Britain After the Five Crises: Financial Collapse, Migration, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine [1st ed. 2023] 3031436490, 9783031436499

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Britain: A Decade of Crises, Particular and General, 2008–2022
Crisis in the Recent Decades
Particular Crises Interlinked
Provisionally, Firstly, Political Failings
Provisionally, Secondly, Institutional
Provisionally, Third Organizationally
Provisionally, Fourth, Failing to Grasp Social Impacts
General Crisis: The Wheel of History
The End of Ideas About Neo-liberal Globalization
The End of Ideas of Western Pre-eminence
Finessing the Crises
An agenda for Enquiry
2 The British Empire: Finessing the Collapse, 1942–1956
Shaping Post-War British Politics: A Road Not Taken
The State-Empire: Geographically Extensive, Multi-ethnic and Loosely Ordered
Metropolitan Conflict, Peripheral Revolt and the Progressive Collapse of Empire
Metropolitan Critics
Peripheral Voices
Aspirant Players
World War and Empire Collapse
Major Conflicts
The State-Empire System Overwhelmed
Reworking the Empire: Change and Understanding in Core and Periphery
First, Which People; Boundaries and Territorial Definition
Second, What Type of Economy; Conflict and Argument (Classes/Theories)
Third, What Sort of Identity; Dynamics of Political-Cultural Redefinition
Social/Cultural Legacies of Empire: Nostalgia, Race and Racism
Post-War: Some Reforms, Disappointments
The Empire: Collapse, but Elite Continuity
3 European Union: Particular Anxieties, Deeper Issues, 2008–2022
Europe: The Broad Historical Trajectory
European Union in Summary
Europe: The Disasters of Early Twentieth Century
The Crisis, Cold War and the Division of Europe
The End of the Bloc System
EU/NATO Linkage
Membership of NATO and the Union
Europe: Recent Anxieties, Deeper Issues
Particular Anxieties: Euro Crisis, Migration and Brexit
Deeper Issues: The Machinery, the Role of Law and the Core Commitments
The British: Enduring Doubts, Transactional Arrangements and the Accident of Brexit
Europe: Futures
4 Britain’s Financial Crisis: Debts, Bail-Outs and Austerity, 2008–2010
The Reassertion of Market Liberalism
Britain and the Rise and Fall of Neo-Liberalism
The Run-Up to the Financial Crisis, 2008–2010
The Crisis Breaks
Subsequent Diagnoses of the Crisis Offered
Unfolding Reactions to the Crisis: Popular Doubts
The Long-Term Costs of the Crisis: Austerity
Reform Proposals in Britain
5 European Union: The Migration Crisis: 1999–2015
Human Migration: From Pre-History to the Beginnings of the Contemporary Era
The Shift to the Modern World and the Early Modern Era of State-Empires
Movement in the Contemporary Era: Constrained and Monitored Flows of People
From State-Empires to States: Institutional Change and Population Movements
International Institutions: Ordering the Post-War World, Grasping Flows of People
The European Union’s Situation
Migration and the European Union: Long-Term Trends and Current Problems
Migration and Law
Migration in Practice
The Slow Rise of Populist Right-Wing Political Parties
Merkel’s Error and the Downstream Consequences
Migration as Crisis: Current Political Problems in Europe
The Failed Constitution
The Ukraine Crisis
The Financial Crisis
And the Issue of Migrants
Migration: One More Problem for the Union
Afterword
6 Brexit Crisis: Unpacking Some of the Lessons, 2016–2022
Brexit: The 2016 Referendum
The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 EU Referendum
Politics as Advertising
Subsequent Events I: The General Public
Subsequent Events II: The Political Classes, Shock and Confusion
Subsequent Events III: The Failure of Prime Minister May’s Deal
An Unhappy Sequence Unfolds
Trying to Make Sense of the Episode
Prime Minister May’s January 2019
Towards the Fall of Prime Minister May
Parliamentary Manoeuvres, Party Splits and Lawfare
Subsequent Events IV: The Work of Remain Groups
Overturning the Result: Re-vote, Elide or Disregard
Melancholia: Looking Backwards
Brexit: Some Interim Lessons?
General: The End-Time of Neo-Liberalism
Narrowly: A Revival of ‘Real Politics?
Specific—Some Casualties?
Ongoing Questions
Sketching a Possible Future
Available Work
7 The Covid-19 Pandemic, Spring 2020
The Early Phase: Recognition of Disease Emergence in Wuhan
First Response Phase: Test, Isolate and Contact Trace
Second Response Phase: Herd Immunity
Third Response Phase: Lockdown
Fourth Response Phase: Starting to Lift the Lockdown
Popular Reactions to Disease, Government and Fellow Citizens
Some Occasional Issues Were Aired in the Press
Unpacking the Data: First Cuts
The Lockdown Statistics: March 23 to May 10, 2020
Total Covid-19 Cases
The Statistics: Counting, Analyzing and Presenting
Problems of Estimating Excess Deaths in Britain
The UK Record: Comparisons with Mainland Europe
The Data Unpacked—Age, Gender, Ethnicity and Etcetera
Critical Public Debates to May 10, 2020
The Post-Lockdown Phase: From May 10 Into Summer and Autumn
State/Government Failure
Looking to the Present Concerns
Looking to Future Issues
More Remote Matters Arising
State/Government Failures in Retrospect
8 The Disaster in Ukraine: Tracking the Failures of Political Elites, 1991–2022
Lines of Available Argument
Roots of Crisis—A Timeline
Gorbachev’s Reforms and His Opening to the West
The Ordered Dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the Collapse of the USSR
Ukraine Independence in Context, 1991
Outside Involvement
USA/NATO Expansion and the Misreading of Russian Anxieties
The EU’s Neighbourhood Policy in the Balkans and Ukraine
China and Global South
The British Involvement
Unfolding Consequences
How Might the Fighting End?
9 Re-imagining Britain: Crises, Identity and Representation, 1973–1998
Insurgencies: Formal/Polite and Informal/Impolite
Ireland: A Violent Struggle to Independence
Scotland: A Civic and Political Route to Devolution
Wales: A Civic and Political Route to Devolution
Britain: Forging the Nation
Britain and the Idea of England
Collective Memory and the National Past
The Idea of England
An Anglo-British Official England
A Rural England: Land, Place and People
A Commercial/Industrial England: Innovative, Entrepreneurial and Expedient
A Radical England: The Common Man, Progress and Democracy
A Multicultural England: Empire, Migration and Diversity
England—No Settled Image—Future Is Open
10 On Living in a Rich Country
The Failure of Globalization and the End of Claims to Western Pre-eminence
Globalization Falters
The End of Claims to Western Pre-eminence
Interlinked Crises: The Domestic Scene
Political Ideas: Elite Complacency and the Market Ideology
Institutional Forms: Conventional Wisdom and Organizational Rigidity
Social Impacts: Differential Effects, Rich Ok, Rest Not So Good
Europe, Britain and Unfolding Trajectories
Resilience: State Action for Security
Britain: Formal Withdrawal from the European Region
Contemporary Britain: Sketching a Possible Future—Democracy, Modernity and Europe
Democracy and Democratization
Modernity and Modernization
Europe and Europeanization
Principle, Pragmatism and Opportunism
Afterword
*********
*********
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Britain After the Five Crises Financial Collapse, Migration, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine P. W. Preston

Britain After the Five Crises

Image shows Leyan Coffee Shop—photo by author

P. W. Preston

Britain After the Five Crises Financial Collapse, Migration, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine

P. W. Preston Department of Political Science and International Studies University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-43649-9 ISBN 978-3-031-43650-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface

Harold Macmillan was once asked what was the most difficult political problem that he had faced during his premiership and he replied, ‘events dear boy, events’. In more recent years, in today’s Britain, events have come thick and fast; there have been a number of major political crises and either they constitute a remarkable run of ill-luck or perhaps they have something in common. The essays in this book investigate this question. The period 2008–2022 has seen the British state/government embroiled in a number of full-blown crises, each impacting the fundamental operations of the state and demanding, therefore, urgent responses from the government of the day. In the first case, the 2008 nearcollapse and partial nationalization of the banking system consequent upon decades of irresponsible credit creation coupled to permissive regulation; in the second, the migration crisis of 2015, which saw waves of refugees moving through Europe, provoking anxious responses from European Union member states and opening-up related political debates in Britain; thus, third, the 2016 referendum in regard to membership of the European Union, which the London-based elite clearly thought they would navigate easily before, to their evident shock, losing, an event itself precipitating further extraordinary Westminster manoeuvring; and then fourth, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, met with an initial casual sangfroid before the government, its actions informed by epidemiological modelling, made an abrupt shift to ‘lockdown’, with dramatic social and economic consequences. To these episodes, whose impacts run down v

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to the present, could be added; fifth, the 2022 disaster in Ukraine where the British state/government has chosen to involve itself by supporting one set of combatants in a conflict where presently, after more than a year of fighting, there is little sign of a means to the resolution of the violence. ∗ ∗ ∗ These particular crisis episodes can be addressed in two broad ways: firstly, as a series of discrete case studies of crises and state/government responses; and secondly as an interlinked sequence, where the crises have common characteristics and disruptions within one particular crisis feed into the next, with the whole sequence together comprising a more general crisis. The discussion in this text will entertain this second alternative. It is a conjecture. It might be noted that neither the particular crises nor the posited general crisis arrived un-announced; there were precursors; and episodes of successful elite adaptation to new circumstances. Thus, first, at an historical distance, the year 1945 offered the elite a share in a significant military victory whilst at more or less the same time presenting them with the crisis of the collapse of empire; the former provided the elite with some of the materials used to navigate the latter as the elite confected a new national story; Britain, it was said, was a long-established sovereign nation-state, recently victorious in a morally correct war and something of a model for other peoples; the idea of ‘Continuing Britain’. Then, second, more recently, the events of the late seventies signalling the slow process of the failure of the post-Second War settlement with its mixed economy and welfare state as particular problems mounted, including economic underperformance, social unrest and a more general cultural loss of confidence; the whole being summed as a period of ‘stagflation’. This ensemble of problems was finessed by the elite in the turn to neo-liberalism; a novel way of reading the circumstances of the polity, one which offered a route to the future cast in free market terms; neo-liberalism. A long period of reconstruction followed by financial liberalization, state asset sales, extensive de-industrialization and debt-financed consumption. The political stance of the state/government became more evidently top-down; an authoritarian populism. All this pointed towards greater social division with issues of race and inward migration becoming more prominent, along with riots, scandals and domestic security scares involving Islam/Islamists. The distinction between elite and mass held,

PREFACE

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but now the masses were more evidently divided along lines of class/ money, race/ethnicity, North/South. The collective habits of the long post-1945 period of Keynesian-informed concern for welfare and full employment were set to one side; individualism was celebrated, purchases in the marketplace affirmed and those who were successful prospered, whilst those who were less favourably positioned slowly lost ground. Significant sections of the population came to experience the period in negative terms; loss of community, weakened services along with loss of secure employment and this all fed rising resentment. The neo-liberal period was also marked by foreign wars; in particular America’s wars in the Arab Middle East and whilst the British elite elected to rally to the side of the USA, in both Afghanistan and later in Iraq their armed forces proved incompetent; and amongst commentators this generated further doubts about elite competence. All this helped pave the way for the post-2008 hostility towards the London-centred elite. These episodes formed the backdrop to the 2008–2023 sequence of particular crises. The 2008 financial crisis broke in the context of these wider anxieties. The crisis opened up a number of fissures within the polity. It undermined the British state/government’s claim to competence in one of its core areas, that is, finance/economics, with the late Queen Elizabeth II reportedly asking why, if the crisis was so obvious, had no-one seen it coming. The episode opened a divide between experts and populists with the claims of the former being dismissed by the latter in favour of the ideas running through society. The crisis also reinforced a divide between classes; the banks were bailed out with those in charge seemingly escaping any responsibility, whilst the related policy of austerity in state spending reduced levels of living amongst the poorer members of society; and, at the same time, the supply of cheap credit was expanded and those with tangible assets saw their net wealth grow. The 2015 migration crisis invoked politico-cultural resources laid down in earlier decades; in particular, those sets of ideas built around race/ ethnicity where the flow of refugees and other migrants reinforced the latent prejudices of sections of the population. It picked up and reinforced scepticism amongst the general population in respect of the elite’s claims to competence (no very obvious state/government control) and— amongst different groups—it opened up doubts about elite claims to human rights as these were conspicuously not extended readily to inward migrants. Overall, popular doubts in respect of the elite grew. And, of

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course, the flows of refugees on the mainland, coupled to those much smaller numbers entering Britain, fed into the arguments made by local populists: they fed into Brexit. The 2016 Brexit crisis picked up long-simmering resentments on the part of wide sections of the domestic population; a loss of trust in the elite plus a related scorn for experts, specifically those who rallied to ‘project fear’ (economic and financial experts had not recovered their pre-2008 status, which was further undermined with wild claims during the referendum campaign). Amongst these groups, there was a concern to assert local identities in place of the market-centred amorphousness of the consumption-oriented claims of proponents of neo-liberal globalization. Already available social divides were further opened between educated urban pro-Europe groups and the rest; those with lower education levels; provincial; plus, some simply bloody-minded (thus, we have had many disappointments, now you can see how you feel when it happens to you). The voting data of the referendum was considered in detail by skilled commentators but varieties of popular non-elite, nonmetropolitan relatively marginalized groups fed the populist wave. The populist wave signalled a deep loss of trust in the elite: rhetorically, responsible to whom? aiming for what goal? and in neither case serving majority interests. Scepticism in regard to the competence and concerns of the elite continued as the Covid-19 crisis reached Britain; it was quickly clear that the politicians were not up to speed; it was also clear that preparations were weak. But here there was a crucial difference. There were regular media briefings but these were buttressed by contributions from medical-scientific experts. The population acquiesced in state/ government demands for lockdown and most went along with the various regulations. Elite figures were quoted as being surprised, illustrating thereby their view of the population. But as Peter Winch argued, human exchanges are shaped by reason, not causes and to seek the latter is to prefer attempts at manipulation. The general population heard and understood the medical-scientific personnel and acted accordingly. Finally, all these state/government failings: incompetence; poor information/knowledge; lack of preparation and half-hearted opportunism were in evidence in the elite’s misreading of the fighting in the Donbass and their choice for Kiev following the 2022 Russian intervention. ∗ ∗ ∗

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On the basis of the case studies, it can be argued that these particular events have features in common: firstly, politically, the ideological commitments of the governments of the day were pro-market, that is, lodged, to a greater or lesser extent, within the fashionable nostrums of globalization theory thereby disposing governments to a hands-off stance, slowing initial responses. Secondly, institutionally, in each case the response of the relevant authorities was slow, being handicapped by related ingrained habits of thought (such as ideas of light-touch regulation or inhibitions about nationalization) or elite-level consensus (proEuropean Union, hence calls for a referendum re-vote). Third, organisationally, as state capacity was reduced, problems were compounded by ill-prepared machineries, as evidenced in responses to Covid-19; and fourth, socially, with the interests/ideas of core players taken for granted, there was a consequent unequal distribution of policy-mediated social and economic impacts through society, as in the case of austerity or Brexit or the impacts of the epidemic. These discussion will track how each crisis developed; how state/government failings in one case were rehearsed in the others; and how these crises were amplified by the assumptions underpinning neo-liberal globalization theory. The sequence of particular crises discussed begins in 2008 and runs through to 2022. Both dates are significant. The first, marks the end of a long period of neo-liberal globalization; the intervening years have seen its slow demise as state/governments have turned to other sets of policies, no longer simply ‘more market’ with recently the rather different preference for ‘more state’. The second, marks the end of the illusions of leaderships in the West to global pre-eminence; the disaster in Eastern Europe has been read by China, India and most of the Global South as a European issue, not one with which they need directly engage, a set of reactions signalling the development of a multi-polar global system. ∗ ∗ ∗ And whilst all these issues are, so to say, current, finally, more speculatively, the discussion will ask how the future might unfold, hence the ideas of de-globalization, new state/government concerns for resilience and the related possibilities of democratization. Birmingham, UK

P. W. Preston

Acknowledgements

As ever, scholarship is a collaborative effort, so my thanks and greetings go out to friends and sometimes colleagues in Europe, England and East Asia and to my anonymous reader at Palgrave. Much of the material presented here has its origins, that is, its first draft forms, in work done whilst making presentations to mostly graduate students in China; primarily in the Law Faculty at Beijing Normal University and the School of Marxism at Jiangsu University. Some of the pieces were sketched out whilst sitting in the Leyan coffee shop on the campus of JU whilst other materials were created in a number of coffee shops located in and around the campus of BNU. Chapter 1 is newly written, so too is Chapter 2 which is a development of earlier work; Chapter 3 began life as a paper given to a seminar in JU in 2018 and it was published in Mandarin but the piece here has been largely rewritten; Chapter 4 on the financial crisis picks up earlier work and was written as part of a projected textbook whilst working as a visiting professor in JU; Chapter 5 was published in Mandarin, the piece here is the hitherto unpublished English language original; Chapter 6 began as talk in JU, rewritten here; Chapter 7, began as a part of the above mentioned projected textbook, drafted in JU; Chapter 8 is new, however, the intellectual and moral ground of the piece derives from my book National Pasts in Europe and East Asia published in 2010 by Routledge; Chapter 9 is largely new, a follow on to earlier work on identity; and finally, Chapter 10 began as a talk in JU.

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Contents

1

Britain: A Decade of Crises, Particular and General, 2008–2022

1

2

The British Empire: Finessing the Collapse, 1942–1956

13

3

European Union: Particular Anxieties, Deeper Issues, 2008–2022

39

Britain’s Financial Crisis: Debts, Bail-Outs and Austerity, 2008–2010

65

5

European Union: The Migration Crisis: 1999–2015

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6

Brexit Crisis: Unpacking Some of the Lessons, 2016–2022

117

7

The Covid-19 Pandemic, Spring 2020

143

8

The Disaster in Ukraine: Tracking the Failures of Political Elites, 1991–2022

169

Re-imagining Britain: Crises, Identity and Representation, 1973–1998

191

On Living in a Rich Country

217

4

9 10

Afterword

243

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CONTENTS

Bibliography

251

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Britain: A Decade of Crises, Particular and General, 2008–2022

Over the period 2008–2022, the British state/government has found itself embroiled in a number of serious crises, each placing acute demands upon the available machineries of administration and government : the 2008/10 financial crisis , the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, the 2016/20 Brexit crisis and, recently, the 2020/22 Covid-19 crisis. More recently, the state/ government has chosen to become involved in the conflicts in Eastern Europe. The run of particular crisis can be regarded—in total—as elements in longer systemic crisis. In this regard two dates are significant: the former 2008 signals the beginning of the end of ideas of globalization informing policy, the latter 2022 signals the end of Western illusions about their global pre-eminence as a multi-polar world takes shape. The British state/ government has had to react to these intermingled particular crises but commentators report that the machinery has in many respects performed poorly with failures of anticipation, planning and thereafter response. The commonalities in these failures point to underlying more general structural weaknesses in the extant state/government and open the way to a discussion of both likely future trends or developments and within this unfolding context the possibilities of democratization.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_1

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P. W. PRESTON

Crisis in the Recent Decades The fourteen-year period 2008–2022 has seen the British state/ government embroiled in a number of significant crises; each of these episodes impacted the fundamental operations of the state and required urgent responses from the government of the day. All this cannot be a matter of coincidence, an unfortunate run of bad luck, an extreme case of Harold Macmillan’s ‘events dear boy, events’, so it seems to make more sense if they are regarded as interlinked; evidence or expressions of problems within the core areas of political life, the machineries of the state/ government. The first case to note was the 2008/10 near collapse and partial nationalization of the banking system consequent upon decades of irresponsible credit creation and overly relaxed regulation. In the run-up to the crisis, the denizens of the financial system created a vast debt bubble. Private sector banks in the USA,1 UK and mainland Europe marketed many novel instruments of debt, whilst a fashionable and convenient theory2 stated that the global financial marketplace was well able to sustain the risks; but in the event, predictably, the bubble burst. Commentary offered after the fact canvassed a number of explanations: hence, individual and corporate greed/malfeasance3 ; the creation/sale of risky financial instruments where the practice was buttressed by available economic theories of ‘risk sharing’4 ; the lax/non-existent regulation consequent upon the state’s regulators buying into prevailing opinions; and more general elite-level collaboration in these excesses. 1 In respect of the USA, offering a similar reading to that of critics of UK state/ government, George Packer 2020 ‘We Are Living in a Failed State’ in The Atlantic June 2020 writes about the crisis in the USA—he notes ‘…a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public …’—Packer also notes a run of crises: September 11, 2001 and subsequent Iraq War, 2008 financial crash and the virus. 2 Efficient markets theory—see G. Cooper 2008 The Origins of the Financial Crisis: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Markets Fallacy, New York, Vintage. 3 Thus, the Bearings Bank collapse 1995, see N. Leeson 1996 Rogue Trader, London, Little Brown; thus Gillian Tett 2009 Fool’s Gold, London, Little Brown, quoting young bankers hoping to make money and leave before it all collapses; thus A. Tooze 2018 Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London, Allen Lane; see also ‘predatory lending’. 4 See Tett 2009; see P.W. Preston 2012 England After the Great Recession, London, Palgrave.

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Then secondly, there was the 2015 crisis of inward migration in mainland Europe. The spillover from America’s wars in the Arab world, plus analogous social problems in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, occasioned a wave of migration into the member countries of the Union which they found difficult to deal with, either individually or via Brussels, collectively. The mass media of newspapers and television showed images of columns of migrants walking across southern Europe. The flows of migrants via the Balkan, Libyan and Moroccan routes placed unexpected burdens on member states; accommodating the numbers was not easy, plus there was a right-wing political backlash. In Britain, the 2015 episode of migration in Europe was less important than the other crises, nonetheless, it had a double impact: firstly, debates about migration fed into the debates about membership of the European Union and, secondly, these debates in turn fed into a growing inclination amongst sections of the population to identify as English rather than British5 ; that is, the business of identity was attaining a higher profile in public discourse. Third, there was the referendum crisis. It was called by Prime Minister Cameron for narrowly party political reasons. There were strands of opinion within the Conservative Party that had long favoured leaving the European Union and they agitated over the years for a referendum. They were a problem for the party elite, so too a minor populist party, UKIP, which ran similar anti-European Union lines, and eventually the party leadership agreed to the demands for a public vote. In the referendum campaign, the mainstream Conservative Party elite assembled a coalition of the great and the good and the party made its support for continuing membership clear; major organizations came out in their support and they ran a strong albeit somewhat negative public campaign that stressed the costs of leaving the European Union; critics dubbed it ‘project fear’. The advocates of Brexit ran a populist campaign which impugned the work of ‘experts’ and promised immediate post-exit benefits for the country. It was clear in retrospect that the London-based state/government elite thought that they would win the referendum vote without too much trouble and, as noted, they buttressed their beliefs with a series of warnings of the economic consequences of leaving. However, in the event, they lost. The shock to the elite was clear and the following three years

5 See A. Barnett 2017 The Lure of Greatness, London, Unbound.

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saw elite-level faction fighting along with divisions of opinion within the general public. On occasion, the logic of the ‘unwritten constitution’ was called into question. All these conflicts ran on until an election was held in late 2019 and the Conservative Party—now led by a leave-minded leader, Boris Johnson—won a large parliamentary majority and so the issue was resolved for the time-being via parliamentary legislation. And then the fourth case, the domestic impacts of the 2020/21 Covid19 pandemic. Here the initial response of the state/government seems to have been in line with World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, that is, test, isolate and contact trace, but this was quickly abandoned in favour, albeit not directly or official stated, of ‘herd immunity’ until this, in turn, was also abandoned in the light of modelling exercises from a local London university research group,6 and ‘lockdown’ was implemented. Over the next few weeks up until early June 2020, when the restrictions began to be eased, the number of recorded deaths linked to the virus passed 40,000, whilst over the same period the number of excess deaths exceeded 60,000.7 To this run of crises can be added the decision of the British state/ government to involve itself in the long-running problems in the eastern parts of mainland Europe. This conflict has deep roots. The period 1989/ 91 saw sweeping change in CEE countries as they peacefully changed existing post-Second World War party-state structures for variant forms of liberal democracy. This would have been difficult in any circumstances but this was followed by the precipitate dissolution of the USSR, with consequent problems of state-making in nominally independent sovereign territories,8 the expansion of NATO/EU eastwards and the growth of inter-communal tensions/violence in Ukraine, eventually opening a local

6 The research group produced formal epidemiological models which predicted possible outcomes in terms of hundreds of thousands of deaths and the government changed track; however, later, journalists looked at the record of the researchers and suggested that they were not very good; the utility or otherwise of formal models later turned out to be one part of a wider debate about the relationship of the scientific community and elite level politics. 7 R. Booth 2020 ‘Excess Deaths in the UK Under Lockdown Pass 63,000’ in The Guardian, June 6, 2020. 8 As with dissolution of European overseas empires, former peripheral territories had to reinvent themselves as sovereign nation-states—state creation, nation invention and then the pursuit of economic and social development.

