>From Independent (UK) http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/C0603921.html <Picture>Ian Buruma - Can our island race ever link up with the Continent? Voltaire popularised the idea that Britain was an enlightened island of liberty facing tyranny European Anglophobes and the more extreme British Eurosceptics agree about one thing. They believe England is so uniquely, absolutely different from the continent of Europe that, with or without a tunnel, the Channel can never be bridged. Napoleon was convinced that Albion, the perfidious nation of shopkeepers, would, out of sheer spite, do anything to stop France from uniting European nations in a federation of "free peoples". More than a century later General de Gaulle blocked England's entry into the Common Market because, in his view, England was not part of Europe, and if it were to join the Continent none the less, England would no longer be England and that would be a terrible shame, for England and for Europe. The sense of unease about Britain's membership of a pan-European enterprise is still with us, even under a relatively Euro-friendly Labour government. Now that Tony Blair has announced his official enthusiasm for the euro, we might look again at what, apart from a stretch of cold and increasingly dirty water, it is that has divided Britain (or should I simply say England) from the Continentals. What are those vices and virtues that Continental Anglophobes, as well as Anglophiles, saw as so distinctive about England over the past 200 years or so? Voltaire, who lived in England for several years in the 1720s, set the tone for a particular kind of Anglophilia, still echoed in our time in the nationalism of some Tory Eurosceptics. He popularised the notion that Britain was an enlightened island of liberty facing a Continent of darkness and tyranny. Having arrived in London less than 50 years after the Glorious Revolution, from France, where an absolute monarchy stilled reigned, Voltaire had reason to feel this way. More surprising perhaps, though, again, quite understandable in his time, was his admiration for British intellectual life. In Britain writers and scientists were honoured; in France they were more likely to be locked up. But Voltaire admired Britain in particular for its combination of civil liberties and commercial enterprise. Speaking as a kind of Thatcherite avant la lettre, he believed that the two went together. Trade, he said, made the British rich and free, and freedom helped to expand their trade. And not just the British. Voltaire also recognised the emancipatory effect of trade. Foreigners came to London to make their fortunes because, to a greater extent than was common elsewhere, they were able to do so. Eighteenth-century London was like 17th-century Amsterdam, or New York today: a haven for refugees, adventurers, artists and fortune-hunters from all over the world. The Royal Exchange, Voltaire wrote, was a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims "transact together as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts". There were many things Voltaire did not admire about England: a popular press obsessed with scandal and gossip, Shakespeare's vulgar entertainments, a boorish underclass, a snooty upper class, bad food and worse manners. But his love of British liberties never wavered. Freedom of trade and religion, an empirical approach to science, and constitutional limits on the monarchy - these made Britain into a model for the European Enlightenment. Others despised Britain for precisely the same reasons. French revolutionaries such as Rousseau hated monarchy in any form. They thought so-called British liberalism was a sham to keep the rich and well-born in power. Men of the monarchist right in France attacked Britain for its materialism and its crass and shallow culture, and the plebeian disorder resulting from too much freedom - pretty much the same thing, in other words, that anti-Americans say about the US today. France has always been rich in Anglophobic literature, richer, in fact, than Germany. One of the most interesting French tracts was written in London, by a refugee from the failed anti-monarchist revolution of 1848, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who had enjoyed the distinction of governing France for two hours before he was forced to flee across the Channel. His pamphlet, entitled The Decline of England, put the anti-British case in a way that still strikes some familiar notes. Apart from the usual stuff about the vulgarity of British culture, the awful weather and the ghastly food, Ledru-Rollin criticised the grip on power by a commercial and social upper class or, as he put it, an "aristocracy of the crown, of the land, and of the counting-house". He also had scorn for the "irrationality" of British common law, so different from the logic of the French legal system. In France, he said, "logic is a religion". The French will pursue an idea to its end. And, most important of all, France speaks for Europe, if not the world, whereas Britain, that nation of selfish traders, speculators, stock-jobbers and greedy toffs, "has never raised its eyes above its masts and its cargoes". (The Continental suspicion that Britain joined the European Common Market only for commercial reasons, is still in this vein.) In 1855 Ledru-Rollin, together with other European exiles in London, such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Lajos Kossuth, signed a manifesto for a free, republican Europe. "To ensure [victory]," it read, "we have but to inscribe , not only upon our flag, but on our hearts, on our plans of war, in our every act, the grand word of European solidarity." Even though it was published in London by an English friend of Karl Marx, there was no British signature on this document. Given the reputation for selfish commercialism, for rating the Stock Exchange more highly than fine pan-European ideals, it is not at all surprising that anti-British (and anti-American) feeling should often have been mixed up with anti-Semitism. At the time of the Dreyfus trial in 1895, a book appeared with the arresting title, L'Anglais est-il un Juif? (Is the Englishman a Jew?). Its author, one Louis Martin, argued that Anglo-Saxons were Jews in disguise. The word "Anglo-Saxon", he maintained, was in fact derived from the name Isaacson. Jews had infiltrated Britain in ancient times and had infected the country with their mercantile, blood-sucking