Can you really be a nation without a national anthem?

National anthems will matter for as long as nation-states themselves do. These hymns to blood and soil became the soundtracks to state-building

Chris Robshaw sings the national anthem, God Save the Queen (Getty)

MPs decided this week to debate a bill to introduce a national anthem for England. Toby Perkins, Labour member for Chesterfield, worries that the default to “God Save the Queen” at sporting tournaments denies English fans the chance to salute their own teams with their own ditty. It also “causes resentment among other nations of the British Isles” when England confiscates the UK’s signature tune. In Ballymena, Ballater and Builth Wells, they surely speak of little else.

MPs chanted “Amen” to the Perkins proposal. It returns to the Commons on 4 March. If they need left-field ideas for a new stadium belter, I suggest the late David Bowie’s “Heroes”, already enlisted for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Its clinching phrase captures the evanescence of sporting – or indeed national – glory: “just for one day”. Pleasure-loving patriots, meanwhile, could reach further back and consider Purcell’s gorgeously sensual aria from King Arthur: “Fairest Isle, all isles excelling/ Seat of pleasure and of love.” Forget imperial conquests and xenophobic arrogance. Bring on the British bacchanalia.

By the time of the debate, legislators ought to notice that Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s “Jerusalem” already accompanies England teams at sporting events, from Test cricket matches to the Commonwealth Games. In this year of multiple anniversaries, perhaps that strange amalgam of revolutionary mysticism (the words) and Victorian-Anglican uplift (the music) does deserve an official nod. It was in 1916 that Parry, then in the twilight of his career, set the lyric that prefaces Blake’s epic poem Milton. He composed it for a mass rally convened to “brace the spirit of the nation” during a year of futile carnage.

Parry, though, was no vulgar chauvinist – any more than Edward Elgar, who came to detest the rabble-rousing fate of his first “Pomp and Circumstance March” once A C Benson’s lyrics had converted its big tune into “Land of Hope and Glory”. Apart from its zeal for transformation – and the way the climactic high E grippingly shifts from “Jerusalem” to “built” between verses – Parry’s version has another claim on contemporary respect. To the composer’s delight, it became an anthem for women’s suffrage: a cause much more to his taste.

He authorised its use for a campaign concert in 1918, and later gave the copyright to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. He wrote: “People seem to enjoy singing it. And having the vote ought to diffuse a good deal of joy too. So they would combine happily.” From Blake’s revolution to the 20th-century struggle for equality, this song has form.

Almost anything would improve on the depressive drone of “God Save the Queen”: that passive-aggressive dirge popularised as the Jacobite rebels threatened London in 1745. At the time, plenty of the English, Scots and Irish would have laid bets that the Hanoverian George II was not “long to reign over us”. Benjamin Britten’s arrangement does its level best, but he had shoddy raw material. As for censuring any politician who fails to intone its dreary words with fake gusto, do we live in a grown-up democracy or a Ruritanian comic operetta? On the relationship between ceremonial warbling (or croaking) and true national wellbeing, heed A J P Taylor’s synopsis of the argument that drives his history, England from 1914 to 1945: “The British Empire, declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England Arise’. England had risen all the same.”

Yet national anthems will matter for as long as nation-states themselves do. Born, in Europe at least, as churches and dynasties weakened and the nation assumed their roles, these hymns to blood and soil became soundtracks to state-building. Even if a people had lost or never enjoyed self-rule, a stirring song might the keep the ideal alive. Composed after the country’s partition between Russia, Austria and Prussia, the Polish anthem – Dabrowski’s “Mazurka” – has a special edge of loss. “Poland has not perished yet,” it pluckily insists.

The Polish plea has its melancholy charms. More often, overblown lyrics and third-rate melodies make of hymns to nationhood a ritualistic ordeal that only a tone-deaf jingoist could love. They often sound, in the strictest sense, blasphemous – in that their words attribute divine powers and virtues to vague abstractions of geography and consanguinity. It may not be music, but at least the Haka – the Maori war dance with which New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team intimidates its opponents on the pitch – gets to the point about anthems. Big up your gang and scare the other lot.

