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I was flipping through one of my favorite news
magazines the other day, when I came across a story that
struck me. It was about how Wales, Scotland, and
Northern Ireland are protesting the United Kingdom's
governmental proposal of promoting unity by requiring
graduating high school students to pledge allegiance to
the queen. The article went on to say that other
unifying proposals being considered include a
citizenship ceremony for immigrants and a national
holiday. A national holiday? How is it possible for the
UK to not have a national holiday? Although I found this
fact very strange at first, I soon realized that it
actually made a lot of sense.
When you think about national holidays, the
one thing most of them have in common is celebrating
independence from a colonizing state or some other form
of oppression. Here, in the US, it's the signing of the
Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. In
France, it's the storming of the Bastille and the
beginning of the French Revolution. In much of
southeastern Europe, it's independence from the Ottoman
Empire. In much of South America, independence from
Spain. In much of Africa, from France or Britain. The
holiday is a little different for the Germans, who
celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nevertheless it's the
same concept: Freedom from oppression.
So, where does that leave the United
Kingdom, an island nation that hasn't been conquered
since Roman times, whose bloody revolution in the 1640s
proved unsuccessful, and is still, effectively, a
monarchy? On top of all that, the UK encompasses the
reluctant, if not separatist, states of Wales, Scotland,
and Northern Ireland, which all have their own culture
and history. This latter fact is probably of more
importance. Take Spain, for example, whose national
holiday, when
Columbus
discovered the Americas, doesn't fit into the “freedom
from oppression” formula at all. Although still a
monarchy, Spain has been conquered by and freed itself
from the Moors and Napoleon. It suffered a bloody civil
war and endured more than thirty years under Franco.
Yet, because of the Basque and Catalan territories'
different perspectives on Spanish historical events, the
national holiday is dedicated to
Columbus'
explorations, something that is so apolitical and
far-removed from the Spanish people that no one
questions it.
All this having been said, I wonder what the
United Kingdom and Prime Minister Gordon Brown will come
up with for the new British national holiday and just
how many proposals will be rejected before settling upon
something like, I don't know, the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution perhaps?
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