Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [2]
It is most obvious in international affairs, where the imperial habit remains a very hard one to break. When a British prime minister puffs out his chest and declares he ‘will not tolerate’ some African or Middle Eastern despot, he speaks not as a creature of a twenty-first-century political party in a dilapidated democracy but as the latest reincarnation of Castlereagh or Palmerston – somehow, British foreign policy has never shaken off a certain nineteenth-century swagger, and the implied suggestion that if anything happens to a British citizen, a Royal Navy gunboat will be dispatched to menace the impertinent perpetrators. It is not entirely their fault that British politicians bluster in this fashion – the frayed old frock coat comes with the job. The merest glance at regimental battle honours in the British army discloses a roll-call of colonial wars, from Abyssinia to Zululand, by way of everywhere from Canada to New Zealand. This long history of fighting in faraway places of which we know next to nothing has left the British army positively eager to be deployed across the world. When, for example, the Grenadier Guards were sent to Afghanistan in 2007, they arrived sporting battle honours from the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, a campaign against Islamist forces in Sudan in the 1890s, another to subdue the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, and a ‘temporary’ British intervention in Egypt which began in 1882 and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Once you’ve got that sort of pedigree you’re keen to measure yourself against it. And perhaps, at another level, this history of involvement overseas also helps to explain why it is that British charities play such a disproportionately large role in international development and disaster relief.
When Edward Gibbon said, ‘I have no way of judging of the future but by the past,’ he acknowledged the determining influence that history has on the present. Can we, for example, understand the European Union without recognizing the French fear of the Germans and the Germans’ fear of themselves? And in the United Kingdom it has proved very hard – if indeed anyone has really tried – to discard all that stuff about how Britannia rules the waves. It is the imperial heritage which gives the Foreign Office the supercilious vanity that it somehow understands the developing world better than countries which have not had the sola-topi experience. Despite being the biggest and most prosperous country in Europe, Germany does not command a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, because it lost the Second World War. Britain may have emerged from that conflict battered and broke, but it still possessed sufficient imperial presence to become one of the Permanent Five. And, had the United States not once been part of the British Empire, the much fetishized ‘special relationship’ would never have become such an obsession in the minds of British governments.
It goes much further. It was their empire which convinced the British that they were somehow special. Yet the disappearance of their empire has failed to persuade them that they are not so very different from much of the rest of Europe. Is it any wonder that Britain’s relations with the continent are so tortured and its commitment to the ‘ever closer union’ sounds so hollow, when its relations with the rest of the world are managed by an institution housed in a great neo-classical building whose very design was intended to impress upon foreigners the unique splendour of British rule? The interior walls are covered in murals portraying ‘Pax Britannica’ as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire.