'... a fear of opening oneself up to the world...'

Few topics disturb my sangfroid quite as utterly as British Euro-scepticism. The phrase itself rouses my ire. While 'scepticism' might be an appropriate description of the misgivings felt by some in Britain, it can hardly be said to convey the feelings of the most ardent advocates of British independence. 'Hostility' would be more accurate. Or 'suspicion'. Or plain old 'xenophobia'.

As with most things about this movement, its name is disingenuous: under the banner of scepticism it can claim, as its own, people who, while genuinely sceptical about union with Europe, are no more than sceptical. It can then hide behind these more moderate elements whenever it requires political cover.

The hard-core of Euro-sceptics, whatever they may say publicly, have one central aim: ending immigration. They seek complete British withdrawal from the European Union, not, as they claim, because British sovereignty is threatened by 'faceless, un-elected bureaucrats in Brussels' (the standard mantra), but because, under the terms of EU membership, Britain has to accept economic migrants from other member states.* The only way to prevent this, according to the Euro-sceptics, is to cut all ties with Europe. Few will admit this openly, however, as it is generally understood - among the British population - that Britain needs to continue trading with other European states if it is not to become impoverished: cutting political ties may risk severing economic ones as well.

Instead, we have an argument in stages: each stage concealing a more politically sensitive - that is, unpalatable - stage beneath (just as the term 'Euro-sceptic' conceals the term 'Nationalist'). The final stage is the closing of Britain's borders to all foreigners, followed - I suspect - by the expulsion of any undesirables living within those borders.

The Euro-sceptic reply is invariably the same: that this is alarmist and hyperbolic; that they have no desire to stop immigration completely, let alone expel foreign nationals already living in Britain; that they are not xenophobic; that they accept Britain is a modern, multicultural society; that they simply want to preserve Britain's political independence.

Even if we take them at their word, the fact remains that they are on a slippery slope. As Primo Levi warns:

'Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.'

The conviction that Britain is better off alone, that its independence is paramount, has deep historical and cultural roots. Uncovering those roots is - obviously - beyond the scope of a blog post. But what can perhaps be said is this: that the conviction Levi describes is undoubtedly present among growing numbers of the British public, and most importantly, it is a conviction, not scepticism. Scepticism implies an open mind, a willingness to admit error. Conviction, on the other hand, suggests a mind that seeks to exclude whatever it perceives to be a threat.

The aim of the Euro-sceptics is not to encourage scepticism. They want only to convince.


* If they really cared about British sovereignty they would focus equal attention on the encroachment of American foreign policy (which effectively dictates British foreign policy). Their silence regarding America can be adduced as further proof of an anti-European bias. The prejudice is one of language, primarily. Some foreigners are more foreign than others.

Another reason the sovereignty issue is a red herring: Parliament is not the only body that decides what becomes law. Big business spends millions lobbying politicians and it expects its money's worth. The civil service - faceless, un-elected bureaucrats every bit as faceless, un-elected and bureaucratic as their counterparts in Brussels - also have a say in deciding what is permissible and what is not. No self-respecting political analyst would argue in good conscience that Britain, or any other democracy for that matter, has genuine sovereignty. And while I suspect that notions such as self-respect and a good conscience are entirely alien to the majority of Euro-sceptics, I feel certain that democracy, to them, is an even stranger concept. Given power, the last thing they would do is give it away to the British people.

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The above comments were prompted by a post on the excellent blog Status Viatoris. The following excerpts are also intended to be a response of sorts.


From The New York Times

The British Euro Farce
By ROGER COHEN

Published: December 12, 2011


LONDON — The British, or rather English, mistrust of what lies beyond the Channel has always been fathomless. W.H. Auden, observing a “cult of salads,” jested that “before very long” the south of England would resemble “the Continong.” There across the sea, on a suspect Continent, lay lands of constitutions, Napoleonic legal codes, defeated armies, imperfect freedom, rabies, wife-swapping and garlic.

Auden, of course, was writing before the birth of the Tory Euro-sceptic, the pinstriped effluence of an ex-imperial nation. This specimen’s ascendancy was reflected in Prime Minister David Cameron’s veto of a Europe-bolstering treaty change to defend the euro through greater fiscal cooperation and tougher sanctions on nations going Greek.

The Euro-sceptic wants less Europe not more. In the place of “ever closer union,” the Euro-sceptic wants ever looser union and, if possible, none whatsoever. In his or her — and it’s overwhelmingly his — heart beats the spirit of Britain’s “finest hour” and the United Kingdom (with a little help from the Yanks) holding out against the Luftwaffe. Only now the object of resistance is Germany’s glum Frau Merkel.

Or so the Tories see it. Since Cameron’s “No,” there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.” Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality. In fact Cameron, playing the wrong chips without partners or preparation, was not so much opposed on grand principle as eyeing an opportunity to extract concessions for the very City of London financial institutions seen as the villains of the 2008 meltdown and its dire aftermath.

