“Brexit
cannot guarantee a promising return to a post-imperial nation-state partly
because the balance of power has shifted (in favour of non-European and
non-Western powers), structurally weakening Western democracies in front of
authoritarian powers. And yet, a nostalgic view of Britain has been crucial to
the Brexit debate, and will not quickly disappear, leaving the United Kingdom
more internally divided than in recent history. The dream of a “Global Britain”
has a great deal in common with the historical concept of “Greater Britain”—in
this sense it is indeed nostalgic and grounded in an idealised past. But it
actually rests on the legacy of a “Little England” that is a little too
specifically English”.
Anglo
Nostalgia – The Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West?
Dante’s Britain?
Alphen, Netherlands. 13
June. Abandon all hope ye who enter here? That was the impression I gained from
reading a new, hard-hitting book by Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassu entitled
Anglo Nostalgia – The Politics of Emotion
in a Fractured West? (London: Hurst). In fact, the book may well have been
entitled, Anglo Nostalgia – A Warning to
Italians. Still, this is an important book, and an excellent read, because
it has the courage to consider the structural implications of Brexit for Europe
head on. This is hardly surprising as one of the authors, Marta Dassu, I have
known, liked and admired for many years. Still, rather than me eulogise the
work, you can make up your own mind and I would encourage you to do that, let
me challenge some of the fundamental assumptions at the books core. The picture
it paints of my country, Britain and the Brexit mess, as well as that of the US
and President Trump’s America First, is
one that I only partially recognise.
The most important
message of the book for the British, or more specifically ‘we’ English, is that
we should recognise that we are little different from, say, Italy, or any other
European nation, and invest what fading power ‘we’ have left in a “hybrid
Europe”. Britain’s latent strategic ambition is pretence born of a form of
myth-based patriotism/nationalism and archaic identity. Worse, it is dangerous nostalgia
that prolongs the fantasy that Britain can somehow act as a bridge between
America and Europe.
Therefore, it was perhaps
fitting that I read the book on various planes bouncing around Europe in the
run up to the D-Day 75 commemorations. The
book is certainly eloquent and compelling concerning Brexit, particularly the
danger posed by ‘buy one, get one free’ populists offering simplistic solutions
to complex problems. The discussion about the role myth plays, and has played
in the British national story is powerful. For much of my career as both
historian and analyst I have fought a battle between head and heart over what
role in the world post-imperial Britain should aspire to, and what hard realities
Britain needs to face. It is precisely because
I am both historian and analyst that it is a battle I think I have by and large
won, without having to abandon my deep-seated and, I hope, moderate British
patriotism.
Patriotism or nostalgia?
My problem with this book
is that there is no place for even my idea of patriotism, which the book
suggests is part of some “epidemic of nostalgia”. Rather, I must accept that
Little Britain abandon all and any pretence to strategic ambition for that is
the only hope there is of eventually making the EU work in a globalized world
in which ‘one size fits all’ European states count for little and, by
extension, the European citizen even less. This smacks not only of a denial of
identity, but also a form of defeatism and that the only way for Europeans to
counter big, inefficient political blobs like China is to create yet another
big, inefficient political blob called ‘Europe’.
Central to the book is a particularly
scathing view of hard-line Brexiteers, and what it sees as their nostalgic fantasies
about the rebuilding of the British Empire, or something such like. First, it
seems to confuse Brexiteers at times with all mainstream Brits. Second, in my
many debates with Brexiteers I have yet to come across anyone who harbours such
illusions of Empire reborn. Rather, the main impulse for most Brexiteers I engage
with is both the scale and scope of mass immigration and/or concerns about who
really governs us and the degree to which people are accountable to any electorate.
There is a particular concern, given the direction of travel of the European Project
about who or what will govern ‘us’ thirty years hence if Britain remains in the
EU. Brexit is also as much about Britain as ‘Europe’ with many Brexiteers simply
frustrated with a political mainstream that seems unwilling and/or unable to
address the very big issues of change with anything approaching competence.
A central and strong
argument of the book is that no single state, let alone European state, can
alone deal with many of these big issues. This is undoubtedly correct. However,
the book would have been strengthened if it had tried harder to understand Brexit
and posed the question all Europeans need to consider: to what extent must European
states constrain/pool sovereign action in the name of the collective, possibly
common good, action, given that any such ‘action’, by definition, weakens influence
over policy and the accountability of power to the people.
Much of the Brexit
insurgency, for that is what it is, has more to do with the ever-weakening
relationship between voting and power in Europe’s fading democracy, than
nostalgic concerns for some long-lost glorious past. Where I disagree with the
book is when it suggests that what it sees as specifically English nostalgia
for a return to what it calls “pure sovereignty”. In fact, much of the Brexit
angst is simply a cri de Coeur for
democracy to matter, and even a Remainer like me harbours those concerns, which
is hardly nostalgia.
Pure sovereignty
This apparent English
desire for a return to “pure sovereignty” suggests a lack of understanding of
English political philosophy and culture. First, if there is a nostalgic aspect to
Brexit it has little to do with Empire of which most Britons today under the
age of fifty have only the faintest memory. This is not least because ‘history’,
as I know it, is no longer taught in schools. If Brexit has any roots it is in the
political philosophy that emerged in the seventeenth century with Hobbes, and
evolved through Hume, Burke and Mill. The English civil war was essentially
about the nature of the relationship between power and people in a “Commonwealth”.
