Britain’s
imperial fantasies have given us Brexit
Gary Younge
As Theresa
May is discovering, the UK’s overblown sense of its place in the world has led
to overplaying our hand with the EU
Sat 3 Feb
2018 06.00 GMT Last modified on Sat 3 Feb 2018 11.35 GMT
In his
recent book Behind Diplomatic Lines, Patrick Wright, a former head of the UK
diplomatic service, provides an illuminating account of Margaret Thatcher’s
worldview. The former British premier wanted South Africa to be a “whites-only
state”, and believed the Vietnamese boat people should be pushed into the sea
before they reached Hong Kong. In addition, the late prime minister was
particularly gripped by “Germanophobia”.
“She seems to be obsessed by a feeling that
German-speakers are going to dominate the [European] community,” Wright writes.
“Any talk of German reunification is anathema to her.” At one point it got so
bad that the former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd claimed: “Cabinet now
consists of three items: parliamentary affairs, home affairs and xenophobia.”
So when the
outgoing German ambassador to Britain claimed this week that Brexiteers were
fixated on the second world war, he was on to something. Referring to the
popularity of films such as Darkest Hour and Dunkirk, Peter Ammon said:
“History is always full of ambiguities and ups and downs, but if you focus only
on how Britain stood alone in the [second world] war, how it stood against
dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but does not solve any problem of
today.” (If the second world war taught us anything, it was that you couldn’t stand
alone. They weren’t called “the allies” for nothing.)
There were
some sound reasons for voting to leave the EU – although the campaign was
rarely fought on them, and wasn’t won because of them. And this nostalgia for a
particular, and peculiar, version of our history long preceded Brexit.
Remarking on the chant “Two world wars and one World Cup” that rang out
whenever England played Germany at football, academic Paul Gilroy wrote, in
After Empire: “The boast to which the phrase gives voice is integral to a
larger denial. It declares nothing significant changed during the course of
Britain’s downwardly mobile 20th century … We are being required to admit that
the nations which triumphed in 1918 and 1945 live on somewhere unseen, but
palpable.”
But Ammon
was only half right. For while the Brexit vote was certainly underpinned by a
melancholic longing for a glorious past, the era it sought to relive was less
the second world war than the longer, less distinguished or openly celebrated
period of empire. For if memories of the war made some feel more defiant,
recollections of empire made them deluded. Our colonial past, and the inability
to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far
bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. At some point they
convinced themselves that the reason we are at the centre of most world maps is
because the Earth revolves around us, not because it was us who drew the maps.
It was
through this distorted lens (“Let’s put the Great back in Great Britain”) that
a majority voted to leave. Ammon puts the fantasies down to war stories from
Brexiteers’ childhoods. “Obviously every state is defined by its history, and
some define themselves by what their father did in the war, and it gives them great
personal pride.” But British history didn’t stop after the war. Empire was more
recent and, for a considerable element of the Brexiteers’ campaign, more
personal.
Douglas
Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda; Arron
Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his
childhood in South Africa, where his father ran sugar estates, as well as in
Kenya, Ghana and Somalia; Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and
raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong
family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these
formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his
libertarianism to Idi Amin’s “arbitrary rule”) but it would be odd to conclude
they didn’t have any.
The past 18 months has illustrated the rapid
journey from hubris to humiliation
But if
echoes of empire reverberated through the campaign, they have also framed our
negotiating strategy. The past 18 months have illustrated the journey from
hubris to humiliation. For a couple of generations, we have seen our attributes
and others’ weaknesses through the wrong side of a magnifying glass; now our
diminished state is becoming fully apparent, and, like Boris Johnson, the
foreign secretary, reciting Kipling in Myanmar, we are struggling to adjust.
This
awakening would be funny (abroad they find it hilarious) if it were not so
consequential. Johnson told the Commons the EU27 could “go whistle” for an
extortionate Brexit bill. They whistled; now we will cough, to the tune of
£35-40bn.
During her
2017 election campaign, Theresa May, channelling her inner Thatcher, boasted
about being a “bloody difficult woman”. “The next man to find that out will be
Jean-Claude Juncker,” she claimed. In fact Juncker, the president of the
European commission, and his team have found May more overwhelmed and befuddled
than overwhelming and belligerent. After one Downing Street dinner, European
negotiators concluded that she “does not live on planet Mars but rather in a
galaxy very far away”.
In a recent
private meeting between May and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the two
leaders reportedly found themselves in a tragicomic conversational loop. May
kept telling Merkel: “Make me an offer.” To which Merkel would reply: “But
you’re leaving – we don’t have to make you an offer. Come on, what do you
want?” To which May would retort: “Make me an offer.”
A change of
leader won’t make this right. Lacking authority and coherence, haemorrhaging
relevance and credibility, May is a faithful reflection not only of her
government but of the country at this moment. Brexiteers have ostensibly got
what they want: Brexit. They assumed we could dictate the terms; we can’t. They
assumed we could just walk away; we can’t. They had no more plans for leaving
than a dog chasing a car has to drive it. They are now finding out how little
sovereignty means for a country the size of Britain in a neoliberal globalised
economy beyond blue passports (which we could have had anyway). What we need
isn’t a change of leader but a change of direction.
May is no
more personally to blame for the mess we are in with Europe than Anthony Eden
was for the mess with the 1956 Suez crisis – which provides a more salient
parallel for Britain than the second world war. It took Britain and France
overplaying their hand, in punishing Egypt for seizing the Suez canal from
colonial control and nationalising it, to realise their imperial influence had
been eclipsed by the US and was now in decline.
“France and
England will never be powers comparable to the United States,” the West German
chancellor at the time, Konrad Adenauer, told the French foreign minister. “Not
Germany either. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role
in the world: that is to unite Europe … We have no time to waste; Europe will
be your revenge.”
Once again,
Britain has overplayed its hand. Preferring to live in the past rather than
learn from it, we find ourselves diminished in the present and clueless about
the future.
• Gary
Younge is editor-at-large for the Guardian
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