That was politically inept — less the fighting spirit of the Normandy hedgerows than the self-regarding hypocrisy of the giant offshore hedge fund that Britain often resembles these days.

Even without an election five months away, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, would have been tempted to avoid shaking Cameron’s hand. With an election the snub for perfidious Albion was too good to pass up. Of course The Sun, the British tabloid whose dislike of Gauls is exceeded only by its disdain for Germans, shot back at Sarko: “Who do you think E.U. are?”

After uncertain mumblings, the deputy prime minister, Nick (“don’t call me a doormat”) Clegg, managed to reach beyond this theater to something approaching strategic reflection. Declaring himself “bitterly disappointed” at Cameron’s decision, he said: “There’s nothing bulldog about Britain hovering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, not standing tall in Europe, not being taken seriously in Washington.”

There is no Euro-sceptic strategy; at most there’s a tactic for short-term political gain. For a long time the post-Cold-War widening of Europe to 27 members put off the need for deepening. This suited Britain, which was never interested in political union but saw advantage in a borderless European market. Now the euro crisis has exposed the need for a federative push to give the shared currency political backbone. In so doing, it has also exposed the basic British ambivalence that twice caused De Gaulle to say “Non” to U.K. membership.

As Warren Buffett has observed, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” The mid-Atlantic, as America pivots to Asia, could prove a lonely place for Britain, whose economy is heavily dependent on the euro zone.

Of course, the fiscal pact Britain rejected still has to be turned from words into reality — and if Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, declines to provide the liquidity to keep European bond and money markets working time could still run out on the euro before reform is enacted.

Still, a watershed has been reached. The air has been cleared. The proposed pact represents a necessary if tardy admission: that the euro was an irrevocable step toward the political and particularly fiscal integration that alone can sustain the currency. Ever closer union means just that. With a touch more finesse and a lot less bombast Britain could have accompanied this process without adopting the euro. Instead, it’s isolated.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Cameron’s veto coincided with a young Euro-sceptic Tory member of Parliament, Aidan Burley, finding himself at a stag party in Val Thorens — a French ski resort with a German-sounding name — along with a bunch of mates dressed up in Nazi SS uniforms and performing Nazi salutes in an atmosphere of great jollity. Burley, who’s had to apologize, footed the bill for the festivities.

Britain’s defiant freedom and independence are real virtues proven over time. The thing about the Euro-sceptics behind Cameron’s Brussels bungling is they turn past glory into posturing theater. Their nostalgia for British greatness is often no more than the trumpeting of a bunch of insular snobs who seem to have a hard time restraining their inner-fascist.

Marx observed that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Having a British prime minister say he’ll only go along with Germany saving the euro if City of London banks get an exemption from a financial transactions tax, while a Tory M.P. parties with Nazi lookalikes, and another Tory boasts of Cameron having “played a blinder,” is about as farcical as it gets.


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From Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened To Modernism? (Yale University Press, 2011) pp.174-177

'Reading [Julian] Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world... All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue.

How has it come about? I would venture three points. 'Like most Victorian novelists', writes John Bayley, '[Dickens'] sense of other places and people was founded on fear and distrust. The Boz of the Sketches seems to hate and fear almost everything even though it fascinates him.' But this is something that antedates the Victorians. As Linda Colley has shown in her fine book, Britons, from the early eighteenth century on Britons defined themselves in opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not to be taken in evinced by Larkin and Amis in the face of European Modernism, something that reminds me of the Just William books I so enjoyed as a child, it soon begins to pall. Taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.

Second, and paradoxically, ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the 'pretentious', worships the serious and the 'profound', so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a 'majestic sweep', are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.

Finally, ours is the first generation in which High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit joyously welcomed by both parties. When the speakers at major literary festivals are for the most part politicians, television personalities or foreign correspondents; when we are enjoined to buy three books for the price of two in our major bookshops and a serious newspaper like the Independent offers its readers the chance, as a Christmas bonanza, to gatecrash a book launch of their choice with one of the paper's literary critics, we have truly arrived at an age where art and showbiz are one and the same...

As historians, not all Marxist, have been pointing out for rather a long time now, naturally Britain has had a history, but it has preferred to ignore that history. Perhaps the best one can say is that it has had the luxury of not having that history thrust upon it as most of the European nations have.

So many English novelists today confess to wanting to write like Dickens that it might be thought that the difference between England and France and Germany is that we have no great model to look back to, who might give us an understanding of what it might mean to have a European sensibility, that is, to be as English as they come and yet have a real historical awareness. But there is one, as I have suggested: Wordsworth. Unfortunately within English culture he has been consistently misrepresented as either a bucolic poet or a political reactionary. This is a travesty. He occupies the same place in English literary history as, say, Hölderlin and Baudelaire occupy in German and French: someone with all the powers of the Romantic poet at his fingertips but aware of the deep paradoxes of his calling in an age when art itself is in question. Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.'