, their wild conspiracy theories before the press largely seemed to acknowledge the futility of the whole enterprise. (Accidental truth telling in 2015 by some GOP House members regarding the motivation about the Benghazi committee likely also convinced reporters the endeavor was largely a scam.)

Unfortunately, this was after several Beltway journalists’ reputations took serious hits when they were caught trusting dubious sources who lied about Benghazi revelations.

Meanwhile, here’s some distressing context. I wrote this more than 1,300 days ago:

Benghazi has entered the realm of churning, right-wing myth making. (Think Waco and Vince Foster). The story has become completely detached from reality, and the twisted narrative feeds off itself with constant misinformation that’s repeatedly presented as ‘fact.’

I certainly never thought in the fall of 2012 that four years later I’d still be pointing the Benghazi hoax and highlighting the obvious absurdity of the pursuit. Overall, Media Matters has posed hundreds of fact-checking items on Benghazi and we’ll continue to do so as long as conservatives cling to the fantasy. But that will be much harder to do now without a congressional inquiry to give the wild claims shape.

The larger point is that Republicans and Fox News have wasted untold time, money and energy pushing a thoroughly discredited pipe dream about how Obama and Clinton are supposedly monstrous people who chose to let four Americans die at the hands of Islamic terrorists and then lied about it. Worse, Obama watched video “in real time” while the terrorists snuffed out American lives. “Support wasn’t given,” in the words of Karl Rove.

Vile, vile lies.

This whole endeavor has been a depressing reflection on how broken the conservative movement has become, and also how the Beltway press simultaneously takes its marching orders from the scandal-obsessed right wing. Like Republicans, journalists seemed to be eagerly holding out hope for an Obama or Clinton scandal to emerge from the Benghazi investigations.

And of course that faulty blueprint hasn’t just applied to the Benghazi “scandal.” As noted in September last year, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News together spent just as much time covering Clinton’s email controversy as they spent covering the substance of her entire presidential campaign.

If we’re truly bidding farewell to Fox News’ Benghazi conspiracy hoax (fingers crossed), there’s another point about context that’s worth stressing one last time.

I think one way the GOP and conservative media were able to string the serious press along on Benghazi was that they framed the Benghazi terror attack as an almost-unprecedented event in American history (sadly, it was not) and one that exposed unheard of security failures by Obama’s White House and Clinton’s State Department; it was supposedly an epic fiasco that demanded countless investigations.

What the press for most of the last four years refused to do is put the Benghazi terror attack in any kind of historical context.

Consider these facts under President Ronald Reagan:

*April 18, 1983: Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut. 63 people were killed, including 17 Americans, includingthe CIA’s chief analyst in the Middle East, and the Beirut station chief.

*September 6, 1983: Two Marines were killed during a lengthy rocket assault on the Marine base at Beirut’s airport.

*Oct. 23, 1983: Bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut. A suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives at a U.S. Marine barracks; 241 U.S. service personnel were killed.

*Sept. 20, 1984: Bombing of U.S. Embassy annex. A truck bomb exploded in Aukar, northeast of Beirut, outside the annex, killing 24 people, including two U.S. military personnel.

During an 18-month span, U.S. facilities in and around Beirut were attacked by terrorists four times, killing 330 people, including 262 Americans.

There was exactly one congressional investigation into the Beirut debacle.

Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."

Source: salon

The Brexit of 1947: ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab’

BOOK EXCERPT

The differences between the countries of Europe, said the British then, were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jun 24, 2016 · 03:14 pm

Ramachandra Guha

By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand-year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes. In that year a man who had helped put the Raj in place gave a series of lectures in Cambridge which were later published in book form under the simple title India. The man was Sir John Strachey. Strachey had spent many years in the subcontinent, ultimately becoming a member of the Governor General’s Council. Now in retirement in England, he set his Indian experience against the background of recent political developments in Europe.

Large chunks of Strachey’s book are taken up by an administrative history of the Raj; of its army and civil services, its land and taxation policies, the peculiar position of the ‘native states’. This was a primer for those who might work in India after coming down from Cambridge. But there was also a larger theoretical argument to the effect that ‘India’ was merely a label of convenience, ‘a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries’.

In Strachey’s view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’.

There was no Indian nation or country in the past; nor would there be one in the future. Strachey thought it ‘conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries’, but ‘that they should ever extend to India generally, that “men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-western Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible. You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.

