What has made us an Ingenious, Active and Warlike Nation… What has rendered us a Great, Wealthy, and Happy People… and what is it has made us Terrible to the whole World, but our English Liberty?1
It is almost 300 years since this rambunctious rhetorical question was asked and answered in a combative political pamphlet of the 1720s. Allowing for occasional scruples at being seen as ‘Terrible to the whole World’, it seems nonetheless likely that its central message continued to resonate within the political mainstream for most of that time – and almost certain that, in the Age of Brexit and Trump, patriotic boosters on both sides of the Atlantic would still claim it as an admirable sentiment.
Whether framed by the narrative of ‘Whig history’ that gave us these notions of martial liberty – and American concepts of ‘Manifest Destiny’ – or by the parallel French conviction of being ‘the Great Nation’ with a ‘civilising mission’ to the world, Western notions of cultural and institutional superiority were born out of long histories of conflict. These propositions were used to whip up support for aggressive global action, playing assertions of strength against fears of weakness and claims of unity against the dread of subversion and defeat. The national bodies of America, France and Britain always felt themselves to be under attack, even as they exercised global power through technological, economic and military dominance.
The USA was born in fear of subversion, and of the idea that tyrannical power was plotting to turn ‘merciless Indian savages’ against the white population – those words made it into the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, while even more paranoid fears of slave insurrection were edited out. Before the end of the eighteenth century the new republic crafted a series of Alien and Sedition Acts authorising the detention and expulsion of dangerous foreigners. In the following generation, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to a genocidal process of ethnic cleansing in the lands east of the Mississippi. Scarcely had this great and tragic purge been completed than fears of immigration by ‘un-American’ Irish Catholics prompted the rise of the ‘Know-Nothings’ across the nation. These vehemently Protestant ‘nativists’ stormed the polls in the 1840s and early 1850s by drumming up the danger of subversion by racially inferior peoples loyal to the Pope. Their membership peaked at around a million before being undermined by scandals and the looming wider confrontation over slavery.
Fear of widespread slave uprising was endemic to slaveholding as a system, given new life at the end of the eighteenth century by the example of what became the Haitian Revolution. Contamination by the ideas and bodies of ‘French negroes’ sent waves of panic through the South. Slavery nurtured a fear of subversion as savage and all-embracing as the institution itself, with ‘slave patrols’ of white men routinely empowered to police the movements of the non-white population, up to and including the arbitrary execution of runaways.2 In the 1860s, defence of this system was so ingrained that the resultant Civil War was ground out over four years of campaigning, causing around three-quarters of a million deaths – more than 2 per cent of the entire population. In the post-Civil War landscape of Reconstruction, violent resistance to black people being incorporated into society and politics helped give birth to the Ku Klux Klan, reasserting a romantic myth of Southern civilisation and doing it by intimidation and murder.3 Robert O. Paxton, an eminent historian of fascism, has pointed to the KKK and its well-publicised methods as a forerunner and literal inspiration for later European movements.4
The history of the twentieth century merely recapitulates much of this earlier record of fearful hate – continued endemic racial discrimination, antisemitism, the extermination of socialist movements that were often led by immigrant communities, the scare over international communism prompting deportations from the time of the First World War onwards, the refounding of the Klan in the 1920s, blanket detention of ‘untrustworthy’ Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, more ‘Red scares’ and McCarthyism in the nuclear age, and so on down to the continually traumatised, racially divided society of today. One recent strand of academic history has even highlighted the extent to which US Jim Crow racial laws were the model for Nazi plans to incorporate open discrimination into the German legal system.5 Public lynchings remained commonplace through the first half of the twentieth century. Most of some 700 monuments to Confederate causes in American cities were put up after 1910. A significant number were put up in the 1960s and 1970s.6
Britain and France, meanwhile, spent much of their modern history engaged in traumatising each other with the threat of internal subversion and moral dissolution. From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 onwards, French royal support for Stuart tendencies towards Catholicism aroused the same paranoia that Spanish deeds had a century earlier. The Bill of Rights that framed the desires of the 1688 Glorious Revolution denounced James II for causing ‘good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law’. Many of those ‘papists’ were Irish; and several years’ conflict in Ireland followed, adding to the alarm of encirclement. These fears were perpetuated by the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Rebellions in Scotland, led by Stuart pretenders openly backed by France.
The imperial battle for North America and India that raged through the eighteenth century continued to carry on both sides a freight of anxiety about subversion and dissolution. As late as 1780 rumours of secret royal Catholic rites and Jesuit infiltrators fuelled the massive ‘Gordon Riots’ in London, while French elites hostile to the corrosive impact of the Enlightenment saw Freemasonry – a new import from the Anglophone world that had become fashionable in the salons of the Parisian elite and beyond – as a wicked anti-Catholic plot.