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Civil War in 2014 plus a wider proxy war involving both Russia and the USA running on from 2022.

Particular Crises Interlinked The crises, each of which impacted the basic structure of the state, were interlinked in a series of cross-cutting ways, that is, the fundamental dynamics of one crisis were replicated in the following crises and each episode of crisis stressed the system and uncovered weaknesses. It will be argued here that these events have features in common. Firstly, politically, the ideological commitments of the governments of the day were pro-market, that is, lodged, to a greater or lesser extent, within the fashionable nostrums of globalization theory thereby disposing the government of the day to a hands-off stance, slowing initial responses. Secondly, institutionally, in each case, the response of the relevant authorities was slow, handicapped by ingrained habits of thought (light-touch regulation, inhibitions about nationalization) or elite-level consensus (pro-EU, hence calls for a referendum re-vote). Thirdly, organizationally, problems were compounded by ill-prepared capacity, as evidenced in responses to Covid-19; and fourth, as a supplementary, the London-based authorities have neglected the differential impacts of these crises upon the wider domestic social world. Provisionally, Firstly, Political Failings The ideologies and party programmes of key players shaped their initial reactions to the demands of the crises and in all three cases the commitments of the governments of the day—thus both Labour and Conservative—were pro-market, that is, lodged, to a greater or lesser extent, within the fashionable nostrums of neo-liberal globalization theory. These intellectual dispositions, the ideas taken for granted, helped to shape policy responses. Globalization theory was constructed during a period of American international pre-eminence; economic, military and in the wake of the ending of the Cold War in Europe, read as ‘victory’, also cultural. Commentators spoke of a ‘uni-polar moment’ or a ‘hyper-power’ and the period was given a theoretical rationale, ‘globalization’. From proponents,

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it was asserted that the world was flat9 and that history was at an end10 ; and from some opponents, it was suggested that a post-modern era had begun11 ; whilst other opponents offered a counter-argument in favour of ideas of ‘regionalization’.12 In the event, the episode ran into the sand as domestic problems (financial crisis) and overseas wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria) undermined American claims to pre-eminence and the positive theoretical counterparts (affirmative and critical) faded. In the end, the episode recalled the similar 1950s episode of modernization theory, similarly optimistic, celebrating the five stages of economic growth13 and similarly undermined by war, financial pressures and domestic upheaval. Successive British governments bought into the ideas of globalization and these patterns of understanding disposed the government of the day to a hands-off stance in respect of policy-making; the marketplace was key, not the state. Such ideas worked to slow any initial responses to crises: the financial crisis was a direct shock, as these failures were not supposed to happen; in the case of Brexit vote, the elite were shocked at the result, as popular rejection of elite guidance was not supposed to happen; and in the case of the Covid-19 epidemic, elite shock/confusion was the result of the slow decades-long weakening of the resilience of the state (evidenced in both high death rates and economic disaster14 ). Provisionally, Secondly, Institutional Established structures helped to shape elite-level responses, and, in each case, the relevant authorities were unprepared, and the response of the relevant authorities was slow, being handicapped by ingrained habits of thought. With institutions, in the financial crisis , the key elite-level players were found in the core political agencies (state/government) and the related financial regulatory authorities. In the financial crisis, these

9 T. Freidman 2005 The World Is Flat, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 10 F. Fukuyama 1992 The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press. 11 See for example F. Jameson 1991 Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism, Duke University Press; see also David Harvey 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell. 12 P. Hirst and G. Thompson 1996 Globalization in Question, Cambridge, Polity. 13 W. W. Rostow 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth, Cambridge University Press. 14 A. Tooze 2020 ‘Shockwave’ in London Review of Books 42.8.

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authorities were initially slow to react, with responses to the failure of Northern Rock and the very public run on the bank slowed by inhibitions about nationalization. In the Brexit referendum, where the key players were associated with the Whitehall/Westminster machinery, other than a small group of anti-Europeans, there was a strong metropolitan elite-level stance in favour of maintaining membership, and this inhibited a forward-looking response to the result. The elite sought to protect the status quo and the vote was deemed illegitimate on various grounds and a re-vote was demanded thereby drawing out the crisis. In the Covid-19 epidemic crisis, with key players in the core political agencies supplemented by professional medical agencies, the response of these authorities was confused: herd immunity or WHO advice or lockdown with the latter picked up only after the virus was spreading rapidly through population.15 Provisionally, Third Organizationally There were problems compounded by ill-prepared capacity. This was true of the financial crisis where there was a rapid response to protect the financial system but no significant subsequent reform as proponents of radical reform were outside the system and thus disregarded. It was much less obvious in the case of Brexit as here the elite’s failings were less about organization and more about a lack of elite recognition of the possibility of defeat. The remain organization was not badly organized, rather it failed to recognize and thus respond to disenchantment with the status quo of many relatively poor people (later dubbed the ‘somewhere(s)’. And then, in the case of the epidemic of Covid-19, the state/ government’s failures were clear. An exercise called Exercise Cygnus16 run by Imperial College in October 2016 produced dire results: it identified shortages of NHS equipment such as PPE; it identified shortages of NHS resources such as ICU beds; and it identified lack of organizational integration with many bodies running according to their own sometimes out of date plans. The government did not act on the report and as of today, the report has not been released to the public. When the 15 What was noticeable about this third strategy was popular acquiescence—by this point, medical professionals with expertise based in natural science had come to the fore in public statements; cogent explanations were offered in place of familiar state/ government PR. 16 Daily Telegraph March 28, 2020; Daily Mail, March 29, 2020.

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Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in England the report’s criticisms were born out—a lack of materials, capacity and organization—one striking aspect of the state/government’s response to the pandemic was the preference for centralized responses and the use of private sector contractors, and even the armed forces, in place of local-level expertise. The Whitehall/ Westminster authorities eventually asked local government public health officials to take charge of testing in care homes in their areas (some 900,000 residents and staff) but the only issue here is why it took so long.17 Provisionally, Fourth, Failing to Grasp Social Impacts The ways in which elite-level decisions unpacked through the social world were not neutral. The response to the initial financial crisis involved some reforms to the banking system along with efforts to manage or pay down debts incurred in the rescues; this involved tax rises and spending cuts, together ‘austerity’. The disproportionate impact on the poor has been widely remarked.18 The results of the epidemic underscored these patterns of inequality as the virus impacted different communities in different ways. The substantive detail of these crises are quite different: financial market functional breakdowns, chaotic elite/popular politics in regard to Europe and recently the question of how to deal with a novel Corona virus in conditions of global pandemic, but the ways in which the state/ government responded reveals striking commonalities, provisionally: • • • • •

Intellectual initial disinclination to acknowledge the crisis; Lack of forward planning despite independent advice/warnings; Slow/confused responses to crises; Preference for elite-centred reactions; Inconsistent elite concern for social implications of crisis responses.

17 David Brindle in The Guardian May 8, 2020. 18 K. Pickett and R. Wilkinson 2009 The Spirit Level, London, Bloomsbury.

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General Crisis: The Wheel of History The inter-state pattern at the end of the Second World War left the British Empire in a condition of advanced decay, mainland Europe was damaged and divided into two blocs with the USA as the key political player. Much of the international machinery of the post-war world was, so to say, made in America; the UN, the IBRD, the IMF and so on. Add to this claims to a cultural centrality and the institutional/political result is the idea of ‘the West’. It was within the frame of the West that Britain and Europe recovered from wartime disasters. It was an America-centred liberal system; the ideal of a rule-governed global system reached a peak of influence in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a brief period of ‘uni-polarity’ which in turn modulated into claims about globalization and the end of history. The End of Ideas About Neo-liberal Globalization The decades encompassing the end of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first century saw an emphatic celebration of the power of the liberal marketplace—the line of argument was presented by political players, commentators and academics—in addition, these ideas found acceptance in key institutions—in international financial institutions, thus, importantly, the IMF, World Bank and WTO, and in the domestic politics of many otherwise sovereign states. In Britain, claims about the marketplace became commonplace; in the 1980s the New Right assiduously pressed these claims and alternate sets of ideas were marginalized. However, a mix of over-enthusiastic money-making in the banking industry coupled to lax government regulation, created the conditions for a crisis—the bubble of debt created over a couple of decades collapsed in 2008: in both America and Britain—and later in mainland Europe—the states bailed out the banks. The End of Ideas of Western Pre-eminence The crisis of 2008 signalled the end of the ideas of neo-liberal globalization; it is true that the global economy did not immediately shrink and trade and financial linkages continued; but any ideas that the future was

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market-centred and secure were overthrown; a conventional wisdom19 had failed. Another was to fail a few years later. In 2022 a long-simmering conflict in Eastern Europe mutated into an open cross-border invasion; the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The response of the USA and its European allies was swift and programmes of military, economic and diplomatic assistance were put in place for Ukraine. But, at the same time, it was noted that significant global powers did not rally to the support of the West—China, India and the bulk of the ‘global south’ read the conflicts in the Donbass region as a narrowly European issue. At which point, it became clear that the familiar post-1945 Western claim to preeminence had failed. It became evident that the global system no longer took the form of a key power, the USA, with a related network of allies plus thereafter all the rest. A new multi-polar global pattern was in the process of taking shape. Finessing the Crises The British elite has shown that it can finesse a serious crisis—it did so in 1945 as the Second World War came to an end and its empire dissolved away—it did so in the later 1970s as the post-war Keynesian settlement faded into economic failings and political contestation. There is no reason to suppose that the elite will not be able to deal with the current unfolding general crisis. However, nothing is guaranteed and as crises present opportunities, a speculative route to progressive reform could be found; a programme shaped by consideration of three ideas—Europeanization, modernization and democratization20 —with this last noted as the key.

An agenda for Enquiry The details of each particular case will be considered. Much of this can be accomplished by creating simple chronologies detailing how the state/ government read and reacted step by step to these crises, identifying the 19 J.K. Galbraith’s term—see J.K. Galbraith 1958 The Affluent Society, London, Penguin. 20 Flagged in P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England: Englishness in the New Europe, Manchester University Press, see Afterword; an earlier gesture to this end was made in P.W. Preston 1984 Europe, Democracy and the Dissolution of Britain, Aldershot, Avebury.

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key agents, key institutions and their declared policy responses. More can be accomplished by tracking the post-crisis downstream consequences: (i) most obvious in the case of the financial crisis where failures in finance and regulation were met with tax rises and service cut-backs for the population in general, so cast in money terms the costs of the banking crisis were borne by the population; (ii) somewhat more ambiguous in the case of the Brexit vote where winning and losing groups in the population are not clear cut (thus pro-leave voters perhaps loose financially but win culturally with the election of the Conservative Party in 2019—in the same vein, pro-remain voters lose culturally and where young maybe also financially); and (iii) seemingly clear in the case of the pandemic—old, poor, BAME, male and fat suffer disproportionately, the wealthy middle classes suffer less and elite suffer less. And, more speculatively, looking to the more general crisis, under the heading of matters arising, further questions for scholarship can be noted principally around ‘de-globalization’; thus, the weakening of liberal market ideologies coupled to a renewed stress on the role of the state in securing ‘resilience’ points also to the issue of democratization. In the case of Britain, debate has often focused on the over-concentrated character of the state/government.21 This line of criticism runs through commentary on the post-Second World War political history of Britain; there is one centre, Whitehall/Westminster and it is complemented by the plurality electoral system; together they ensure that political power is concentrated at the centre. Whitehall/Westminster seemingly does not engage with local-level expertise or the wider population preferring instead to issue instructions.22 There are various tags characterizing this practice: club

21 State/government, that is, groups of professional politicians, come and go, but the networks of elite actors, that is, the core civil servants, the military/security, the judiciary, the central bank/city, the monarchy/church and the state broadcaster, together the machineries of the state, continue to wield power whichever political party happens to be in office, and it is the state which lodges the polity/country within wider trans-state structures of power, thereby opening up a further set of elite-level linkages; on this, S. Strange 1988 States and Markets, London, Pinter. 22 Conventionally, the realm of international relations—but these flows of structural power run through the domestic realm—one way of thinking about the domestic or national state is that it is an elite-centred ‘membrane’ ordering trans-state flows of power; on ‘elites see W. Case 2002 Politics in Southeast Asia: Democracy or Less, London, Curzon.

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government23 ; oligarchy24 ; early phase transition to liberal democracy25 ; mal-development26 or living in an old country.27 And all of these serve to open up the issue of ‘democratization’, the task of bringing effective political power closer to the people that the state nominally serves. In respect of Britain, the whole system is popularly characterized as a liberal democracy and whilst aspects of this description do make sense (thus a concern for individual rights or the routine use of popular competitive elections and in turn their general popular legitimacy), considered structurally, that is, the institutionally buttressed distribution of power, it is clear that the polity is controlled by a narrow ruling group that successfully reproduces itself but which is not rigidly closed so that figures from subordinate groups can rise or as necessary be co-opted28 ; the whole ensemble is best understood as a soft oligarchy.

23 D. Marquand 1988 The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana; D. Marquand 1981 ‘Club Government: the Crisis of the Labour Party in the National Perspective’ in Government and Opposition 16.1. 24 F. Mount 2012 The New Few: Or, A Very British Oligarchy, London, Simon and Shuster. 25 A. Meyer 1981 The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York, Croom Helm. 26 Nairn-Anderson Thesis; see T. Nairn 1977 The Break Up of Britain, London, New

Left Books. 27 P. Wright 1985 On Living in An Old Country, London, Verso. 28 In this way ‘Britain’ resembles a colony: the metropolitan ruling elite is secure,

dominates its political periphery and can draw in talented subalterns; in Britain, London is the primate city, the place to which the aspiring young make their contemporary ‘colonial pilgrimages’; on this, see B. Anderson 1983 Imagined Communities, London, Verso.

CHAPTER 2

The British Empire: Finessing the Collapse, 1942–1956

Over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the shift to the modern world saw the contemporaneous creation of the British Empire, Britain and the British. The system took shape in the guise of a state-empire and the creation reached an apogee in the early years of the twentieth century, yet the brief period 1942–1956 saw its collapse and the consequent re-ordering of its component territories in peripheral independence and metropolitan downsizing. The metropolitan elite addressed the crisis of collapse and with it the business of adaptation to novel circumstances with denial coupled to the creative re-imagining of their core political project in ‘Continuing Britain’, thereby finessing the possibilities of deep reform; and so, the elite kept power. The subsequent political history saw reform attempts ordered around ideas of ‘the new Elizabethan Age’, later ‘Europe’, and more recently ‘globalization’ and where all promised much, all failed to deliver. The root of the cycle of optimism and disappointment lies in the success of the elite in restricting change, for whilst reforms were made as the empire collapsed, in particular, the creation of the ‘welfare state’, fundamental political arrangements were left largely intact. The system endures, it is strong, it is resilient, it blocks deeper reform and as a consequence, it ensures a process of relative decline; but the decline is slow, the country is rich, with the masses acquiescent and the ruling elite content.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_2

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Shaping Post-War British Politics: A Road Not Taken The Second World War was a political catastrophe for the governing elites of the British Empire; at the outset of the fighting, the metropolitan elite governed an empire that embraced large parts of the globe. The linkages were various including formal colonies, protectorates, mandate territories plus those with dominion status, and add to these, the informal links, the gentlemanly capitalism of trade links,1 and some idea of the power of this political organization can be grasped. One substantive illustration2 points to Britain’s late nineteenth-century dominant position in energy (coal), finance (sterling) and manufacturing (heavy industry) plus possession of a powerful military (Royal Navy). But by the end of the fighting, the empire was in an advanced state of disintegration. In the East3 ; holdings in China were lost, occupied by Imperial Japan; those in Southeast Asia had been occupied, with Singapore captured in 1942,4 and crucially, India had been promised independence. As the world war unfolded, the future status of territories in the Middle East was in question. Latin American links had weakened as during the war those countries turned to the USA.5 And after the 1956 Suez debacle Harold Macmillan moved quickly to withdraw from sub-Saharan Africa. All this amounts to a dramatic collapse: political, economic and diplomatic; and replicated, 1 See P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins 1993 British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914, London, Longman; P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins 1993 British Imperialism: Crisis and Reconstruction 1914–1990, London, Longman. 2 D. Edgerton has written on British science and technology, see: D. Edgerton 2006 Warfare State: Britain 1920–70, Cambridge University Press; D. Edgerton 2011 Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, London, Allen Lane. A later text broadens his scope as he writes about the post-war rise of a ‘British nation’, roughly from 1945 to the late seventies—a tale of partial success; D. Edgerton 2018 The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, London, Allen Lane; in contrast Corelli Barnet has written about long-term decline; against both, others have argued that change has come to the UK slowly, see Arno Mayer, Tom Nairn. 3 On this A. Iriye 1987 The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific,

London, Longman. 4 On this N. Tarling 2001 A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia 1941–45, Singapore, Horizon Books; C. Bayly and T. Harper 2004 Forgotten Armies; The Fall of British Asia 1941–45, London, Allen Lane. 5 On this, Raul Prebisch, ECLA and structuralist economics, the precursor of dependency theory, later influentially presented by A.G. Frank.

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it might be noted, by mainland European countries in respect of their overseas holdings—France, Netherlands, Belgium and, after a period, Portugal. The failure of empire, a wide political-structural collapse involving the dissolution of a geographically extensive, multi-ethnic and loosely hierarchical system, gave rise not only to the emergence in sometime peripheral territories of competing aspirant replacement elites (thus, for example, the relationship of Nehru and Jinnah, or Lee Kuan Yew and Tunku Abdul Rahman, or Kim Il Sung and Rhee Syng Man) but also, in the sometime metropolitan core, the elite’s task of reading and reacting to the dissolution of empire. It was a major political crisis and the elite response was creative; in brief, the elite invented a new country and proceeded to run it as though nothing much had happened, claiming success in war, continuity in domestic affairs and the promise of future prosperity. The broad social reformism engendered by the war years, the second major war in twenty years, was channelled into the legislative efforts of the 1945 Labour government; in brief, a slew of industries and banks were taken into public ownership along with the creation of a welfare state. However, political reform was ignored and the newly invented country was not founded on ideas of democracy. The post-war settlement was a contested compromise and a variant of the status quo ante was put into place; networks of power continued; thus, the elite linkages of finance, industry, monarchy, church and armed forces plus the Conservative Party. In government the Labour Party contented itself with ameliorative welfare reforms; these plans were drawn from pre-war debates with many reformist liberal ideas and supported by many patrician figures.6 But the reform programmes were ambitious, indeed David Edgerton7 argues that they did create a ‘British Nation’, but by 19768

6 K.O. Morgan 1984 Labour in Power 1945–1951, Oxford University Press; Morgan

lists the birth dates and backgrounds of key figures and, in a caustic fashion, so too Corelli Barnett 7 Edgerton 2018. 8 Callaghan speech to party conference 1976—‘you cannot … spend your way out of

a recession’—cited in K.O. Morgan 2001 Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace, Oxford University Press, p. 382.

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the reform impulse was spent and the way was open to reaction; in brief, the rise of the New Right, later, neo-liberal globalization.9 It is clear in retrospect that the metropolitan elite’s response to the collapse of the hitherto long-running project of empire was effective: they gave ground on empire (they had to10 ), they gave ground on welfare (they had to11 ), they gave ground on civil society and popular culture (they had to12 ), but they did not give ground on the core institutions of the residual state (they didn’t have to13 ) and so these remained intact. In respect of Westminster, a corrupt electoral system facilitated the interchange of two conservative parties, the one patrician, the other subaltern, with both engaging society in a top-down fashion. And then, more broadly, the elite embraced the new leadership role of the USA (they had to14 ), and the official rhetoric of the country now spoke of ‘the West’15 with Britain presented as a stalwart part of that politicocivilizational unity, a moderating influence, Greece, to America’s Rome,16 and a bridge between the USA and Europe,17 but in truth the empire had been eclipsed, global power had moved westwards and the residual

9 Along with a popular decline in concern; Peter Mair 2013 Ruling the Void, London, Verso. 10 As noted, the settlement colonies were by now independent ‘dominions;’ the jewel in the crown, India, had been promised independence whilst other holdings were untenable and were relinquished relatively quickly; for an overview, J. Darwin 2009 The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, Cambridge University Press. 11 Morgan 2001—there were many patrician reformers, Labour was in some respects pushing against an open door 12 The rise of an American-style commercial and popular culture and by the sixties patterns of cultural deference were weakening rapidly although the influx of commercialism was read as ambiguous by some, see R. Hoggart 1958 The Uses of Literacy, London, Penguin. 13 Domestic reforms were top-down—ordered by patrician reformers—Attlee, Beveridge et al.—internationally, the elite eschewed involvement in changes afoot in the mainland, preferring to follow the USA whilst claiming continued great power status; hence participation in Korean War; hence Bevin’s British bomb with union flag on top of it. 14 Thus Eisenhower, responding to the British, French and Israeli invasion of Suez threatens to pull the plug on the UK currency. 15 N. Davies 1997 Europe: A History, London, Pimlico, pp. 39–45. 16 Attributed to Harold MacMillan. 17 Andrew Gamble 2003 Between Europe and America: The Future of British Politics, London, Palgrave.

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territory of empire, the new sovereign state Britain, was a dependent subordinate of the USA.18 The elite creatively managed this severe general crisis, finessed simultaneous calls for deeper metropolitan reform from the Labour left, the influential CPGB, some public intellectuals,19 those demobilized soldiers who had encountered the work of the army education core20 plus, as intellectually adjacent figures, London-based colonial nationalists,21 and preserved their position and reordered the now domestic nation-state, cementing the new settlement with the confection ‘Continuing Britain’. Core political-institutional machineries were carried over into the new situation and new circumstances required new explanations. The ideological confection of Continuing Britain comprised a number of threads: the claim to the existence of a historically long-established nation-state (better described in terms of preceding empire and earlier feudal system22 ); the claim to military victory in a virtuous war (not false, but misleading23 ); and the claim to the status of a model for others (not so, rather the USA). It was a creative response to shifting circumstances and it informed the stance of the elite (‘punching above our weight’) just as it informed the thinking of the masses (‘we won the war’), but it was not a uniform response and the new ideological boundaries had to be policed and critics on the left and right addressed.24 In summary, the elite had to respond to changing structural forces, that is, global shifts in power, and order its domestic population, and they were successful; demands for deep political change were finessed

18 Bretton Woods machinery plus US dollar plus NATO organisation—together, ‘the West’; Corelli Barnet is critical of post-war elites, taken to have missed the boat in the matter of reconstruction. 19 Ideas of a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ were debated by early sixties left-

intellectuals—Tony Crosland—Richard Crossman—Ralph Miliband. 20 Paul Addison 1977 The Road to 1945, London, Jonathan Cape. 21 Thus, Lee Kuan Yew’s PAP had its early incarnations amongst London-based

reformers. 22 Linda Colley, John Darwin, Norman Davies 23 On the fighting, N. Davies 2006 Europe at War1939-1945: No Simple Victory,

London, Macmillan; on the multiple hatreds and subsequent memories, Tony Judt 2005 Post-war: A History of Europe since 1945, London, Allen Lane. 24 Corelli Barnet’s conservative line on decline; liberal/libertarian lines from F. Hayek and followers; socialist lines from broad political left.