The English have long been suspicious of distant ‘we know best’ Leviathans, be they rigid Stuart kings
or suave Eurocrats. England’s civil war in time gave birth to modern liberal democracy
because it set limits on monarchy and, as such, its creed was also evident in
the ‘no taxation without representation’ nature of the American Revolution over
a century later. It is an explanatory historical link the book fails to
exploit.
The book also fails to
properly understand the impact ‘hybrid Europe’ has had on the hybrid political
artifice that is the United Kingdom. The UK was, in effect, born in 1707 of a
strategic, imperial narrative that emphasised a certain ‘national’ myth to hold
Britain together by creating a story beyond English hegemony. It is the retreat
from that narrative/myth that was implicit in Empire, allied to EU membership that
has helped to loosen the ties between the peoples of Britain and which now
renders the future of NATO open to question. The emergence of Brussels as an
alternative pole of power has weakened all of Europe’s composite states.
The UK-US ‘special relationship’
is also painted by the book as one of ‘co-operative nostalgia’, which will fail
on the rocks of America First. For me, this was one of the least convincing
analyses in the book because it presents the still important relationship between
America and Britain as the strategic equivalent of those two old Muppet
characters, Waldorf and Stadler, who sit in the stalls of the theatre
criticizing the work of others whilst longing for the good old days. As I see
myself on a regular basis, the UK-US relationship remains that of two modern,
powerful states, admittedly one far more powerful than the other, which
operates to effect both in public and far beyond, and which continues to be the
core relationship upon which the defence of Europe and NATO is established.
Little, Ordinary, Britain
It is the central thesis
of the book that is most worthy of challenge. To the authors Britain is simply
another ‘ordinary’ European state, like Italy, and for its own good, and that
of ‘Europe’, must accept its ordinariness. Whilst I am very comfortable, as a
European with the European bit, I am less convinced about Britain being simply another,
‘ordinary’ European state. All European states are distinct but Britain, along
with France and Germany, are not as ‘ordinary’ as many other European states.
Britain remains larger and far more powerful than most other European states,
and I can say that without any delusions of post-imperial grandeur. It is plain
fact. States remain the essential building blocks of international relations,
including European states. States must also compete and to compete successfully
they must constantly tell themselves a story, about themselves and to and for
themselves. It was ever thus. This is not nostalgia, it is an essential part of
identity which is precisely what the EU lacks, and which is the main reason
Project Europe has stalled.
The simple reality is
that Britain today is an important regional power with the second or third
largest economy in Europe (depending on the exchange rate on any given day),
with one of Europe’s more capable armed forces. Britain still has weight if not
the weight it had 150 years ago, and most Britons of all stripes are entirely
comfortable with that. ‘Europe’, hybrid or the full Espresso, will not be built
if all Europeans are forced to prostrate themselves before the ‘reality’ of
their own weakness by exaggerating that relative weakness. This is simply wrong
about the nature of power in the twenty-first century world. For the EU to work
it must aggregate the power of its member-states, celebrate them, and encourage
them all to be all that they can be, not force them into a single strait-jacket
for the sake of the political convenience of Brussels marked ‘historical
has-beens’.
It is also a vision built
on a false set of assumptions. First, it implies that the likes of China, and
much of the rest of Asia, will rise inexorably. This reveals a misunderstanding
about China and Asia, and the many internal contradictions therein. Second, it
suggests that a relative rebalancing of American power is a mark of American
decline. And, that even the vital strategic ambition of the United States, upon
which Europe relies for its freedom, is little more than some form of America First nostalgia that exaggerates
the American sense of self-importance, and thus America’s role in the world.
Little Britain or Little
Europe?
For all of the above this
is still an important book, and I heartily recommend it to you. Power, narrative
and identity DO co-exist and CAN all too easily tip over into nostalgia. That
Britain is particularly vulnerable to such nostalgia is a fair point for the
book to make. As is the argument that elements of nostalgia are clearly present
in the Brexit (and the America First) debate. That Britain and the British (the
differentiation in the book between the English and the other four nations that
make up the UK – Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and…London, is far too
simplistic) might at times come across as arrogant, nostalgic and mired in the
past is a legitimate observation for the book to make because that is how many
fellow Europeans see us. Europeans who also now see a Britain humbled before
its own Brexit hubris, even if I rarely detect much schadenfreude about that.
However, what the book
calls ‘nostalgia’ is too often confused with a latent and legitimate sense of British
strategic ambition that is, with respect, lost to many Italians with their very different
set of national myths. It is strategic ambition that is, by and large, shared
with France and which will be essential if ‘Europe’ is ever to be a global
actor rather than a defensive European bunch of pathetic patries lost pathetically in the pathos and myths of their respective
vainglorious pasts. Critically, it is strategic ambition that mercantilist
Germany does not share, which perhaps explains more about Little Europe’s little
place in a big world than power fantasist Little Britons.
However, the book should
be careful for what it wishes. Had it not been for ‘Anglo Saxon’ strategic
conceits it would have been unlikely that Italy, or the rest of Western Europe,
would have been freed from the Fascism of Mussolini, or the Nazism of Hitler,
and protected from the Stalinism of the Soviet Union. It is unlikely if left to
Continental Europeans, that the Cold War would have been fought with such
authority with an America and supportive Britain at the core of the dozen or so
democracies that fought it. Those thousands of Britons who died liberating
Italy, or were mown down storming the Normandy beaches, or cut down struggling
through the entanglements of its bocage,
seventy-five years ago, were no doubt armed in part by what the book calls Anglo
Nostalgia. It is just as well they were!
Julian
Lindley-French