The French Revolution of 1789, and the Terror that followed, was, for such reactionaries, proof enough that they had been right all along, while in Britain it prompted new waves of alarm as a new set of ‘French ideas’ threatened to overturn the monarchy and established social order alike. For an entire generation, near-hysterical suppression of dissent accompanied the more familiar epic of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating most memorably in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 – men, women and children cut down by the sons of the propertied classes serving as volunteer cavalry, enraged at the apparent threat a peaceful march for political reform posed to the structure of their nation.
Both Britain and France in the nineteenth century soared far enough ahead of the rest of the world economically and imperially that some of these fears went into abeyance – though both wrestled with the alarming consequences of industrialisation and the rise of socialism in their different and sometimes brutally violent ways. Never actually at war with each other after Waterloo, the two powers were sufficiently uneasy to find themselves in an arms race in the 1860s, less than a decade after allying against Russia in the Crimea. Monumental fortifications on England’s south coast and around key naval bases, redundant before they were even finished, were one result.
Both nations, like the USA, were shaped by waves of immigration throughout the century and into the next, in an age when the economic migration of millions from poorer regions was accepted as a fact of life and the reputation of all three countries as refuges for those fleeing more overtly authoritarian and persecuting regimes was real – despite the laments of nativist prejudice. Karl Marx lived in Paris for several years in the 1840s, then in London for decades, famously working on his theories in the reading room of the British Museum, while also being a correspondent and columnist for the New York Tribune.
In their twentieth-century histories, both Britain and France faced the contradictions of being globe-spanning empires – based on increasingly elaborate notions of cultural, scientific, military, technological, economic and ‘racial’ superiority – and of seeing those empires end. In 1908 Evelyn Baring, recently retired British proconsul in Egypt, published his authoritative account of Modern Egypt, showing the heights to which such notions routinely reached. For Baring, the ‘trained intelligence’ of the European worked ‘like a piece of mechanism’, while ‘The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry’.
Baring deployed his long experience as an administrator to generalise: notwithstanding any ancient achievements, Egyptians were now ‘singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth.’ Under questioning, such a person ‘will probably contradict himself half-a-dozen times before he has finished his story. He will often break down under the mildest process of cross-examination.’7 Generations of imperial civil servants and policemen who had sternly and disapprovingly filled out their reports as ‘Orientals’ quailed before them found themselves within the space of only one lifetime cast out of their positions, forced to watch the expanding bounds of empire shrink and attempts at assertion, like Suez in 1956, end in further humiliation.
As those generations have passed into the grave, they have been replaced by others whose experience of national glories is almost entirely second-hand. Nigel Farage, for example, may recently have solemnly declared that every patriot needed to see the film Dunkirk, but he was born in 1964, a year after The Great Escape first hit cinemas with its message of derring-do (based on reality but also, with its fabricated American leads, delivering a certain kind of fantasy in its place). Nigel was a small boy when Battle of Britain came out in 1969 – though he seems to have missed its acknowledgement of the valiant role of Polish airmen in the struggle. As documented by an acquaintance of his 1970s schooldays, he may perhaps already have been en route to a preference for Nazi marching songs – something he could have picked up from Battle of the Bulge, first released when he was still a toddler.8 The repeated assertion by middle-aged men of the patriotic duty that events twenty or thirty years before they were born impose on the whole nation would be amusing were it not also a grim reminder of how deeply ingrained a whitewashed and heroic construction of the imperial past remains.
