Yookay'nt Misbehavin'

The reappropriation of Britain

A land-appropriation is constituted only if the appropriator is able to give the land a name.

Carl Schmitt

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the Japanese Imperial House seized power from the shogunate and installed the Emperor as sovereign both in fact and in law, the new government set about dismantling the old feudal network of han, or ‘domains’, and reorganising the country into ‘prefectures’ with entirely new names.

At the same time, the people at large were required to take surnames for the very first time (a privilege only previously enjoyed by about 6% of the population). I have heard it said that the reason so many common Japanese surnames refer to ordinary landscape features (Yamada, ‘mountain and rice field’; Yamashita, ‘under the mountain’; Morita, ‘forest and rice field’; Inoue, ‘above the well’; etc.) is simply down to late-19th century peasants suddenly having to think up surnames for themselves and their families on the spot.

The new regime, it seems, understood something important: the act of renaming, or giving something a name which did not have one before, is more than mere symbolism. The bestowing of a name is a primal exercise of power - perhaps the most primal of all. To name something is to change its nature. It is associated with taking, with seizure, with categorisation, and with reconstituting.

This places the renaming of Britain in context. One of the most curious turns of events in recent decades has been the widespread adoption of the term ‘the UK’ amongst British politicians and journalists, and, slowly but surely, the chattering classes as such. The country was never called this when I was growing up. It was referred to as Britain, ‘this country’, and, not infrequently, ‘our country’. When people wanted to get things right, they called the place ‘the United Kingdom’. They never went around saying, ‘I was born in the Yookay,’ or ‘When I’m back in the Yookay,’ or ‘the Yookay economy is weak’. Anyone who did that was looked at with suspicion as taking on American airs.

Nowadays, ‘the Yookay’ is the term of choice - even weather forecasters use it: ‘there will be sunny spells today across the Yookay’ - and the change seems to indicate something important. Britain was a home. ‘The Yookay’ is at best a legal construct - an artifice. It is a state only in the sense that it has the trappings of statehood: a flag, a capital city, a currency, an army, a government. It is the furniture of a country assembled in a rather haphazard pile in a given location, with nothing substantively different about it from France, Azerbaijan or the Central African Republic. The name suggests something vague and formless; ‘What does ‘the UK’ stand for, dad?’ ‘It stood for something once, son, but I can’t remember what.’

The renaming happened through gradual evolution in the sense that there was no edict which went out to declare and enforce the change. But something can be evolutionary and yet still be deliberate - the use of the term is not a sheer accident. People adopted it for a reason: they wanted a break with the past. ‘Britain’ to their ear sounds fusty, nationalistic, imperialistic and old-fashioned. It is what retired Colonels talk about in gentlemen’s clubs. ‘This country’ and ‘our country’ are even worse. ‘The Yookay’, rather, sounds (or sounded, when it first began to spread in the late 1990s) fresh, modern, somehow progressive. It faced the future. The fact that it was novel indicated a caesura: it was a post-national name for an incipient post-national state.

This makes the renaming an act of power as significant as those conducted by the Meiji state, for all that it was exercised much more diffusely. In the second Appendix to The Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt notes the curious connection between the German words for ‘name’ (name) and ‘taking’ (nahme). The two concepts - naming and appropriating - had, he said, a ‘unity’. The act of naming was also one of appropriation. And naming was therefore at the heart of political order as Schmitt saw it. This is because such an order is created and maintained through the pattern of appropriation, division and production. First land is appropriated, then it is divided and distributed, and then is made productive. These are the ‘three acts of the primal drama’; they are the ‘main processes of human history’.

Appropriation, distribution, and production, for Schmitt, are what create and sustain a nomos (itself a Greek word deriving from the verb nemein, whose root is the same as the German nehmen, or ‘to take’, from which nahme comes). A nomos - a spatial order, if you like - is an appropriation, a distribution, and a making-productive. And a new nomos, it follows, begins with a new appropriation, or taking, and hence also a new naming. That is the foundation on which a new distribution, and from there a new pattern of production and ultimately a new way of life, rests.

Schmitt chiefly had imperialism in mind, of course. The colonial powers found the Americas, took the land, then divided and distributed it and made it productive in new ways. The initial taking happened in tandem with renaming. And this pattern is also starkly evident in the renaming exercises of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. The year 1868 marked the beginning of Japan’s rapid period of modernisation and industrialisation, and also the beginnings of its experimentation with democracy and constitutional monarchy - as well as its adoption of legal codes based on those of France and Germany. This all began with the act of taking - and naming - whereby the feudal domains of old were both seized and named afresh.

In both these cases a new order, or nomos, came into being. The appropriation of the Americas was the dawn, according to Schmitt, of a new global order which centred Europe at the heart of world affairs and imposed a European ordering on regions outside. From this followed a means by which the European ‘Great Powers’ distributed and divided the world beyond Europe and also oversaw its internal dispensations - and, too, a new and vastly more productive commercial economy. In Meiji Japan the process of appropriation-distribution-production marked a shift from an essentially pre-modern agricultural and artisanal way of life to a modern economy as such - as well as an entirely new constitutional structure. From the taking, and naming, emerged new patterns of living altogether different from those of the past. These were fundamental breaks, out of which new regimes, new modes of government, and new ways of relating erupted.

This helps us to understand what is, or was, going on with the renaming of Britain - that it has happened alongside a process of appropriation, distribution and production that is as diffuse, but all pervasive, as the renaming itself. Again, it has not taken place exactly as the result of a single decree or command. It has happened in a variety of ways and through a miscellany of mechanisms, many of them unconscious. But, as I earlier suggested, the effect has been powerful, and in its own way as reconstitutive, as the birth of modern Japan.

What we have witnessed in other words is nothing less than the birth of a new nomos. Britain was a country defined by one process of appropriation, distribution and production; the Yookay is another. The former was class-based, industrial, insular, and governed by a powerful executive checked by traditional sources of authority and repositories of loyalty. The latter is post-industrial, globalised, financialised and governed by technocrats; its traditional institutions are hollowed out. The two of them are the same country on paper, but almost everything about them is different; and this is because the transition from one to the other has marked a shift to a new nomos. There was one way of life before; now there is another.

The adoption of the name ‘the Yookay’ is therefore to be understood as an entirely natural counterpart to the country’s re-appropriation, by a new governing regime, and thus a new set of distributions and divisions and a newly productive economy. It marks an irreversible cleavage in the ‘main process’ of our history; it also points towards a ‘primal drama’ that has played out, and indeed still does play out, before our very eyes.

This primal drama is one in which one order is replaced with another. This has happened; there is no going back. This does not mean that improvements cannot be sought and even revolutionary change cannot take place. But it does mean that the Britain that some of us remember is gone and that the Yookay has killed it. We live in that country now, and it is that country which we must confront, think about, challenge, and grapple with - politically but also personally. We must do this for all that we might consider it a bleak prospect, because there is no alternative. We inhabit a new nomos, and experience a new ordering, and it is this new way of life that we must now navigate.