There is now a crippling void at the core of politics in the historically leading nations of the West, an absence of reflection so profound that it is hard for conventional commentary even to perceive it. In the former global powers of Britain and France, and the troubled superpower that is the USA, political perceptions are breaking dangerously free of a mooring in actual history. At the very time when shifting global power-structures – and the looming catastrophe of climate change – demand a confrontation with the realities of past and present, electorates and commentators are swerving around those realities, latching on to random distorted visions of the past in place of an undesirable future.
The roots of this problem run deep into history. In the summer of 1947, George Orwell identified some of them in a short essay entitled ‘Toward European Unity’. Here he presented three bleak scenarios for the nuclear-armed future, one of which – eternal oligarchic stalemate – was the seed of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Against this gloom, he pressed the case that ‘democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area’ in order to give the world an alternative, and that western Europe was the only suitable location to start.1 Orwell acknowledged that ‘the difficulties of bringing any such thing into being are enormous and terrifying’, and went on to list four of them. Two were the essential opposition of both the USA and USSR, and one the then still hugely influential Catholic Church – a reminder of the widespread ‘clerico-fascism’ of the period and his own experiences in Spain. The fourth, to which he devoted almost as much space as these others combined, was the practice and legacy of imperialism.
In discussing this, Orwell voiced a basic historical truth that still haunts the West:
The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. This relationship has never been made clear by official Socialist propaganda, and the British worker, instead of being told that, by world standards, he is living above his income, has been taught to think of himself as an overworked, down-trodden slave. To the masses everywhere ‘Socialism’ means, or at least is associated with, higher wages, shorter hours, better houses, all-round social insurance, etc. etc. But it is by no means certain that we can afford these things if we throw away the advantages we derive from colonial exploitation. However evenly the national income is divided up, if the income as a whole falls, the working-class standard of living must fall with it. At best there is liable to be a long and uncomfortable reconstruction period for which public opinion has nowhere been prepared.
Colonial territories, he argued, ‘must cease to be colonies or semi-colonies and become autonomous republics on a complete equality with the European peoples’ if a democratic Socialism was to have any chance. The difficulty of realising this vision – weeks before India’s disastrous and hastily imposed Partition took effect – was clear, as was the underlying risk:
the British worker, if he has been taught to think of Socialism in materialistic terms, may ultimately decide that it is better to remain an imperial power at the expense of playing second fiddle to America. In varying degrees all the European peoples, at any rate those who are to form part of the proposed union, will be faced with the same choice.
This prophetic voice from seventy years ago announces in a few short paragraphs both the failures of the intervening decades and the disastrous choices that voters, commentators and politicians appear to be making to avoid coming to terms with reality. Orwell’s most gloomy prognostications did not come to pass, but neither did we manage to advance towards his beloved ‘democratic Socialism’. The question of what would really happen if the West became equal with everywhere else was avoided. Instead, postwar generations were brought up to see generous welfare provision as a historic accomplishment of their national societies, belonging to them, along with a continued leading role in the world economy, as a birthright. From its origins this assumption held a dangerous tinge of racial privilege.
The long-term reality can be summed up in a few basic facts. India before British imperialism was a wealthy part of the world – indeed, this was a prime reason for the eagerness with which merchants flocked to its shores, to gather the high-quality manufactured goods that sold for premium prices to European elites. In the middle years of the eighteenth century, there was very little difference between the living standards of the average Indian and British worker.2 Two hundred years later, at independence, the vast majority of the Indian population lived in a grinding poverty by then vanished from Britain. In 1960, per capita GDP in the UK was seventeen times greater than in India. By 1970, it was thirty-eight times greater; and by 2000 sixty-three times. But by 2015, it had fallen back to only twenty-seven times greater; and a year later, only twenty-three times.3 Similar pictures could be painted of imperial and post-imperial relations all round the world. A great historical bubble is deflating, and it is as much about what happened ‘after’ empire as during the classic age of imperialism.
In the USA after 1945, the suburban ‘American Dream’ that had been interrupted by the Great Depression resumed its march. In the UK and France, nationalisations and public provision under the guidance of ‘expert’ planners marked out a different route to the same goals of present prosperity and future opportunity. A genuine focus on improving the lives of the core populations in these countries made the period between the later 1940s and the early 1970s into what the French label les Trente Glorieuses – thirty glorious years of well-planned growth. In comparison with the years that came afterwards, these decades saw a moderation of extreme wealth, and a rising share of real income for ordinary workers, which from our present vantage point, after the reversal of these trends, still looks to many like a golden age.