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and the elite managed the process of the collapse-plus-reconstruction of its sustaining political machineries. In the shift from empire to state the old order adapted and the old order prospered25 albeit in the changed circumstances of a novel American hegemony and domestic subaltern cultural self-assertion.

The State-Empire: Geographically Extensive, Multi-ethnic and Loosely Ordered The earliest phases of the ongoing shift to the modern world of natural science-based industrial capitalism can be dated to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Natural scientists come to a new importance,26 social theorists endeavour to grasp the changes in classical political economy27 ; so too artists,28 many in a romantic mood, others, later, celebrating the new patterns of emergent middle-class life.29 Northwest Europe was the key area; including the British Isles.30 It is also the period that saw the creation of the British Empire. Here Linda Colley’s argument31 points to the 1707 Treaty of Union, the loss of colonies in North America as a result of the American War of Independence and a loss of access to mainland Europe consequent upon the rise of Napoleon, as the crucial structural changes which, supplemented by the suppression of local impulses to democratic political reform, plus the development of a post-1707 integrated domestic marketplace, produced

25 On this, see T. Nairn 1977 The Break Up of Britain, London, New Left Books; Arno Mayer 1981 The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York, Croom Helm. 26 On the role of natural science and industry in twentieth century, see Edgerton 2005. 27 A sociologically inflected version is available from Anthony Giddens 1971 Capitalism

and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, Cambridge University Press. 28 J.M. Turner paints the shift: familiarly, The Fighting Temeraire 1838 and Rain, Steam and Speed 1844. 29 Impressionists worked in Britain; Victorian genre painting 1837–1901 rejected classicism for realistic paintings of familiar themes, landscapes, animals and the like for a new middle class market. 30 N. Davies 2000 The Isles: A History, London, Papermac. 31 L. Colley 1992 Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 , Yale University Press.

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the circumstances that turned the attentions of the local elite outwards, actively pursuing the project of empire.32 The empire had a metropolitan core in London33 ; home of politics, finance and administration; other domestic provincial cities/areas were important, for extractive industries, heavy industry, manufacturing and the like. The empire was ordered as a loose agglomeration of subordinate cores: thus, Cairo, Cape Town, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney, reaching thereby into South Asia, Southeast Asia and China, and later reaching into sub-Saharan Africa and via trade links into Latin America. The empire was multi-ethnic as the process of territorial expansion had drawn existing communities into the overarching empire system; cast in developmental terms, these ranged from small-scale communities with low material levels of living through communities with relatively well-off levels of living, some in the context of large-scale highly sophisticated premodern empires. However, in the late nineteenth century, these ethnic groups were ordered by metropolitan elites in terms of a quasi-Darwinian hierarchy of races with these relationships seen in competitive terms, economic, cultural and military, hence the routine recourse to violence. The empire covered a vast geographical territory with holdings in North America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia and China; hence the popular idea that the ‘sun never set’ on the empire. It traded over this vast area, buttressed by naval power, and a network of economic and administrative institutions served it. And as the British Empire was created, so too was Britain and the political–cultural identity British. Ernest Gellner34 argues that nations were an elite response to the demands of structural change contingent upon the creation of modern states. In the case of Britain, Norman Davies35 argues that following domestic dynastic problems, the

32 Darwin 2009. 33 On the imagery of London in mid-nineteenth century, see Linda Nead 2000 Victo-

rian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London, Yale University Press. 34 E. Gellner 1983 Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Blackwell; B. Anderson 1983 Imagined Communities, London, Verso. 35 N. Davies 2000 The Isles: A History, London, Papermac, pp. 248 et seq; Davies’ argument is summarized in P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England: Englishness in the New Europe, Manchester University Press, pp. 3–4.

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importation of a German head of state—King George—meant that the country’s history of links with France had to be veiled and so a version of ‘Medieval England’ was embraced, a stylized national past. The state-empire system reached its apogee in the 1930s; prosperous, influential and stable; metropolitan industry remained strong and new light industries were growing, the city remained influential, the currency was widely used, the military, in particular the navy,36 remained strong; the elite confident. Yet the state-empire was subject to increasing criticism, not merely details (this or that local problem), nor the system in its entirety (current conditions, read a defective in this or that fashion), rather the idea of empire itself, now read by critics as fundamentally inappropriate to the modern world.

Metropolitan Conflict, Peripheral Revolt and the Progressive Collapse of Empire During the 1920s/1930s, the state-empire system was under pressure from a variety of sources37 ; domestic critics, voices from the peripheries and the pragmatic arguments of rising powers such as the USA and Imperial Japan seeking analogous privileges within the extant global system. Finally, the British Empire, along with those of mainland European countries, was fatally undermined by the violent events routinely summed as the ‘Second World War’ so that after 1945, ‘empire’ was untenable, dissolution inevitable. Metropolitan Critics So first, within the confines of metropolitan Britain, there were critics, and the empire was variously judged to be too expensive, un-ethical and in today’s terms, long past its sell-by date. There were various proposals including dominion status for some territories, federations and at some point—usually distant in time—independence. The idea of independence was key but was typically not considered to be imminent.

36 Debatable according to Corelli Barnet 1991 Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, London, Hodder, who identifies cutbacks and mal-organisation in the twenties and thirties. 37 On this, see P.W. Preston 2014 After the Empires, London, Palgrave.

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Peripheral Voices Then, secondly, within the scattered territories of the empire, there were various analogous calls for change, to which the metropolitan elite responded cautiously. Benedict Anderson, looking at America, writes about colonial pilgrimages as people from the peripheries move to the centre and then discover that any further social advance is blocked and now they read their circumstances accurately, the root of secessionist nationalist sentiment.38 The most vigorous and important of these claims to independence were made by groups in then British India but other European colonial powers encountered similar problems with the French in Indo-China and Algeria, the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies, whilst other European powers dug-in and tried to keep their colonies, most noticeably, Portugal in East Africa and West Africa; eventually these too became independent but not without long-running guerrilla wars. Aspirant Players Thirdly, on a wider scale, within the global system powerful competitors emerged, notably, to the west, the USA and in the east, Imperial Japan, both emerging in the late nineteenth century as significant empirebuilding players in the global system. The USA asserted itself both diplomatically in East Asia with the trading voyages to Japan in the 1860s, which precipitated the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent rapid development of Imperial Japan. America also developed trading activities in China; it was the USA that produced the idea of the ‘Open Door’ in China, protecting access for all foreign powers. In other expansionist moves, affirmed in ideas of ‘Manifest Destiny’, the USA acted militarily with the conquest of the Spanish holdings in the Philippines plus seizure of territories in Latin America, the Caribbean and areas in southern North America; all this plus the Indian Wars which allowed the USA to hold most of the continent. Japan followed suit, engaging in militarily successful wars against both Czarist Russia and Qing China over control of the Korean peninsula, and later advancing into Manchuria and northern areas of China. The Imperial Japanese looked at the condition of China in the late nineteenth century and saw domestic conflicts, a weakening Qing, along with 38 B. Anderson 1983 Imagined Communities, London, Verso.

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avaricious foreign traders, and concluded that they had to assume a leadership role in East Asia, that is, in the hitherto Chinese sphere, hence the development of the ideas of ‘Pan-Asianism’. The idea of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere grew out of these circumstances. The Imperial Japanese elite pushed for territory in Manchuria, then northern areas of China, before eventually launching a war against the forces of Nationalist China. These actions provoked tensions with the USA and war began in late 1941; the Japanese forces swept away the European colonial powers and for a whilst they occupied most of China before experiencing defeat at the hands of the military forces of the USA.39 World War and Empire Collapse And finally, in the early years of the twentieth century, the state-empire system failed; it was finally destroyed during the events routinely summed in Britain as the Second World War. Add to this the war in East Asia, familiarly, the Pacific War. The whole complex period involved multiple participants, multiple military campaigns, multiple nominal end-points and multiple subsequent memories of great loss.40 Major Conflicts • • • • • • •

1911–1914 1928–1937 1937–1945 1939–1945 1941–1945 1941–1945 1945–1949

The Chinese Revolution First Chinese Civil War Sino-Japanese War The Second World War The German-Soviet War The Pacific War Second Chinese Civil War

39 European allies, including forces of British Empire, played secondary roles: see C. Thorne 1978 Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan 1941–45, Oxford University Press; C. Thorne 1986 The Far Eastern War: States and Societies 1941–45, London, Counterpoint; in China, the armies of the KMT and CCP also played a key role, but it was American naval strength that was decisive in the war against Japan 40 On this, N. Davies 2006 Europe at War1939-45: No Simple Victory, London, Macmillan; see Tony Judt 2005 Post-War: A History of Europe since 1945, London, Allen Lane; see also P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge.

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To this list should be added a number of secondary wars; those involving colonial wars of independence and those which were informed by Cold War competition involving primarily, the USA, USSR and PRC. In this overall period, there were conflicts around the planet and they caused great loss of life and material destruction. The State-Empire System Overwhelmed The confection of Continuing Britain contained the claim, often associated with the creation of the Commonwealth, represented as a club of sovereign nations, that withdrawal from peripheral empire territories had been achieved smoothly and in general peacefully, that is, replacement elites had slipped easily into power as the metropolitan power withdrew, but this is fiction as the withdrawal was not smooth as prospective successor elites fought the colonial authorities and each other in the run-up to the sweeping political renewal called independence. The collapse of the state-empire was neither smooth nor uncontested and it was anything but non-violent. First, the exigencies of warfighting allowed sometime peripheral elites to effectively demand change, some via wartime military contributions, others in the context of the disruptions of occupation, yet others, arguing along with the tides of opinion, now decidedly unsympathetic to ideas of empire. Thus, in China, where the 1911 revolution had signalled peripheral resistance to foreign interference, the contending forces of the later Civil War ensured colonial withdrawal.41 In Southeast Asia change was precipitated as a result of wartime occupation in Burma and Malaya with pro-allied guerrilla groups active, later feeding into independence movements.42 In India, there were the long-building demands of Congress and the Muslim League and independence came after the war years. In the Middle East, various groups struggled for control in Mandate Palestine, whilst in Egypt nascent nationalist groups sought change. British attempts to keep their holdings failed with the 1956 Suez debacle. Later still, similar changes ran through sub-Saharan African holdings where there were particular problems with 41 Except for the British re-occupation of Hong Kong—in defiance of war-time understandings with Nationalist China; see S. Tsang 2004 A Modern History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press. 42 Aung San in Burma, Chandra Bose for India, INA—plus resistance in Malay peninsula MPAJA.

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colonies of settlement. The change also came to the Caribbean. And during the war years Latin America, cut-off by war from traditional links to Europe, experienced a re-orientation, away from Europe, in particular Britain, towards North America.43 Then, secondly, the exigencies of warfighting led domestic metropolitan groups to demand both macro-level and local-level change; decolonization and domestic reform were intertwined as both revolved around the ideas of democracy/independence. The second major war in twenty years discredited the ruling elite, a process familiarly symbolized by Chamberlin’s news conference on his return from Munich. The Atlantic Charter 1941 offered a macro-level justification for the fighting; it promised a different future both internationally in a rule-based system, and in its domestically-oriented passages, with better levels of living for ordinary people. In Britain, the future of the empire was sketched out in the Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1940. Domestic reforms were summed by the Beveridge Report 1942, the Education Act 1944 (Butler Act) and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947; together these acts ushered in a period of planned development for broad economic and social reform and they were the key to popular mobilization, in particular, Beveridge, the architect of the post-war ‘welfare state’.44 And third, the financial situation of Britain in 1945 was poor and commenters usually sum up by remarking that ‘the country was broke’; the costs of warfighting materials had been heavy, overseas holdings had been sold-off and debts to the USA had mounted. In addition to these burdens, there were demands for funding both to rebuild domestic war damage and to fund the new projects of a welfare state. The post-war Atlee government confronted this accumulation of problems. Domestically, it moved ahead, as noted, but internationally, in retrospect, it remained stuck in a collective mindset that understood Britain to be a ‘great power’. In the late forties resources were made available for the military and armed forces were active in Mandate Palestine, Malaya and Korea. And in 1956, with the invasion of Egypt, Anthony 43 Creating the idea of ‘Import Substituting Industrialization’—theorized by Raul Prebisch and ECLA. 44 These initiative provoked hostility: thus F. Hayek, a critic of socialist planning, opening the way to the later efforts of Milton Friedman and the libertarian followers of novelist Ayn Rand; see J. Ree 2023 ‘Opium of the Elite’ in London Review of Books 45.3 February 2, 2023.

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Eden authorized the last major deployment of forces in defence of empire. The expedition was halted by financial threats from the USA. Two consequences followed: on the one hand, politically, long-terms security policy was shifted towards subordination to the USA; and on the other hand, the financial costs of resisting drives for decolonization led the metropolitan elite to off-load all remaining territories of the rapidly fading state-empire, in particular, in sub-Saharan Africa; hence the famous ‘winds of change’. The state-empire system slowly disintegrated; as the multi-ethnic, geographically scattered and multi-centred hierarchical political unit, the British Empire, faded away, its territories were politically reordered. In the sometime peripheral territories, a large number of new nominally sovereign nation-states were created; that is, replacement structures were created as new nation-states were proclaimed. Local replacement elites sought to build states, invent nations and pursue development. At the same time, in the sometime metropolitan core territory, a novel nation-state was created.

Reworking the Empire: Change and Understanding in Core and Periphery Dismantling the empire entailed a mix of political, institutional and cultural exercises in redefinition. In the core, this re-ordering can be unpacked as a series of complex, interrelated changes which turn the central part of a state-empire into a simple nation-state. An analogous set of problems faced replacement elites in the sometime peripheral territories and they created novel nation-states. First, Which People; Boundaries and Territorial Definition Dismantling the empire involved redefinition; that is, the task of drawing the boundaries and identifying the citizens of the new states. In regard to Britain, the first element took around twenty years to accomplish (the process of withdrawal from peripheral holdings), and the second element was both quicker (law, defining citizens) and took much longer in practice (minority/majority relations and further law defining citizens). But the business of specifying the geographical/juridical boundaries of new states was not straightforward. The sometime metropolitan core of the empire could lay claim to a pre-existing modern state and the post-empire

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state was thus read as a successor to that state. In contrast, in the sometime peripheral territories, aspirant replacement elites faced more awkward issues: first, physically controlling a given territory with competing local elites and interested non-local elites, plus second, securing the support/ acquiescence of the local population, which might be ethnically diverse and culturally non-modern,45 at which point replacement elites were able to write formal constitutions which specified the borders of the newly created states.46 In the case of the sometime core, there was a diminution of geographical claims to sovereignty, as territories were off-loaded; thus, the boundaries of the core grew smaller. Claims on these territories were reduced; the claims made on the old core by new states were limited (sovereignty implies ‘going it alone’). In respect of Britain, at the time and now, all this was accomplished in the juridical context of no written constitution, instead an adaptation and accumulation of law. Linda Colley47 argues that rules for government or the king are age-old but constitutions belong to the modern world and whilst the link is usually made between democracy and constitutions, with the American 1776 and French 1789 revolutions, there is a wider tale to tell for in general constitutional law was created in the context of warfare. Elites write constitutions after wars and they serve to legitimate the rulers, advertise a role on world stage and enable coherent state to tax population, and once written they help shape subsequent politics. Early examples were found in England where the Civil War gave rise to systematic reflection on the nature of political community, with declarations drawn up until the restoration of the monarchy halted this line of political advance. It was not until the Dutch invasion of 1688 that advance resumed. Colley points out that the Bill of Rights restricted the power of the crown, asserted the independence of courts and parliament and guaranteed free elections—all within a class-divided pre-modern society. Colley adds that this also created a strong state, centred on London and able to mobilize financial and manpower resources and open the way to empire with its characteristic mix of trade, violence and written agreements. On the broadest scale, the British Empire created the notion 45 Empires typically included multiple cultural groups each with their own ideas about the world; relativism is a given, see C. Geertz 2001 Available Light, Princeton University Press. 46 In respect of East Asia, see Preston 2014. 47 Linda Colley 2021 The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, Princeton University Press.

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of a British Subject; in principle, it encompassed all who dwelt within the empire and the ideas are codified in British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. If boundaries mark the geography, then ideas of citizenship identify the population and in this regard the end of the empire presented problems. Political redefinition was needed in identifying citizens; thus, the business of defining the membership (and non-membership) of the new state, hence citizenship laws encompassing those born in the territory (jus soli) or those born to citizens (jus sanguinis) or those migrating to the territory and fulfilling the criteria for naturalization.48 The roots of idea of ‘citizenship’ lie in mediaeval law related to lord/peasant, superior/inferior, but in the modern era the idea was extended towards the idea of an equal member of a community; later still the idea was extended to empire where the mix of people was accommodated with assorted statuses. The post-empire experience of inward migration opened up further issues; integration, assimilation and the like, with the most recent instance of this old debate centring on EU migrants, both during British membership and withdrawal from the EU. The core territory, the state based in the British Isles, could claim to be the successor state of the empire and so continuity was assumed,49 but it took work to establish the nature of that continuity: boundaries and membership were at issue and these were raised at 1947 Commonwealth Conference. The British Nationality Act 1948 addressed this problem. It created an over-arching status—Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC)—and particular local rules were made for national citizenship, thus Canadian, Australian, South African, New Zealand and so on. As colonies became independent their CUKC status lapsed. There were many detailed problems and so on, but dissolving the empire was a difficult business. One consequence of the law was an inflow of migrants from sometime peripheral empire territories; thus, they were British Citizens (CUKC) and the now symbolic arrivals were the passengers on the Empire Windrush. At first, such migrants arrived in relatively small 48 Recent issues: (i) disintegration of Yugoslavia, with multiple new states; (ii) dissolution of Soviet Union, with multiple new states; (iii) Brexit, with end to ‘EU citizenship’; (iv) Hong Kong, with status of BNO holders. In all cases, politics, law and culture shape state and popular views. 49 Key institutions reworked their activities, see S. Stockwell 2018 The British End of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press.

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numbers but as inward migration continued, sections of the host population expressed reservations, and in the fifties and sixties there were social problems, abstract and practical. The 1948 act and the inflow of migrants opened up issues of identity, belonging and with inward flows, assimilation. A new area of political, intellectual and social reflection and action was opened up and ideas of racism and multiculturalism were debated, later, ideas of ‘institutional racism’ along with more positive responses grasped as ‘convivial culture’. Stuart Hall and his colleagues opened up the area of contemporary cultural studies. Inward migration produced local difficulties but it also remade the cultural make-up of Britain.50 A series of new laws were made in effect restricting the scope of 1948 citizenship and restricting thereby inward migration: Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, 1968; then Immigration Act 1971 introduces the idea of ‘patriality’, that is, links to home-born and this further reduces inflow of migrants. The British Nationality Act 1981 abolished the CUKC, creating further odd anomalies; further acts in 2002 and 2006 and confusions and problems continue. The inflow of migrants has continued; in general terms, as the overall population has risen from 50.2 million in 1950 to 67.7 million in 2023, the share of migrants has drifted upwards—in the fifties, Irish, Polish and Indian; in the fifties, Irish were joined by Caribbean migrants; in the sixties, South Asia and Africa; and more recently, citizens of EU plus refugees from assorted wars; migrants form 14% of UK population.51 In the early 2010s, the issue of inward migration was re-animated; the context was British membership of the European Union. Brussels is protective of the Union’s ‘four freedoms’, one of which is the free movement of individuals and treaty commitments (plus Schengen for most mainland member states) led to internal flows of migrants. Contentious in some minor respects, thus, ‘Polish plumbers’, it suited business, both skilled and cheap labour could be imported into Britain, but problems slowly built, again, and sections of local-born population were uneasy. Add to this the 2015 European migration crisis, plus Chancellor Merkel’s 50 S.O. Rose 2010 ‘Who Are We Now? Writing the Post-war Nation, 1948–2001’ in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland eds 2010, Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, Manchester University Press, p. 159; in the visual arts, the Black Arts Movement 51 Taken from web, so indicative only: see Macrotrends.net; ONS.gov.uk; migrationobs ervatory.ox.ac.uk.

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rebuff of Cameron’s renegotiations52 and the way was open to Brexit, with, again, subsequent debates about the rights of those non-British who were nonetheless ‘settled’. The issue of boundaries and citizenship runs on. In recent years there have been inflows of migrants via cross-channel people-smuggling, plus refugees from the wars in the Middle East (where British forces were involved), plus refugees from Hong Kong, (in particular, those with BNO status), plus refugees from Ukraine (where the West has helped sustain the fighting). In response, sections of local-born populations (of whatever ‘ethnicity’) have become uneasy and the political rise of nominally nationalist parties has given rise to questions about the current/future status of ‘home nations’, Wales and especially Scotland. London has dealt with this in terms of limited devolution with parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff, but this increasingly looks like a stop-gap on the way to a thoroughly unclear future settlement. Second, What Type of Economy; Conflict and Argument (Classes/ Theories) The pre-war liberal model was taken as a failure, and economic redefinition of the situation opened the way to a Keynesian-informed mixed economy. There were debates running on from pre-war days involving claims about state intervention, planning and welfare and these ideas found expression in the work of left-of-centre reformers and they gained support from large sections of the Conservative Party—hence ‘post-war consensus’. Against this, it might be noted reformist ideas were rejected by right-wing figures who turned their attention to the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand, together, keys to the neo-liberalism of the later eighties and onward. The reformers were a disparate group. The key figures (Keynes, Beveridge and Atlee) were patrician reformers whose early years fell in the late nineteenth century, and they were joined by trade unionists, religious dissenters, pacifists, demobilized military and the generally pro-reform rank and file of the Labour Party; add to this the broad record of conservatives—depression and appeasement—and the reformers were ensured of a hearing in the first post-war general election. Their programme 52 On this, M. Karnitschnig 2015 ‘The Summit That Wasn’t’ in Politico December 18, 2015.

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of the government revolved around the top-down organized pursuit of growth and welfare, what today would be tagged ‘development:’ urban redevelopment, industrial policy, new towns (economic growth); plus, housing, schooling and health (social insurance). This ambitious agenda was pursued in difficult international circumstances with calls for colonial independence, calls for European reconstruction, the issue of how to respond to the increased presence of the USSR in central Europe and the looming problems associated with the Cold War. David Edgerton53 argues that in the immediate post-war period, the country was strong, with both powerful science/technology sectors and a strong military,54 hence a ‘warfare state’. In a further discussion, Edgerton55 argues that this period saw the creation of a ‘British Nation’ albeit subsequently in eclipse following the election of Margaret Thatcher. Against this, the more familiar tale is one of the extensive domestic reform—‘the New Elizabethan Age’—masking overall continual decline. Corelli Barnett56 pursued this line in a number of books, pointing both to relative decline, inevitable as the empire holdings fell away, and to a species of absolute decline insofar as reforms to industry and finance were not made (unlike the countries of the mainland where extreme material destruction and social dislocation in effect mandated reform programmes). The record shows a slow long-term relative decline. The defensive nature of withdrawal was required in a number of areas in order to secure now-overseas holdings (thus, for example, Anglo-American oil interests in Iran, tin and rubber resources in the Malay peninsula, or in respect of anticipated access to China, the re-occupation of Hong Kong). Plus, action to buttress domestic industry by re-purposing the wartime statedirected economy. Alongside these concerns, there was a slow shift from the wartime domestic regulations and scarcity to the early fifties and the threshold of a consumer society.

53 Edgerton 2005. 54 Militarily—able to join the USA in Korea and maintain forces overseas as withdrawal

from empire advanced. 55 Edgerton 2018. 56 C. Barnett 1972 The Collapse of British Power, London, Methuen; C. Barnett 1986

The Audit of War, London, Free Press; C. Barnett 1995 The Lost Victory, London, Macmillan; C. Barnett 2001 The Verdict of Peace, London, Macmillan.

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Third, What Sort of Identity; Dynamics of Political-Cultural Redefinition The collapse of the state-empire system and the consequent inevitable reinvention of the sometime core territories constituted the major elite crisis of the second part of the twentieth century; a state-empire system assembled over a couple of centuries was destroyed in a decade or so. The elite’s response was both pragmatic (focusing on the key objective of sustaining elite power) and creative (the process of the invention of a new national past)—in brief, the business of creating reconfigured or new nations—part of the business of making nation-states. The former objective was secured domestically via an exercise in limited reform (mixed economy, plus welfare) where this entailed a mix of elite costs, such as domestic status loss, and significant benefits with deeper structural reform blocked. The latter objective was secured via a double shift in the presentation of hitherto peripheral state-empire holdings and the related novel core territories.57 Firstly, the peripheral territories were re-imagined as separate from the core. The state-empire was no longer thought of as a unitary albeit organisationally ragged enterprise. Then these peripheral territories were further characterized as neither crucial nor acquired acquisitively; the separate peripheral territories of empire had in fact, it was now claimed, been acquired in a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’ and, moreover, they had been relinquished peacefully, hence the emergence of the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’. Secondly, the corresponding re-imagining of the hitherto core territories of the state-empire involved an interrelated set of claims. Crucially, a claim to the status of a longestablished modern state along with a claim to an equally long-established nationhood. Thereafter, a claim that recent changes were not so important as the state and the nation were long-lived with their joint history reaching deep into the past. The re-imagining also involved a claim to international status; that the nation-state was victorious in a morally correct war and was something of a model for other countries. The whole ensemble can be tagged ‘Continuing Britain’.

57 On this, see P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire, London, Palgrave.

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Social/Cultural Legacies of Empire: Nostalgia, Race and Racism The nature of the cultural afterlife of empire is contested. In this text, the post-empire era is grasped in terms of an idea of elite continuity; ‘Continuing Britain’. Other scholars cut into these issues in different ways and here two ideas might be noted: cultural nostalgia or more pointedly, melancholia, an inability to grieve and the awkward idea of race. The juridical, political and diplomatic aspects of the dissolution of empire were in principle clear notwithstanding open security issues in several territories, including India,58 Malaya, Kenya and Rhodesia where the latter pair involved white settler groups,59 which in turn received support from conservatives in Britain. A little later, the 1956 Suez fiasco accelerated final moves to dissolve the last tranche of overseas holdings.60 The institutions that served the empire only slowly adjusted to changed circumstances. Sarah Stockwell notes the empire roles of the Mint, Oxbridge, the Bank and the Military. They were deeply involved in running the empire and affirmed an empire culture of superiority, topdown rule and so on, and when the empire dissolved away the attitudes remained even as the institutions adapted, mutating into development advice, with the attitudes only shifting after 1956.61 The empire continues to have a political/cultural afterlife and the elite’s creative invention of Continuing Britain has had the effect of both sanitizing the empire (Commonwealth plus British monarch as head, hence overall the half-plausible dual claim that empire had been accumulated piecemeal and surrendered peacefully), whilst pre-empting any direct engagement with its actual historical character (acquired, sustained and relinquished with a mix of violence and politico-juridical sleight of hand). Paul Gilroy62 pursues this idea, diagnosing a concern for the loss of empire that manifests itself, in one form, as racism; it is a hangover 58 The disaster took place after formal independence—partition into India/Pakistan. 59 John MacKenzie 2010 ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’ in S.

Howe ed 2010 The New Imperial Histories Reader, London, Routledge. 60 Phases—East Asia, South Asia, Arab Middle East and then sub-Saharan Africa— leaving only odd bases scattered around the planet. 61 Stockwell 2018. 62 P. Gilroy 2004 After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture, London, Routledge;

Paul Gilroy 1987 There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, London, Routledge.

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from empire and Gilroy points in contrast to the urban cultures of today’s Britain with multiple ethnic groups together making a ‘convivial culture’. The episode of empire has not been addressed in the general public sphere, the episode has been read as a type of loss; hence the nostalgia or melancholia. But scholars in recent years have addressed the complexity of empire, including the importance of considering the intermingling of class and race in the British Empire, itself lodged within wider empire systems63 ; the parallels and exchanges between different European empire systems64 ; and the tangled business of withdrawal along with its legacies for the sometime metropolitan cores.65 Paralleling this evasion has been the response of long-term populations to the post-empire arrival of migrants from the sometime peripheries.66 In the late forties and early fifties these newcomers were often characterized pejoratively in terms of race. These ideas of race derived from the nineteenth-century science such that humankind was divided into race categories, each with different attributes and all destined to Darwinian style to compete. Racial hierarchies were constructed and taken to be naturally given, with White Europeans sitting at the pinnacle. These ideas have fed long-lasting albeit declining inter-community tensions, but more recently these attitudes have been diagnosed in institutional guise; hence, Scarman on the racism of the Metropolitan Police; hence the scandal of the official treatment of members of the ‘Windrush generation’; and hence ongoing sensitivity to the treatment by state institutions, corporate organizations and the ordinary public of members of ‘visible minorities’. These legacies of empire serve, it has been argued, as a reservoir of cliched prejudice; found, recently, in debates about Brexit, where the role of inward migration has been considered.67 But against such evidence, it might also be noted that government policy and the passage of time have taken the edge off earlier tensions—there has been extensive intermarriage between incoming and long resident groups—popular culture 63 C. Hall and K. McClelland eds 2010 Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, Manchester University Press—two ideas to be added to broader treatments of empires. 64 E. Buettner 2016 Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture, Cambridge University Press. 65 S. Howe ed 2010 The New Imperial Histories Reader, London, Routledge. 66 Buettner 2016, pp. 251–70. 67 M. Sobolewska and Robert Ford 2020 Brexit Land, Cambridge University Press.

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has embraced diversity—in music, television and film—and in the fine arts.68

Post-War: Some Reforms, Disappointments The elite-sponsored re-fashioning and re-imagining of the sometime metropolitan core territories of the state-empire into the more familiar form of a nation-state, presented as ‘Continuing Britain’, both protected the elite and served to block deeper structural reforms to the now domestic sphere. Some reforms were attempted, but initial enthusiasm routinely gave way to later disappointment as reform impulses faded. On a macro-scale, these episodes of attempted reform included: first, the New Elizabethan Age, the early fifties efforts at rebuilding Britain with domestic state-planning, welfare, new high-tech industries, new towns and the like (modernism in urban design) along with aspirations to a continuing great power role69 ; second, the European Community, where the turn towards Europe, with EEC members seen as more successful, was informed by long drawn out domestic debates about the future,70 along with recognition of a declining overseas great power role; and more recently, third, the episode of neo-liberalism and globalization with the turn towards the political objective of a free market system. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the elite’s political project of market-centred reforms, with a much-reduced role for the state, finally collapsed in a welter of crises. There were a number of these: firstly, the 2008/10 financial crisis (claims in regard to self-regulating nature of the liberal market financial/economic system were definitively rebutted in a widespread crisis and the role of an interventionist state provisionally re-affirmed—‘bailing-out the banks’71 );

68 Thus the ‘Black Arts Movement’—formed by students at Wolverhampton Poly in 1979—inspired by Stuart Hall—key figures, Rasheed Araeen Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson 69 Corelli Barnet sees a failure to respond to decline; Edgerton, contrariwise, on the

early post-war success of the British nation, Edgerton 2018; on the Labour Party, K.O. Morgan 1984 Labour in Power 1945–1951, Oxford University Press. 70 P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England, Manchester University Press. 71 A debate revisited with late 2022 government plans to relax bank regulations as a

part of new ‘Brexit freedoms’; Martin Wolf in Financial Times voiced doubts about the wisdom of the proposals.

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secondly, the 2016/20 Brexit crisis (elite-level faction fighting precipitated a referendum which the pro-EU faction lost and adjustment to this result continues); thirdly, the 2020/21 Covid-19 crisis (where a global pandemic was initially misread by the British government, subsequently unevenly handled and with the role of the interventionist state reconfirmed) and fourthly the neo-liberal phase might finally be bookended by the activities of the government of Liz Truss whose short period in office in late 2022 provoked one more financial crisis, subsequently quietened by Prime Minster Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. The recent sequence of crises along with the deeper issue of an unreformed system, raises the issue of democracy and change. In the late forties, a lack of democratic reform was understandable; reconstruction was ordered by planners of one sort or another and as the old elite was pushed into the background a new technocratic elite came to the fore. This politico-intellectual settlement endured until the late seventies with 1976 as a key turning point as Jim Callaghan announces the end of Keynesianism (or what was widely taken to be that approach). The long era of middle of the road post-war consensus failed. In retrospect it was never a consensus, more a contested compromise between contending groups and when the political balance changed it opened the way for the nascent New Right, later Thatcherism and finally neo-liberal globalization; projects pursued in a class-divided society ordered by an entrenched elite with the core of the system variously described: the establishment, club government72 or oligarchic.73 Down the years, many politicians, policymakers and commentators, including academics, have made calls for reform: political (new parties, or new party platforms or minor revisions to current system74 ); policyoriented (this or that alternative set of policies turned to this or that

72 D. Marquand 1988 The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana; D. Marquand, 2008

Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy, London, Weidenfeld. 73 F. Mount 2012 The New Few: Or, A Very British Oligarchy, London, Simon and Shuster; see also F. Mount 2012 Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, London, Short Books. 74 Example- Gordon Brown’s autumn report to the Labour Party—A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy 2023 London, The Labour Party

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problem75 ) and cultural (moral entrepreneurs calling for this or that change in popular opinion76 ); yet the system resists change.

The Empire: Collapse, but Elite Continuity The British Empire reached an apogee in the early years of the twentieth century. It survived the difficulties of the inter-war years, but the Second World War triggered its collapse; the 1942–1956 period saw the total collapse of the state-empire, and the consequent re-ordering of its component territories, peripheral and metropolitan. The response of the British elite involved both denial and creative adaptation. They denied that the loss of peripheral territories was all that important and they covered up the subsequent processes of metropolitan core adaptation, in effect, the tasks of both state- and nation-making, with a novel official ideology which presented the new arrangements as a long-established nation-state, recently victorious in a virtuous war and consequently something of a model for other elites/countries. And in respect of the issue of political reform, if democracy is read as an ongoing historical achievement—not a simple recipe for competitive elections—then it can be argued that the post-war Atlee government fell short of what was possible. There was a mobilized population, and a clear line of responsibility for war traced back to pre-war elites and the optimistic cultural model of the USA; yet political reform was blocked.77 In respect of contemporary Britain demographic data reveals that the profile of the country has changed; the overall numbers have risen and the ethnic minority population has increased; sociological data shows that inequality has increased over the last twenty-odd years, that is, downstream from the 2008 financial crash78 ; data shows a falling away of rates

75 Example—Electoral Reform Society. 76 For example, in sequence; George Orwell’s anti-communism; Timothy Leary and

Sixties radicals; in the seventies and eighties, Mary Whitehouse’s popular reaction; and from more recently, Nigel Farage, plus assorted spokespersons for minority groups— ethnic, religious, sexual and so on. 77 This is a variant of a familiar line of argument—Nairn/Anderson—Patrick Wright— Arno Mayer—Peter Mair—and etcetera. 78 In part evidence of the long-term impact of austerity policies, pursued by Chancellor Osborne post-2008.

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of inter-class social mobility and recent years have seen mobility stagnant.79 The class system endures. All that said, economic data show that Britain is—in fact—a rich country80 ; it is, however, a rich country falling behind its mainland neighbours.81 So the system endures, it is strong, it is resilient, it blocks deeper or more progressive reform and as a consequence, it ensures a process of relative decline; but the decline is slow, the country is rich and the ruling elite content. The 1942–1956 period is crucial in understanding today’s Britain. The elite, like others in the global system of states, has to read and react to enfolding circumstances, embrace a political project (ideas/policies) and appropriately discipline its population. In 1945–1956 the British elite adapted to the collapse of empire in a creative fashion—they invented a new polity—‘Continuing Britain’. This reinvention put in place the core machineries and ideas that have shaped the entire post-war period. In sum, the metropolitan elite were successful: they kept power, blocked the possibility of deeper institutional reform and sold the idea of ‘Continuing Britain’ to themselves and the masses.82

79 UK Government Social Mobility Commission April 30, 2019 (accessed November 2022). 80 See World Bank data; UNDP data. 81 Summary data from Economist Intelligence Unit 2022 The World Ahead 2023,

pp. 100–102. 82 Earlier essays: on identity, Preston 2004 and on the formal ideology, Preston 2014.

CHAPTER 3

European Union: Particular Anxieties, Deeper Issues, 2008–2022

The shift to the modern world in Europe was accompanied, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a period of global dominance; this came to an abrupt end in the early twentieth century. Europe was engulfed in a series of wars. Taking note of the scale of the disasters of the early part of the century, the collapse of overseas holdings and the division of the continent into nominally hostile blocs, together the moral and political impetus to deep cooperation, it can be recalled that in the post-Second World War period the European Union has drawn together the nations of Europe and the continent has experienced a lengthy period of successful development. The institutional machinery of this cooperation has been the Brussels-based European Union. The organisation is rooted in law and has its own supreme court which in regard to Union matters asserts its priority in regard to the courts of member state, and whilst the organisation has had its difficulties, it has in general prospered. However, in the last decade or so the Union has found itself embroiled in a series of crises: particular anxieties (euro crisis— migration—Brexit) and deeper issues in regard to the structure of the Union and its direction—(the machinery—the role of law—the core commitments). In all this, Brexit, although initially shocking for the Brussels elite, turned out to be no big deal; British semi-detachment was familiar and so Brussels handled the problem decisively (imposing harsh withdrawal terms) whilst the British state/government floundered.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_3

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Europe: The Broad Historical Trajectory1 The European Union inherits the long history of Europe; on the one hand, a civilization with a written history reaching back some 2500 years, and on the other, a continent riven by warfare over the centuries, these last culminating in a catastrophe of such proportions that the continent ended up not merely damaged, with deaths and injuries along with incalculable material and cultural destruction, but also occupied and divided into East and West. After the division, both areas were ordered as blocs led by outside powers, Moscow and Washington respectively. It was from a year zero in 1945 that recovery began but it was simultaneously a project of re-imagining the continent; in the West, albeit subordinate to the USA/NATO and the Bretton Woods economic system, this took the form of those organizations that became the EU; and in the East, recovery and advance were cast in state socialist terms organized from Moscow. In the event, occupation by Washington was by far the best deal for European populations as the USA was rich and strategically generous (via Marshal Plan) whilst the USSR was poor, had suffered around 26 million casualties and large swathes of its territories had been laid waste by contending armies. ********* Europe has a written history reaching back some 2500 years to the nominal source in Ancient Greece, one generally taken to have been rediscovered in the fourteenth-century Renaissance; further back in time lie the civilizations of the Middle East and thereafter the work of archaeologists and palaeontologists reaching back millennia. Contemporary European politics has its own history and the key is taken to be the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which gave the continent a system of sovereign states (whose borders and indeed existence were always liable to violent revision2 ) and which thereafter proceeded to invent nations, these serving to help order and legitimate the new domestic systems of power.3 The

1 Earlier versions of these arguments have been published in P.W. Preston 2010

National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge; P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England, Manchester University Press. 2 N. Davies 1997 Europe: A History, London, Pimlico; N. Davies 2011 Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half-Forgotten Europe, London, Allen Lane. 3 E. Gellner 1983 Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Blackwell; B. Anderson 1983 Imagined Communities, London, Verso.

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pattern of nation-states replaced, albeit slowly, the earlier feudal system based on the control of land and associated peasantry with the whole ordered via transient networks of alliances with the machineries of the church standing above the whole pattern. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw not only the rise of states but, crucially, the early elements of a natural-science-based industrial capitalism; at first in agricultural improvements plus mercantile centres plus early industry with the novel social ensemble variously characterized and explained4 but most familiarly tagged as the industrial revolution. The core of economic activity shifted away from agriculture towards towns; a mix of natural science, industry, finance and trade; together a powerful mix, as classical political economists—and Marx—would later note. The form of life turned out to be very dynamic both routinely increasing the demands it made on its domestic population and routinely expanding outwards as it sought new resources and new markets; from the seventeenth century onwards, European powers made empires overseas. The expansion ran through phases; early on, Spain and Portugal, a little later the principal players were Britain, France and the Netherlands, then later, Germany and Italy. In mainland Europe multi-national empires were made; Czarist, Hohenzollern and Hapsburg. Other states also expanded, Ottoman. The nineteenth century saw empire systems created by the USA and Japan and so by the late nineteenth century much of the global system had been drawn into one or the other empire system. The empires typically covered large geographical areas, involved multiple ethnic groups and were ordered in a hierarchical fashion with peripheral units linked to the metropolitan core. The individual systems varied but all reported back to their core. The systems had two crucial lines of weakness; there was competition amongst core powers, thus, for example, in Africa, Britain and France clashed in 1898 at Fashoda,5 and later, with the rise of Germany, a 1911 clash with France at Agadir; in

4 C. Bayly 2004 The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Oxford, Blackwell; A.G. Frank 1998 Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, University of California Press. 5 Fashoda Incident 1898 (resolved, later Entente Cordial 1904).

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East Asia, the expanding American and Japanese empires joined Europeans contending for access to China6 as the Qing empire slowly failed; and there was opposition to the system itself from within the peripheral territories of empire (riots, rebellions and independence movements). The empires were unsustainable over the long term: not only these lines of tension but also the emergence of domestic critics arguing that empire was immoral or empire was too expensive or empire was simply an irrelevance to domestic concerns. The latent crisis reached a tipping point in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Revolution of 1911 signalled the eventual end of foreign empires in Asia; in Europe, the outbreak of war in 1914 threw metropolitan regimes into confusion; for Europeans, the specific period 1914–1945 can be read as a general crisis as one system broke down in catastrophic violence and in time a novel system took shape, post-1945 and ongoing: • • • • • •

The The The The The The

Great War 1914–1918 Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917–1923 Great Depression, 1929 onwards rise of European fascism, 1933 onwards Second World War 1939–1945 Pacific War 1941–1945

The cost to Europeans of these interlinked conflicts were immense; in terms of personnel, the dead, injured, traumatized and bereaved; in terms of infrastructure, the destruction of production facilities, transport networks and research centres and in terms of the arts, the destruction of vast amounts of materials.7 The destruction was extensive as noted and the political consequences were also significant; in macro terms, the continent, having in significant measure precipitated a global war, was divided and occupied with half ordered from Washington and the other half ordered from Moscow. The two halves were quickly reordered in Cold

6 W.G. Beasley 1991 Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945, Oxford, Clarendon; R. Bickers, 2011 The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832–1914, London, Allen Lane. 7 Industrial scientific warfare saw extensive use of bombing causing great destruction and many casualties, mostly civilian; by way of an example, on Germany, see Jorg Freidrich 2006 The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–45, Columbia University Press.

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War terms, West versus East, with the former oriented towards liberaldemocratic systems with liberal markets and the latter oriented towards state socialist systems with planned economies. The division, in place by the end of the forties, endured until the autumn months of 1989 when a combination of local civil society groups and the forbearance intrinsic to President Gorbachev’s reform programme, led to the collapse of the bloc system.8 It is this crisis of war and division that provided the moral and political impetus to the creation of patterns of cooperation in the Western bloc that in time became the European Union and by the same token, it is why, in the years following 1989, that the Union welcomed new members; their slogan being ‘a return to Europe’. The EU now has a population of around 400 or so million; the majority of its member states are wealthy and the machinery of the Union centred on Brussels ensures that the organization has a global presence and a commensurate weight in international relations. It is now one of three major economic centres in the global system: North America, East Asia and Europe. However, all that said, it is also the case that the Union has experienced severe problems over the last decade or so and, as noted, there have been particular anxieties around the euro crisis, the business of inward migration and the debacle of Brexit, and there have been deeper issues in regard to the make-up and direction of the Union with these debates looking to the political and bureaucratic machinery, the role/scope of Union law and the continued efficacy of long-time core commitments to ‘ever closer union’. European Union in Summary In terms of key treaties: ECSC 1951; EEC 1957; SEA 1985; Maastricht 1992; Lisbon 2007; In terms of membership: 6 9 10

1957 1973 1981

8 A. Brown 2020 The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War, Oxford University Press; V.M. Zubok 2021 The Fall of the Soviet Union, Yale University.

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12 15 25 27 28 27

1986 1995 2004 2007 2013 2022

In terms of domestic features, European nation-states can be characterized in simple terms: • • • • •

population sizes; linguistic, ethnic and religious divisions; socio-economic divisions (classes, life-chances and life-styles); political parties; types of parliamentary and electoral systems; and the actual political histories of the countries.

But the overall politics involves a more complicated mix: • • • •

domestic politics at sub-state level (regions) domestic politics at central state level state-level interaction with Brussels state- and Brussels-level interactions with the wider system of international politics.

Europe: The Disasters of Early Twentieth Century Contemporary European politics cannot be understood without some appreciation of the cultural impacts of the wars of the early part of the twentieth century; recent reminders of the depth of the impacts were given by the wars in the Balkans and more recently in eastern Ukraine when elite-level and popular revulsion was more or less automatic. In the first decade of the twentieth century European empires, formal and informal (via finance/trade) covered large parts of the globe and European elite confidence in the power of their states/empires was at its highest. European elite confidence about the potency of their form of life found expression in notions of Social Darwinism and as nations

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competed, successful nations grew. European popular enthusiasm, nationalist and imperial, was at its highest as the continent took itself as the pinnacle of civilized life.9 The interlinked crises were triggered by metropolitan competition and peripheral revolt and the system of European empires began to disintegrate in the late summer of 1914; earlier dates could be picked, thus, most obviously, the 1911 revolution in China, associated with Sun Yat Sen, but the determining crisis was found in Europe. The assignation of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered a diplomatic sequence that resulted in open warfare between the central powers of Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and Britain, France and Russia on the other; further countries were drawn in, but the key was in Europe. The start of the war has been characterized in various ways. The standard tale of the victors blamed Germany; a view enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles. The terms of the treaty were criticized at the time,10 later viewed as an error and precursor to the subsequent war. A more recent history is cast in terms of ‘sleepwalking’11 ; state elites plus nationalistic populations rallied to warfare in ignorance of its likely character notwithstanding that this had been advertised in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War when a shocked Japanese elite/public learned the nature and costs of industrialized warfare.12 The Great War of 1914–1918 was centred on Europe where the contending armies quickly established a stalemate in the west roughly along the northern border of France; it came to be known as the Western Front and was variously remembered in the years following: in France, the sacrifice of farmer-soldiers,13 in Britain, the site of pointless slaughter14 and in Germany, the myth of the stab in the back. However, in the east, the central powers had success against the Czarist armies with defeat, revolution and ‘no war/no peace’ until, eventually, in March 1918, the 9 F. Illes 2012 1913: The Year Before the Storm, London. 10 Notably by J.M. Keynes 11 C. Clark 2013 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London, Penguin. 12 See D. Wells and S. Wilson eds 1999 The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective,

1904–05, London, Macmillan. 13 See R. Kedward 2005 La Vie en Bleu: France and the French Since 1900, London, Allen Lane; Preston 2010, pp. 32–42. 14 See Robert Owen; Vera Brittan 1994 Testament of Youth: An Autobiography of the Years 1900–1925, New York, Penguin.