Even countries which can boast shoo-in favourites as potential anthems perversely refuse to use them. The show-stopping theme at the heart of Sibelius’s Finlandia is not, in fact, the Finnish national anthem. That’s something much less memorable. Likewise, Italians dutifully grind through “Fratelli d’Italia” when “Va, pensiero” – Verdi’s chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco, as cherished in Cardiff as in Catania – is theirs for the taking.

Foreigners as well as the French often admire La Marseillaise above every rival tune. True, Rouget de Lisle’s revolutionary marching song descends into the ghoulish butchery of the age with its lines about steeping our furrows in an impure blood. Nonetheless, no neutral could gainsay its unifying power after the terrorist outrages in Paris last year – or, less solemnly, when the habitués of Rick’s bar raise their voices against the Nazis in Casablanca. In an allegedly post-patriotic and border-scorning age, these aural cards of identity and solidarity still command deep loyalty. The European Union’s half-hearted and cack-handed bid to pool or mingle sovereignty has had to recruit its own theme song, in the form of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

So the anthem has retained its allure without much of a diminuendo. From the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations to the Euro 2016 football championships and the Olympics in Rio, the coming months will deliver an ear-tormenting surfeit of them. The globalisation that despatches capital, technology, ideas and labour across borders has failed to dissolve allegiances that set hard in the 19th or even 18th century. No one has written a popular song for humanity, as opposed to the militant war cry of a cross-frontier movement such as “The Internationale”. And that appeal to worldwide workers’ unity served until 1944 as the anthem of a combative nation state, the Soviet Union. Bids to bind the species rather than a class in song seldom rise higher than the schmaltzy Coca-Cola ad that tried to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Perhaps “Auld Lang Syne” – words Robert Burns; melody anonymous – comes closest to the real thing.

The tribal bonding song can flourish under the unlikeliest regimes. Remarkably, even Isis has its own “national anthem”. In December 2013, jihadis uploaded a number that roughly translates as “Our Umma, the dawn has come”. Discount what you think you know about music as haram or impure to fundamentalist Islam. The militants have developed an entire genre of incendiary hymn, the anasheed jihadiya. Alex Marshall explores this bizarre mutation in a fascinating chapter of his book about anthems, Republic or Death!. As he writes, “Isis is trying to create a sense of belonging among people in its territory, rather than just frightening them into submission.” In other words, it is behaving like a state.

As the online soundtrack to torture and murder, Isis’s sonic signature stands at the far end of a road of hubris and hatred that too many anthems take. Could there be a people’s song that refuses to incite delusions of superiority? Some have tried. After 1945, both parts of divided Germany underwent an anthemic crisis. A defeated people asked if the traditional “Deutschlandlied” could be redeemed, given that the Third Reich had besmirched the beautiful tune that Haydn composed for the Habsburg emperor Francis II in 1797. In 1950, West Germany chose to keep the music and just the inoffensive final verse: no more “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”. In the East, Hanns Eisler composed a fresh anthem for the Communist GDR, “Risen from Ruins”.

Eisler’s collaborator Bertolt Brecht wrote a separate set of lyrics for this tune, the so-called “Children’s Hymn”. On the net, you can find a poignant recording of Eisler himself playing and singing it. Chastened, modest, peaceable, it seems to atone for centuries of musical bluster and bombast with its prayer that “a decent German nation” may “flourish as do other lands”. The words yearn for other peoples to “give up flinching/ At the crimes which we evoke,/ And hold out their hands in friendship/ As they do to other folk.”

Britain, too, might benefit from a newly composed answer to the “Children’s Hymn”: a post-nationalist anthem. Billy Bragg would certainly do it well. Blake fans, however, would hope for the visionary P J Harvey to give it her best shot.