That view is only possible, of course, by closing one’s eyes to some of what Orwell had already seen. Suburban America was a racially segregated landscape, with ‘white flight’ from urban areas refashioning the earlier ‘Jim Crow’ era of explicit discrimination. ‘Sundown towns’ that physically excluded non-whites could be found across the country, and the epic struggle for Civil Rights demonstrated by its extent and intensity – and terrible casualties – how the USA exercised an almost imperial domination over parts of its own population. That non-white part was also excluded, by countless subtle and overtly violent means, from much of the rising prosperity of the era, and has continued to be marginalised in geographic and social terms. The USA was formed as an empire, in its acquisition and rule over most of its current territory. Native American tribes and nations still live in complex and troublesome relationship with the states overlaid on their historic territories. Inhabitants of Guam and Puerto Rico live with most, but not all, the rights and representation of US citizens, as horrific neglect in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria has demonstrated.
In Britain after 1945, the Labour government may have hurried out of India, at the cost of 15 million dispossessed refugees and a million deaths, and abandoned its ‘mandate’ in Palestine to violent partition less than a year later, but it made very little progress otherwise towards decolonisation. Imperial territories were still seen uncontroversially as opportunities for Britons to exploit, even if under the banner of ‘modernisation’. Labour ministers launched the infamous ‘Groundnut scheme’ to grow peanuts (primarily for processing into cooking oil) in what is now Tanzania. Tens of thousands of demobilised British soldiers volunteered to join the Groundnut Army and were shipped out to East Africa with the goal of clearing and cropping a vast 150,000-acre zone. Almost £50 million was poured in over four years, before the scheme was recognised as completely unviable and abandoned, having reduced the land it had cleared – less than a third of the original target – to a dustbowl.
Under the same Labour administration, settlement of white people in Kenya continued to be encouraged. The original imperial landowner class was joined by a wider range of middle-class professionals and businessmen and these, being less economically secure and more anxious about their status, would prove to be particularly aggressive as anti-colonial unrest became the Mau Mau Rebellion. Like the so-called ‘Malayan Emergency’ of the same era, straddling the boundary of Labour and Tory administrations, the first half of the 1950s was marked in Kenya by brutal insurgency and counterinsurgency. On the part of the rebels, a campaign of killing those they regarded as African collaborators was punctuated by the murder of several dozen whites, including women and children. The outraged colonial authorities imposed large-scale internment on groups suspected of rebel sympathies. Widespread torture in the form of prolonged beatings and physical mutilation led to the death of some 20,000 rebels, in addition to over 1,000 official executions. Local and imperial authorities had full knowledge of all these horrors, but colluded to hide them from public sight – except where rebel atrocities were used for propaganda.
Even within the Labour government, private prejudice about the colonies was rife. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, wrote in his diary in February 1950 in horror at the idea of being posted to a governorship in West Africa, ruling over ‘pullulating, poverty-stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run’, and who were ‘querulous and ungrateful’ for imperial efforts to raise them up.4 Meanwhile in Britain itself, economic reconstruction drew in a steady flow of the ‘West Indian’ immigrants who first arrived in 1948 on the Empire Windrush and who, as they spread out beyond the port cities where ethnic mixing had been a fact of life for centuries, encountered persistent hostility. The racial dimension of that hostility was always clear.
Postwar Britain was so desperate for labour that workers were scooped in from the displaced populations of Eastern Europe, from Malta and Cyprus and in huge numbers from Ireland – by 1961, one in every six Irish citizens was working in Britain, some of them shipped over like so many cattle, with labels round their necks saying ‘British Factories’.5 On the Windrush itself were several dozen Polish women, collected from a curious wartime safe haven in Mexico. Probably the wives of Polish men already settled in Britain, they were all designated in documents as ‘H.D.’ – Household Domestic labour.6 Most of these groups, which numbered many hundreds of thousands, were allowed to assimilate gently – after some early press grumbling about some of the Europeans being enemy aliens – and the huge disruption of the era faded from popular memory.
