SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY -1
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
President Obama’s visit to the UK reminded some people of traditional British values like hostility towards bullies of all kinds and sympathy for the under-dog, values that can be traced back to the way that the English idea of the “Sovereignty of the People” was linked to the idea of one “common people”, who lived by their own English common law.
A FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND EUROPE
In “The First Europe”, which was published posthumously in 1947, C. Delisle Burns saw this as something that set the English apart from the rest of Western Europe from as early as the fifth century. For as the authority of the Roman Empire in the west declined and fell, the unity imposed by Rome disintegrated into a complex patchwork of people divided against each other often ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’, as was reflected by a patchwork of laws.
But, whereas on the continent all these laws were written in Latin, leaving the ghost of the Roman military dictatorship as the only overarching source of authority, from the earliest Anglo-Saxon times the laws were not written in Latin but in the language of the common people that seems to have made it easier to promote the idea of one people living according to their own “common law”: and so, after the throne of England had been briefly occupied by Viking conquerors a thousand years ago, when Edward the Confessor was called back from exile in his mother’s Normandy in 1042, a Coronation Oath was drafted for him to swear that has defined the contract between the English people and the monarchy ever since.
And to Burns, who was writing when the British people were ‘standing alone’ against the Hitler's Germany and the Axis Powers, this difference must have seemed at least one part of the reason why Great Britain stood out against “the mainstream”. For by June 1940 the War Cabinet could consider the condition of continental Europe where everyone else had come to terms in one way or another with the German mastery of Europe, even the USSR and its loyal Communist Party members in German occupied places like France. Indeed, after the first bombing raid on the London Docks, mindful of the “come the revolution” talk that became quite fashionable in some quarters after the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was some discussion of the possibility of the Blitz producing a popular uprising in protest against the Churchill’s resolve to “never surrender” and abandon Europe to the monstrous and evil German regime.
But, as Burns saw it, in part no doubt in the light of his experiences when working for the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1920s, right back at the birth pangs of the First Europe across the continent: “The Latin language prepared the way for the later domination of Roman Law. …Kingship in England has always, even at the Renaissance, been freer from the defects of the Roman system of military dictatorship than kingship elsewhere.”
But, when I observed to my French father-in-law a few months ago that it was very difficult for an English person to really imagine what it felt like to live under an alien military occupation, he paused to reflect on his teenage years, and just said that they all just got with it and tried to live their lives as normally as possible. At which I reflected that not only is it is a long time ago, but also that it seems that French people, especially away from Paris always tend to look at their governments as a potentially alien, and overarching “superstructure” seeks to extract its own life and power out of the people, who therefore individually and communally resist, manipulate and exploit it as best they can in return.
A FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND EUROPE
In “The First Europe”, which was published posthumously in 1947, C. Delisle Burns saw this as something that set the English apart from the rest of Western Europe from as early as the fifth century. For as the authority of the Roman Empire in the west declined and fell, the unity imposed by Rome disintegrated into a complex patchwork of people divided against each other often ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’, as was reflected by a patchwork of laws.
But, whereas on the continent all these laws were written in Latin, leaving the ghost of the Roman military dictatorship as the only overarching source of authority, from the earliest Anglo-Saxon times the laws were not written in Latin but in the language of the common people that seems to have made it easier to promote the idea of one people living according to their own “common law”: and so, after the throne of England had been briefly occupied by Viking conquerors a thousand years ago, when Edward the Confessor was called back from exile in his mother’s Normandy in 1042, a Coronation Oath was drafted for him to swear that has defined the contract between the English people and the monarchy ever since.
And to Burns, who was writing when the British people were ‘standing alone’ against the Hitler's Germany and the Axis Powers, this difference must have seemed at least one part of the reason why Great Britain stood out against “the mainstream”. For by June 1940 the War Cabinet could consider the condition of continental Europe where everyone else had come to terms in one way or another with the German mastery of Europe, even the USSR and its loyal Communist Party members in German occupied places like France. Indeed, after the first bombing raid on the London Docks, mindful of the “come the revolution” talk that became quite fashionable in some quarters after the Russian Revolution of 1917 there was some discussion of the possibility of the Blitz producing a popular uprising in protest against the Churchill’s resolve to “never surrender” and abandon Europe to the monstrous and evil German regime.
But, as Burns saw it, in part no doubt in the light of his experiences when working for the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1920s, right back at the birth pangs of the First Europe across the continent: “The Latin language prepared the way for the later domination of Roman Law. …Kingship in England has always, even at the Renaissance, been freer from the defects of the Roman system of military dictatorship than kingship elsewhere.”
But, when I observed to my French father-in-law a few months ago that it was very difficult for an English person to really imagine what it felt like to live under an alien military occupation, he paused to reflect on his teenage years, and just said that they all just got with it and tried to live their lives as normally as possible. At which I reflected that not only is it is a long time ago, but also that it seems that French people, especially away from Paris always tend to look at their governments as a potentially alien, and overarching “superstructure” seeks to extract its own life and power out of the people, who therefore individually and communally resist, manipulate and exploit it as best they can in return.