While some make bold assertions about what the glorious past demands we do, it remains trivially easy to show how the long history of imperial dominance continues to cast a shadow – or indeed a stain – over public life. In November 2016, the UK government confirmed that more than 1,500 Chagos islanders, forcibly removed from their homes in the Indian Ocean half a century ago to make way for a massive airbase, were definitively barred from returning. Admitting that the ‘manner’ of the original removal had been ‘wrong’ and was now a matter of ‘deep regret’, the Foreign Office nonetheless said ‘defence and security interests, and cost to the British taxpayer’ prevented resettlement of the islands. A commitment of £40 million ‘over the next decade’ was intended to soften the blow – though of course only decades of campaigning and litigation by the islanders and their supporters had produced any response at all.9
Meanwhile, in a far larger and grimmer matter, the UK government continues to contest the claims of tens of thousands of people allegedly tortured by British authorities during the 1950s Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. Having been forced to settle initial claims – and to admit to the existence of massive quantities of previously hidden administrative records – the UK now seeks to deny further liability.10 One of its most recent manoeuvres, in the spring of 2017, was to claim in court that some testimony about misleading ministerial statements in the 1950s might be punishable as ‘contempt of parliament’.11
The persistent relics of empire are literally global. With the single exception of New Zealand’s administration of the tiny island territory of Tokelau, every single ‘non-self-governing’ territory listed by the United Nations with an ‘administering power’ is controlled by the UK, USA, or France.12 Guam and its neighbouring Northern Marianas Islands, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, along with Puerto Rico (which is not on that list), are home to American citizens who, because of their territories’ quasi-colonial status, do not enjoy the same political representation as those of the fifty states. As long ago as 1993, ‘globalisation’ was already exploiting this situation. Saipan in the Marianas was the home of ruthless sweatshops staffed by migrant labourers whose products carried lucrative ‘Made in USA’ labels.13 Similar scandals about American Samoa erupted a decade later.14 Criminal prosecutions dealt with the worst cases of working conditions little better than slavery but the dependence of these territories on cheap labour continues, as does their anomalous status that encourages such practices.15
In France’s assorted overseas departments and territories, relative poverty and neglect continue to be serious problems. Per capita GDP of the French Caribbean departments, Martinique and Guadeloupe, is barely half that of Metropolitan France; that of French Guiana, despite the presence of the European space programme, lower still. The Pacific territory of New Caledonia enjoys a per capita GDP higher than the metropole, but much of this is generated by exports of nickel whose benefits do not reach the general population. Persistent separatist unrest abated nearly twenty years ago with agreement on routes towards a future independence referendum, now looming in 2018.16 With continuing discontent at high levels of unemployment, social dislocation and violence, President Macron has nonetheless spoken out against a ‘rupture to the common history shared with France’ when the vote occurs.17 Just north of New Caledonia, incidentally, is Vanuatu, which until 1980 was ruled as the New Hebrides in a truly bizarre colonial ‘condominium’ by rigorously equal teams of British and French administrators.
French concern to maintain itself as a literally global power transcends political divisions. Since the end of the Second World War, France has maintained economic influence in Western and Central Africa through the CFA-Franc currency. CFA once stood for Colonies françaises d’Afrique but now instead means Communauté Financière Africaine; it serves fourteen states through two regional central banks and is intimately tied to France, where much of the cash reserves of the system are held. It may not be true that, as some sensationalist internet headlines repeat, these nations are ‘Forced by France to Pay Taxes for the “Benefits” of Colonialism’, but it is hard to deny that the fundamental links forged before independence persist.18
Throughout the later decades of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, a network of corrupt economic and political connections bound French businesses and politicians to a series of dictatorial rulers who flourished under their former colonial masters’ protection. This system was widely known as ‘Françafrique’ but also punned brutally as ‘France à fric’, likening it to a cash-dispenser for political bribery and slush-funds.19 Oil revenues from Gabon were a central part of the arrangement, and the source of much of the cash that swilled back and forth between Paris offices and presidential palaces. Leaked documents in 2009 linked the election campaigns of both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy to huge amounts embezzled in Gabon from one of the CFA-Franc’s central banks. President Hollande throughout his time in office promised to end this net of relationships, but there is no evidence of France relinquishing its basic role as overseer of the region and its political machinations.20
Britain cannot look on the French role in Africa with any smugness. It controls a majority of territories the UN lists as ‘non-self-governing’, and three of those – Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands – come close to the top of any list of notorious global tax havens (along with Jersey and the Isle of Man, peculiar historic jurisdictions within the European sphere). Only in 2013 did these territories agree to enter into a slightly more transparent set of arrangements, yet in 2016 the UK government was still refusing to press them to relax the secretive company-ownership laws that are a chief component of their tax-haven status.21 UK authorities hide behind the quasi-independence of these states to avoid responsibility for the widespread illegality of the kind revealed in the ‘Panama Papers’ investigation.22
The UK’s historical role as an empire still sits at the centre of what was once the British Commonwealth and is now the Commonwealth of Nations. As an organisation, this has floated for decades between an explicit founding intention to maintain empire-like connections on a more equal basis – but with Britain implicitly central – and a more decentred ambition to promote values that, like ‘British values’ in domestic discussion, are supposedly distinctive but are indistinguishable in practice from universal human rights. Maintaining the respectable veneer of membership has often seemed to take precedence over any concern with such rights, leading to rows as recently as 2011 over the cynical adoption of lip-service declarations by member states.23 A new Charter of the Commonwealth signed in 2013 embraced a wide range of opposition to discrimination, but conspicuously failed to put in place any mechanisms for action over, for example, the many members still operating laws against homosexuality. If the Commonwealth is not the neo-colonial cash-machine that Françafrique represents, it might justly be called a comfort blanket of prestigious but unenforced good intentions.