For the black population, things were different. Some 125,000 West Indians, and a little less than half that number from South Asia, had arrived by the late 1950s. With an economic downturn raising tensions across the workforce, a confluence of racial and sexual alarms among groups of young white men saw the alleged treatment of white women by black men used as a pretext for violent attacks on the latter.7 ‘Race riots’ from this point on became a potential and actual threat to what politicians dubbed ‘race relations’: the management of tensions caused by the collision of endemic racism and casually laissez-faire immigration policies. ‘Immigrant’ and ‘black’ became implicitly linked in public attitudes. By the early 1960s, the postwar assumption that all races were citizens of the same empire and could move freely around it had been replaced by new distinctions of status for entry to the UK that, however muffled, were essentially racial. This was still far from enough for the swelling chorus of voices that Enoch Powell amplified in his infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Throughout this era, as internal turmoil grew, British troops continued to fight anticolonial rebellions in far corners of the world, from Cyprus to Yemen to Borneo.
France faced a parallel series of conflicts. The governments of the ‘Fourth Republic’ formed after the Liberation, as they carefully planned the economic renaissance of the battered Hexagon, had committed themselves to also delivering urban modernity to their colonial populations. While channelling notions of universal progress, this vision was also entirely dependent on those populations’ willingness to remain subjected to Parisian dictates. In the late 1940s, France remodelled its empire into the ‘French Union’, a nominally constitutional and democratic global federation – but one in which non-white populations voted in ‘electoral colleges’ with less influence than whites. The real problem with the idea of guiding populations to higher levels of development was demonstrated by events that began on the very day that Nazi Germany surrendered: 8 May 1945. French troops opened fire on a victory parade in the Algerian town of Sétif in which banners demanding independence had been displayed. Attacks by local Algerians and the authorities escalated, with more than 100 white settlers being killed in nearby villages and a reprisal campaign that historians agree probably killed at least 6,000 Algerians in the following weeks.8 At the same time, at the other end of the Mediterranean, French troops began a three-week campaign to suppress a movement for Syrian independence, killing hundreds and ending with a two-day artillery bombardment of the opposition forces clustered around the Damascus parliament building. While opinion in Metropolitan France barely noticed these events, they set the scene for the bitter struggles that followed.
By the end of 1946, France was openly at war with nationalist-communist forces in Indochina, culminating in 1954 with the expulsion of the French, after humiliating defeat by their former colonial subjects in full-scale battle at Dien Bien Phu. That same year, smouldering conflict across northern Africa ignited into sustained guerrilla warfare in Algeria, which was technically a fully incorporated region of France. This war cost France more than 25,000 military dead over the next seven years, alongside the loss of a larger number of Algerian auxiliaries, while they inflicted over 140,000 casualties on their enemies. As in Kenya, torture of suspects was normalised. A recent monumental study of these conflicts opens with the chilling juxtaposition of a young Algerian woman’s account of physical and sexual torture and the memoirs of a French general, openly and unrepentantly recounting what had been done in the name of preserving empire. Both texts were published in France in 2001, and the second outsold the first.9
The war in Algeria ended only after it had destroyed the Fourth Republic itself. Faced with an attempted right-wing coup in favour of a hard line against independence, the Republic’s leadership turned in 1958 to the wartime leader Charles de Gaulle (ironically viewed as a desirable figurehead by the coup plotters themselves). Building a highly presidential Fifth Republic around himself, De Gaulle used his moral authority to push through an independence settlement for Algeria over the next three years, at the cost of exposure thereafter to assassination attempts from recalcitrant right-wing settler groups.
Right up to the end of this process, violence, including bombings, had convulsed both Algeria and France. Extremely aggressive responses from the Parisian police, including a blanket curfew on the city’s Algerian population, culminated in a mass attack on a demonstration of Algerian workers on 17 October 1961. Essentially given licence to kill, thousands of police shot, beat and threw protesters into the Seine, murdering possibly as many as several hundred. The full truth of these events was rigorously covered up by the authorities, gaining no public acknowledgement until the 1990s.
