Identity - Britpop, Britart, Britlit and Britflix have all failed to generate enduring cultural myths. We should be celebrating plurality not homogeneity

When the Ancient Greeks wanted to describe the distinctive characteristic of the inhabitants of this island, they chose the word for the local habit of body painting - Pretanoi. The Romans turned this into the Latin, Britanni - and so one word for our national identity derives from a bizarre cultural act, still practiced by football fans today.

The attempt to define Britishness by Sir Bernard Crick's Life in the United Kingdom Advisory Group, which has suggested a cultural test, is only one of a series of projects designed to interrogate an increasingly slippery term. Earlier last month, Tate Britain, established less than three years ago, launched British Art Week, a nationwide series of events, exhibitions and lectures exploring the relationship between national identity and British culture. The first panel discussion asked: does "Tate Britishness" actually exist? In his lecture on "the Britishness of British art", critic Andrew Graham-Dixon noted that "British" art has not previously been considered worthy of such attention. (Suddenly sensitive to labels, I noticed that these events were sponsored by BP, a multinational corporation that has abbreviated its Britishness to a postcode.)

The historian Krishan Kumar (to whose recently published The Making of English National Identity I owe the story of the Pretanoi) writes that issues of national identity are being debated as never before. In particular, there is a crisis of Englishness: Tom Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain (1977), Linda Colley's Britons (1992) and Norman Davies's The Isles: a history (1999) made significant contributions to this inquiry. And Richard Weight's Patriots: national identity in Britain 1940-2000 was published last year.

These books reflect the current anxiety and confusion over national identity. Curiously, this uncertainty was present at what is normally regarded as the most nationalistic cultural event of the year, the Last Night of the Proms. This was not only because the master of ceremonies was an American, conductor Leonard Slatkin who wore a Union Jack bow tie. More significantly, the BBC mounted parallel concerts in Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow. In the interval, television viewers watched flag-waving crowds enjoy their separate nationalistic epiphanies: Celtic keening from the Chieftains, a welcome from the hillside from Robert Tear, and a choir celebrating the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

Ritual performances of Elgar, Wood and Parry followed, but as the London prommers got increasingly out of control, ethnic folk melodies from around the British Isles were seamlessly included in the programme. Slatkin described this as "uniting the four nations of the United Kingdom", an expression that may not have gone down well with everybody in the crowd outside City Hall, Belfast. Yet the BBC seemed to protest too much. The "Rule Britannia"(which has words by a Scotsman) that followed was curiously muted, and the contradictions in the national psyche were further exposed as the socialist "Jerusalem" was followed by the royalist national anthem, before the evening was rounded off by "Auld Lang Syne".

The rise of local nationalisms and the weakening attachment to Britishness measured by opinion polls is not a problem for the Scots, the Welsh, or even the Northern Irish, who can define themselves against "the other" of the economically, numerically and politically dominant English. But the English cannot declare independence from themselves. Having effortlessly suborned the subaltern nations into the imperial adventure, the English are unsure of themselves now the Great Game is over.

Britishness did get a late boost during the Second World War, as the films of the period show. Lost patrols, leaking submarines and damaged bombers are crewed (according to the political correctness of the time) by Scots, Welsh and Irish, plus members of the white Commonwealth, but the officer in charge is invariably English. Were the young lieutenant to look over his shoulder to check on the men today, the loyal troops might well have scarpered.

The residue of English identity has become exposed as never before. David Blunkett has remarked that "there is something almost apologetic about the English", and we can see why. Speakers at the Tate Britain discussion spoke of a "thin Englishness" that didn't add up to anything very much. A confident "Englishness" - the word entered the language only in 1805 - had its apogee just before the First World War, but it already stood for a nostalgic, anti-industrial pastoralism reflected in Georgian poetry and the "cowpat" school of English music. "English literature" was invented as an academic subject. The more racist elements of what was in fact Anglo-Saxonism were moderated by war with Germany, but, in Patrick Wright's memorable phrase, "deep England" remained an important touchstone in the Second World War.

Traces of these values may be detected in the titles of cultural institutions such as English Heritage and English Nature, though Richard Weight argues that even the countryside is losing its atavistic hold. The once-mighty Arts Council of Great Britain, product of wartime propaganda, has shrunk to Arts Council England.

The real problem is that English means white, in a country where curry outsells fish and chips. As the hold of the monarchy weakens, there are no unifying images to describe adequately what our nation has become. According to the English Tourism Council, "St George is emerging from the shadows" - though since he is believed to come from Dalmatia, these must be the shadows of a lorry park at Dover. Thanks to "white van man", the thin red cross on a white ground has become as sinister as the graphic simplicity of the swastika.

Notwithstanding the racism shown to immigrants, the English cannot agree on a defining Other. For the right, it is Europe, for the left, America; and unless some serious external threat appears, "thin Englishness" will prevail. Britpop, Britart, Britlit and Britflix, all metropolitan rather than national phenomena, have failed to generate enduring cultural myths. Perhaps the answer is to launch Tate England.

Yet I am happy to live without the comfort blanket of an imposed identity. I prefer the pluralism of White Teeth to the homogeneity of the white cliffs of Dover. Let those who live here become a Runnymede nation - in the words of the Trust's Parekh report of 2000, "a community of communities", where identities are fluid and we can link ourselves to whatever group we chose. Empire has gone, and so has the model of centre and periphery that sustained it. British-, Anglo-, let hyphenation thrive.

Robert Hewison is a Demos associate

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