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Treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed. The boundaries of new states were settled but multiple local-level conflicts remained. To the south, Austria and Italy fought in the Alps; to the southeast, the British and Arab Legion attacked the Ottomans in the Middle East. The fighting subsided and came to an end in the west late autumn of 1918 but other areas saw problems, including violence, run on. The Versailles Treaty, overseen by American President Wilson, sought to settle all outstanding issues. In Europe, borders were drawn around nominal nations and minorities were simultaneously created and so new sets of tensions were built into the settlement. The empires of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Ottomans all failed and many new nation-states took shape. The inter-war period in Europe was shaped by Versailles and the revolution in Russia: the peace negotiations drew lines on maps and created numerous new nation-states in Eastern Europe, whilst the revolution up-ended taken for granted political ideas. In Germany a socialist revolution was suppressed, giving the country the Weimar Republic, briefly successful, then total collapse, today an episode with a quasi-mythic cultural status.15 A pandemic in 1918 killed millions; the demographic impacts of war and pandemic were severe; memorials were built in many countries. There was a period of economic growth—in the twenties— but then the Wall Street crash and the global spill-over recalled as the Great Depression. In Europe popular dismay fuels the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Central Europe plus Scandinavia plus Ireland, later the Spanish Civil War and the victory of a fascist regime; there was fascism in Portugal and in Britain, Mosely and the BUF. Britain between the wars presents a mixed picture. The 1918 promise of political and welfare reforms was not kept; there were post-war government cut-backs (debts incurred during the war). Memorials are built in many town centres. But, at the same time, the empire expanded as Ottoman territories became League of Nations Mandate Territories. In the 1920s, there was prosperity but the 1930s depression impacted the old industrial heartlands. But new light industries are established along arterial roads in the south. A version of modernism in the arts16 ; London underground posters, suburban living. There are also growing doubts

15 See E.D. Weitz 2018 Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Princeton University Press. 16 See A. Harris 2010 Romantic Moderns, London, Thames and Hudson.

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about empire, increasingly seen by critics as wrong and/or expensive. There are also growing anxieties about politics in mainland Europe. There was a cascade of problems. In Britain, these included Mosely and BUF, the International Brigade, plus belated re-armament along with the policy of appeasement. In mainland Europe, the Rhineland crisis was followed by the Czechoslovakia crisis in 1938, then Danzig and the German government demands on Polish government and in September 1939 war begins. The British government sent the BEF to Northern France where it experienced unequivocal defeat and withdrawal. France signs an armistice. At which point the standard story claims that Britain ‘stands alone’ but as David Edgerton points out it was the British Empire, at that time very strong. In East Asia, the empire is under threat as the Sino-Japanese War unfolds. In June 1941, Germany attacked USSR. In December 1941, Japan attacked America. War now engulfs both Europe and East Asia; it ensures, amongst other things, the collapse of the British Empire.17 But, in 1941, a three-way alliance of the USSR, USA and Britain was formed; all three fought Germany. The USA and Britain fought Japan. USSR joined war against Japan in 1945. After the end of hostilities, the ‘big three’ divided up the map. The Cold War begins within a few years. Britain became dependent on the USA for finance and arms. The British Empire is dissolving; but the elite finessed crisis and invented ‘Continuing Britain’—welfare and industrial reforms—outline of the shape of contemporary Britain. The detail of the inter-war and wartime period in Europe includes: • • • • • • • • • • •

1920s Legacies of Great War—League of Nations 1930s Rise of fascism in Europe 1930s British and French policy of appeasement 1930s Failure of League of Nations 1936 Outbreak of Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) 1939 Outbreak of war 1940 military defeat of France 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union 1941 USA becomes involved/in war against Japan 1944 Formation of United Nations 1945 End of Second World War and Pacific War

17 On Europe and East Asia, see Preston 2010.

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• • • •

1945 1945 1947 1948

Occupation of Germany Nuremburg Tribunals Long telegram Berlin blockade—Cold War

The detail—in numbers.18 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Military deaths Europe USSR 11,000,000 Germany 3,500,000 UK 144,000 USA 143,000 Key battles in Europe Barbarossa 1,582,000 Stalingrad 973,000 Kursk 325,000 Overlord 132,000 El Alamein 4,500 Europe and East Asia Total Deaths Great War 8,000,000 Inter-war 3,500,000 World War 41,000,000 II East Asia 31,200,000 Total 83,700,000

The Crisis, Cold War and the Division of Europe The crisis 1914–1945 period was extraordinarily violent. A sequence of crises marked the era. The Great War was Europe’s first experience of scientific-industrial warfare; it was not merely a military shock (huge casualties) but a wider cultural shock: the casualties; the loss of young men; the loss of confidence in the elite; the social impacts; plus, later, the impacts of the epidemic of flu with further millions of casualties. The inter-war period saw an elaborate process of forgetting and remembering (official and popular); this era was succeeded by the Second World War;

18 N. Davies 2006 Europe and War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory, London, Macmillan, pp. 24–25; Preston 2010, pp. 16–20; all figures are estimates.

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once again, extensive violence and more stylized memory.19 In Europe, this crisis was succeeded by the Cold War; two agreed official truths were constructed; in Western Europe people spoke of the free world and liberal democracy; in the east areas people spoke of overturning capitalism and building state socialism; these official truths shaped political life throughout the Cold War; but in 1989/91, the Cold War came to an end, the blocs disappeared and amongst other things the European Union advanced to the centre of European political life. The End of the Bloc System The contemporary spread of European nation-states did not follow a single historical development trajectory as there were many routes to the modern world. In the late nineteenth century, most of the current CEE countries did not exist, they were parts of one or other regional empire: the German Hohenzollern Monarchy’s empire territories, or parts of Czarist Russian empire territories, or parts of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire, or parts of the Ottoman Empire in the European southeast and the Middle East.20 The situation changed after the Great War and the related Russian Revolution and Civil War. The empires collapsed in chaotic violence and were obliged to give up territory and the sometime elements of these empires emerged as states; borders were confirmed but building nations was different as the new states typically contained significant minorities—cross-border tensions were so to say built-in. In the north and centre of Europe, hitherto Czarist, Hohenzollern or Hapsburg empire lands were remade. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary appeared as sovereign nation-states. In the south the slow break-up of the Ottoman Empire saw other nationstates emerge—Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and territories in the Balkans. Changes began in the later nineteenth century and were further impacted by the events of subsequent wars. During the inter-war period, many of these states turned towards conservative or more right-wing regimes; they were dominated by the military or the church, they were not liberal

19 Tony Judt 2005 Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945, London, Allen Lane. 20 See N. Davies, 2011 Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half Forgotten Europe,

London, Allen Lane.

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democracies. They tended to be agrarian, relatively underdeveloped with multiple ethnic minorities including the greater number of European Jewish communities, plus numbers of Roma. All these countries were drawn into the Second World War and all suffered extreme population loss and extreme material damage. All were liberated and then occupied by the Soviet Union; Austria was neutralized and occupying armies withdrew; otherwise, the continent settled into two blocs, one turned to Washington, the other to Moscow. In the East, the post-1945 era was one of slow reconstruction. The war damage in the east was extreme and reconstruction was ordered in terms of the tenets of state socialism. A further problem confronted the authorities as the novel state socialist pattern had been laid onto older pre-war social patterns and there were instances of overt resistance: East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Then in 1989/ 91 sweeping change in Europe began as President Gorbachev introduced the ideas of reform and democratization21 ; there were reforms in Poland in the summer of 1989, then sweeping change in Eastern Europe throughout the autumn—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In 1991, the USSR was dissolved, the Baltic States became independent, so too hitherto Soviet lands in Central Asia and so too Belorussia and Ukraine. The dramatic end of the Cold War along with the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union allowed many of the newly created countries to plan for new futures and now free of the restrictions of bloc time began to turn to the West, the allure of the EU—all cast in terms of a ‘return to Europe’. EU/NATO Linkage After the end of the Cold War, two institutions expanded their membership to the east, the European Union and NATO. This linkage has proved to be unfortunate: the European Union revolves around Brussels and the organization is a prospective federal state with its focus on the peoples of Europe; NATO is an American geo-strategic instrument that revolves around Washington although the organization is headquartered in Brussels. It allows the USA to insert itself into European affairs both

21 Brown 2020.

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with overarching rule-making (liberal markets and liberal democracy) and detailed politicking (thus, in regard to the Iraq wars, Old Europe/New Europe distinguished22 ). At the present time, the NATO linkage coupled to American anti-Russian rhetoric plays into contemporary CEE member states’ anti-Russian nationalism; the Cold War split has been reworked, now with the ‘iron curtain’ moved several hundred miles eastwards. It is a dynamic that has fed into the crisis in the Ukraine. Membership of NATO and the Union Poland Hungary Czech Republic Baltic States Slovakia

-

NATO NATO NATO NATO NATO

1999 1999 1999 2004 2004

-

EU EU EU EU EU

2004 2004 2004 2004 2004

Bulgaria Romania

- NATO 2004 - EU 2007 - NATO 2004 - EU 2007

In the following years, those countries adjacent to Germany have prospered, and those more distant have fared less well. These developments were put in question in 2022 when the crisis in Ukraine became much more serious as open warfare developed along with CEE and EU involvement with financial, military and social (refugees) support.

Europe: Recent Anxieties, Deeper Issues The EU project has not developed smoothly and there have been periods of relatively rapid advance interspersed with periods of apparent stasis or crisis. The conventional wisdom with respect to the Union is that crises have helped its development; relatedly, ironically, the Union only acts when all other lines of advance have proved unhelpful. The Union is now a significant global player and accordingly domestic problems are potentially significant for the wider world and as ever in the global

22 See, for example, R. Kagan 2003 Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, London, Atlantic Books.

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system external events can and do impact the Union. The last decade or so has produced a number of problems—the euro crisis, migration and Brexit—plus there are deeper concerns with the Union’s machinery— authority/responsibility, the role of law, and the core treaty commitments. At the present time, in the early 2020s, it is not clear whether the Union remains wedded to a political programme of ‘ever closer union’ or if it is merely a large somewhat bureaucratic trading area. If it is the latter, then the machineries of unification and law seem over-developed and if it is the former, then officialdoms focus on the marketplace seems somewhat misdirected. Particular Anxieties: Euro Crisis, Migration and Brexit (i) The financial crisis and problem of euro The financial crisis of 2008/15 had its origins in the behaviour of Wall Street and London banks.23 The governments of both the USA (Clinton) and the UK (Thatcher/Blair) had deregulated finance industries in both countries. The Clinton government overturned a long-established postGreat Depression regulation that separated utility banks from investment banks so that the latter could not use the balances of the former for ‘investment’, that is, gambling. With the regulations removed major banks in Wall Street and the City moved to open up new areas of business and many new essentially speculative products were contrived and cross-holdings of these new securities were organized. The whole pyramid was sustained by inflows of new money or new financial instruments. The players were reassured by the theory of efficient markets which told players that any risk attached to these new instruments would be distributed around the system which would accommodate any actual risks via the pricing mechanism. As it turned out, the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the USA revealed the intrinsic instability of what in practice was a bubble of unsustainable debt. The bubble duly burst in 2008 as banks in America and Britain went bust and—with a few exceptions—were bailed out by their respective states; that is, the states took 23 The first phases of this debacle are discussed in P.W. Preston 2012 England After the Great Recession, London, Palgrave; the more recent phases are discussed at length by R. Tooze 2018 Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London, Allen Lane.

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over the debts and found new monies to recapitalize the utility banks (necessary for the functioning of the industrial capitalist system). That the states could take over the debts rested, finally, on the twin resources of fiat money (nominally independent central banks print as much as seems necessary and it is lent to the state) and established tax-raising powers (controlled populations generate tax revenues). There were extensive knock-on effects. There were short-term falls in economic activity. Such problems were coupled to longer-term government policies of austerity. This strategy claimed that cut-backs in government spending were necessary to stop state debt levels rising and over the longer term to begin shrinking these debts. The cut-backs in spending were supposed to free tax monies for other tasks. The crisis had a wider aspect. European Union banks had in many instances followed the lead of Wall Street and the City; novel debt instruments were created and banks had over-lent in pursuit of profits. One aspect of such lending had seen northern banks lend to southern customers—debts built up—critics later spoke of ‘predatory lending’. The bubble burst around the same time as Wall Street and member state banks were found to be in various sorts of trouble. However, the situation in the European Union was different from that of the USA or Britain because the rules governing the common currency severely restricted the scope of action of finance ministries in member states. The currency was treaty-based, had elaborate rules and was overseen by the ECB, which in turn had a very restricted mandate. At the time of its founding, critics suggested it was ill-designed and most likely would fail at some point, but commentators replied that this underestimated the political capital involved in the currency. In the short-term, the weakness of the European Union banks resembled those of USA/Britain and the remedies were in principle the same: the state should absorb the unsustainable debts and recapitalize the banks, but the euro system precluded any simple response; member states could not print money; they had to borrow on the money markets which meant printing bonds. Initially, bond buyers assumed that all member states’ bonds were safe but this view changed and the interest rates on some member state’s bonds rose; a distinction was made between northern bonds, which were safe, those issued by the PIIGs which were not. The interest rates charged for southern member state’s bonds became unsustainable and so a second phase of EU crisis opened. The response was rapid for the European Union and Brussels introduced a series of backup credit lines—EFSF—EFSM—ESM; all ways of lending weaker

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members funds in exchange for agreeing with programmes of reform, usually, austerity style. The ECB also took a hand—LTRO—OMT—but the key turned out to be a remark made by head of ECB, Mario Draghi, to the effect that the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’—the crisis slowly abated. (ii) The migration crisis The migration crisis of 2015 caught elites by surprise.24 There are three areas of discussion: (i) migration into the European Union that is foreignborn people moving into the Union, including legal migrants, illegal migrants and asylum seekers, (ii) migration within the Union as citizens of one member state move to another and (iii) recent migration into Union from the war in Ukraine. Legal migrants comprise two main flows: those coming for employment and these people can be from anywhere, and those coming to settle, and these people tend to be from former territories of empire. Once legally resident inside the EU they can live like anyone else. Illegal migrants arrive in a variety of fashions, in particular overstaying a visa, or smuggling (either as a migrant or trafficked); illegals must perforce live without documentation and their lives are thus difficult. Of these, asylum seekers must seek permission to remain so until their case is decided their lives are precarious but if granted asylum, they can live like anyone else. As it happens, migrants from outside the Union can often be identified easily in routine social life—culture or ethnicity or religion—and consequently, they may suffer discrimination; it is also true that they can experience generally lower levels of living to native-born. The European Union guarantees free movement of labour, it is one of the ‘four freedoms’ that underpin the political economy of the Union, and in addition, there is a separate agreement—the Schengen Agreement amongst 27 member states—and this allows for free travel across state 24 The European Union confronted an unexpected surge in external migrant numbers in the summer and autumn of 2015—one aspect of this episode was the threat posed to the EU’s common external border and its related common internal border-free travel arrangements—in 1985 the Schengen Agreement pointed to the gradual abolition of internal borders, the 1990 Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of borders and the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty took the Schengen Convention into the body of European Union law—www.ec.europa.eu.dgs/home affairs.

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boundaries. The movement of people around Europe has come as something of a surprise to some communities, those not otherwise used to outsiders and once again, their presence can be an occasion for political concern. The Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022 produced a wave of refugees, with the numbers of people displaced running to around 14 million; many of them were internally displaced as they fled active fighting, but of these, around 8 million found refuge in countries within the EU. The greater number of refugees are in CEE countries, while others are deeper within the EU. Around 2 million relocated to Russia. In all, the largest refugee exodus in Europe since the Second World War. Most of the external refugees were women and children as men were forbidden to leave and were liable to conscription into the army. The flows of people were not all one way—some returned—others returned only to leave once again. In early 2023, the first anniversary of the invasion, reports suggested a mixed picture amongst both host communities and the refugees; some of the latter began to settle, and some of the former began to consider the long-term implications.25 By February 2023 questions were being asked by commentators about the future and two points were made: first, that the longer the fighting continued, the longer the refugees stayed, and it was noted that this might have long-term consequences, namely, that the refugees become settled— jobs, kids in school, stability, and second, that the demographics of Ukraine showed long-term decline as the population had fallen since 1991 and birth rates were below replacement levels. Predictions were made showing the population numbers in continuing decline; this, together with outward migration, suggests not merely problems for any post-war Ukraine administration, but also problems for the EU in supporting a weakened country. (iii) Brexit and the problems of withdrawal The Brexit crisis followed the June 2016 British referendum vote in favour of leaving the European Union which caught both local and European

25 A report in the Economist (February 23, 2023) noted that Ukraine’s population had fallen by around 18% and that some Ukrainian politicians had voiced worries that refugees might be ‘Polonized’, that is, settle in Poland.

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elites by surprise. In the referendum campaign, the opposing sides had each run slick advertising claims; the pro-EU group had forecast rapid economic contraction (project fear) whilst the pro-independence group had promised immediate benefits (project cake) and whilst both were duplicitous, the result was clear. Subsequent commentary tended to be cast in terms of the leavers failing to realize the benefits of membership and the costs to them of leaving. Remain proponents quickly suggested a re-vote, tagged a ‘People’s Vote’, but instead parliament slowly dissolved into confusion. An early battle surrounded Article 50, once this was triggered by UK government, a two-year period began the end of which was a departure; eventually the article was triggered by the government of Teresa May which ought to have settled matters but it did not with parliament divided and the tensions between leavers and remainers continuing with little sign of them fading.26 Deeper Issues: The Machinery, the Role of Law and the Core Commitments (i) The machinery, the failed constitution and the Lisbon Treaty Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked that when it came to Europe he did not know ‘who to call’ because it was not clear where power lay; power and responsibility were spread around with some in the Brussels machinery, some in member states and some in sub-state organizations (national regions). Additionally, some rules were internal to the EU founding treaties whilst other rules were subject to treaties outside the EU treaties; all in all, a mish mash of supranational and inter-governmental rule. The EU Constitution was intended to remedy this situation. In the event, it did not. It was written using extensive civil society consultations but turned out to be extremely long; moreover, it was rejected in referenda in 2005 held in France and the Netherlands. The constitution was stillborn. It was resuscitated—in part—in the Lisbon Treaty which took the procedural elements of the failed constitution and ditched all the rest and this treaty was passed by member state governments.

26 D. Wyatt 2023 ‘Public Support is on the Rise but the Road to Re-joining the EU Would Not Be Smooth’ in LSE British Politics and Policy blog January 31, 2023.

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All these debates re-opened long-standing issues, in particular, the relationship between supranational law and intergovernmental law. It is a fundamental issue of where power lies—with Brussels or with member states. The issue is unresolved and probably unresolvable. The global system is ordered in terms of states and these state machineries are powerful; it is difficult to see why or how any state could surrender power, at best there could be deepening interlinkages, what has been called ‘deep regionalism’. All these debates also opened up questions with respect not to the status of Brussels but its efficacy; questions of institutional design (making and implementing agreed policy) and the machineries reliability (networks of influence, lobbying and outright corruption). Critics complained that the machinery was remote from the public it claimed to serve, whilst others doubted that this public existed (German constitutional court, popular opinion), so failings in terms of models of democracy. Critics also complained that the machinery was inefficient (too many staff, too few senior jobs), liable to sectional capture (serving the business world27 ) and on occasions simply corrupt (bribes and the like). All the above then overlap with member state’s domestic politics, thereby creating circumstances conducive to difficult decision-making, for example, in 2020, the tensions between. Brussels and two CEE countries, Poland and Hungary where Brussels threatens to withhold funds until internal member state legal systems are adjusted to its liking; or the tensions between Brussels and London over the status of Northern Ireland where a particular concern for a faction in UK parliament was the involvement (or not) of the ECJ. (ii) The role of law and core commitments The European Union was established by international treaties, the core treaties have been written and rewritten several times with the later treaty embracing the former. There are four key treaties: the Treaty of Rome 1957, the Single European Act 1986, the Maastricht Treaty (TEU) 1993 and the Lisbon Treaty 2007 (TEU/TFEU). The European Union is thus grounded in law. Horspool et al.28 pick out the core commitments 27 W. Streek 2016 How Will Capitalism End, London, Verso. 28 These points are derived from M. Horspool et al. 2018 European Union Law, Oxford

University Press, see Chapters 6, 7 and 8.

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lodged in European Union law—principle, rights and administration. First general principles, taken to be intrinsic to the body of EU law have developed as ECJ has considered cases; drawing principles from these cases, they set a standard—key ideas include subsidiarity, proportionality, sustainability and solidarity—together affirming the importance of the founding treaties and the obligation of member state governments to adhere to them. Then fundamental rights, whilst much of the text of the founding treaties is turned to matters of economics the ECJ has determined that these treaties do entail respecting universal human rights, so case law thus expands the scope of EU law. And finally, general administrative procedures, ensure that law is read and applied consistently, thus, common procedures, non-retroactive law, legitimate expectations of subjects and procedural rights. Horspool et al.29 also note that EU law claims supremacy over member state law. EU law has ‘direct effect’ but enforcement is problematic. Brussels has a sequence of administrative and legal steps that it can take and finally, there are financial penalties (deployed against Poland, Hungary, threat of withholding EU funds is very persuasive). Compliance is, it seems, improving.30 However, Horspool et al.31 note that this is an important issue. The role of the ECJ has been criticized. It has asserted its priority over member state law but such laws are written into constitutions which in turn underpin political communities; a basic idea of democracy, but there is no ‘European political community’.32 The ECJ is not protecting a political community, rather it seems to be advancing the primarily economic claims of the Brussels machinery; claims increasingly tagged as in essence ‘neo-liberal’.33 Other critics argue that the 29 Horspool et al. 2018. 30 B. Pircher and K. Loxbo 2020 ‘Compliance with EU law in times of disintegration’

in Journal of Common Market Studies 58.5. 31 Horspool et al. 2018. 32 The German Constitutional Court in dealing with a challenge to Lisbon 2009

dismissed case but added that whilst Basic Law promotes cooperation it does not allow submission to an outside authority; the EU is merely an association of sovereign states and EU law in regard to the Basic Law must in principle be revocable; in 2020 dealing with a case concerning ECB, the ECJ rejected the complaint, later agreeing substance, but once again asserted the superiority of German Basic Law—it is an issue of the relative status of the courts—this politico-legal dispute is ongoing (as of 2022)—source, press reports, Horspool et al. 2018. 33 Streek 2016.

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ECJ is an ‘activist court’, not merely protecting the founding treaties but interpreting them in a fashion that extends their reach, again in line with Brussels’ formal ideals. But such activity is the concern of member state parliaments; at which point, critics have said that the ECJ thus undermines the very notion of the rule of law.34 (iii) Europe in the wider global system Europe and the European Union are not the same thing: Europe designates a cultural sphere based in the western fringes of the large Asian landmass35 ; it has a written history reaching back some 2500 years36 ; and it was a key site in the ongoing shift to the modern world.37 The European Union on the other hand is a political project of very recent vintage, a mere 70 or so years, nonetheless, the EU is a major player in the contemporary global system. The role of the EU is particularly clear in respect of political economy. The EU is a significant player with research spending, high-value manufacturing output, trade volumes, finance and services. However, with respect to the Union, international relations theorists voice doubts, as the Union is less powerful diplomatically and it is weak with respect to the military where its member states are subordinate to NATO and this organization—as the 2023 crisis in Ukraine has shown—is a key vehicle for American influence within the continent. However, against these doubts, it might be added that Europe is a key cultural power; as noted it has a written history going back 2500 years and it was a key site for the shift to the modern world. All this amounts to ensuring a significant ‘soft power’ status; the role of culture, both highculture of arts and literature, and the popular spheres of consumption, leisure, tourism and the like, mean that Europe—but perhaps not the EU—will continue to figure in global affairs.

34 M. Smith 2019 ‘Staring into the Abyss: A crisis in the rule of law in the EU’ in European Law Journal 25.6. 35 N. Davies 1997 Europe: A History, London, Pimlico. 36 On this see Kenneth Clark 1970 Civilization (BBC film); on today’s EU links to

PRC, see A. Xing and P.W. Preston 2024 China and EU Relations in the Twenty-first Century, London, Routledge. 37 C. Bayly 2004 The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Oxford, Blackwell.