It is emblematic of the relationship between France’s colonial and metropolitan political cultures that a much smaller (though still horrifying) incident of deadly violence, the killing of nine white trade unionists and communists at the Charonne metro station after a demonstration in February 1962, produced an immediate public outcry. A mass funeral procession of several hundred thousand people was held, with the full might of left-wing mobilisation, and the ‘Massacre of Charonne’ acquired a permanent place in the French left’s litany of state crimes. The leader of the police responsible for both massacres, Maurice Papon, a close associate of De Gaulle, was later exposed as responsible for both the rounding-up of Jews in wartime Bordeaux and the torture of insurgents in 1950s Algeria.10
In these same years France caught up with where the UK had reached a decade earlier, and tested functional nuclear weapons – with supreme irony, in the Algerian desert that was just about to be surrendered. Both the UK and France, under governments of left and right, had pursued nuclear-power status since the late 1940s, and have of course retained it to this day. Anglo-French mushroom clouds in safely distant imperial territories book-ended what was otherwise an era of visible decline. Sitting at its heart was the fiasco of Suez in 1956, a sorry tale of desperate collusion and half-baked military adventurism. Attempting to retake the nationalised Suez Canal from Egypt by force, before being obliged to withdraw under intense US pressure, marked the point at which, in practical terms, two centuries of global power began decisively to fade. The theoretical ability to kill millions was a very expensive and not-very-useful replacement for the practical ability to impose political solutions thousands of miles from London or Paris.
The difficulty of adapting to this new situation is ironically marked by the early years of resistance to nuclear weapons themselves. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began life in Britain wedded to a rhetoric of global leadership – the very first Aldermaston march of 1958 had been literally under the banner of ‘Britain Must Give the Lead’. ‘Setting a moral example’ was identified as a way for Britain to retain greatness without military dominance, and historic actions like ending the slave trade were explicitly cited as precedents. Time and again through the early 1960s, CND policy documents and public positions assumed that it was the responsibility of the UK to lead and direct resistance to the threat of atomic destruction. In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, CND’s newspaper Sanity opined that Britain had ‘failed miserably’ to demonstrate any continuing military greatness, ‘But CND says there are other kinds of greatness. We have been pointing them out for a long time. Can we now start exploring them?’11 It seems to have been an article of faith among the clerics, intellectuals and activists who took this highly oppositional position that it was, nonetheless, part and parcel of the special qualities of Britishness – and the British place in the world – to do so.
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While CND positioned themselves instinctively at the moral forefront of progress, politicians did so with low cunning. Just as De Gaulle was bearing down on the Algerian War, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan signalled the abandonment of a decade of staunch Tory resistance to rapid decolonisation. In possibly his most famous utterance after 1959’s claim that Britain had ‘never had it so good’, Macmillan told the South African parliament on 3 February 1960 that ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.’ In the face of rising unrest, political pressure in the United Nations and the possibility of generalised Soviet-backed anticolonial warfare, Macmillan’s government had decided to cede independence as quickly as possible to whatever forces could be found willing to accept continued friendly relations. Pronouncing this in front of the stony-faced architects of Apartheid put Britain on the side of the angels, even if it was effectively an admission of defeat.
Harold Macmillan – almost a caricature of an ageing patrician, though his family’s wealth actually came from the publishing business – also devoted considerable energy in these years to positioning the UK as Greece to America’s Rome. Building a relationship with the thrusting young administration of John F. Kennedy, he hoped his avuncular charm could override a strong tendency in Washington to see Britain as a declining empire and awkwardly needy ally.12 At the personal level this seemed to succeed, but did little to shift Kennedy’s determination to aggressively resist communism – producing the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the brinkmanship of the 1962 Missile Crisis and the first steps towards deep entanglement in Vietnam.
By the early 1960s, as the first cohorts of the post-1945 ‘Baby Boom’ came of age, the politics of the West seemed poised for a generational confrontation. For the Labour Party, looking to a shining future was the route out of ‘thirteen wasted years’ of ‘Tory misrule’, as well – not incidentally – as a deflection from damaging internal strife over nuclear arms. Thus the party’s new leader, Harold Wilson, had many reasons to promise in September 1963 a ‘new Britain’ to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of a scientific and technological revolution. Insisting that ‘there is no room for Luddites in the Socialist Party’, he called on his comrades to wholeheartedly embrace change, denounced ‘educational apartheid’ in grammar schools and promised tens of thousands of new university places.13 Through pages of detailed discussion about the potential for change in different sectors of the economy (written in full paragraphs, unlike modern political soundbite-speeches), Wilson proffered a vision that helped Labour overcome a Tory majority of almost 100 to scrape into power in 1964 and push ahead to a substantial 96-seat majority in the 1966 snap election.
