Dean Acheson, an American Secretary of State who served under President Truman, observed in 1962, “Great Britain has lost an Empire, but not yet found a role.”
For the word “role,” substitute the term, “vocation,” and you may have something closer to the truth. This is not to say that the Empire was good, or bad: in Belize, it was enlightened; in Ireland, it was genocidal. The Romans generated a record that was similarly uneven. But the empire was a national mission; and what has succeeded it, has made the U.K. less and less relevant.
For a point of contrast, the U.S. is still struggling to honour its founding pledge: all men are created equal. We are pulling up the grapes of wrath by their roots, as the Battle Hymn of the Republic urges us to do. It is a radical agenda and it leads to over-reach rather than caution. We are exorcizing our own demons, on a global stage. This quixotic progress lands us in other people’s struggles.
It is only an apparent contradiction, that the U.S. barges around the world, invading countries at will, like some Golem re-animated by a bad spell, and yet attracts hopeful immigrants from all corners of the globe. As George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island in 1790:
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance… May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants – while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
This is another gesture which recalls Cromwell, who invited Jews to return to England, from which they had been expelled in 1290.
The tragedy of England, is that it clearly confused geopolitical decline, with economic stagnation. Being released from the burdens of empire should have been a boon to the economy.
As in France, and in Belgium, maintaining an empire occasionally required huge investment from the state, but generated profits for only select individuals and corporations. This phenomenon, running from about 1783 to 1947, constituted a massive transfer of wealth to an increasingly narrow cohort, with one foot in England, and one in ventures scattered overseas.
It offset a range contemporaneous initiatives to distribute wealth more fairly, and to expand a safety net for working people. This form of class war, or economic attrition, subsided after 1945; and until 2010, in every measurable field, England made progress toward a settlement between its warring blocs that it is unlikely to repeat.
Now, we know exactly how close the two sides of this canyon were, before the glaciers melted, leaving them as a monumental testament to work left incomplete.
England could have made more radical advances, if it had opted out of the Cold War, on the unassailable grounds that this was a U.S.-Soviet conflict in which Europe had to remain neutral to remain viable, especially after electing Attlee’s Labour government.
Acheson’s speech and the furious British response are discussed in an academic paper submitted on August 9, 2015 by Rita Deliperi, and available online at this site: http://www.e-ir.info/2015/08/09/dean-achesons-observation-of-great-britain-in-1962/.
“the British over-reaction appeared to be nothing more than a storm in a teacup; Acheson himself, delivering a message to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., expressed his astonishment and surprise regarding an uproar of such magnitude, wondering, in a tone of bitter sarcasm, who was ‘the unsung genius who read through the whole speech and found that paragraph to cable back to London.’ Yet, the tumult around Acheson’s statement has deep roots that originated in a seed of truth. The controversial claim had indeed hit the nail precisely on the head, as, by mentioning an unmentionable truth – perhaps indelicately – Acheson simply got it right. More than fifty years have passed and the role-hunting season is yet to reach its closure.”
Leaving the EU is not a role, any more than remaining.
The absence of any clear sense of national mission, has repercussions that filter down to the warp and weft of life day-to-day. It is possible to live and work in England, even have children who are “from England,” as my son assures me he is, without caring much about England, without – sadly – making any English friends, apart from the genre of casual acquaintances who tend to fade into recrimination or sheer awkwardness.
Partly this is because “British” is a quirky sort of thing to be, and we suspect that if we tried it on, it would look like we were mocking you, and we have no desire to do so. It is not an identity sufficiently free of the grotesque and illogical elements that thrive in it, like flies in soup. It is not a way of life, like being American or French: it is something infinitely more subtle and insidious. It is an attitude. And as such, it comes with a lot of emotional baggage. It is a set of coping skills honed in a specific environment, that allows its owner to survive in a hostile climate, like a creature adapted perversely to a toxic ecosystem.
Part of this has to do with the way that the state sector, which operates all social services, including schools and hospitals, functions: as a curiously rigged kind of inside baseball, based on sharp elbows and conspiratorial manoeuvring. This lends vivid colour to the Ayn Rand school of American conservatism and its quest to drive socialism from our amber shores, by parsing stories in The Sun about the NHS.
You have built yourselves a cosy little world, the way that children make forts of couch cushions, to establish a semi-enchanted realm of their own, whose enchantment cannot survive the first cushion to go awry and fall splat in the glass of milk posed to one side. It’s not built to survive.
This is the only country in the world in which the locals write books about how peculiar their native land is, attempting to play anthropologists for an audience of other natives. Sometimes this reminds me of the way that psychiatric patients become chroniclers of their own afflictions, as if they had a loving relationship with a condition that is undermining their sanity; much as addicts share their love for their poison of preference, the glue that cements the bond between them.
This English fixation on diagnosing yourselves resembles acute narcissism, in other words, an addiction. This is an anti-social condition, no matter how much company you have. Think about how people drink in groups: there is something haphazard about their camaraderie that makes you suspect they would only dimly recognise each other if they passed the next day.
For a point of contrast, most of the people who write books about France are Americans, from Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway, bearing out the truth of what Ben Franklin observed: “Chaqu’un a deux patries, la France et la sienne.”
We disagree with the French frequently. We have shouting matches before the whole world about our foreign policy, our economic system, the tenor of our society, the quality of our movies, and yet, we remain inextricably linked, by ties that are profound and indissoluble.
Our ties to England, by contrast, are fairly shallow. Once we have recovered from the heady buzz of shared mission in foreign lands, and shared greed in all forms, not unrelated phenomena, we have a fairly transactional relationship. Like drinking buddies, we enable each other. We issue each other the kind of blanket immunity that creates moral hazard. Strip that away, and there’s not much fondness.