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The British: Enduring Doubts, Transactional Arrangements and the Accident of Brexit In 1945, the metropolitan ruling elite in London finessed the unfolding collapse of their global empire by reinventing themselves as a longestablished nation, recently victorious in a morally correct war and something of a model for other polities, the package tagged ‘Continuing Britain’. So, in the early post-war period, the elite took themselves to be leaders of a great power and this self-understanding embraced contrasts with the polities of mainland Europe, where armies had fought battles and countries had been radically changed through defeat and occupation; thus, British continuity (however illusory) versus mainland disruption. In the early fifties, when mainland elites began to work towards some sort of formal reworking of pre-war relations, broadly cast in progressive terms, thus cooperation oriented towards a long-term goal of unification, it presented the British with a dilemma: to engage or stand aside. In the event, the British opted for a kind of negative engagement and when early discussions around trade addressed the mainland’s idea of a common external tariff, the first step towards a unified marketplace, the British resisted.38 The mainlanders went ahead and the 1957 Rome Treaty established the basis for what was to become the EU; the British took a different path with the 1960 Stockholm Treaty established EFTA. However, the unfolding collapse of the British Empire, which was accelerated after the 1956 debacle of Suez, together with contrasts in respect of economic prosperity between Britain and the mainland six, meant that the British elite began to look favourably on the mainland organization. A number of applications to join were made and Britain became a member in 1973. The matter might have been thought settled, but British membership of the EU was never fully secured as domestic elites were as likely to look to Washington as to Brussels and organized party groups both right and left were home to factions dissenting from the formal pro-EU politics. At the same time, popular opinion was subject to the political whims of elements of the popular press where EU-bashing became a regular feature. More seriously, perhaps, successive London governments secured ‘opt-outs’ from new treaty commitments

38 D.W. Urwin 1997 A Political History of Western Europe Since 1945, London, Longman, pp. 107–11.

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and so crucially Britain did not use the euro nor did it join the Schengen Agreement. The relationship of Britain to the project of the European Union has long been characterized by observers in somewhat downbeat terms— semi-detachment or an awkward partner or, in a rather different register, America’s number one ally in Europe—but after the 1990 departure of Prime Minister Thatcher, the relationship seemed to have settled into a workable form as the cycle of meetings in Brussels oriented towards the pragmatics of low politics ran on quietly and domestic discourse remained subdued. But the May 2010 return of the Conservative Party to government albeit in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats reawakened public debate about the high politics of membership. The coalition lasted until May 2015 when an election returned the Conservatives to power. Mr Cameron announced in February 2016 that there would be a referendum on membership. A number of explanations for Mr. Cameron’s actions have been offered: tactical maladroitness in dealing with Brussels (veto threats and the like); a failure to understand the concerns of mainland colleagues (who are wedded to the project of ‘ever closer union’); an inability to unpick the muddle of Westminster’s attitudes towards Europe (thus, symptomatically, pro-expansion to the East coupled to a desire to restrict inward migration from those areas); and anxieties about the rise in support for UKIP plus relatedly the disruptive behaviour of euro-sceptic Tory Party backbenchers in Westminster. It might be added that Mr. Cameron also affirmed a confidence in democracy (competitive elections). And at the back of all these lies the matter of the government’s response to the 2008–2010 financial crisis, that is, its embrace of austerity (contested, and at best ambiguously successful). As the debate unfolded some measure of truth was found in all these lines of commentary, but none of them addressed perhaps the most startling aspect of events, that is, the reminder offered of the deep-seated hostility towards the political-cultural project of the European Union held by sections of the Conservative Party. Sets of particular interests could be invoked by way of explanation; thus, the links between the City of London and Wall Street or the stateinstitutional links between the UK military/security services and those of the USA (and the related corporate links between defence contractors), plus displaced ideological nostalgia (thus Harold Macmillan’s characterization of Britain as Greece to America’s Rome), and so on. It is true that lobbyists for these various groups have been active, but these sorts of

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activities would seem to be both rational and part and parcel of routine high-level politics. However, another explanation could be found in the habits of thought of those unable to reconcile themselves to the European Union. This points to matters of political culture where the preoccupation with sovereignty, the concern for independence, the invocation of ‘a thousand years of history’ plus the appeal to the wartime ‘bull-dog spirit’, along with the antipathy towards Brussels, all evidence a particular view of the polity as independent, long-established and proud. But this involves an elaborate exercise in active remembering and forgetting, producing a deep-seated historical amnesia; specifically, a failure to acknowledge that the British state-empire system is long gone. A reluctance to confront the implications of the loss of empire feeds the habit of harking back to the supposed intellectual, moral and political resources of that period coupled inconsistently with the purportedly exemplary efforts of ‘wartime’. Yet as the contemporary polity is deeply enmeshed in wider political and economic networks—in recent years cast in neo-liberal terms—any government needs must manage these relationships with an eye on the future not the past and the evident elite confusions cut against finding a consensus about the appropriate route to the future.

Europe: Futures The European Union emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War; the casualties were heavy; the costs similarly heavy; the overseas empires were untenable and quickly lost; and the continent itself was divided and occupied. It was from this parlous state that the recovery began and it was also from this point that the idea of a unified Europe took shape; pre-war utopian ideas in respect of federations or functions were dusted down and put into practice; the core countries were mainlanders whilst the British sought at first to undermine the plan, but, rebuffed, stepped back.39 The first founding treaties were signed, the organization prospered and Western Europe experienced decades of rapid growth, the years of ‘baby-boomers’. The success has continued unevenly with periods of advance interspersed with periods of stasis. The number of members has increased and the organization now hosts most of the sovereign states of Europe. It has 39 Early debates about a common external tariff—opposed by UK—on this Unwin 1997.

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become an economic power of global significance. The recent euro crisis has driven the member states closer together via the mechanisms provided by Brussels and the creative work of the ECB. But the organization is liable to member state disagreements, in the recent past over sovereign debt, now, in the 2020s, there are disagreements in respect of defence; specifically, the crisis in Ukraine. The CEE states have been particularly outspoken but here again there are differences (Poland/Hungary). It may be that the best characterization of the Union was given several years ago: it is an example of ‘deep regionalism’,40 and its contingency is simultaneously its strength as it is able to accommodate political differences and weather external shocks; however, that said, following American involvement in the Ukraine crisis, and the apparent re-starting of Cold War in both Europe and East Asia, some mainstream commentators diagnose deep-seated problems for the Union.41

40 B. Laffan et al. 2000 Europe’s Experimental Union: Rethinking Integration, London, Routledge. 41 M. Wolf 2023 The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, Allen Lane.

CHAPTER 4

Britain’s Financial Crisis: Debts, Bail-Outs and Austerity, 2008–2010

The dynamics of the 2008 financial crisis were represented by the government of the day as ‘global’ but this was misdirection for—as commentators noted—the epicentre of the crisis was the interlinked network of the City of London and Wall Street banks. At the outset, the run of problems had their dual occasion in market-centred optimism in regard to investment riskspreading and government-centred acquiescence in light-touch regulation, where both sets of ideas were grounded in deeper claims about the fundamental characteristics of human life in advanced modern societies; hence the individualism of radical liberalism, hence, ideas of ‘globalization’ and hence finally the rhetorical claims in regard to the ‘end of history’. In 2008 key elements of the system failed—banks and the like—and a sequence of domestic cascades and international contagions followed. In the UK, the near collapse of City banks was followed by ‘bail-outs’ and ‘austerity’. The bail-outs saved the banks from collapse but these actions transferred private company debts onto the state and these large sums became parts of sovereign debt. Confronted with these sharp increases in sovereign debt the prevailing market orthodoxy demanded tax rises, cut-backs in spending and privatization; in sum austerity. One consequence of this decades-long policy stance was the steady weakening of key social institutions, in particular, schools, hospitals, social housing and local government services and all this in turn was an example of the wider hollowing-out of local communities.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_4

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The Reassertion of Market Liberalism In the eighties, a long-available approach to political-economic analysis gained decisive influence amongst political agents in the West and whilst there were differences of emphasis the key to the novel approach was a commitment to the central role of the liberal market, both in the context of the real world plus the realms of politics and policy-making, the market was taken to be a rational, self-regulating mechanism that needed only a minimal state acting to guarantee private contracts and public order. State intervention in the economic life of the community was rejected because the state could not better the logic of the marketplace, indeed, its actions were likely to fall far short. In brief, ideas, institutions and agents came together; this discourse flagged the era of neo-liberalism.1 Appropriate policy stances were adopted by states in the eighties,2 in particular in the West, but these ideas were distributed more widely via IFIs such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In Britain, the long episode had seen waves of privatization, with state assets soldoff cheaply and these policies had been supplemented by debt formation, public and private. And these were additional to the vast inflow of monies from the North Sea oil business. At the same time, looking at institutions, successive governments had sought to reduce the role of the state and open up the sphere of private business; liberalization was accompanied by reductions in the powers of non-central state institutions (local/ regional government) and the steady repression of organized labour; in sum, the package tagged ‘Thatcherism’.3 In the early eighties there were popular protests (such as the Poll Tax riots, the miners’ strike, plus political scandals such as Westland helicopters and there were high levels of unemployment), but it was not until the 2008 crisis that the neo-liberal package was discredited. Yet he impacts of the period and the immediate crisis rolled on. Most directly, as private debts were taken on by the states, these debts became sovereign debts, elements of state overall borrowing,

1 Rooted in the work of Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Fredrich von

Hayek plus more recently followers of novelist Ayn Rand, see J. Ree 2023 ‘Opium of the Elite’ in London Review of Books 45.3 February 2 2023. 2 In Britain, symbolically, Callaghan’s speech to the Labour Party Conference, September 1976. 3 A. Gamble 1988 The Strong State and the Free Economy, London, Macmillan; see also S. Hall 1988 The Hard Road to Renewal, London, Verso.

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and the markets demanded fiscal restraint; in Britain, the damaging policy of ‘austerity’.4 And there were similar policy stances elsewhere; thus, a bank crisis was re-described as a crisis of state borrowing, both excusing the behaviour of the banks and condemning their populations to years of state retrenchment.5 The 2008 financial crisis6 had a twin centre in Wall Street and the City of London. The crisis had its dual occasion in market-centred optimism in regard to investment risk-spreading and government-centred acquiescence in light-touch regulation, where both sets of ideas were grounded in deeper claims about the fundamental characteristics of human life in advanced modern societies; hence individualist liberalism, ideas of ‘globalization’ and claims about the ethico-political ‘end of history’. The upshot of these attitudes was a bank-sponsored debt bubble. In time, the bubble burst, triggered by failures in the American subprime mortgage industry where relatively poor people had been encouraged to involve themselves in buying houses. At this point, the banking system was unable to function,7 as debts had been spread around the system to the point that no one bank knew if those banks it dealt with were solvent or not, and consequently inter-bank lending came to a halt. The crisis also spread to Europe where banks had engaged in similarly ill-advised lending, this time, with northern banks providing soft credit to southern banks and thence their retail customers. As the financial collapse unrolled, with, famously, Lehman Brothers as the first casualty, the system had to be supported by state action; the banks were bailed out and the financial system stabilized and recapitalized. Adam Tooze8 argues that the 2008 financial crisis is best thought of as a North Atlantic crisis as it involved the USA, Britain and the European Union. It began in the American real estate mortgage industry and then spread to the wider banking industry; and as this was an industry that was 4 J. Burn-Murdoch 2022 ‘Britain’s Winter of Discontent is the Inevitable Result of Austerity’ in Financial Times December 23 2022. 5 Simon Wren Lewis 2018 ‘Bait and Switch’ in London Review of Books 40.20 October 25 2018. 6 An earlier treatment of these issues: P.W. Preston 2012 England after the Great Recession: Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of Crisis, London, Palgrave. 7 R. Tooze 2018 Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London, Allen Lane; see review Wren Lewis 2018. 8 Tooze, p. 13.

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internationally interlinked, the US/Europe crisis had impacts around the global financial system. The US government reacted quickly and bailed out the banks via TARP. The British government acted quickly; several key banks were nationalized. The European Union leadership prevaricated; the member states were divided on how to respond and the Union’s rulebook was grounded in law9 and this law cut against collective action at the Union level. The recovery was long drawn out. China too reacted quickly. The upshot of these responses was to confirm the position of the USA (only the USA could issue the dollars needed to keep the global financial system working), weaken the claims of the rising status of the EU (as their own constitutive rules simultaneously hindered collective action) and to confirm the shift of global economic activity towards East Asia (in particular, China). In the wider world, the more a country was integrated with the global financial system the greater the difficulties it faced (as with Thailand in 1997 Asian financial crisis10 ). Tooze goes on to argue that standard free market economic analysis in terms of states is limited because the key players are the networks of major banks; MNCs are now supplemented by FMNCs; Tooze suggests that there is a ‘tightknit corporate oligarchy’,11 adding that ‘At a global level twenty to thirty banks matter’.12 However, when the crisis in the banks hit, the only remedy, contra the nostrums of neo-liberalism, was the power of the state, in particular, Britain and the USA were able to create new money for the system. And after the banks were bailed out, with the taxpayers covering the debts, the state then introduced austerity; bait and switch.13 The crisis did not end neatly in 2008, it dragged on in various ways. The implications of the power and irresponsibility of MNFCs are now clear but it is far from clear how a democratic response can be made.

9 Neo-liberalism was bult in; it suited the British at the time of the 1985 SEA; it suited the Bundesbank with its commitment to Ordo liberalism—obedience to rules stressed. 10 P. Phongpaichit and C. Baker 2000 Thailand’s Crisis, Singapore, ISEAS. 11 Tooze 2018, p. 13. 12 Ibid., p. 13. 13 Ibid., pp. 13–15.

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Britain and the Rise and Fall of Neo-Liberalism In Britain, the high-tide of neo-liberalism was reached around the turn of the twenty-first century—following the governments of Thatcher/ Blair (1979–2007) —but then a number of crises broke, in particular financial collapse. The optimistic political and policy stance summed as neo-liberalism saw its lustre diminished; however, the elite weathered the storm and a policy of domestic austerity was introduced, debts were to be paid down. Nonetheless, the 2008/2010 crisis broke neo-liberal ideas; a conventional wisdom14 had been overthrown. The Run-Up to the Financial Crisis, 2008–2010 In Britain, during the seventies, the political and policy stance associated with Keynes, that is, the mixed economy, became unserviceable and whilst there were multiple aspects it was inflation that came to be seen as both symptom (of a failing system) and the key to reform (control inflation— reboot the economy). The solution, the critics said, was to utilize the theory of monetarism, whereby controlling the supply of money would act as a means to regulate the economy. The policy sought to cut state spending sharply in order to purge the system of inflation and allow growth to resume. In Britain, the policy was anticipated by a Labour government in 1976 and it was pursued by a Conservative government in the 1980s; in practice, the upshot took the shape of extensive industrial closures, job losses, and little sign of the anticipated spontaneous recovery. At this point a fully-fledged neo-liberalism began to take shape; it was a political project15 ; successive governments sold-off state assets and increased debt levels; the corporate world took on debt and private individuals were actively encouraged to take on debt. The creation of debt acted to keep the economies growing; debt levels rose, inequality rose and the working classes in Britain found themselves under pressure with low-skilled and semi-skilled workers experiencing precarious working conditions and static wage levels. In Britain, over the period of neo-liberal hegemony, roughly 1979– 2008, the role of finance in the economy grew significantly. In Britain 14 Idea from J.K. Galbraith 1958 The Affluent Society, London, Penguin. 15 C. Hay 1996 Re-stating Social and Political Change, Buckingham, Open University

Press.

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1986 ‘the big bang’, implemented by the Thatcher government, radically reformed the City of London; essentially de-regulation, it enabled the activities of City financiers to create new financial instruments and these had the effect of generating a debt bubble; this debt bubble continued to grow through the nineties. The change in regulation was legitimated by three lines of argument: claims to technical expertise; assertions that it was a done deal; and finally, the claim that the market system worked to maximize human freedom. So first, there was a claim to technical professional expertise on the part of mainstream liberal economists; their models, plus mathematics, plus data plus a claim to an intellectual status akin to that of the natural sciences. One theory was particularly influential—the efficient markets hypothesis16 —which claimed that markets always acted efficiently and that the rise in debt was thus not a problem as the market distributed risk widely, and, more positively, the provision of debt to new consumer groups was providing them with the opportunity to participate in the liberal consumer market in the same way as others.17 Second, the claim that the global integration of liberal markets was irreversible; here the rhetoric of globalization facilitated corporate world agendas, representing integration as some sort of natural process which thus required creative acquiescence (as opposed, for example, to Keynesian state control/planning). And third, the ideological claim that liberal markets worked to maximize material welfare, facilitate individual responsibility (moral maximization), and support individual freedom (political maximization) with the whole package supported by positive knowledge (knowledge maximization).18 The Crisis Breaks Helen Thompson19 argues that the 2008–10 financial crisis unfolded in stages; it did not appear out of nowhere. There were earlier geo-economic 16 G. Cooper 2008 The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Market Fallacy, New York, Vintage. 17 In retail this meant sub-prime mortgaged along with multiplicity of credit cards from banks and shadow banks—elsewhere tagged ‘predatory lending’. 18 P.W. Preston 1994 Discourses of Development: State, Market and Polity in the Analysis of Complex Change, Aldershot, Avebury, p. 95. 19 H. Thompson 2022 Hard Times in the 21st Century, Oxford University Press, pp. 135–39.

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shifts in the global economy that opened the way: ‘…China’s economic rise, its effects on oil prices as production stagnated, the Eurodollar markets and the fall out of each on credit conditions’.20 So the crisis was not just the property market crash, although it is here that the final phase began. Thompson argues that there were three linked crises: first, the American housing market collapse; second, a recession which had its origins in oil price rises; and third, the banking crash. The latter signalled the acute phase of the crisis. This final damaging phase began in the deregulated casino banking operations of major firms in the City of London and Wall Street; debt was created and spread around the financial system. One class of debt turned out to be unsustainable, sub-prime mortgages; here financial institutions made funds available to individuals who did not have the means to service the debts and as this class of debt failed, the problems cascaded through the system and contagion shifted these problems into the real economy.21 Headline events included: BNP Paribus—August 2007—new funding; Bear Stearns—2008—failure, later bailed out; Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac September 2008—placed in conservatorship; Lehman Brothers—15 September 2008—files for bankruptcy; AIG—16 September 2008—bailed out; RBS, Lloyds, HBOS—2008—bailed out. Anatole Kaletsky22 argues that the financial system was acting to reduce debts until Hank Paulson on 15 September 2008, let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, with the result that there was chaos as flows of credit between banks dried up. The British government offered guarantees to depositors on 8th October, the Americans followed 13th October and then, Kaletsky, argues, the crisis began to abate. Tooze23 is more critical arguing that a coterie of international banks wielded great power and they puffed up 20 Ibid., p. 135. 21 Stephen Valdez and Philip Molyneux 2010 An Introduction to Global Financial

Markets, London, Palgrave. 22 A. Kaletsky 2010 Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy, London, Bloomsbury. 23 Tooze 2018.

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a debt bubble and when it burst, they looked to the states to bail them out. Tooze sees a weak, fundamentally unstable system. However, debates aside, when confronted with a collapsing bank system, governments had to act: (i) to flood the system with new money; (ii) transfer debts of failed or failing banks onto its own books thus increasing levels of government debt and thus servicing costs and (iii) introduce state spending cuts as these were required by the money markets because of the increase in sovereign debt. The cut-backs impacted the local economy and citizens and the problems spread around the system in Britain, America and a little later mainland Europe.24 In Britain, there was a significant political spill-over. As the financial system was bailed out with the costs shifted to the population the machinery of the state and the parliament were subject to criticism. Amongst political parties a blame-game began but it was clear that the state and its parliament had failed; they had failed to monitor and control the activities of the financial sector that had become too big to fail, too concerned with gambling and too reliant upon implicit guarantees from the state. Subsequent Diagnoses of the Crisis Offered In respect of the financial crisis, multiple diagnoses were offered: neoliberal economists pointed to fraud, cheating or ill fortune (that is, it’s not our fault)25 ; institutionalists pointed to City cultures and weak regulation (predictably greedy bankers,26 lazy politicians and slack regulation); political economists offer a third diagnosis, they locate the heart of the problems in the recently expanded powers of the financial markets—the City of London and Wall Street27 —and several factors are 24 Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain—labelled, coarsely, ‘the PIIGs’. 25 Ree 2023 offers a witty list of ways in which the market routinely falls short of the

ideological images affirmed in abstract-general liberal market theorizing—oligarchs, loan sharks, arms dealers, racketeers and more; see also John Lanchester 2010 Whoops: What Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, London, Allen Lane. 26 Gillian Tett 2009 Fools Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, London, Little Brown; see also J. Stiglitz 2010 Free Fall, London, Allen Lane. 27 Robert Wade 2008 ‘Financial Regime Change’ in New Left Review 53 September/ October 2008; Peter Gowan 2009 ‘Crisis in the Heartland’ in New Left Review 55 January/February 2009.

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cited in their diagnosis including exotic products, political influence and straightforward propaganda. The banks produced many financial exotic products. The change in regulations, summed up as de-regulation and organized in America by the Clinton28 regime (in particular, the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall Act), and in Britain by Thatcher, allowed banks and other financial institutions to re-organize themselves and there were many amalgamations which had the effect of creating huge integrated international firms. The new regulations allowed banks to create many new exotic products and these were sold to each other, to governments, to pension funds and to retail savers. This was the key shift from utility banking (gathering surplus savings and putting them to productive use) to originate and distribute model or casino banking (where more and more loans/debts could be created and fed into the expanding financial marketplace). These debt instruments were structured so as to distribute risk around the system (in line with the efficient markets hypothesis) and to generate a flow of profits to the banks and their staff. The banks came to hold significant political power. As the financial industry grew, its contribution to the exchequer also grew, banks and bankers paid tax—their share of the overall economy grew, reflected in their contribution to the GDP of the country. They also offered consultancy payments and job offers to elite civil servants and politicians. The banks argued that they were crucial to the new service-based economy; making stuff was yesterday’s concern, today was controlling and managing the system’s money flows and these flows were being made global. The key money centres were linked—Europe, North America, the Gulf, South Asia, East Asia—and the outline of a twenty-four-hour industry was seemingly in place, the process was tagged ‘globalization’ and read as irreversible. The new circumstances gave rise to energetic propaganda. The key claims revolved around the purported inevitable process of globalization with, it was claimed, integrated finance, integrated production chains and movement towards a single integrated global economy with only superficial cultural differences marking what had been discrete forms of life. However, the idea was little more than 1950s modernization theory re-hashed and both were overturned by shifting circumstances (wars, debts and social upheaval). 28 Repeal of Glass-Steagall—1999—this depression era law had separated out utility and casino banking

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Overall, it was the rise of the financial sector that proved crucial; a process of financialization as a power within the productive sphere of the economy slowly shifts away from the natural scientists, engineers and so on who actually make stuff, towards the financial actors who control the supply of credit (all business in a modern liberal economy require access to funds—for day to day running costs and for investment in ideas, plant and machinery). In Britain, finance in the post-war period was closely controlled by the state but in the eighties, regulations were relaxed. In Britain ‘the big bang’ organized by the government of Mrs. Thatcher. The financial sector grew sharply and banks and other institutions created many new products and debt instruments. The sector came to employ many people and to pay much tax and to comprise a significant share of gross GDP. It became very powerful. It had a double base in Wall Street, with crucial links to the US Treasury, the IMF and politicians, and in the City of London where its links to the Bank of England gave it access to the core of the British government machine. In the case of Britain, London became the richest city in the country as power—economic, political and cultural—drained to London. However, post-big bang, the City, as it turned out, was busy creating a debt bubble, and eventually, it burst and the acute crisis began.

