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It is now over sixty years since Dean Acheson (former US Secretary of State) made the immortal comment that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role”. Although made in a Cold War context, as Britain made faltering attempts to enter Europe, the question can still legitimately be asked today, contemplating Britain’s fractured and fractious political scene.
Acheson’s comment, made at a December 1962 lecture at West Point Military Academy created a furore in Britain, perhaps because, in the wake of the Suez crisis, imperial decline was a painful reality, with the push to decolonisation in Africa becoming critical with the dismantling of the Central African Federation, and the scaling down its global defence activities, defined as ‘east of Suez’. The observation also hurt for questioning the ‘special relationship’ with the US, already undermined by Suez and demonstrated as marginal in the great US/USSR confrontation of the Cuba crisis two months previously. Yet, decades later, it is still something Britain clings to as part of a perceived global influence.
Acheson, in the mood for home truths, also commented that a special relationship role “apart from Europe…based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength – this role is about played out.” British policy, he said, seemed “as weak as its military power.” Both European and Commonwealth elements in British foreign policy have continued to generate arguments without real conclusion.
The Acheson speech came a month before De Gaulle rejected Macmillan’s bid to join the then European Community, a bid half-hearted and belated, since the question of belonging to Europe has been one of the great unresolved issues in the British political psyche in the post-imperial age. The eventual successful 1972 adhesion to the then EEC engineered by Edward Heath, was three years later the subject of an ‘in-out’ referendum, and was a bone of contention through all Mrs Thatcher’s eleven years in power, contributing to the fall of her successor John Major. The Europe issue may have been navigated successfully through the Blair-Brown years, especially by neatly avoiding joining the troubled Euro currency zone. Europe, however,. has re-emerged as highly toxic politically for David Cameron’s coalition government. The post-2008 recession has seriously damaged confidence, and disillusionment with the political class has grown, feeding the spread of Euro-scepticism, while a rabid tabloid press has tended to heap current ills on the shoulders of Brussels.
At the same time, the Commonwealth, which, despite Acheson’s dismissal, was meant to be a comforting and meaningful successor to empire, has seen a slow decline in public favour. If Macmillan, Wilson and Heath successively abandoned it in favour of Europe, it thrived for a time from its important role in helping push through change in Southern Africa in the 20th century’s last decades. Since the arrival of full democracy in South Africa in 1994, however, the Commonwealth has struggled to maintain its relevance. Cameron and Hague, on coming to power tried to present it as an alternative, but without conviction. The role it could play as a ‘soft-power’ influence, as well as its post-imperial value for small states (the ‘confetti of empire’). is scarcely perceived.
Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands adventure summoned up old spirits, pursuing the special dream of “making Great Britain great again”, but it has tended to lead to the encouragement of thumb-sucking self-delusion. It may even have stimulated a revival of the spurious belief that the British Empire was virtuous, abetted by historians who would want us to rewrite history in the interest of Britishness at the same time as the devolution process of the United Kingdom is bringing the idea into greater doubt. The move to be “great” is paradoxically leading to a revival of the self-shrinking notion of ‘Little England’, reminding us that there was always confusion between what is British (above all an empire, a passport) and what is English, one of the world’s great languages and culture, even if England as such is a sleeping entity more rooted in history than in present realities.
The ‘England’ issue even tends to surface in lamentable campaigns such as that against immigrants, an issue masking xenophobia and even outright racism under copious statistics and ‘legitimate fears.’ It finds a voice in right-wing protest movements such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), pandering to that amorphous zone called ‘Middle England,’ a cosy dream-world too often riddled with bigotry. The search for cultural or religious identity, a world-wide post-modern phenomenon comes as a reaction to globalisation, digitalisation and multilateralism, These are pressing and pervasive realities, but hardly causes people will die for.
Areas to watch are this May’s European parliamentary elections, which UKIP may win alongside other far right European parties, such as the FN in France; and above all the September referendum on independence for Scotland. Passions are already rising, but a ‘yes’ vote portends the end of the United Kingdom as we know it. But will it mean further retreat to fantasy island status?
Kaye Whiteman