You cannot be American and European. It is a formula for incoherence and therefore bad faith. You cannot play both sides against the middle, because both ways of life require total commitment, spiritually, economically, logistically, ethically, practically, politically. It’s like trying to find a recipe for meatloaf that uses only vegetables. You cannot have the best of both worlds. You have to make choices, and as a wise friend observed, every choice implies a sacrifice.
And here is what baffles me: you have substituted our judgment for your own, on so many occasions, sought our preferment at the cost of your own vivid interests, and your own equilibrium, in so many ways, to such anguished cost, that complaining about over-reach from Brussels, or Berlin, seems like a genuine psychological case of displacement.
England used to be confident enough to assimilate immigrants with astonishing success, figures as disparate as Ralph Miliband, V.S. Naipaul, Henry James and Karl Marx. Yet this has ceased to be the case. We now merely coexist with you, but we are on a totally different plane. The British people, almost by definition, are the ones who are left behind.
Brexit was not a fluke. It was a victory for a disease with deep roots, stretching, as all organic tendrils do, into every cornice and crevasse in this wilful, proud and protean society, much as a cancer may breed more rapidly – through no paradox – in a healthy body.
I have not passed a newsstand in at least a year, without a blaring, braying, bellowing headline about immigrants. You think you’re tolerating us? Try putting that shoe on the other foot, where you’ll find that it fits nice and snug. As much as I ought to resent being pilloried simply for being an immigrant, I find it hard to take it personally. Merely the use of the term suggests an almost-endearing vagueness about the phenomenon that the rhetoric seeks to target.
One cannot take this kind of rhetoric seriously. It’s freakish. Petty. Vindictive. Farcical. It’s something like the symptoms of Tourette’s: babble. We know this isn’t about us. It’s just a lot easier to fixate on us, than to look in a mirror, and ask what went wrong. We are survivors. But I think I understand how many victims feel in the opening stages of abuse, or a crime: simply gobsmacked. Because if you have a clear conscience, you don’t understand the game that’s being played, or why you’re supposed to take part in it.
You can see us purposefully plowing on with our lives, with little if any concern for the rest of you, muttering and puttering and heaving off to one side, trapped in the rut that you’ve mistaken for the road. This is not because we take your country for granted. It is because the violent debate about the existential nature of “British” identity, has nothing to do with real life.
Standing on a chair, and shouting, “England! England!” is like watching Donald Trump pound the inaugural podium, vowing, to international hilarity, “America First! America First!”
Americans are accustomed to the fact that our country incubates crazy people. We are aware that we are judged globally against our own paranoia, animosity, and bad hype, as a recent exhibit highlighted, featuring pop-art, captioned semi-ironically, “Home of the free, land of the brave.” The exhibit was reviewed in The Spectator, where a writer observed gleefully, “We know when the dream died: November 9, 2016.”
But a dream is never preferable to reality, unless you’re someone who can’t cope with it. As Jimmy Carter put it, “If we fall sleep in a dream world, we will wake up in a nightmare.”
Rather than dream, I prefer the bracing certainty that my society has woken up — rudely, but finally — and rejected Trump and his ilk, election or no election. You can’t legislate culture. You can only witness it thrive or die. This has little to do with power. It’s spontaneous, unaccountable, and unpremeditated. Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Trump has proved; but it is also a bluff. Self-respect belongs in a completely different category.
Our problems are the inverse of yours, in many respects. Americans are working too hard, whereas the Brittles are not working hard enough. In both cases, we have pitched off our equilibrium, with the U.S. government doing too little, and yours doing too much. It’s the nanny state vs. the self-absorbed, absentee father.
You may imagine that with your history, you can take on all of Europe and survive; but Europe is not the enemy. You are facing a phantom menace, conjured by people who would sap you of your strength because they profit by it. Their motives cannot be sound. What can possibly be gained by surrendering to a fantasy based on schadenfreude and nostalgia?
As the Steve Bannon of The Spectator put it, “the country has, in general, accustomed itself to Brexit and is so far relieved that virtually none of the annihilations predicted to befall us have occurred. But there is still a pretty fanatical anti-Brexit rump in some of our major cities, and especially London.” (22 April, 2017, “What I Expect from this Pointless Election,” by Rod Liddle).
The writer is as financially illiterate as the rest of those who’ve claimed “mission accomplished” in comically premature fashion. Brexit is not set to take effect until 2019, ironically enough, on the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, another pact that isolated one country from the collective European economy. In the meantime, all the bluster over its righteousness is a bit of shadow-boxing. This rhetoric is a hostage to fortune: a series of signed, blank cheques, that your economy cannot hope to redeem.
The most enlightened society in the world cannot survive the implosion of its economy: “Exactly 80 years ago, in the summer of 1931, an international banking crisis sent the Western economy into free fall and unleashed the terrible political anger that brought Hitler and the Nazis to power.” I am quoting The Daily Mail (ibid, Dominic Sandbrook), because here, alarmism is appropriate.
The difference between an anthropologist, a psychologist and a friend, is the following: an anthropologist will chronicle a society in free-fall with total detachment, as one might chart a queer celestial phenomenon, plotting the path of a meteor on a collision course with the earth, with no concern for the affected populace. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, “Le monde a commencé sans l’homme et il s’achèvera sans lui.” A psychologist might apply the same indifference to the life of a subject; but a friend will grab you by the shoulders and shake you, and tell you to open your eyes, and run.