A LOFTY DREAM OF ENGLAND. 1. THE AGE OF THE SUPERPOWERS
Created | Updated Dec 9, 2016
Since mid-July I have been working on a project entitled “A LOFTY DREAM OF ENGLAND”, a title drawn from Philip Guedalla’s assertion in 1926 that George Canning’s vision for the New Europe that had to be built after 1815 was “a lofty dream of England” that could serve as “a model and ultimately an umpire” for Europe, adding that “for nearly forty years his dream lived on in Palmerston” (page 154).
And my project is sub-titled: “THOUGHTS ABOUT A POST-BREXIT ‘GREATER BRITAIN’” for I tackled Guedalla’s 1926 book on Palmerston in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and as some kind of antidote to Victor Kravchenko’s 1947 autobiography “I Chose Freedom”, which I came upon earlier this year, fifty years after having chosen the history of Soviet Economic Planning as my final year special topic back at university 1965-6, when top-down Macro-Economic planning was ‘all the rage’. And arguably that was especially so within France and Europe, where the Common Market was “essentially the brain-child of that brilliant French economist, M. Jean Monnet” (page ix) according to Stuart R. de la Mahotiere’s “comprehensive guide” published in 1961, when Great Britain was exploring the possibility of entry, before being condemned to a kind of Brexit reality, which led to ‘the Wilson Years’.
THE AGE OF THE SUPERPOWERS
One of great selling points of the EU, according to M. de la Mahotiere, was that- “The Common Market is a unique and noble attempt by dedicated men to build a new Europe, not as Charlemagne or Napoleon had done, by force of arms, but by free negotiation between sovereign nations, which had been all but destroyed in the holocaust of the Second World War.” And as a consequence much of the book’s argument compared the aggregate size of The Six with that of each of the existing superpowers with a clear inference that a United Europe could become a third superpower, a prospect that has never endeared itself much to the English people for good historical reasons.
For, in fact, since the late Nineteenth Century the rest of the world has had to live with fear and apprehension of the massive impact of three emerging superpowers, with the whole idea of a European superpower in 1957 far from undesirable as far as the American Superpower was concerned; for, as Alexander Werth wrote in 1965, though De Gaulle blocked British entry into the EU because he feared that Britain would act as an American “Trojan Horse”, the actual American Trojan Horse was West Germany, the most powerful fragment of Germany, that the USA had been keen to re-establish as a strong ally in the Frontline of the Cold War, not least because, as described in Tibor Mende’s “China and her shadow” (1960) “A New economic, political and military force of colossal size is being created in the Far East with amazing and frightening rapidity”.
And sixty years later the dominant players in world affairs are once more the USA, Germany, Russia, and China not least because of their capacity to destabilise the whole world merely by any shifts in their ‘centre of gravity’, as has apparently happened with the election of Donald Trump.
But back in 1926 Canning’s “lofty dream of England” that “for nearly forty years…lived on in Palmerston” also interested the French Historian Elie Halevy, for it had been realized by many before 1914 a great “clash of empires” and it had fallen to the First World War allies of Great Britain and France to carry the chief burden of making a success of the Peace of Versailles and the “Brave New World” dream that the Great War would be the “war to end all wars”.
And Halevy, who had specialised in the History of the English People, published the fifth and last volume of his History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century covering the decade 1895-1905 explaining a fateful transformation:
“A peaceful nation the English had been in the period around 1860, possibly more peace-loving than any nation in the entire course of history…[But] Unfortunately, [by 1895] the situation, not only on the continent …but throughout the world, had radically altered during the last half century to the disadvantage of Britain”. (page 10)
“Britain was, and knew herself to be, threatened by ‘empires’”: for by 1891 the population of Great Britain was about 38.5m, much the same as France, but the new-built German Empire had a population of 50m, the USA 63m, while “the population of Russia was estimated at 100m”. And in the face of such emerging powers even the British felt anxious and not just militarily: “For, if for some years previously a vague feeling of pessimism and anxiety had prevailed in England, it was because a number of symptoms- decrease in exports and unemployment-had led the English to ask themselves whether their country had not entered upon an era of industrial stagnation, possibly of actual decline.” (page 12)
In fact the exceptional military and economic power of the three giant and ‘modernising’ empires seemed to be squeezing the life” out of Great Britain through a new phase and, in many ways a new kind, of “imperialism” made possible by the steam-revolution of railways and steamships. And the England of Lord Palmerston had known all about the danger of empires, for during his tenure as Foreign Secretary from 1830 “Pam” looked to a ‘progressive alliance’ of Great Britain and France to steer Europe and the world through the dangers and challenges posed by old empires, both in Europe and elsewhere, with the decaying and “orthodox” civilizations of the so-called “Holy Alliance” of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey by their very nature engendering the instability of political extremism with Revolution from below and Reaction and Repression from the top.
For “Imperialism” weigh upon the domestic society as well as the lands that are conquered or annexed: and, large as these European empires were, they hardly compared with the great ‘empires’ of India and China, relics of the ancient world of the times of Rome, Greece, and even Egypt: and, like those others that had eventually suffered “Decline and Fall” leaving chaos and disorder, they were remarkable examples of the way such a massive state superstructure, for all its magnificence, only managed to achieve that magnificence by means of weighing and pressing down on vast populations, in which the majority of the people lived as slaves or serfs with no human rights at all: a situation that was made worse in both India and China by the fact that both empires had been conquered and taken over by foreign invaders, who were essentially alien parasites, merely taking advantage of the established imperial machinery to keep the ‘native’ population subservient and oppressed as mere producers and consumers, while they themselves enjoyed wealth ‘beyond the dreams of avarice’, the Chinese state going so far as to have a monopoly control of the production and distribution of opium, the original “opium of the masses”. Nevertheless Napoleon, the conqueror of most of Europe, had said “When China wakes up, the world will tremble.”