Strachey’s remarks were intended as a historical judgement. At the time, new nations were vigorously identifying themselves within Europe on the basis of a shared language or territory, whereas none of the countries that he knew in India had displayed a comparable national awakening. But we might also read them as a political exhortation, intended to stiffen the will of those in his audience who would end up in the service of the Raj. For the rise of every new ‘nation’ in India would mean a corresponding diminution in the power and prestige of Empire.

Ironically, even as he spoke Strachey’s verdict was being disputed by a group of Indians. These had set up the Indian National Congress, a representative body that asked for a greater say for natives in the running of their affairs. As the name suggests, this body wished to unite Indians across the divisions of culture, territory, religion, and language, thus to construct what the colonialist thought inconceivable – namely, a single Indian nation.

Very many good books have been written on the growth of the Indian National Congress, on its move from debating club through mass movement to political party, on the part played by leaders such as Gokhale, Tilak and (above all) Gandhi in this progression. Attention has been paid to the building of bridges between linguistic communities, religious groupings and castes. These attempts were not wholly successful, for low castes and especially Muslims were never completely convinced of the Congress’s claims to be a truly ‘national’ party. Thus it was that when political independence finally came in 1947 it came not to one nation, but two – India and Pakistan.



This is not the place to rehearse the history of Indian nationalism. I need only note that from the time the Congress was formed right up to when India was made free – and divided – there were sceptics who thought that Indian nationalism was not a natural phenomenon at all. There were, of course, British politicians and thinkers who welcomed Indian self-rule and, in their own way, aided its coming into being. (One of the prime movers of the Indian National Congress was a colonial official of Scottish parentage, A. O. Hume.) Yet there were many others who argued that, unlike France or Germany or Italy, there was here no national essence, no glue to bind the people and take them purposively forward. From this perspective stemmed the claim that it was only British rule that held India and the Indians together.

Among those who endorsed John Strachey’s view that there could never be an independent Indian nation were writers both famous and obscure. Prominent in the first category was Rudyard Kipling, who had spen this formative years in – and was to write some of his finest stories about – the subcontinent. In November 1891 Kipling visited Australia, where a journalist asked him about the ‘possibility of self-government in India’. ‘Oh no!’ he answered: ‘They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it them straight.’

Where Kipling laid emphasis on the antiquity of the Indian civilization, other colonialists stressed the immaturity of the Indian mind to reach the same conclusion: namely, that Indians could not govern themselves. A cricketer and tea planter insisted, after forty years there, that

    “[c]haos would prevail in India if we were ever so foolish to leave the natives to run their own show. Ye gods! What a salad of confusion, of bungle, of mismanagement, and far worse, would be the instant result.

    These grand people will go anywhere and do anything if led by us.

    Themselves they are still infants as regards governing or statesmanship. And their so-called leaders are the worst of the lot.

Views such as these were widely prevalent among the British in India, and among the British at home as well. Politically speaking, the most important of these ‘Stracheyans’ was undoubtedly Winston Churchill. In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagrafra’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea ‘not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ to stall any such possibility.

In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then ‘an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’. Three months later, speaking at the Albert Hall on ‘Our Duty to India’ – with his kinsman the Duke of Marlborough presiding – Churchill argued that ‘to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins [who in his opinion dominated the Congress Party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence’. If the British left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services created by them – the judicial, medical, railway and public works departments – would perish, and ‘India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages’.

A decade and a half after Winston Churchill issued these warnings, the British left India. A time of barbarism and privation did ensue, the blame for which remains a matter of much dispute. But then some sort of order was restored. No Germans were necessary to keep the peace. Hindu ascendancy, such as it was, was maintained not by force of arms but through regular elections based on universal adult franchise.

Yet, throughout the sixty years since India became independent, there has been speculation about how long it would stay united, or maintain the institutions and processes of democracy. With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; after every failure of the monsoon there has been anticipated country wide famine; in every new secessionist movement has been seen the disappearance of India as a single entity.

Among these doomsayers there have been many Western writers who, after 1947, were as likely to be American as British. Notably, India’s existence has been a puzzle not just to casual observers or commonsensical journalists; it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one. That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable’, wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favourable conditions.’ ‘India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations’, wrote another American scholar, adding: ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism regarding the viability of democracy in India.’

The pages of this book are peppered with forecasts of India’s imminent dissolution, or of its descent into anarchy or authoritarian rule. Here, let me quote only a prediction by a sympathetic visitor, the British journalist Don Taylor. Writing in 1969, by which time India had stayed united for two decades and gone through four general elections, Taylor yet thought that

    the key question remains: can India remain in one piece – or will it fragment? . . . When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge.

    It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.

    I believe it no exaggeration to say that the fate of Asia hangs on its survival.

The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried that it wouldn’t. The place was too complicated, too confusing – a nation, one might say, that was unnatural.

In truth, ever since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have seen the survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots) speaking or writing in fear, others (the secessionists or revolutionaries) with anticipation. Like their foreign counterparts, they have come to believe that this place is far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure as a democracy.

Excerpted with permission from India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Ramachandra Guha, Picador India.

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Britain and Europe: A long history of conflict and cooperation

History Remembered

British history is deeply connected to Europe and whatever the result of its referendum, this will continue.

Image credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Jun 23, 2016 · 11:30 pm   Updated Yesterday · 09:54 am

Brendan Simms, The Conversation

Britain’s referendum on the EU marks another step in the country’s long and troubled history with its European neighbours. Divorce or not, Europe will continue to have a huge influence over British politics and society – history has a few lessons for us here.

Europe made the UK. The emergence first of England as a nation state was the product of European pressures – to defend itself against Viking raids. So was the formation of the United Kingdom, which rallied England and Scotland against the France of Louis XIV.

Moreover, Europe has almost always been more important to us than the rest of the world. The 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, for example, spoke of a “Commonwealth of Europe”, long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of.

The nature of the European challenge varied greatly over time. It was always strategic. In the Middle Ages the main enemy was France. In the 16th century and early 17th centuries it was Spain. From the late 17th to the early 19th century it was France again; in the mid to late 19th century it was Tsarist Russia. Then, in the early and mid-20th century it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of World War II to the present day.

Very often, the danger was also ideological. From continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through counter-reformation Catholicism (which also become a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the 16th and 17th centuries, French Jacobinism in the late 18th century, right and left wing totalitarianism in the 20th century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants today.

Furthermore, Europe has profoundly shaped domestic politics in the UK. It has been the subject of argument without end for hundreds of years. In the 16th and 17th century there were furious debates over the best way to protect Protestantism and parliamentary freedoms in a Europe in which both were under severe attack.

Anti-Jacobin sentiment in 18th century British papers.Library of Congress

From the 18th century onwards, Britons disagreed on the best strategy for maintaining the European balance of power. The prevailing orthodoxy among one side of parliament (the Whigs) looked to alliances and armies on the continent. The Tories on the other side called for greater restraint and more focus on the country’s naval and colonial power. Throughout these debates, some argued for military intervention on the continent and interference in the internal politics of sovereign states there, while others demanded equally passionately that Britain should stay out, for reasons of pragmatism, as well as principle. Both views are well represented in both major political parties today.

Of each other’s making

If Europe made Britain, then Britain also made Europe. The British shaped Europe in their interests and increasingly in their image. Their military presence and reputation on the continent was usually formidable, from the iconic victories at Agincourt, Dunkirk, Blenheim, Dettingen, Waterloo, in the Crimea, during the two world wars to the deterrence in Europe under NATO. It was enhanced rather than reduced by the fact that many of these triumphs were secured with the help of coalition partners.

Britain played an important, and often a decisive role in most of the major European settlements since the late 17th century: the treaty of Utrecht, which enshrined the principle of the “balance of power”, through the Congress of Vienna, which remodelled Europe after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – right down to the treaties on European Union we have today.

Plus, Britain saw and realised its security through the power of ideology. This began with the defence of the Protestant interest in the 16th and 17th centuries, the protection of European “liberties” in the 18th century, the promotion of liberalism in the 19th century, and the spread of democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Euroscepticism and engagement has a long history. US Library of Congress

Britain has therefore been distinctive in Europe. Its European story is not merely separate and equal to that of the continent, but fundamentally different and more benign. The British pioneered two innovative forms of political organisation: the nation state as represented in parliament and then the concept of multinational union based on a parliamentary merger of Scotland and England.

Over the past 500 years, by contrast, Europeans have explored political unhappiness in many different forms. These have ranged from absolutism, through Jacobinism, Napoleonic tyranny, Hitler, Soviet communism, to the well-meaning but broken-backed European Union today.

Continental Europe, in short, had failed before 1945, and even now the European Union is only failing better. Unlike virtually every other European state, which has at some point or other been occupied and dismembered, often repeatedly, England and the United Kingdom have largely – with very brief exceptions – been a subject of European politics, never merely an object.