Perhaps the most significant paragraph of the ‘white heat’ speech, in historical hindsight, is one near the beginning that takes a very different tone:
There is no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living. One of the dangers of the old-boy network approach to life is the thought that it is international, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship with someone or other to bail us out. From now on Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn, as we can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live.14
When Wilson spoke those words, Macmillan’s Tory government had already suffered the brutal rebuff of being vetoed by Charles de Gaulle from membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), as it then was. Four years later, at the end of November 1967, the French general would repeat the gesture against Wilson’s own bid, rejecting the idea that Britain’s maritime economy was compatible with the agricultural heartland of the then six-member grouping.15 Only a week before this, the prime minister had been forced to decree a substantial devaluation of the pound, as exports struggled against dock strikes and the grim international impact of the dramatic ‘Six-Day War’ between Israel and its neighbours. The white heat of the technological revolution seemed little more than a flickering ember.16 ‘Swinging London’ might have been in full flow for several years, and Beatlemania had conquered the world, but keeping the wider British economy alive was starting to become very difficult indeed.
Britain finally made it into the EEC in January 1973, with barely time to settle in to new arrangements before the entire West experienced the profoundly disorienting ‘oil shock’. Petroleum-producing countries, with their non-white leaderships, flexed their economic muscles in disapproval of US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. While their outright embargo was short-lived, quadrupled wholesale prices became a new fact of life, as did rising inflation. Les Trente Glorieuses were over.
Underpinning this whole era had been the effort to retain the unfair advantage that Orwell had highlighted in 1947 and Wilson had counselled against in 1963. The immigration that so enflamed tensions was constantly spoken of in terms of ‘labour shortages’; but, as with the huge influx of Asian workers to the textile towns of the north, it was just as often an attempt to find workers who would settle for wages low enough to keep British employers profitable. Much like immigrants of the twenty-first century who are found sleeping packed into garden sheds, such workers did not do this to themselves but rather were the prey of landlords and employers.17
At the global level, pursuit of economic advantage pushed British governments into a vacillating relationship with what had once been the empire and was now the Commonwealth. Throughout the decade of efforts to join the EEC, Britain played a weakening hand in trying to maintain some sense of preferential treatment by these territories as a trading partner while repeatedly prioritising the richer, nearer market of the Continent. Sentiment and economic sense interwove with a persistent belief in British entitlement to do well out of trade, even as its industrial infrastructure grew outdated through years of under-investment. Conservatives would come to blame over-mighty trades unions and increasing industrial strife for the besetting evils of ‘stagflation’ – and in the short term they won the argument, launching the country on the Thatcherite experiment. But this did not solve the underlying question of where an ageing post-imperial power fitted into the world.
This dilemma extended beyond the economic realm into the geopolitical, and rings down to the present day. In September 2015, History & Policy, a think-tank devoted to publicising the value of historical awareness for public decision-making, produced a paper highlighting the trap into which British defence and global policy-making was falling.18 Faced with the political and practical impossibility of a major increase in military spending, the UK government risked failing to take the hard decisions that the Labour government of the 1960s had done in choosing to withdraw British forces from ‘East of Suez’ and focus on European NATO commitments – action that had allowed the UK to play a major role in the security of Europe until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
The afterlife of that investment was sufficient to carry British forces through participation in the subsequent 1991 Gulf War, peacekeeping in the Former Yugoslavia and other post-9/11 operations down to the 2014 withdrawal from active engagement in Afghanistan. Most of these more recent commitments, of course, had drawn the UK decisively East of Suez once more; and the decision to confirm that for the foreseeable future was marked in December 2014 by the announcement of a deal to create a base for the Royal Navy in Bahrain, independent of existing US facilities there.19 Like so many geopolitical moves, this one tied the UK to a regime that had a very dubious human-rights record, having invited Saudi military intervention in 2011 to repress popular unrest and continuing to use torture to suppress dissent.20
What the History & Policy paper focused on, however, was the parallel with the 1960s situation, when post-imperial Britain had been simply incapable of maintaining its global posture without a ludicrous disengagement from the security of its neighbours, which remained critical to its own security and overlapped with the anxious bipartisan effort to join the EEC. Continuously trimming funding for all capabilities while aspiring to maintain them created a looming risk of systemic incapacity. The Wilson government’s recognition of this dilemma saw them abandoning the aspiration to maintain a fully capable native aviation industry, and setting in train the end of the Royal Navy’s aircraft-carrier fleet.