The idea of the Commonwealth has intruded into the Brexit debate in ways that reveal more about the sometimes-fatuous sense of privilege surrounding UK politics. In January 2015, a group calling itself the Commonwealth Freedom of Movement Organisation was founded. This was not, as one might have hoped, a lobby for a less restrictive – and less racial – approach to such movement between richer and poorer nations. The CFMO, which relaunched as CANZUK International two years later, presented itself as ‘the world’s leading non-profit organisation advocating freedom of movement, free trade and foreign policy coordination between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom’.24 Its website displays eight men, seven of whom are conspicuously white, as ‘our team’, including Andrew Lilico, a former Conservative economic adviser and notable public advocate for Brexit.
Lilico’s perspective on history and identity can be gauged from a recent exchange on social media, where, in the course of a few tweets, he moved from arguing that widespread British pride in the history of empire was an undeniable fact of contemporary life to proposing as self-evident that ‘The British Empire was vastly more humane, liberal, self-sacrificing, self-restrained & morally driven than its competitor states.’25 Lilico is also one of the fourteen individuals – all white men – shown on the parallel website of CANZUK Uniting, which bills itself as ‘your source for comment and analysis, promoting political and economic unification among the peoples of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom’.26 Intriguingly, on this site, six of the fourteen white men appear to be based in – and are perhaps citizens of – the USA.27
One of the others is Andrew Roberts, the splenetically right-wing historian who in 2006 published A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, updating Winston Churchill’s famous work and jingoistically boosting the Anglosphere as the best of everything on the planet.28 In September 2016, Roberts pontificated that Brexit provided ‘many splendid opportunities’, of which ‘perhaps the greatest is the resuscitation of the idea of a CANZUK Union’. In this piece, as in others by Lilico, much ingenuity is exercised to claim that current arrangements (the EU, but also for example NAFTA) are obsolete and defunct, and to suggest that historical cultural similarity, the existence of cyberspace, and visa-free personal mobility are key ingredients for allowing a ‘union’ of four states that literally span the globe to ‘retake her place as the third pillar of Western Civilization’ – alongside the conspicuously more compact USA and a ‘United States of Europe’.29
Although a handful of conservative politicians outside the UK have gestured towards the thought that some elements of this might be a nice idea, none has pushed it anything like this far.30 In Roberts’ vision, arranging the future is an almost childishly simple matter of recolouring some maps to restore a sensation of emotional harmony and loyalty. John Elledge in the New Statesman has pointed out how other Brexit and CANZUK advocates enjoyed childhoods in exotic corners of the world that were more like those of the imperial ruling class than of most modern Britons.31 To them an Anglosphere makes emotional sense, while freedom of movement across the Channel does not. But there is a strong sense in which the whole CANZUK concept concentrates the cultural dementia of this moment into a particularly intense form.
Purely economically, it is almost meaningless – Canada and the UK both send no more than 3 per cent of their exports to the other three CANZUK partners. Australia’s 5 per cent and New Zealand’s 22 per cent on the same basis reflect trade between them as actual neighbours. New Zealand’s exports to the UK make up only 3.4 per cent of its total, whereas 18 per cent of its products go to China; 56 per cent of all Australian exports go to China, Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile 77 per cent of Canadian exports go to its massive southern neighbour. Even the UK currently exports nearly three times as much to the EFTA countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) as it does to CANZUK states; added to the 44 per cent it sends to the EU, this makes a clear majority of all its overseas trade. CANZUK as a replacement for EU membership is an idea any rational political actor should be embarrassed to put forward.32 When it is proposed as some kind of cultural reunification of Western civilisation, that embarrassment should calcify into shame.
To consider it as a question of demography, there are for example almost as many people of South Asian origin in the UK (3.08 million, or 4.9 per cent of the population in 2011) as there are people of European origin in New Zealand (around 3.24 million, 69 per cent of 4.23 million in 2013). A quarter of the New Zealand population are Maori or Pacific Islanders, and most of the rest originate from Asia. Of Canada’s 35 million population, some 5 million people – 15 per cent – identify as ethnically French, almost as many as Irish and almost 10 per cent as German. Italians and Chinese both number more than 1 million. Almost 4 per cent are of South Asian origin. Hundreds of thousands more come from almost every European country; 4.2 per cent of Canadians (1.37 million) identify as First Nations and a further 1.36 per cent (447,000) as Métis, a distinct ethnicity with its origins in historical French intermarriage with First Nations peoples.