Unfolding Reactions to the Crisis: Popular Doubts The 2008–2010 financial crisis was a debacle of sufficient scale to resist being brushed under the carpet or briefly acknowledged and kicked into the long grass; both familiar elite strategies when confronted with untoward events. The financial crisis was reported in the mass media and thus fed into political debates. As noted, some of the responses were predicable; thus the concern of elite players to protect the central claims/ policies of the neo-liberal years, the prioritizing of the needs of the corporate world and the provision of credit lines by the central bank as debts were taken onto the government’s books. All the time this was presented as a temporary measure and business as usual was to be resumed as soon as possible. If all this was predictable, less predictable was the popular anger directed against the banking industry, now seen as not only incompetent on a massive scale but also when details of pay levels became widely known, as greedy, unprincipled and corrupt. Then, finally, as the crisis unfolded, a somewhat unexpected response became clear; that is,

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the widespread popular loss of confidence in parliament. Politicians had failed to regulate the finance industry—plus in the popular press, there were a string of accurate reports on the expenses claimed by members of parliament,29 read by the public as grubby low-level corruption with fiddling expenses, manipulating housing allowances and the like. These themes were picked up later as the general crisis rolled on. Oliver Bullough30 characterizing the network of white-collar specialists, the bankers, lawyers, accountants and the like who serve those who can pay, as collectively a ‘butler to the world’. These respectable specialists are found concentrated in London. Caroline Knowles31 investigates their businesses and their places in the context of a walk through the heart of the city. The text is urban sociology. She includes one noted site, Grenfell Tower32 which was a public housing development in the Kensington and Chelsea administrative district of London. It was built in the 1970s and was designed to provide approximately 120 flats. The building was constructed of concrete with each apartment physically separate. There was a single central stair along with a double lift. The building was upgraded in 2015/2016 with both internal and external work. In 2017, a fire began in a fourth-floor apartment and rapidly spread via the new external cladding. The building was quickly engulfed in fire. The emergency services responded quickly but 72 people were killed. The fire was a political shock to the elite and wider population (via media). Kensington and Chelsea Borough (the local administrative unit) is one of the richest parts of London, which, in turn, is the richest part of Britain, which, in turn, is the fifth richest country on the planet. In line with pro-market government policy, the upgrading had been outsourced to contractors. And, similarly, the administration of the building had been outsourced, but the relationships between residents and systems of administration were poor.33

29 Reports in the Daily Telegraph, May 2009. 30 O. Bullough 2022 Butler to the World, London, Profile. 31 C. Knowles 2022 Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, London, Allen Lane. 32 Knowles 2022 p. 119; https://www.Grenfelltowerinquiry.org; A. O’Hagen 2018

‘The Tower’ in London Review of Books June 7 2018; https://www.Grenfellactiongroup. wordpress.com. 33 O’Hagan 2018.

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The widespread popular distaste for the behaviour of bankers and politicians spilled over to embrace the London-based elite as a whole. An insurgent political party, initially treated as a joke by the commentariat, began to make something of a popular splash—UKIP; the party gathered some support in local authority elections and the European parliamentary elections (where PR was in place), but they made little headway in parliamentary elections (where FPTP was in place). UKIP’s activities resonated with the anti-EU ideas of sections of the Conservative Party and further complaints against the EU were made, and in time, these fed into the calls for a referendum, which finally won in June 2016 (52–48%). At this point, commentators began to write about ‘populism’; it was noted in the case of domestic British politics and also in respect of politics on the mainland. The term was not used in a neutral fashion, as it could be, as there is a long history of populism, going back to late nineteenth century America, rather it was used pejoratively; thus, populist politicians were taken to be dishonest salesmen whose policies would be doomed to failure if they were ever implemented and the supporters of such politicians were taken to be dull-witted or poorly informed or prejudiced (or all three, plus other terms of abuse depending quite what had been said by the politicians). What was clear was that the mainstream commentariat was not prepared or able to give the populist politicians and their supporters a fair hearing. Cast in neutral terms, populism entailed political programmes turned closely to the wishes and opinions of ordinary people (or, rather more polemically, democracy), but this could also be read as pandering to popular prejudices. The commentariat typically added other terms to their dismissal of populism: thus racism, evident, it was argued, in populist references to ethnic minorities, in particular, recent migrants; thus authoritarianism, evident, it was argued, in populist calls for leadership. The more excitable commentators ran all three ideas together—racist, authoritarian populism—to suggest that here was a new version of fascism.34

34 The more aggressive use of the terminology has been reserved for discussions of the activities of governments in eastern parts of Europe; thus Poland, Hungary, Austria and the Lander government in Bavaria; and more recently, mid-2018, electoral results in Slovenia and Italy

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Finally, some commentators turned to long-term issues. Wolfgang Streek,35 working with reference to the tradition of critical theory, looks at the structural condition of European society. Streek argues that the present post-2008 crisis is merely an aspect of a deeper crisis; that of European capitalism itself. But this is not an apocalyptic diagnosis, looking to an imminent breakdown, rather Streek sees a condition of entropy. The system has been failing for a whilst, that is, it has run out of creative responses to the flow of events. And the social world has become oddly degraded (coping, hoping, doping and shopping), whilst remaining seemingly stable (no signs of structural change). Streek focuses on Europe. The European Union is read as an essentially neo-liberal project, with rules about liberal economic relations imposed from the Brussels centre (naively, in the event, as in the wider global context neither the USA nor China in practice embrace these rules/ideology). The EU’s stance effectively subordinates people to the demands of an internationalized economic system. Streek distinguishes ‘state-people’ from ‘market-people’ where the former is the denizens of states, rooted in particular places, whereas the latter comprises an international network of finance and other corporate organizations and they are the real power holders in the current system, a system that post-2008 is stuck, that is, no longer progressive (even in its own terms). Looking at Europe as a whole, Streek diagnoses three phases in its post-war history: Keynesian social democracy, neo-liberal era free market liberalism, and now, with debts to manage, the emergence of the ‘consolidation state’ focused on the technical control of debts, a species of austerity politics. The implications for ‘democracy’ are clear in that collective debate and decision-making must give way to restricted technical decision-making; markets plus oligarchic states. The industrial capitalist system seems to have weathered the financial storm: political systems remain intact and the elite adjust, in Europe and in Britain.36 It should be noted that much later, a decade or so after the financial crisis, there were signs that the policy of austerity was slowly being relaxed. Theresa May’s government spoke initially about attending to the 35 W. Streek 2016 How Will Capitalism End, London, Verso; W. Streek 2014 Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, Verso; see also review by A. Tooze 2017 ‘A General Logic of Crisis’ in London Review of Books 39.1 January 5 2017. 36 W. Streek 2015 ‘The rise of the consolidation state’, Discussion Paper 15/1 Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, February 2015.

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concerns of local people37 but her government was engulfed in Brexit debates and a new Prime Minister emerged, Boris Johnson. Shortly thereafter, the Covid-19 crisis broke and remaining neo-liberal small-state nostrums were cast aside,38 irrelevant to the demands of the new set of circumstances with the state/government making available lavish funding for businesses in order to keep the economy from collapse.

The Long-Term Costs of the Crisis: Austerity The response of the Bank of England to the financial crisis involved both short-term activities, thus taking over the banks and refunding or relocating their debts to the state’s accounts, and longer-term activity in regard to the wider economy, thus ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE). In Britain, QE was begun in March 2009. The Federal Reserve had a similar programme (TARP) and a little later the ECB followed suit with its own suite of measures. The policy was novel and required the central bank to create vast sums of money which were fed into the banking system and thereafter distributed through the wider economy. In Britain, the central bank’s programme of QE created monies that were lent to banks which underpinned further lending in the stock markets and property. Holders of these assets enjoyed increases in wealth. But the double job of bailing out the banks and supporting the wider economy saw sovereign debts rise sharply and it also triggered asset price inflation and neither phenomenon was welcomed by the financial markets. The conventional wisdom of the market players was that in this sort of situation, the sharp rise in the state’s debts along with related inflation had to be controlled; the standard recipe was sharp cutbacks in state spending. These strategies of austerity are familiar. The austerity programme involved cut-backs in local government spending (where much of the funding comes from central government) and this 37 Nick Timothy, one of her key advisors, offers the ‘Birmingham model: harking back to nineteenth century city fathers’, N. Timothy 2020 Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism, Cambridge, Polity. 38 The immediate concern for government in early 2020 was dealing with the

epidemic—one aspect of the state’s responses involved loans and grants and guarantees and so on to private individuals and companies—the state’s debt was set to rise dramatically—commentary in the mainstream press was divided—FT and Economist, supported the government’s policies and were relaxed about the increased debt—it was rational and sustainable.

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created a slow weakening of services. It reduced social welfare provisions across the board and created deepening poverty in some sections of the population. As the state cuts back spending many groups in society are impacted; for example, funds to local government are reduced, funds to key social organizations such as health are reduced and funds to social welfare programmes are also reduced. The economic management effect of such policies is to reduce wages, employment and public services; the hope is that the dip in activity will be short-lived and the economy now purged of excess debt will recover. But the effects of austerity are not evenly distributed throughout society; those who held assets prospered, and those who did not experienced some measure of loss of livelihood. Overall, the mix of bank rescues, QE and austerity led to greater inequality coupled to poorer provisions in health, housing, education and employment. These costs have impacted the population differentially, but in general, it is the poor that have suffered the most direct impacts: those reliant on welfare benefits; those experiencing long-term ill-health; those in precarious employment; those obliged to live in rented accommodation; those without significant savings to help ride out short-term problems; those reliant on food banks; and at the bottom of the heap, those who have joined the ranks of the homeless along with those who are rough sleepers. The asset bubble coupled to austerity created an increase in inequality. Martin Wolf records the changes in income and wealth over both the longer neo-liberal period,39 marked by the elections of Reagan and Thatcher in the early eighties, and the recent post-2008 period and the upshot of liberalization and recent crisis has been to deepen inequalities within polities. Those with assets have prospered, but ordinary working people have seen their incomes slowly decline. Wolf points out that this slowly increasing divide has left the broad masses readily susceptible to populist ideas.

Reform Proposals in Britain In Britain, the impact of the 2008–2010 crisis was severe: real incomes declined; unemployment rose; and in the political realm, populism flourished. One noted mainstream commentator explains the crisis in terms of

39 M. Wolf 2023 The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, Allen Lane, pp. 88–99.

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the mal-development of the globalized system created over the last fortyodd years; a mix of rigged capitalism40 and rent-seeking.41 The elite is castigated; they have evidenced failures and malfeasance over may years. Trump and Johnson did not come from nowhere: ‘They came from forty years of elite failure’.42 A competent forward-looking elite is needed. One exemplar was FDR. The core ideal should be ‘citizenship’. The proposal seems to be that the elite should, so to say, get its act together; but the response of the British elite to the financial crisis of 2008–2010 has been defensive; thus, emergency measures were taken to nationalize failing banks and commentators noted that this sort of action had been a long-term socialist objective, but nothing happened. The banks were refunded courtesy of the tax-payer and left, by and large, to operate as they had before. Calls for deep structural reforms were successfully resisted and the distinction between utility and casino banking was not restored whilst minor reforms to banking regulations were advertised as significant. Indeed, following Brexit, the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, floated the idea of relaxing regulations to help the City.43 However, wider dismay at the performance of banks returned with the March 2023 failure of the American bank, SVP,44 which was followed by the collapse of further smaller US banks and the emergency rescue of Credit Suisse.45 The British elite is well placed to resist calls for reform, be they sectoral (as with, say, banks) or more general (as with, say, the political system). The legitimating stance of the elite speaks of liberal democracy but in terms of the distribution of power and its institutional form, the country

40 Ibid., pp. 148–170. 41 Ibid., p. 153. 42 Ibid., p. 374. 43 Post Brexit, the government of Rishi Sunak proposed softening regulations—part of

making Brexit work—see Financial Times and the Economist, February 2023. 44 In March 2023, the American bank SVP went bust—immediate commentary noted poor management and weak regulation—Gillian Tett in a number of articles in the Financial Times March 14 2023 unpacked this debacle—she also noted that management at the bank had cashed their shares two weeks before the collapse; similar dismay at this new banking collapse was noted by Paul Goodman on Conservative Home web March 13 2023 (accessed March 14 2023). 45 The rescue terms and subsequent confusions were tracked by Financial Times, March 2023.

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is better described as a species of oligarchy.46 Power is concentrated in the networks that link, as noted, the elite civil service, the crown, military, finance and the corporate world, and which works to plug the country into wider regional and global networks of power. David Marquand47 remarks that reforms in the parliamentary system have been made only slowly; elections are widely seen to be unsatisfactory, popular opinion finds expression in slowly falling participation and professional opinion is evidenced in the routine presentation of equally routinely disregarded reports urging electoral/parliamentary reform.48 The British elite is well placed to absorb, deflect and contain shocks, such as 2008–2010, whilst for the most part disregarding popular opinion.

46 F. Mount 2012 The New Few: A Very British Oligarchy, London, Simon and Shuster. 47 David Marquand 2008 Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy,

London, Weidenfeld. 48 S. Hix, R. Johnson and I. McLean 2010 Choosing an Electoral System, London, The British Academy.

CHAPTER 5

European Union: The Migration Crisis: 1999–2015

In 2015, the series of Western-sponsored wars in the Arab Middle East finally spilled over and impacted European politics directly in the form of large flows of migrants seeking refuge in Europe. There were three main routes: the Balkan route from Turkey leading into Germany and Northern Europe; the Libya/Italy route across the Mediterranean leading first to Italy and thence northwards and finally, on a smaller scale, the flows of people from North Africa to Spain. The most heavily used route was through the Balkans. The refugees involved had been lodged in camps in Lebanon and Turkey but in the summer of 2015, they began to move in large numbers, first into Greece and then northwards into the European Union, where, for many, their goal was Germany. In 2015, the series of Western-sponsored wars in the Arab Middle East finally spilled over and impacted European politics directly in the form of large flows of migrants seeking refuge in Europe. There were three main routes: the Balkan route from Turkey leading into Germany and Northern

This essay was published in Mandarin; Preston, P.W. ‘Non-standard governance of immigration crisis in Europe’ in Social Governance Review 14.4 May 2017. The essay was initially prepared in English and this is the original text (with a few typos corrected). I am grateful to the Editor for agreeing to the publication of this version. An Afterword has been added. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_5

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Europe; the Libya/Italy route across the Mediterranean leading first to Italy and thence northwards and finally, on a smaller scale, the flows of people from North Africa to Spain. The most heavily used route was through the Balkans. The refugees involved had been lodged in camps in Lebanon and Turkey but in the summer of 2015, they began to move in large numbers, first into Greece and then northwards into the European Union, where, for many, their goal was Germany. The various state authorities were caught by surprise. Border controls were reimposed. In places, fences were built. In Germany, confronted with an unanticipated influx of refugees, Chancellor Merkel spoke of a ‘welcoming culture’, whilst the government proposed ‘burden sharing’ amongst EU member states. This was rejected with CEE member states strongly opposed. In a similar fashion, the British state/ government responded defensively; irregular migrants were not welcomed. These attitudes were to shape in part the later debates about Brexit. The decades-long wars in the Middle East spilled over into Europe in the summer of 20151 as Syrian migrants from refugee camps in Turkey and Lebanon began to move into the European Union. They followed a difficult route organized by people traffickers from Turkey to the Greek Islands, thence to the Greek mainland and then along routes through Balkan countries before entering Germany and in the summer and autumn of that year many hundreds of thousands of migrants made the trip. State authorities were caught by surprise and overwhelmed and the media offered mixed messages: from drowned infants through tearful children to unruly gangs of young men. The migrant crisis has come on top of other problems confronting the European Union’s elites and policymakers—economic conditions, relations with Russia, the rise of right-wing parties and so on—but in this discussion attention is turned to the issue of migration. Many social scientists have considered the matter of the movement of human populations. Such movement is not new and it can be tracked from pre-history, through the rise of the modern world of natural sciencebased industrial capitalism and thence up to the present day. The dynamics 1 The European Union confronted an unexpected surge in external migrant numbers in the summer and autumn of 2015—one aspect of this episode was the threat posed to the EU’s common external border and its related common internal border-free travel arrangements—in 1985, the Schengen Agreement pointed to the gradual abolition of internal borders, the 1990 Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of borders and the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty took the Schengen Convention into the body of European Union law - https://www.ec.europa.eu.dgs/homeaffairs.

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of movement change: slow mass migrations, movement within stateempire systems and through to the closely regulated movement of today’s world. It is clear that in the post-1945 world, there is a distinctive environment within which such movement takes place: sovereign states, treaty agreements, international organizations, political-economic internationalization, mass media, and so on. It is within this distinctive environment that migration, regulated and irregular, takes place, and it is the latter form of movement that has in recent months seen people flowing towards the European Union.

Human Migration: From Pre-History to the Beginnings of the Contemporary Era Human movement is not new.2 The historical record reveals that human populations have moved—that human social groups have moved—that human individuals have moved—these movements have been studied by a range of social scientists—here a few simple distinctions are made to illustrate the nature of human movement—pre-history, pre-modern era and the process of the shift to the modern world along with its linked episode of state-empires. The era of pre-history has been investigated and whilst the lives of peoples leave no written records the evidence of their existence and patterns of settlement and movement has been assiduously gathered by archaeologists and others. These enquiries have found evidence of largescale long drawn-out population movements. At the largest scale, in respect of the evolution and dispersion of homo sapiens, debate revolves

2 Claims have been (and are) lodged by a number of scholarly communities. Historical evolution (thus, humankind is ‘out of Africa’—thus North America was populated by migration from Asia across the Bearing Strait—Australasia was populated by people moving down from continental Asia—the peninsular of Europe was populated by waves of migration from the east—and so on). Colonial history—core powers were happy to move around groups of peripheral peoples (British shipping South Asians to East Africa, or Southeast Asia or the Pacific (Fiji) and so on). Economic and political historians (the Irish famines leading people to migrate to North America—plus other European migrants during this period—and so on). Development theorists take note of flows of migrant workers—from Southeast Asia to the Gulf states—from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe— and so on). Cultural theorists note the impacts on sending and receiving cultures of these flows of people—thus notions of diasporic communities and hybrid identities—and so on).

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around the ‘out of Africa thesis’3 ; the idea that humankind emerged in East Africa and then spread in a series of waves around the rest of the planet, a process taking millennia. Within this frame there are sub-debates; populating North America via Asia and Bearing Strait or populating European peninsular via migration from the east—and so on. Ancient societies and civilizations, those leaving written records, even if fragmentary, have been investigated by historians and archaeologists— noting their rise/fall—noting also related flows of people. In Europe these histories would include Middle Eastern civilizations, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire; thence to the rise of the Catholic Church and the creation of familiar pre-modern societies in Europe. In East Asia, these histories would include the emergence of states in Northern China, the Korean peninsula and Japanese islands—plus more fluid polities in Southeast Asia. Familiar pre-modern societies, those that built stable sophisticated agrarian-based societies, have been looked at by a range of social scientists: feudalism in Europe, and other forms in East Asia. Population movements were occasioned by famines and wars, plus there were extensive trading networks. Thereafter, the crucial themes have been the impacts of the modern world, the responses of local elites and changes that swept through extant societies; in brief, the unfolding process of the shift to the modern world. The Shift to the Modern World and the Early Modern Era of State-Empires The shift to the modern world, the slow uneven creation of natural science-based industrial capitalism,4 was centred on Europe. The system was dynamic and evidenced both domestic intensification and external expansion, and the shift to the modern world was accompanied by the construction of Europe-centred state-empire systems. Within these 3 For a recollection, see Mary and Louis Leakey; for a witty take on the tale see Luc Besson 2014 Lucy (film). 4 This is a shorthand formulation to embrace the changes that ran—in Europe—from

around mid-seventeenth century through to early nineteenth century—the slow creation of natural science (a complex set of cultural changes)—and its impact upon extant patterns of the social creation of livelihood (new technologies and new economic activity and new trading links)—hence industrial capitalism—plus its inherent dynamism, intensification and expansion.

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systems, migration took a number of forms and these have become familiar themes within the social sciences: sources of migrants, the routes taken, the responses of new host populations, processes of mutual adjustment; plus tales of winners and losers. Within the European core, there was local rural–urban migration along with the growth of towns and this took place within state territories; in England, for example, the shift from rural England to the new towns often took the form of the displacement of extant peasant forms of economic life and their relocation to early industrial towns and cities where conditions were poor.5 Within the core there was also intraEuropean migration;, for example, from Eastern states to Western, thus Max Weber’s early work on peasant farming migration into Germany. Within the core territory there was also trans-oceanic outward migration to peripheries; thus Europeans migrating to America, in the nineteenth century some twenty five million or so; plus there were other destinations in Latin America, Africa and Australasia. However, that said, settlement colonies were the exception. The key to the state-empire systems was trade, with its mix of opportunity and loss. Trading involved many groups, traders, soldiers, administrators, plus adventurers, émigrés and other socially marginal figures.6 Most outward migration from core to periphery was in the form of sojourners and so living overseas was a part of a career and it was temporary. The counterpart to these activities was oppression (material or social): poor people left Europe in search of better lives (it was viewed as a problem by some states—loss of population meant, for example, loss of workers for industry or the military or issues of shifting demographics7 ); and many prisoners were transported to remote peripheral locations.8 In the receiving areas, there were further enforced changes; more instances of population movement. 5 Detailed in a series of now famous texts: F. Engels 2009 (1845) The Condition of the Working Class in England, Oxford University Press; E.P. Thompson 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, London, Victor Gollancz; or more recently, G. Orwell 1937 The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Victor Gollancz. 6 On early Europe and its borderlands—see L. Colley 2007 The Ordeal of Elizabeth

Marsh: A Women in World History, London, Harper. 7 Late nineteenth century Europe saw rise of Social Darwinist ideas along with eugenics—in brief, domestic class make-up or international comparative racecompetition—ideas thereafter exported to peripheral areas—mixing with local ideas in respect of status hierarchies. 8 In respect of Australia, Robert Hughes 1988 The Fatal Shore, London, Pan.

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In the receiving areas, the arrival of European migrants remade local forms of life; at first, there were small numbers of incomers, later the business of empire9 along with novel forms of life (natural science-based industrial capitalism) and novel forms of authority (the apparatus of colonial rule superimposed upon indigenous forms of political life). And in all this, there was movement of people around these systems with transoceanic migration within empire units, from periphery to periphery; thus South Asians to East Africa, or Chinese from southern provinces moving into the Nanyang or across the Pacific to the American West Coast. The shift to the modern world along with the creation of state-empires had a major impact on population movement and these impacts run down to the present day, the post-empire era. There are minority communities in the Global South who first settled in the period of state-empires and they experience various interlinks with majority populations. The European-centred state-empire systems collapsed around the middle of the twentieth century, say, 1930s through to the 1960s, and during this period of political-institutional re-ordering there were extensive population movements. The subsequent period, that is, our contemporary period, has seen continued population movement, but this has taken place in a new and quite different context. This involves both ordered domestic politics (a system of sovereign states asserting control over their recognized borders) and regulated international politics (international treaties and organizations whereby the system of states is constituted). Over this period there has been both population growth and scientific advance—the human population has grown (numbers have grown dramatically over the last 70 years) and communications have been transformed (knowledge of other cultures and the possibility of alternative lives is available—newspapers, television, diaspora networks and movement is further aided by transport networks—legal and illegal).

9 On European empires, see V. G. Kiernan 1982 European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815–1960, London, Fontana; on the British Empire, see J. Darwin 2009 The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, Cambridge University Press.