ways. Jewish Britain and the Freemasons, he believed, were busy plotting to dominate Europe and undermine the glory of France. Now, Martin was not an intellectual heavyweight, and his arguments were never in the mainstream of French thinking. But they were an extreme version of a particular kind of anti-liberalism, which has flared up at regular intervals in Europe, either from the left or from the right. Kaiser Wilhelm II, especially after he lost the Great War, liked to rant about "Juda-England". In its worship of commerce, Britain had lost its sense of blood, soil and honour. The Kaiser was convinced that the native country of his mother (Queen Victoria's daughter Vicky) could join Europe only when it had been purged of its Jews, its Freemasons and its pro-Americans. Although they were never couched in such crude or extreme terms, the Thatcher period brought out many of these traditional antagonisms. It was, of course, Mrs Thatcher who signed the Single European Act, tying Britain more closely to Europe than ever before. But, as though to compensate for her policies, she promoted a kind of nationalism that was designed to irritate Anglophobes, and even Anglophiles. The common image of Thatcher's Britain was a traditional Anglophobe's nightmare: a country ruthlessly dedicated to material self-interest and doctrinaire free trade, with a thuggish underclass and a brutal popular press. To be sure, what seemed vulgar, materialistic and selfish to some was seen as liberating by many others, in Britain as well as abroad. But Thatcherite propaganda, if not British policies themselves, exaggerated the traditional divisions between what Thatcherites would have described as British "liberalism" and Continental "socialism". All this seems a long time ago, now that we live in a Europe governed by social democrats. The language of the Blairites has been positively Europhiliac compared to that of the Thatcherites. But does this mean that the old divisions between Britain and the Continent have been made to disappear by a wave of Tony's magic wand? Britain's initial aloofness from the euro would suggest not. For Blair has swiped too much from Thatcher to be called a simple European-style social democrat. Compared to his colleagues on the left in France, Italy and Germany, Blair is a Tory. On social policy he may have the zeal of a stern vicar, but his economics are classically liberal. And yet he is unlike Tory Eurosceptics. Tory Eurosceptics typically believe in British exceptionalism. Each nation has its own unique traditions and institutions, and to think that Europeans could become more like the British, or vice versa, is neither likely nor desirable. Tory Eurosceptics are nationalists who prefer to deal with other nationalists, even when they are enemies, or perhaps especially so. Because Britain cannot influence Europe very much, it is better to stay away, and go it alone. Blair, on the other hand, thinks, not without a hint of arrogance, that he can change Europe, and convert it to Blairism. John Major, too, thought he could influence the Europeans, but he was hindered by his own party. Tories are, of course, right to say that nations have their own traditions, but traditions change. Just as Britain's liberal institutions have been influenced in the past by Italy, France and the Netherlands, Continental institutions have been influenced by Britain. The Voltairean idea of a free Britain facing a Continent of tyranny cannot be sustained. All members of the European Union can freely elect their governments and criticise them in their press. This has come about partly because of the influence of British and American ideas. In some respects, indeed, other Europeans are now governed more democratically than the British. European economies are also more liberal than ever before. They were forced in this direction by globalisation, but up to a point they also followed the Thatcherites, whose influence was as stimulating as their rhetoric was disliked. Britain was the first country to adapt to the "global economy". But what about the European Union itself? After all, Britain's historical bugbears were not so much individual nations as European empires, ruled from Paris or Berlin. Here British scepticism can be a positive asset. For the European Union is not a democratic institution. And if the dream of a federal Europe, first articulated by decent men who never wanted to see another European war, were to degenerate into a pseudo-superstate run by authoritarian bureaucrats, it would be a disaster for all of us. However, to picture the future as a conflict between Britain and "Europe" is a distortion. The extreme Tory view of "Eurosceptic tanks" taking the beaches of Normandy to reclaim European freedom is self-flattering nonsense. A return to the pre-war status of competing nation states is no longer feasible; European institutions are already too much entangled for that. What is needed is a careful calibration of national political institutions and European ones. And Britain should help to ensure that the latter are open and free. The authority of the European Union should be limited to measures that facilitate the free movement of trade, goods and people within Europe. This means that a number of common laws and regulations have to be established in Brussels, and some national laws and regulations adapted at home. But it does not mean that we have to strive towards a centralised European state. This is not a struggle between liberal Britons and illiberal Continentals, for it is not at all clear that most Continental Europeans would wish for such a thing. If we were to speak in historical terms, we could, of course, identify liberal British traditions and tyrannical, protectionist Continental ones. But we could also draw an historical arc from the Baltic states, down through Copenhagen, Hamburg and Amsterdam, and thence to Lisbon and Milan, an arc of free-trading, liberal cities, whose traditional interests and preferences are now far more dominant in Europe than the blood-and-soil instincts of Continental despots. It is that Europe of free-trading Anglophiles which needs Britain most of all, not as an island fortress, or an offshore haven, but as a leading ally within the common European fold. � The author's 'Voltaire's Coconuts: Or Anglomania in Europe' is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, price �18.99 ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
