Alphen,
Netherlands. 5 December. It has been an
interesting week spent careering around southern England in my little blue VW
Polo with that vaguely manic look on my face I wear when behind the wheel. I had the honour of addressing the First Sea
Lord’s conference and the admirals, commodores and captains of the Royal Navy at
HMS Collingwood near Portsmouth as to why NATO is so important to the future
defence of the United Kingdom. These
were serious people dealing with serious issues and I was struck not only by
the openness of British military thinking, but also their self-critique, although
having come from the Netherlands which is in defence meltdown it was a little
surprising to listen to complaints that the Royal Navy is only getting two new
super aircraft-carriers, some fifteen state-of-the-art destroyers and frigates
and six new nuclear attack submarines.
This sense of open minds and open thinking was reinforced at a small
meeting on Monday at Kensington Palace with the British Chief of Defence Staff
to discuss the future role and posture of the British armed forces.
In
between the two military meetings I attended a small academic conference in Bath
on ostensibly the same subject. Now,
being academics the title of the meeting had to have the words ‘strategic’, ‘culture’,
‘transformation’, ‘European’, ‘security’ and ‘identity’ all in a row, but in
the words of an immortal Lancashire comedian Eric Morecambe, “not necessarily
in that order”.
I
knew I was in for a tough day when certain words beloved of the academic with
nothing much to say started to appear. ‘Ontological’
was liberally sprinkled about, although ‘epistemological’ and ‘reification’
also beloved of the theorist lacking a point, appeared only occasionally. Ever since my long lost student days I have
been suspicious of these words as I do not know what they really mean and I am
not at all sure those that spout them do either. They seem rather to be part of the ritual of
ivory tower semantics into which so many politics departments at British
universities have retreated in the past twenty years or so. Much a-speak about nothing.
This
was confirmed to me by an exchange I had with a senior academic at the
meeting. I say ‘exchange’ as it was more
an ambush as clearly the chair and the academic assailant had pre-planned the
attack, which was akin to British politician Denis Healey’s
observation about being ‘savaged’ by a particularly genteel colleague as being “mauled
by a dead sheep”. The subject was
Europe. Now, many of you will know that
I used to work for the EU and for many years was a passionate believer in ‘Europe’. However, based on many years of hard
political, economic, social, foreign and defence policy analysis and given
current shocks I am now profoundly concerned about the direction of ‘Europe’
and Britain’s place (if any) within it.
My
analysis was duly presented only to be attacked with what can be best described
as an analysis-free emotive rant. I wanted
to tow Britain out into the Atlantic, I was told. The world’s fifth or sixth largest real economy
and third biggest defence spender had no alternative but to accept its fate and
sign up to a new EU it does not want in which it will be in a permanent minority. No facts, just assertions. And, as what passed for ‘argument’ petered
out (as it did) the assailant feeling himself to be struggling then became
just plain rude. I did not understand either
British politics or the way the EU works.
I resisted a giggle at that moment.
As I
was listening I suddenly had an insight into the grinding leftist
conformism of British academia. There
are certain analyses one is not allowed to make any more because it simply does
not fit into the prescribed, politically-correct dogma that so much of British
academic output reflects. Rather, one
must pass one’s days debating on the head of a pin the increasingly irrelevant
shades of grey of mantra and produce undecipherable peer-reviewed literature
that can only pass muster if it reflects current academic dogma before it is accepted
into the not-so-great pantheon of academic bureaucracy. The gap between the real world the armed
forces are dealing with and the pretend world of much of British academia simply
cannot be bridged. What a shame.
As I
left Bath en route to another more interesting meeting I could not help but be
reminded of a famous 1980s exchange between Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime
Minister and academic Garret Fitzgerald.
Thatcher was hand-bagging on about policy and practice when suddenly
Fitzgerald had the temerity to interrupt. “That’s all very well, Prime Minister”,
he said, “it may indeed work in practice, but does it work in theory?”
Does
anyone know what ontology means?
Julian
Lindley-French