Almost half a century later, UK governments started with a much smaller military yet were making contradictory choices about it. Huge cuts to service personnel and frontline equipment had been made since the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, but at the same time government rhetoric – and decisions such as the completion of two new aircraft carriers – signalled a determination to project power globally. As the 2015 paper highlighted, the logic of this (and the only way to afford such spending in the medium term) was an eventual disengagement from the European defence sphere, if indeed ‘the preeminent strategic threat’ remained Islamic terrorism. But that would only be possible if ‘Europe could divide responsibility for tackling the threats it faces between its member states taking account of their history and capabilities’. What effect a chaotic and bitter Brexit might have was not discussed, because of course in September 2015 such a thing seemed wildly improbable.
The France of the Fifth Republic pursued its own adventures in imperial continuity throughout the Cold War decades, and beyond, while enjoying a semi-detached relationship with NATO that reflected De Gaulle’s sense of national grandeur. Driven out of its biggest colonies, it converted some of its more scattered territories into integral parts of France – so that today Martinique in the Caribbean, Réunion in the Indian Ocean and Tahiti in the Pacific are more thoroughly part of the Fifth Republic than the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands are of the United Kingdom. Being featured in every weather forecast has not necessarily been great compensation for continued economic underdevelopment or, as in the case of French Polynesia, decades of nuclear testing within its territory.
Beyond these ‘Overseas’ regions, as they are called, France also pursued an aggressive strategy of maintaining economic dominance in its former African empire. Outside Algeria, France had, like Britain, disentangled itself from formal rule by assisting in the installation of relatively friendly liberation movements, and from the 1960s onwards built up a complex web of business and political connections known, more or less openly, as ‘Françafrique’. The superficially dramatic French military intervention against Islamist terrorism in Mali in 2013 was part of a much longer project of continuing regional hegemony.21
The United States has of course remained a global superpower throughout these decades, but by the 1970s its own understanding of itself was becoming shaky. The 1973 oil crisis struck a nation dismayed by President Nixon’s criminal attempts to cover up the Watergate scandal and resigned to a withdrawal from Vietnam, after 50,000 American combat deaths, that was very clearly a defeat for the USA. The presidency of Jimmy Carter from 1977 seemed to mark a further low point – Carter himself in a much-mocked speech portrayed the nation as beset with woes of its own making, a ‘malaise’ he could not remedy. The deaths in April 1980 of eight American troops in a botched attempt to rescue embassy personnel held hostage for over a year in revolutionary Iran drew a grim line under a legacy of failure that the new presidency of Ronald Reagan aimed self-consciously to eradicate.
Reagan now lives in American nationalist legend as the man who won the Cold War, and there can be no doubt that the vast and aggressive expansion of the American military he put in train (paid for, contrary to his professed economic principles, by escalating government debt from just over 25 per cent of GDP in 1980 to over 40 per cent by 1988) was part of the multidimensional crisis of internal political collapse that brought down the Soviet Bloc. Reagan’s administration was nonetheless not immune to humiliating defeats. After a catastrophic suicide-bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 US Marines, sailors and soldiers, American forces withdrew from active engagement in Middle East peacekeeping for the remainder of the decade.
The hugely jingoistic posturing around relatively minor military operations – the ousting of a socialist government from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 (only days after the Beirut attack), the aerial bombing of Tripoli in revenge for a terrorist attack in 1986, the removal of Panama’s President Noriega under Reagan’s successor G. H. W. Bush in late 1989 – showed above all the cultural and political need for narratives of overt dominance.22 Such narratives were, of course, complemented in reality by the darker struggle to maintain the USA’s hegemony – the involvement of the CIA in the 1973 downfall of the Allende government in Chile being just one of many antidemocratic interventions justified by the overarching rhetoric of anticommunism. The ‘School of the Americas’ at Fort Benning, Georgia, taught counterinsurgency practices to military cadres from a swathe of right-wing dictatorships, many of whom went on to use violence, torture and selective assassination to control their populations, especially in the ‘dirty wars’ of the 1970s.23 By the later 1980s, figures within the Reagan administration were prepared to break US law and secretly sell arms to their sworn enemy Iran, in order to divert the proceeds to Contra rebels in socialist Nicaragua, bypassing a congressional ban on funds for these forces. The justification put forward for this centred on securing Iranian goodwill towards the release of Western hostages held by militias in Lebanon – circling back to the humiliation of 1983.24
It is also important to remember that, however fondly Reagan’s geopolitical triumphs are remembered, and however much his military build-up stimulated some sectors of the economy, there was no halt in the 1980s to a steady decline in the prosperity of the average US worker. Patriotic rhetoric then, as now, provided only a thin veneer over the reality of what was already dubbed the Rustbelt. Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 lyrics to ‘Born in the USA’, so often mistaken for a patriotic anthem, speak in fact of the grim realities of life in an increasingly post-industrial America. Across the following two decades, into and out of a series of wars, economic bubbles and crashes, the economic condition of most Americans (like most Britons and French) has continued to decline.
