NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE- 1.
Created | Updated Jan 27, 2017
NEW YEAR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE 1
The hopes that the end of the Cold War over a quarter of a century ago might finally lead towards world peace have proved fallacious and much the same kind of popular discontent with the governing establishment that fatally undermined the Soviet Empire has inspired widespread ‘grass roots’ protest elsewhere, along with hopes for real change that have resulted in the current unsettled and unpredictable state of the world.
ENGLAND AND EUROPE
We should not be surprised, therefore, if some of our less sympathetic European neighbours see Brexit as just another example of the English withdrawing from Europe in its hour of crisis in order to look after themselves first and abandon Europe to its fate. But in my half-century of being ‘wedded’ to France, the fact that the “English” have always been able to withdraw from the Gothic Horrors of continental experience has usually been seen in France seen as a piece of enviable good fortune for the English, for the only option for the French is to withdraw into their extensive areas of thinly populated “outback”. As one French lady said to me after the Trump victory, the French still like to see themselves as ‘Gauls’ at heart ever ready to melt away from the long reach of any ruling establishment based on Paris, Brussels or even New York or Washington.
Moreover most ‘enlightened’ French people see just how France has often gained from this English capacity for stepping outside the mainstream of History and carrying on as one united folk along a path shaped by the common sense of one common people working together in the interests of one commonweal. For a recurring theme of French History has been the periods of exile in England that shaped the future visions of men like Voltaire, Louis Napoleon, and more recently those “Free French” exiles who went on to build the new post-war France and the EU, notably Jean Monnet and Charles De Gaulle.
It often seems somewhat unfortunate to the English, however, that these French exiles have usually seized on the idea that our ‘ways and means’ could be adapted to serve a French tradition of top-down government that imposes some half-hearted unity on its complex patchwork of what Voltaire described about 40 different ‘peoples’. And General De Gaulle was mostly dismissive about the important work being done by as part of the Free French organization in London during the war by Simone Weil, who looked at those very fundamental problems that had turned the French people into Henri Amouroux’s “people of disaster” in 1940. For Simone Weil seems to have found in London at war the crucial role of the spirit that she had been striving to understand. In December 1942, for example, she wrote to her parents from London: “In one way, both the people and things here seem to me to be exactly as I think I expected them to be, and in another way perhaps better. Lawrence somewhere describes England with the words ‘humour and kindness’, and one meets these two traits everywhere in the small incidents of daily life…Especially kindness…People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.”
And there were British people who were interviewed during the referendum campaign who refused to balk at the prospect that England or Britain might have to ‘stand- alone’ once again in a world once more reduced to turbulence, insecurity and conflict.
The hopes that the end of the Cold War over a quarter of a century ago might finally lead towards world peace have proved fallacious and much the same kind of popular discontent with the governing establishment that fatally undermined the Soviet Empire has inspired widespread ‘grass roots’ protest elsewhere, along with hopes for real change that have resulted in the current unsettled and unpredictable state of the world.
ENGLAND AND EUROPE
We should not be surprised, therefore, if some of our less sympathetic European neighbours see Brexit as just another example of the English withdrawing from Europe in its hour of crisis in order to look after themselves first and abandon Europe to its fate. But in my half-century of being ‘wedded’ to France, the fact that the “English” have always been able to withdraw from the Gothic Horrors of continental experience has usually been seen in France seen as a piece of enviable good fortune for the English, for the only option for the French is to withdraw into their extensive areas of thinly populated “outback”. As one French lady said to me after the Trump victory, the French still like to see themselves as ‘Gauls’ at heart ever ready to melt away from the long reach of any ruling establishment based on Paris, Brussels or even New York or Washington.
Moreover most ‘enlightened’ French people see just how France has often gained from this English capacity for stepping outside the mainstream of History and carrying on as one united folk along a path shaped by the common sense of one common people working together in the interests of one commonweal. For a recurring theme of French History has been the periods of exile in England that shaped the future visions of men like Voltaire, Louis Napoleon, and more recently those “Free French” exiles who went on to build the new post-war France and the EU, notably Jean Monnet and Charles De Gaulle.
It often seems somewhat unfortunate to the English, however, that these French exiles have usually seized on the idea that our ‘ways and means’ could be adapted to serve a French tradition of top-down government that imposes some half-hearted unity on its complex patchwork of what Voltaire described about 40 different ‘peoples’. And General De Gaulle was mostly dismissive about the important work being done by as part of the Free French organization in London during the war by Simone Weil, who looked at those very fundamental problems that had turned the French people into Henri Amouroux’s “people of disaster” in 1940. For Simone Weil seems to have found in London at war the crucial role of the spirit that she had been striving to understand. In December 1942, for example, she wrote to her parents from London: “In one way, both the people and things here seem to me to be exactly as I think I expected them to be, and in another way perhaps better. Lawrence somewhere describes England with the words ‘humour and kindness’, and one meets these two traits everywhere in the small incidents of daily life…Especially kindness…People’s nerves are tense, but they control them out of self-respect and a true generosity toward others.”
And there were British people who were interviewed during the referendum campaign who refused to balk at the prospect that England or Britain might have to ‘stand- alone’ once again in a world once more reduced to turbulence, insecurity and conflict.