Of Australia’s some 25 million population, some 11 per cent identify as ethnically Irish, 5.6 per cent Chinese, just under 5 per cent either Italian or German, almost 3 per cent Indian, almost 2 per cent Greek and 1.6 per cent Dutch. Of the entire population in the 2016 census, 26 per cent were born overseas; and while that included 907,000 born in England, it also included 236,000 from the Philippines, 219,000 from Vietnam, 78,000 from Lebanon, 67,000 from Iraq and 54,000 from Nepal, among many others. The Indigenous population of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Straits Islanders numbers some 649,000, 2.8 per cent of the total.33
If any of these societies were ethnically homogenous, united around an Anglophone identity by anything more than linguistic convenience, then one might see a shred of sense in a CANZUK Brexit. But they are not. The United Kingdom is home to almost eight million people born in every other corner of the globe, together making up around one-eighth of the whole population.34 When CANZUK advocates talk about free movement, who can we imagine that they mean? Do they really mean the polyglot, multiethnic inhabitants of already-global societies, or do they mean the imagined white Anglophone inhabitants of what were once Dominions under the empire?
These societies – good, open, democratic societies as they mostly are – are growing less Anglospheric by the day, and certainly less attuned to the common heritage Brexiteers proclaim. White settlement on lands belonging to First Nations, Maori or Aboriginal peoples, and all the mistreatment that followed, is no longer swept under the carpet of progress but is apologised for, however inadequately as yet.35 Economically, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have much more to gain by reinforcing links to Asia, and to Europe collectively, than by trying to build a bloc that would implicitly – dementedly – seek to rival them, and whose founding moment was marked by shamefully unabashed racist hostility to all foreigners.
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National identities that were never actually fixed – being always tied to the power of a state to expand its boundaries, to absorb new populations or send off new colonists and administrators to the four corners of the globe – have spent the last few decades shrinking inwards, to the point where any mixing has begun to seem an existential threat. The real threat, however, lies in the attempt to reproduce a false image of a national community, built on an almost entirely mistaken understanding of the difference between present conditions and those that prevailed when such nationalist mythology was created.
To take an iconic example, Britain and France, as late as the 1960s, had the technological and financial clout to deliver the world’s only operational supersonic airliner, and the economic hubris to believe it would pioneer routine supersonic travel for the whole world. What they created, in Concorde, was a marvellous piece of technology, and a beautiful thing. But even as it was brought into service, vastly over-budget and more than a decade after the 1962 treaty that cemented the collaboration, it was falling into the past. Partly thanks to the oil shock, a wave of optimistic international orders from almost twenty airlines were cancelled by 1975. Concorde struggled from the outset to be economically viable, and steadily declined into a white elephant, spending its last years largely on charter flights, famous only for being itself. The rest of the world remained unmoved.
To take an example from the other end of the spectrum of mundanity: many millions of British people today live in a variety of robust houses – Victorian villas, Edwardian terraces, spreading inter-war suburbs – that were laid out during the time of empire; as millions of the French inhabit both grand urban apartment-blocks and sprawling suburbs. The same power that oversaw the new roads and pavements, the water supply, drainage, sewerage, gas lines and eventually electrification of all those homes, ruled at the exact same time millions upon millions around the world who lived in absolute squalor – and did absolutely nothing to improve their lot. The poverty of the imperial periphery was productive of the wealth closer to its centre.
To walk the streets of an elegant French city or a neat British suburb today is to tread on the accumulated advantage of empire. In some ways, anything that can be pointed to as a product of history, in Britain, France or the slowly conquered land-empire of the USA, is by that very fact also a product of empire, so intimately connected have the long histories of expansion, exploitation and migration been. Of course, if you believe in ideas of national distinctiveness, your only thought about all this may be ‘Good for us!’ But even without dismissing such views as simply racist, we can see that they are also futile and self-defeating.
The capacity to accumulate all that privilege was an artefact of unique historical circumstances, in which a bewildering variety of technological and institutional innovations, from square-rigged sailing-ships to crop rotation, slave plantations to steam engines, maritime insurance to joint-stock companies, produced a historical social form uniquely suited to achieving a leading role in the world, and sustaining it – for several centuries – by any and all means necessary, including global industrialised war. But that age is over. Empire really did become unsustainably expensive, even as its combined pretensions to both dominance and progress tore at its conceptual heart. However states organise themselves internally now, whatever attention, lip-service, or scorn they give to democratic norms and ideals, the rest of the world is no longer lying supine at the feet of the West. Nothing will ever restore the epochal advantage that sustained such inequality, and the real danger is approaching that situation with fear and rage.