ABSTRACT
The surge to the colours in World War I remains without adequate explanation. We still lack any real understanding o f the social, political and cultural basis o f British patriotism as it was manifested at this particular moment in history. Many socialists, facing the fact o f working-class complicity in that great carnage, have in the past taken refuge in denunciations o f the ideological reformism o f the Second International. In recent years they have inclined to the proposition that the members o f pre-war patriotic leagues and the recruits to the British Expeditionary Force were victims o f social imperialist manipulation. Both ‘explanations’ are fundamentally insulting to the working classes, and suggest that they were as putty in the hands o f socialist leaders and/or the propagandists o f the governing class. They are not so much explanations as devices by which to avoid acknowledging the depth, extent, power and complexity o f militaristic sentiments within a political culture. The fact must be confronted that such feelings existed: they were o f an order which has often been denied expression by the established political institutions o f a parliamentary regime; they generated forces which new institutions and conjunctures were able to speak for and mobilise.