This should not be an occasion for British triumphalism. On the contrary, whatever the outcome of the referendum on membership, the European Union is not the UK’s enemy. The failure of the European project, and the collapse of the current continental order, would not only be a catastrophic blow to the populations on the far side of the channel but also to the UK, which would be directly exposed to the resulting storms, as it always has been.

Brendan Simms, Professor in the History of International Relations, University of Cambridge

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Aziz Ansari: Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family

SundayReview | Opinion

By AZIZ ANSARIJUNE 24, 2016

Jon Han

“DON’T go anywhere near a mosque,” I told my mother. “Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?”

“We’re not going,” she replied.

I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.

Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage. In our culture, when people think “Muslim,” the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from “Homeland” or some monster from the news.

Today, with the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense.

Aziz Ansari’s parents, Fatima and Shoukath Ansari Credit Photo courtesy Aziz Ansari

There are approximately 3.3 million Muslim Americans. After the attack in Orlando, The Times reported that the F.B.I. is investigating 1,000 potential “homegrown violent extremists,” a majority of whom are most likely connected in some way to the Islamic State. If everyone on that list is Muslim American, that is 0.03 percent of the Muslim American population. If you round that number, it is 0 percent. The overwhelming number of Muslim Americans have as much in common with that monster in Orlando as any white person has with any of the white terrorists who shoot up movie theaters or schools or abortion clinics.

I asked a young friend of mine, a woman in her 20s of Muslim heritage, how she had been feeling after the attack. “I just feel really bad, like people think I have more in common with that idiot psychopath than I do the innocent people being killed,” she said. “I’m really sick of having to explain that I’m not a terrorist every time the shooter is brown.”

I myself am not a religious person, but after these attacks, anyone that even looks like they might be Muslim understands the feelings my friend described. There is a strange feeling that you must almost prove yourself worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else.

I understand that as far as these problems go, I have it better than most because of my recognizability as an actor. When someone on the street gives me a strange look, it’s usually because they want to take a selfie with me, not that they think I’m a terrorist.

But I remember how those encounters can feel. A few months after the attacks of Sept. 11, I remember walking home from class near N.Y.U., where I was a student. I was crossing the street and a man swore at me from his car window and yelled: “Terrorist!” To be fair, I may have been too quick to cross the street as the light changed, but I’m not sure that warranted being compared to the perpetrators of one of the most awful incidents in human history.

The vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump isn’t so far off from cursing at strangers from a car window. He has said that people in the American Muslim community “know who the bad ones are,” implying that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks. By Mr. Trump’s logic, after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.

According to reporting by Mother Jones, since 9/11, there have been 49 mass shootings in this country, and more than half of those were perpetrated by white males. I doubt we’ll hear Mr. Trump make a speech asking his fellow white males to tell authorities “who the bad ones are,” or call for restricting white males’ freedoms.

One way to decrease the risk of terrorism is clear: Keep military-grade weaponry out of the hands of mentally unstable people, those with a history of violence, and those on F.B.I. watch lists. But, despite sit-ins and filibusters, our lawmakers are failing us on this front and choose instead to side with the National Rifle Association. Suspected terrorists can buy assault rifles, but we’re still carrying tiny bottles of shampoo to the airport. If we’re going to use the “they’ll just find another way” argument, let’s use that to let us keep our shoes on.

Xenophobic rhetoric was central to Mr. Trump’s campaign long before the attack in Orlando. This is a guy who kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans “rapists” who were “bringing drugs” to this country. Numerous times, he has said that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets on Sept. 11, 2001. This has been continually disproved, but he stands by it. I don’t know what every Muslim American was doing that day, but I can tell you what my family was doing. I was studying at N.Y.U., and I lived near the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit, I was on the phone with my mother, who called to tell me to leave my dorm building.

The haunting sound of the second plane hitting the towers is forever ingrained in my head. My building was close enough that it shook upon impact. I was scared for my life as my fellow students and I trekked the panicked streets of Manhattan. My family, unable to reach me on my cellphone, was terrified about my safety as they watched the towers collapse. There was absolutely no cheering. Only sadness, horror and fear.

Mr. Trump, in response to the attack in Orlando, began a tweet with these words: “Appreciate the congrats.” It appears that day he was the one who was celebrating after an attack.

Aziz Ansari, an actor, writer and director, is a creator of the Netflix series “Master of None.”

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