A persistent accompaniment to this has been the cultivation of external enemies on whom to project fear and anger. In the twenty-first century, despite the vast disparities in the realistic scale of their threats, Islamist terrorism has provided a solid long-term replacement for the Soviet Union; but, during the hiatus between the two, other foes were easily conjured up. American culture from the late 1980s became deeply hostile to Japanese economic encroachment, as real relative decline mixed with resentment that the loser of the Second World War could possibly threaten the winner’s dominance. Japan as a looming power, doing something fundamentally dishonest and violating the natural order of things, could be treated as a background reality or as a key plot-point.
The uniquely Japanese zaibatsu economic cartels appeared as lurking villains in many works of speculative fiction. Michael Crichton’s 1992 novel Rising Sun (turned into a film the following year) hinged on the culturally alien and supremely manipulative Japanese as economic invaders, while Tom Clancy’s martial techno-thriller Debt of Honor (1994) imagined a second Pearl Harbor attack on US Pacific installations (and a Boeing 747 used as a giant kamikaze to destroy the US Capitol). Ironically, by the time this was published, Japan had already entered its ‘lost decade’ as overenthusiastic expansion led to a property-bubble collapse, and the US was newly uplifted by its post-Gulf-War status as global policeman. Two decades later, the same fears have been transferred to China with what appears to be significantly more practical justification if equally little real cultural awareness or willingness to consider an Asian power as an equal. Tom Clancy was ahead of the game, envisioning in 2000’s The Bear and the Dragon a Chinese government invading Siberia in pursuit of hegemony before succumbing to the inevitable, and satisfyingly devastating, US riposte.
The history of the UK, France and the USA since 1945 is marked indelibly by a sense of entitlement to greatness. Throughout the decades since the end of les Trente Glorieuses, an increasingly financialised capitalism has developed, sustaining the wealth of the upper echelons of Western societies while their welfare states, and capacity to generate mass high-quality employment, have steadily diminished. Once localised as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganomics’, the default academic response to this has been to define this economic model as ‘neoliberalism’, a new ultra-exploitative phase of global capitalism. This is now effectively an article of faith for many on the left, and in many ways it is a perfectly credible observation. However, from the point of view of the average voter, neoliberalism might as well not exist.
Where the academic language of neoliberalism seeks to place us all within a single worldwide structure of rising inequality, and there is strong public support for acting against key elements of that inequality within each society, our cultures overall reject the claim that we are all part of a homogenous global problem. The politics of the present instead place the greatness that is the electorate’s birthright in an unjustly stolen, explicitly national, and nationalist, past – and increasingly seek to scapegoat others as responsible for the theft. Donald Trump’s election slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ booms it out with particular vigour, but the logic of the Brexit campaign’s ‘Take Back Control’ is exactly the same. Marine Le Pen’s most recent slogan, ‘On est chez nous’, says more than just ‘We are at home’, its menacing subtext being: ‘This is OUR home (and not yours, immigrant)’.
All three of these nations’ political cultures are currently beset by ideas that promise a closed national labour market, a wide outflow of trade and the undisputed sovereign power to maintain those things for the benefit of the core, white, population. At first glance, this may seem like simple nostalgia for the imperial dominance that Orwell criticised, but it is in fact a distorted and demented version of the past. Britain, France and the USA never existed as entities that were both closed-off and commanding. Waves of immigration of all kinds shaped their populations even at the height of imperial splendour, while the cost of maintaining that empire, and the resistance to it, was crippling – and indeed, on this side of the Atlantic, this was a strong reason for hastening towards ‘Europe’ as a more rational and attainable form of greatness. Generations of politicians steered their countries through tempests and rapids where, looking back, many now see only the calm waters of a safe harbour.
