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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 22
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WCL 22 January 1999
"This blessed plot"
In an important and absorbing book with this title, the journalist Hugo Young has written a history of the British attitudes to Europe and relations with the European Community from 1945 to the present day. This turns out to be a devastating exposure of the misjudgements, delusions, self-deception, half-heartedness, obscurantism and general woolliness of thinking by almost all the British political class and many of their civil servants since the Second World War. The book should be read by everyone with any interest in British foreign policy of those years.
At times it is almost unbelievable that the people dealing with the western European governments could be so short-sighted, complacent and self- satisfied. The account strikingly recalls the Swedish statesman Oxenstierna's words to his son - "You will be surprised to learn with how little wisdom the world is governed." But more ominous is to see how little seems to have been learned from the mistakes of half a century. British government politicians are still talking and behaving as if they have the same choices to accept or reject European initiatives of the sort that were dismissed out of hand so regularly and disastrously from the 50's onwards.
For, essentially, what Hugo Young is looking at is a mind-cast, above all, of the English. It consisted of an absorption with a nationalism that embraced the whole of Britain, subsuming the Scots and Welsh into an amalgam that also included pink-skinned Commonwealth members, in the woolly minds of its holders. It was a nationalism bred of a thousand successful years of English history, topped by a century of imperial rule and domination of the world's oceans by the Royal Navy not forgotten even though two world wars had utterly changed the world.
The best way of seeing what went wrong is to examine the choices that were offered in the 50s by a prescient observer - that Britain could only remain a great nation if it abandoned the pretence that it was, any longer, a Great Power. That pretence, or self-deception, was not abandoned and indeed still lingers in the minds of some politicians and electors, poisoning the decision-making and, even more, the public perceptions of how other countries should be dealt with. Europe cannot be handled sensibly because the picture in the minds of the rulers is so at variance with reality of the basics in this country's position, economic and political.
There were perhaps other choices: Britain might have tried to develop the Commonwealth as our neighbours exploited their ex-colonies in the French Union; or tried to emulate the fantastic Japanese success of turning the country into a hard-working factory system. That could well have been possible with the unearned bonus of North Sea oil. Instead it was squandered to pay for Margaret Thatcher's unemployment policy, designed to break the trade unions. But British governments were bemused by chasing the chimera an 'independent' nuclear weapon system that in fact had to bought from and remained dependent upon the United States.
The only group of people largely exempt from the collective myopia regarding Europe was a small band of federalists who, in political terms, were solely of consequence in guiding the impotent Liberal Party and providing an essential core of European-minded activists in the Conservative and Labour parties. Usually they were not numerous enough to change the mood or tone of public debate but they were still capable, at decisive moments, of offering leadership adequate to turn government policy in the direction of joining the European Community and, once joined, of keeping Britain within it. And the hero who emerges, above all, was Edward Heath, whose position in history will turn out vastly superior to that of his evil fairy, Margaret Thatcher.
But behind the picture of unhappy mismatch and deliberate obstruction in British moves to enter Europe and deal with the problems of membership, there lurks another abiding problem. Fed with an obsession about a 'special relationship' with the United States and encouraged from childhood in a romantic if lingering attachment to a Commonwealth changed out of almost all recognition, the electors are still at sea. When finally it sinks in to the English (the Irish, the Scots and perhaps the Welsh are largely almost there) that there is nowhere else for Britain to be but in Europe, what will be their attitude to the rest of the world?
For a United States of Europe, in Victor Hugo's celebrated vision, is not an end to be sought. It is merely a stage on the path to the United States of the World. And certainly, a Europe that simply joined in the Game of Nations, turning into a Greater Power in order to repeat the errors of the past and become one more player seeking economic, military and political power to be deployed against others, would be of no benefit to its citizens. There is, so far, little evidence that, despite good intentions and a totally different approach, the Labour government has any clear grasp of the steps needed to take us towards a new global political order.
John Roberts
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