What would Britain look like today if we’d chosen
to follow the roads not taken?
Martin
Kettle
An exhibition in Berlin explores 14 alternative
histories for Germany. What a shame that we don’t do the same
Wed 31 May
2023 16.55 BST
What might
have happened if Britain had … But where do you go with that thought?
Especially in such grim times as these. If only we had voted against Brexit,
perhaps. Or been better prepared for Covid. Gripped the climate crisis more
ruthlessly. The list of missed moments and might-have-beens in our recent past
is dauntingly long.
But always
remember this. Might-have-beens are not always more benign options. Missed
opportunities can look very different from the Guardian reader-pleasing list
above. If only Britain had … Not joined the EU in the first place. Not imposed
a Covid lockdown at all. Sent the Windrush generation back. Kept on digging the
coal to fire the power stations.
Those who
see a divine hand in human affairs don’t think much of a question like: “What
if events had turned out differently?” Marxists who see history as the working
out of the iron laws of dialectical materialism sometimes think the same. EP
Thompson, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, once dismissed
such speculations as “unhistorical shit”.
Thompson
was right, gloriously so, about lots of things. But he was wrong about that one.
History was the future once. Its formation is always contingent, sometimes on
accident, sometimes on conscious choices. As a friend said this week, it’s why
diaries are so illuminating for historians – and now for Covid inquiry chairs.
Those who write them do not know what comes next. They are driving without
lights into the darkness.
That is why
counterfactual “What if?” exercises are not irrelevant to history. On the
contrary. Counterfactuals are more than a game. They can deepen history too.
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga put it this way: “The historian must
constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will
seem to permit different outcomes.” So must the newspaper columnist.
This
summer, Berlin is mounting an absorbing exhibition on this subject. Roads Not
Taken, which runs at the German History Museum until November, provides a
subtle look at some of the pivotal moments that shaped German history over the
past two centuries. You come to each stage of the exhibition knowing what
actually happened. But in each case the exhibition also invites you to reflect
on what could have happened instead, but did not – the roads not taken.
It is a
hugely imaginative show. It takes 14 moments that mattered for Germany,
starting with the year that the Berlin Wall fell, 1989, and then working
backwards in a series of episodes. Finally, it arrives at the revolutionary
year of 1848-9, when the Frankfurt parliament, elected by male voters in what
were then multiple German states and kingdoms, attempted unsuccessfully to
create a unified constitutional monarchy with a charter of fundamental rights.
To
underline that other outcomes are always possible, the treatment of 1989 is
deliberately deflating. Suppose, it asks, East Germans had decided to emulate
China’s repression of the Tiananmen Square uprising in the summer of 1989 and
had cracked down on their own burgeoning democracy protests. East Germany’s
leader Egon Krenz went to Beijing that autumn to congratulate the Chinese
leaders. Repression was a genuine option when he came back. It nearly happened.
So did the
1970s attempt to overthrow Willy Brandt’s diplomatic detente with West
Germany’s eastern neighbours. Back the exhibition goes, through Joseph Stalin’s
tantalising proposal of a reunified but neutral Germany in 1952, through the
genuine possibility of the first nuclear bomb being dropped not on Hiroshima
but on Ludwigshafen in 1945, through the failure of the assassination of
Hitler, through the rise of the Nazis, the struggles of the Weimar republic and
the failure of the peace movement in 1914. At the end, it asks what might have
happened in 1849 if the Frankfurt parliament had actually created the
democratic, federal and constitutional Germany that proved to be so elusive over
the next century and a half. Historically, that may be the biggest
might-have-been of all.
Imagine
such an exhibition devoted instead to British history. We have not had the same
traumatic history that Germany has. But we have had big turning points. What
are some of Britain’s roads not taken?
One obvious
place to start would be Brexit. But we pretty much know what the road not taken
would have looked like there. It would have been a continuation of the
cautious, conditional and internally besieged Europeanism of the years before
2016. More interesting, perhaps, to imagine what might have happened if Britain
had joined the eurozone in 1999. It could have happened. It nearly did.
Journeying
backwards, where next? Perhaps initially to the Falklands war of 1982 and the
all-too-possible sinking of a British flagship that might have stopped the war
in the South Atlantic in its tracks and perhaps hastened an end to the
country’s habitual military hubris. Or, looking at domestic politics, the
still-neglected road not taken after the Bullock report in 1977, which
recommended the culture-changing introduction of German-style co-determination
between workers and management in British business.
A
generation before that, what about the Conservative party’s serious internal
debate about whether to dismantle the nationalised health service in 1951? Or
the very nearly made appointment of Edward Wood as Neville Chamberlain’s
successor in 1940 as the Wehrmacht overran France? Or the decision that the
pro-Nazi Edward VIII might have taken in 1936 to make a morganatic marriage
which might have seen him on the throne at the same time, determined to sue for
peace with Hitler? Not all the roads not taken would be sunlit.
Delving
further back, there would be sections on Ireland and the empire, perhaps in the
context of the William Gladstone home rule bills of 1886 and 1893. Sections on
Britain’s imperial politics might include Joseph Chamberlain’s attempt to turn
back free trade in favour of the empire as a trading bloc, or the early but
rare domestic British efforts, by Keir Hardie and others, for Indian
independence. The exhibition might end with parliament’s rejection of votes for
women in 1867.
This merely
sketches some options. It would be a formidable exhibition if such a thing ever
took place. Yet a British equivalent of the Berlin museum or its thoughtful
exhibition – the latest of many it has mounted – remains inconceivable. Unlike
Germany, which has had to start over again with its national history, we have
never made the generous reset about our past that we need. As a result, our
approach to our history remains locked in contemporary politics, partisanship
and polarisation. We may have shared these islands with each other for
centuries. But we still struggle to share our troubled history. And so we do
not know where to go next.
Martin
Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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