Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [146]
And yet the creation, protection, extension and use of their empire had been the preoccupation of the British for generations. The question of what duty we owed to those we colonized was one of the determining issues in forging modern politics. In some ways, the whole imperial experience shaped the British as much as it shaped the places to which they took their flag, determining not merely how they looked at the world but how they saw themselves, helping to define the Englishman and woman, setting the tone of the educational system, restructuring the armed forces, broadening (and narrowing) the horizons of their statesmen, consolidating the monarchy and creating a worldwide diaspora. It is true, but not particularly helpful, to remark that if it had not been the British doing the colonizing, it would almost certainly have been somebody else: it remains a fact of life that the strong abuse the weak. Some of the British behaviour was appalling and some of it was admirable, but if you had to live under a foreign government, it was better than many of the other possibilities. The British Empire had begun with a series of pounces. Then it marched. Next it swaggered. Finally, after wandering aimlessly for a while, it slunk away.
The British have spent the years since then alternately embarrassed and ashamed. The Germans seem to have managed to forge a new purpose for themselves, even though in recent history they have twice visited Armageddon on much of the world. An alternative route for Britain might have been for the country to throw in its lot with much of the rest of western Europe, in the organization which has now mutated into the European Union. After centuries of unhappy relations with continental Europe it would have required an astonishing conversion. But the timing was all wrong, anyway. When Winston Churchill first called for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’ in 1946, Britain had not even quit India. When the foundations of the Union were laid in 1951, the country still ruled much of Africa. By the time that Harold Macmillan applied to join the Community, President de Gaulle repaid British wartime sanctuary by excluding Britain: the excuse he gave in his memoirs was that he was haunted by the 1898 Fashoda incident (when he had been all of eight years old).
Had Britain joined the European enterprise then, it might have developed into something more respectable than it has become. But to do so would have required the recognition that the British were little different to the neighbours. Instead the British have been cushioned from reality by the fact that, as the country has become a decreasingly significant figure in the world, its people have been able to live more and more comfortable lives. It clearly cannot last. Did the British allow their economic enfeeblement because, for so long, their empire gave them so many comforting illusions about their place in the world? Instead of recognizing that national wealth is born of work and enterprise, they basked in some stupid sense that they were born to rule – it is not so far from a sense that the world owed them a living. As their colonies slipped away, they had nothing with which to replace a vanishing sense of national purpose. And their openness to the rest of the world made the carcass of the Industrial Revolution easy pickings for others. They had entered the twentieth century in command of world trade. They began the twenty-first century struggling to compete and producing very little they could realistically call their own. Their car industry had more or less vanished, they had sold their electricity industry to anyone who would buy it, and even the water mains and sewers laid down by Victorian visionaries were now minor items on balance sheets produced in office blocks in the Ruhr. Even the great imperial sport of cricket, once governed by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), is today run