It is easy to come up with answers for why different groups find different elements of the Trump, Brexit or Le Pen agendas attractive. A simple diagnosis of ‘racism’ will go a long way in many cases. But these sentiments run more deeply into the question of national identity: what it is, how it is built and above all how it imagines national populations in time and what their stories are. Attempting to define distinctive national cultures often sinks into the realm of self-parody – hot dogs, baguettes and Marmite; how to pronounce the word ‘scone’; regional cheeses; which particular forms of bad comedy one prefers. George Orwell himself once wrote at length (and highly questionably) on the way to make a perfect cup of tea. Ironically it is rare for any attention to be given to real structural national peculiarities: the English adversarial judicial system compared to the French inquisitorial one; the remarkable range of different powers enjoyed by individual US states; why Martinique or Guiana is a more integrated part of France than Jersey and Guernsey are of the UK… To do that would imply that peculiarities can be dissected and debated, rather than just cherished. And arguably, as these national cultures have lost the vigour that came with various forms of empire, and have moved into a period of ageing, cherishing their own peculiarities has become a refuge from reality.
Cultures that put a premium on national identity tend to invest it, paradoxically, with both longevity and youth. The latter is sometimes expressed literally: in the 1830s nationalists began to call themselves things like ‘Young Italy’ and ‘Young Ireland’. The trend continued into the early twentieth century with the ‘Young Turks’, as an assertion that nationhood was a thing of vigorous youth, looking to the future, with the empires and potentates it sought to replace moribund, effete and doomed. The idea of youthful vigour was often invested in wider notions of growth, dynamism and expansion – for example, that the French had both a superior culture and the capacity to spread it to the world in a mission civilisatrice; that Britons ‘never shall be slaves’ and would see their empire set its bounds ‘wider still, and wider’; and that it was Americans’ ‘Manifest Destiny’ to conquer their continent. This protected the idea of a long-lived national culture from the obvious risk of longevity: senescence.
Our Western societies are now dominated demographically by older people in a fashion unprecedented in history. This creates tremendous and as-yet-unresolved challenges for healthcare and the balancing of working and non-working populations. These problems are piled upon those of climate change and global competition, which help to drive concern, alarm and despondency about the future. It is tempting to heap responsibility for nationalist distortions directly on to the old: Baby Boomers have notoriously been blamed for stealing Millennials’ future, and their place on the housing ladder, since before the last economic crash. And it is notable that, for example, the slope of support for Brexit rises steeply with age. In France, however, the slope runs the other way: Marine Le Pen’s anti-system xenophobia strikes a stronger chord with the dispossessed young, living through a decade of 25 per cent youth unemployment, than with the old who still remember Vichy. Our current real and potentially fatal cultural dementia cannot be dismissed as merely the product of accumulated individual senilities.
The demands of contemporary ‘populist’ movements make manifest a vision of the past that is the opposite of a coherent history. Little more than a disconnected series of images, it is the political equivalent of the long-retired man who wakes up one morning and tries to leave for work in his pyjamas, or the woman who mistakes her son for her dead husband. In the individual, this dementia is a symptom of looming fatal decline. We risk the same fate for our societies. The politicians of earlier generations did not try to turn the clock back to what had never been. Even Margaret Thatcher, condemning to death the nationalised heavy industries of postwar Britain, had an understanding (agree with it or not) of why old ways could not continue, and a vision of new opportunities for new economic sectors (not least through helping to drag into existence the European single market).
There is something unprecedented and profoundly alarming in the eager reach for the past that now frames our future. Unverified rumours swirl that British ministers may have seriously used the phrase ‘Empire 2.0’ about future global trading arrangements. Fringe political ideas about the merits of the ‘Anglosphere’ and a potential ‘CANZUK’ bloc, based on former colonies’ imagined affections for an increasingly distant shared imperial history, have nudged their way towards the mainstream. From the other end of the political spectrum, the militant former leader of the now-defunct National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, has been quoted in the press as believing that Brexit will be an opportunity to reopen redundant coal mines and cotton mills.25
We can, variously, laugh at, lament and despair over such delusions, and each week’s news brings fresh evidence of the superficial chaos such ideas have injected into politics. But, as we review the contours and underlying assumptions of those events, we can also reflect further on what they are symptoms of – on how we have come to lose contact with history, and what might be done to make the case for saving ourselves, before it is, indeed, too late.