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Movement in the Contemporary Era: Constrained and Monitored Flows of People The collapse of state-empires created the contemporary global system. The collapse took place in the context of multiple wars, in brief, the Second World War and the Pacific War. The process created a contingent pattern of states along with a collection of international treaties and organizations, in sum, a dense network of institutions within which human populations now make their forms of life: such activities include human movement; such movement comes in a variety of forms; and such movement has been subject to a variety of definitions. Characterizing someone as a ‘migrant’ or ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘refugee’ and identifying an appropriate response is a matter of social definition and it is shaped by state concerns. From State-Empires to States: Institutional Change and Population Movements The immediate post-war period during the late 1940s and early 1950s, saw large-scale population movements with millions of refugees in Europe (Central and Eastern Europe), the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia.10 These flows of people reflected the core areas of warfare along with the first phase of the emergence of new states; the main flows can be recalled, as indicated below, but it is certain that there were a multiplicity of smaller, local displacements.11 In the last period of the Second World War, some 12/15 million displaced persons in Europe, including ethnic Germans fleeing west, remnants of European Jewry, slave labourers and prisoners of war12 —the episode saw many casualties.

10 A. Holian and G.D. Cohen 2012 ‘Introduction’ (to special edition) in Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3, p. 313. 11 Recalling the scale and sweep of these wars and associated political dislocations— and consequent social trauma—see P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge. 12 Holian and Cohen 2012, p. 314; on the circumstances of the ethnic Germans, where an estimated two million died as they fled, see Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees 2004 ‘The Expulsion of “German” Communities from Eastern Europe and the End of the Second World War’, in European University Institute Working Paper, Florence, EUI.

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In the Middle East, in the late 1940s around 700,000 Palestinians13 were driven out by Zionist actions in the process of the creation of the state of Israel, again, there were many casualties. In South Asia, the Indian sub-continent was divided and with Partition in 1947, creating India and Pakistan, there was a massive population transfer of around 14 million, with an estimated 2 million dead.14 In East Asia and Southeast Asia, there were analogous population transfers. Several million Japanese civilians and armed forces were transferred to the home islands following the end of the Pacific War. A flow of Chinese refugees fled following the establishment of the PRC, some to Taiwan and also to Hong Kong (around 700,00015 ). Koreans fled the fighting 1950–1953. In Indonesia, ethnic Chinese fled during 1959– 1961; around 100,000 moved to the PRC.16 Once again, the end of warfare and the collapse of empires saw many casualties.17 The contemporary situation in the early twenty-first century is difficult to summarize as there are different definitions and different ways of counting the numbers but cast in general terms IOM data report that around one billion people are migrants: around 240 million live outside their home country along with 760 million who are migrants within their home countries. Discussion of migrants often turns directly to those living outside their home countries. Internal migration is read as usually a matter for state governments, thus, in recent years, 150 million rural–urban migrants in China. With international migration host countries record different percentages of resident migrants: low percentages (around 1.5%) in Latin America, Central, Eastern and Southeast Asia; higher percentages (around 10–15%) in Europe and North America; and

13 Holian and Cohen 2012, p. 314. 14 On Partition, numbers are from https://bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/partit

ion1947_01.shtml. 15 Glen Peterson 2012 ‘The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime

in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia’ in Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3, pp. 331–36. 16 Ibid., pp. 336–40. 17 P.W. Preston 2013 ‘The Enduring Costs of Forgetfulness: Europe, Asia and the Wars

of the Twentieth Century’ in Institute of Chinese Studies Visiting Professor Lecture Series III , Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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very high percentages in a few special cases (from 45 to 88%) in Singapore and the Gulf States.18 Amongst the 240 million international migrants, some 150 million are migrant workers and are thus voluntary migrants; a mix of South–South and South–North migration for work. The IOM records that 60 million are forced migrants, that is, displaced from their homes as a result of violence of one sort or another.19 IOM offers several categories20 : • • • • •

Refugees—around 15 million; Conflict-induced internal displaced persons—38 million; Asylum seekers—1 million; Disaster-induced internal displacement—19 million; Resettlement—approximately 100,000.

IOM added further categories21 : • Irregular migration, that is, people-smuggling, estimated at 50 million; • Migrant deaths—around 5400 in 2015; • Human trafficking—estimated at 21 million; • Remittances—estimated at $581 billion; • Public opinion—variable. As the state-empire systems dissolved, the residual elements of the core were re-imagined as nation-states, whilst the former peripheral areas were reordered into new states and nations. The global system took its familiar contingent shape, with numerous states, each making a claim to sovereignty, including control of borders and movement across these borders. Movement across borders was now a concern of states. Human movement was now read in the terms with which we are now familiar: migration. Thereafter multiple sub-definitions can be created as circumstances unfold: legal/illegal; voluntary/involuntary; sending/receiving 18 IOM Global Migration Trends 2015, p. 5. 19 Ibid., p. 8. 20 Ibid. pp. 8–9. 21 Ibid. pp. 11–16.

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countries; elite responses versus popular responses; state responses versus NGO responses—rights and responsibilities—and so on. International Institutions: Ordering the Post-War World, Grasping Flows of People The international framework developed in an ad hoc fashion; it began with Europe’s problems, supplemented by the anti-communism of the Republican Party in the USA22 ; thereafter the machinery slowly broadened and internationalized. Scholarly reflection has followed a similar trajectory.23 In the post-1945 period in Europe,24 there were millions of displaced persons (DPs): UNRRA was formed to organize aid programmes, repatriation or other settlement and it was followed by the IRO and shortly afterwards in 1950 the work became responsibility of the UNHCR.25 The UNHCR was a product of its circumstances26 ; focused on Europe, largely funded by the USA and caught up in the Cold War. Hence ‘refugees’ were read as people ‘fleeing from persecution’, either (past) fascist or (present) communist. The focus was narrow but it was slowly broadened in focus over post war period. Cold War competition for allies in Africa (USA/ Soviets) led to a more humanitarian focus that acknowledged that people could be displaced for a variety of reasons.27

22 G. Kolko 1968 The Politics of War, New York, Vintage. 23 See special edition of Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3. 24 For the chaos—W.I. Hitchcock 2008 The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of

the Liberation of Europe, New York, The Free Press—for the impacts on collective memory and national pasts—Tony Judt 2008 Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, London, Penguin. 25 In spring 1945 at the end of the Second World War in Europe there were millions of displaced persons (slave labourers, prisoners of war, camp inmates, refugees, demobilized soldiers and so on)—United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was set up to deal with this chaotic situation—to assist, to repatriate or to resettle— much confusion and conflict—the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) succeeded UNRRA—the UNHCR took over from 1950. 26 A. Holian and G.D. Cohen 2012 ‘Introduction’ (to special edition) in Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3. 27 Ibid., p. 323.

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In other parts of the world, the situation was more confused; responses were local and ad hoc28 in the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. In post-1945 East Asia (the other part of the world most directly damaged by war29 ) the situation was (even) more confused. War, Civil War and decolonization had produced many displaced persons but there was no overarching machinery to help and institutional responses seem to have been ad hoc: • Post-war—military administrations established by returning colonial powers, nascent wars of independence and the subsumption of these wars within Cold War conflicts; • New states—elites lay claim to territory and control of resident population and thereafter build states, create nations and pursue development all of which raises issues of citizenship and here conflicts produced local flows of refugees; • Japanese returning to the Home Islands from colonial territories; • UNKRA (Korea); • Chinese refugees moving into Hong Kong30 in late 1940s; • Indonesian-Chinese migrating to the PRC with several hundred thousand in the early 1950s31 ; • Economic Commission for Asia and Far East (ECAFE 1947); • UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP 1949); • Non-alignment Movement;

28 Ibid. pp. 316–7—they mention UNRWA (Palestine)—UNKRA (Korea)—plus Parti-

tion. 29 On the war—C. Thorne 1986 The Far Eastern War: States and Societies 1941– 1945, London, Counterpoint—for sometime colonial territories, returning colonial powers imposed military governments—varieties of nationalist insurgencies followed—in Japan, SCAP organized the reordering of Japan—in China the civil war ran on until 1949 and thereafter the CCP build a state—millions of displaced—by war and disintegration of state-empire systems—for the scale of the wars and the multiple memories see also P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge. 30 Glen Peterson 2012 ‘The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia’ in Journal of Refugee Studies 25.3, pp. 331–6. 31 Local organisation—Chinese People’s Relief Association—resettles 100,000 plus, around 60% in Hainan where they farmed tropical products—see Peterson 2012, pp. 336–40.

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• ASEAN. At the general international level, the UN-centred machineries of trade and politics were constructed: in economics, the Bretton Woods machinery (and its successors); in politics, the United Nations Assembly and its various sub-organizations (and their successors). The agendas of these bodies were shaped by the perceptions of the states supporting them so there was a bias towards Europe and there was a Cold War slant (anti-communism) and so a universal orientation only emerged slowly. One key body in post-war Europe was UNRRA. It was formed to deal with millions of displaced persons primarily in Europe. Later, as its work developed and circumstances changed, the key body became the UNHCR. These bodies imposed responsibilities on all member states, including responsibilities in regard to migrants, and so provided the broadest framework and a multiplicity of definitions as the texts of treaties are turned into workable policy statements.32 Cast in simple terms, there are many forms of migration. Legal migration is documented: for work, for settlement, for temporary visits and, upon registering with the authorities, for asylum (refugees fleeing war or other similar scenarios). IMO data record around 150 million migrant workers and add to this short-term visits (tourism, family visits, business and the like) and the number of people outside their home countries is large. IMO also note that visa over-stayers are a significant source of illegal migration; as their documents become invalid, they shift into the un-documented category. Illegal (voluntary) migration is un-documented. Migrants can cross borders without being documented. IMO33 reports that there are around 50 million worldwide: the USA has 12 million un-documented migrants; Russia has 3 million; Pakistan has 4 million and Malaysia has 1 million. Other countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America most likely also have un-documented migrants but data is scarce. Illegal migration can rely on people traffickers and gathering data for these operations is difficult. Illegal (involuntary) migration relies on people traffickers. Those migrants who are moved across borders may be duped or coerced into 32 Definitions and sub-definitions along with data records and estimates are diverse— NGO work, state authorities and international organizations—plus agendas change—so data is not simple. 33 IMO, p. 12.

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agreeing the demands of the traffickers. IMO34 cites ILO work that around 21 million people are subject to forced labour: Asia–Pacific, 11.7 million; Africa, 3.7 million; Latin America, 1.8 million; Russia, 1.6 million; Middle East, 600,000; First World, 1.5 million. Of the total, estimates suggest around a third are minors, in particular, girls who are found in sex industries; trafficked males work in private businesses. Overall estimated profits of trafficking are estimated at around $150 billion. The European Union’s Situation In the European Union, there is lawful migration within its territory. Citizens of the European Union can live and work wherever they wish. This is one of the four freedoms enshrined in the constitutional framework law of the European Union. One aspect of this complex arrangement is given practical effect by the abolition of state borders. The Schengen Convention allows for the abolition of internal borders and the common external border is the responsibility of Frontex and the authorities of member states. The practical impact of these arrangements varies within the broad regions of Europe, but in general, there has been a flow of internal migrants from poorer eastern and southern regions to richer northern and Western regions. There is also lawful migration into the territory of the Union: there is a continuing flow of migrants from former colonial territories and there is a flow of migrants coming for work plus there are numerous people who come for holidays and study. There is also unlawful migration into the Union along various routes— by sea, via Greece or North Africa, and via aircraft for those who subsequently overstay visa conditions. The principal sources for unlawful migration are the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa plus also South Asia.35 The flow of migrants into Europe is not without many historical precedents, but what is perhaps new is the coincidence of rising local anxieties throughout Europe plus perceptions amongst populations that ‘Brussels’ is remote, undemocratic and uninterested in migration, the

34 Ibid., p. 15. 35 Data available from Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection DG—shows migrants

from Turkey, Syria, Ukraine and South Sudan—https://www.ec.europa.eu/echo/

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whole ensemble of issues underscored by the 2015 flood of migrants into Germany.

Migration and the European Union: Long-Term Trends and Current Problems In the post-war period, European Union member states have received many migrants. To mention a few cases: Germany received forced migrants from Eastern Europe and the country embraced guest workers during its ‘economic miracle’ and some of these have settled; France received forced migrants from sometime colonies, in particular, North Africa, and has received voluntary migrants from other sometime colonial territories in West Africa; Britain has received voluntary migrants from former colonies, in particular, South Asia, plus forced migrants from East Africa. Over the long post-was period, now some seventy years, these migrant communities have experienced difficulties both at the time of marked inward flows and in respect of issues of assimilation/adaptation (and related issues of disadvantage). However, they have generally found a place in contemporary European member countries. Official policies have sought to manage these inflows by restricting numbers and managing popular domestic responses. In broad terms, social changes associated with migrant flows have been accompanied with the widespread popular dissemination of two ideas: multiculturalism (that is, tolerance of cultural diversity) and anti-racism (that is, legal prohibition of discrimination on the basis of membership of a particular group [race]). In recent times, since, say, the 1970s when inflows were restricted, none of this has been characterized as a crisis however there have been signs recently that all was not well. By way of illustrations: in France, October/November 2005 Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of Interior, criticized migrant French and provoked riots in banueilles36 ; in the Netherlands, populist parties focused on the issue of migrants have found some support with political parties led by Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002, and Geert

36 SSRC Web Essays October 2006 ‘Riots in France’ https://www.riotsfrance.ssrc.org.

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Wilders37 ;and in Italy, there have been public protests in Northern Italy against inflows of Roma from Eastern Europe.38 The record of long-term inflows of migrants, plus the occasional experience of public disorder coupled to the rise of popular parties concerned at least in part with migrants provided the background to the recent 2015/2016 shifts in debate. The public and political recognition was triggered by flows of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya into Italy in late 2014/2015. This provoked the Brussels machinery into making a policy statement and the document recommended stopping smuggling, helping failed states and supporting and resettling those granted asylum status.39 But all this was overtaken by events in the summer and autumn of 2015 as new flows of migrants arrived in Greece and began trekking north towards Germany and other Northern European countries. Now there was a ‘crisis’ of inward migration. The numbers were startling. In the 2015 calendar year, 1,015,078 migrants reached Europe by sea40 ; these were the migrants seen on television travelling to Greece or Italy in small boats. Of these, some 900,000 entered via Greece and this was higher than in 2014 when some 77,163 had entered, and Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis made up around 88% of these arrivals.41 A similar surge in numbers of arrivals was recorded for Italy—in 2013, 42,925, then in 2014, 170,00 and then in 2015, 153,842.42 Once ashore these migrants moved north—Germany was a favoured destination— they joined an estimated 1.9–3.8 million irregular migrants, in the main, people who had overstayed visas.43

37 On the assassination of Pim Fortuyun and the artist Theo Van Gough, assassinated 2004, see I. Buruma 2007 Murder in Amsterdam, London, Penguin. 38 BBC News February 04, 2009 https://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/ 7858012.stm. 39 European Commission 2015 ‘A European Agenda on Migration’. 40 UNHCR May 2016 ‘Refugees/Migrants Emergency Responses—Mediterranean’

https://www.data.unhcr.org/meditteranean/regional.php. 41 International Organization for Migration 2016 ‘Global Migration Trends 2015 Fact Sheet’ Prepared by IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, Berlin—https://www. gmdac.iom.int, p. 12. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

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Migration and Law Member states are parties to the treaties and so on associated with the United Nations. Member states are parties to the European Court of Human Rights (not part of the EU). Member states have also bound themselves with regulations covering the European Union. All these regulations are subject to the authority of the ECJ. Three sets44 of agreements are of note: free movement, Schengen and Dublin. The principle of free movement is enshrined in basic EU treaties is the legal right of all EU citizens to live and work wherever they wish, it is considered to be one of the four ‘fundamental freedoms’ enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty (free movement of goods, services, capital and people) and the use/misuse of these provisions are subject to the jurisdiction of the ECJ. The Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border checks for citizens of the Union moving about within the territory of the Union plus the principle of free movement implies the creation of a common external border. An organization has been created to address this, Frontex.45 The Schengen arrangement has a lengthy history. Thus in 1985, the Schengen Agreement pointed to the gradual abolition of internal borders, the 1990 Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of borders and the 1999 Amsterdam Treaty took the Schengen Convention into the body of European Union law. Once again, the provisions are subject to the jurisdiction of the ECJ. The Dublin Regulations, which require that any person from a nonmember state arriving at the border of the Union and wishing to apply for asylum must do so at their first place of arrival. The regulation implies common procedures at the member state level and these are the concern

44 The exchange between member states, the European Parliament and the Brussels machinery are complex—the ways in which decisions are made and how they are given legal and institutional expression, are similarly complex—here the tale is simplified—two sets of agreements and policies—Schengen (internal)—Dublin (external). 45 James Hampshire 2016 ‘European Migration Governance since the Lisbon Treaty: Introduction to the Special Issue’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.4.

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of the overarching Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and its actions and decisions are subject to the jurisdiction of the ECJ.46 The machinery, in principle, is neat and tidy, but in practice, it is anything but, rather it is an agglomeration of competencies lodged at a number of levels; sub-national, national, supranational and international. Decisions made in Brussels are the outcome of a process involving numerous agents and outcomes are contested, provisional and restricted in their scope. Plus, the decisions that are reached are thereafter subject to the vagaries of events and—in particular—the domestic politics of member states.47 Law and regulation have to be translated into practice and in the case of the EU and inward migration pressures this has proved to be difficult. The internal and external difficulties (political/policy, institutional and popular) are legion and the EU has great difficulties in speaking with one voice: member states are bound by local pressures, the Brussels machinery is divided (Council favours control, Commission is more liberal) and migrant supply countries with whom EU must perforce deal seek greater access (not less), as access provides jobs and remittances.48 In regard to Schengen and Dublin, two extraneous events might be noted: (i) the spill-over effects of the violence convulsing the Middle East and, in some measure, the wider Arab world (hence, North Africa)49 has produced large flows of migrants; and (ii) domestic resistance in a number of member states to both the inflow of external migrants and the intraEuropean flow of migrants (from, in particular, east to west). These two

46 Hampshire 2016, pp. 538–40—Hampshire describes the EU’s ‘post-Lisbon architecture’ as ‘more baroque than modernist’ which is to say it is labyrinthine and to the uninitiated organizationally obscure—but the machinery of ‘Schengen’ plus the euro currency are two of the major achievements of the EU—presently, in mid-2016, the future of both is unclear. 47 Hampshire 2016 pp. 537–44. 48 John Hampshire 2016 (b) ‘Speaking with One Voice: The European Union’s

Global Approach to Migration and Mobility and the Limits of International Migration Cooperation’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.4. 49 A rolling disaster that has claimed many lives and displaced millions and where—to

recall—Britain and France were militarily involved, along with the USA and NATO—the intervention in Libya was a particularly egregious episode of misplaced and destructive military intervention—recently dis-owned by President Obama—amongst other things it had the effect of undermining an agreement made by Italy and Libya to control migrant flows (Hampshire 2016 pp. 545–6).

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sets of events have created a clear domestic political backlash. It is differently expressed in different countries, but, roughly, it finds expression in the rise of populist right-wing parties and the consequent mainstream political trend towards reasserting national interests.50 Migration in Practice Migration within the EU has been from east to west and from south to north, or in economic terms from poorer areas to richer areas. In principle, this ought not to raise any social or political issues as free movement of people is guaranteed in the founding treaties of the Union, but in practice, it has created problems. In places, migration has been rapid and as the number of incomers grew this growth has stressed local services and sometimes the patience of local people. It has fuelled the rise of right-wing populist parties in some North Western and Central European countries. Migration from outside the European Union is significant and these flows of people can come from anywhere. There have been legal flows of migrants from many countries in the Global South and North. As regards illegal migrants or those arriving and claiming asylum, in recent times the main sending areas have been Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan and China), the Middle East (Iraq, Syria), North Africa (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) and sub-Saharan Africa (East Africa, West Africa). This inward illegal migration has created problems: the provision of reception facilities; training facilities; cash plus the more intractable problems of cultural adjustment. There have been attacks on migrant hostels (thus, Eastern Lander in Germany) and migrant informal encampments (thus, Calais, a jumping-off point for aspirant asylum seekers targeting Britain). There have also been attacks by migrants on local women (thus, the Cologne incident) plus occasional well-reported terrorist attacks (carried out or planned). Elite-level responses51 have been slow and unsure. Prior to the events of autumn/winter 2015/2016 little seems to have been done. EU internal migrants were not considered a problem (freedom of movement) and migrants from outside the Union were either registered as asylum 50 Hampshire 2016 pp. 544–9. 51 Info graphics are available—European Commission ‘A European Agenda on

Migration’—https://www.ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/european-agenda-migration/ index_en.htm.

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seekers or simply overstayed visas or slipped into the Union with the help of traffickers. However, as the crisis broke the Brussels machinery looked to curb the flows, redistribute the migrants who had arrived and in the long term seek to reduce push-factors. One aspect of the global policy52 is the stress on reinforcing the external border but it can be argued that this policy is misplaced.53 Thus prior to the 1970s, there were legal routes to migration (guest worker programmes, former empire links and the like) but these were restricted in the 1970s and irregular migration began to rise. Recently there has been a spike in numbers and the response of politicians has been to speak of a crisis and to seek to control borders. This has created a ‘border control industry’ and as flows continue this industry grows; it could be argued that it would be better to create new legal routes to migration. Popular level responses varied and once migrant flows were noted there were both pro-migrant and anti-migrant responses. Pro-migrant responses came from NGO groups that welcomed migrants and celebrated Europe’s tolerance of newcomers. Pro-migrant responses came from mainstream economists who argued that inward migration made positive contributions to the GDP. Pro-migrant responses came from state administrations who noted that inward migration was preponderantly of young people and this helped an otherwise ageing demographic profile. Two established ways of thinking about these issues: assimilation and integration; the former looks to absorb migrants into host community whilst the latter looks to a process of mutual accommodation over time. In this framework, one recently noted group is Muslims.54 There have been recent headline terrorist outrages (in particular, in Paris). Research suggests there is in general a gap between Muslim communities and host communities. But in more detail, there are a variety of ways in which

52 J. Hampshire 2016 ‘Speaking with One Voice’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.4. 53 Ruben Andersson 2016 ‘Europe’s Failed Fight Against Irregular Migration’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.7. 54 P. Statham and J. Tille 2016 ‘Muslims in their European Societies of Settlement’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.2; see also P. Statham 2016 (b) ‘How Ordinary People view Muslim Group Rights in Britain the Netherlands, France and Germany: Significant Gaps between Majorities and Muslims’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.2.

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individual members of Muslim communities locate themselves within host communities: religion, place of origin or present circumstances. A new idea—the way in which integration has been picked up—is the idea of ‘super-diversity’ as big cities in Europe are now home to multiple migrant communities.55 A novel form of living together and apart is developing. Research reports that large European cities (London of Amsterdam and the like) have large ethnic populations made up of multiple generations—in Amsterdam and London around 50% are foreign-born or descendants of those early waves of migrants. Discussion of life in these cities in terms of assimilation or integration seems unsatisfactory for the populations are diverse and there are significant differences within ethnic communities and there are significant differences when ethnic communities in different cities are compared—migrant groups in cities need to be disaggregated and the situation studied in finer detail. In a super-diverse city, there are multiple social groups travelling multiple trajectories and whilst some are successful, others fall away from the (now complex) mainstream. In sharp contrast anti-migrant responses come from those communities faced with sudden influxes of foreigners: those receiving communities faced with sudden influxes of foreign workers or those local-level administrations faced with supplying welfare benefits. These reactions varied from country to country; they varied according to state policy (indifference or integration or multiculturalism); they varied according to popular responses (indifferent, welcoming or alarmed); and they varied according to responses of incomers (anxious to integrate, anxious to sustain identities or pragmatic, picking and choosing as circumstances allowed). So, the experiences of migrants and host communities are different but some general patterns can be identified; benefits, problems and so on. Amongst European member states, Scandinavian countries have typically welcomed inward migration. Karen Fog Olwig56 identifies three phases of post-1945 migration in the histories of the trio of Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway and Denmark (around turn of twenty-first

55 M. Crul 2016 ‘Super-Diversity Versus Assimilation: How Complex Diversity in Majority-Minority Cities Challenges the Assumptions of Assimilation’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42.1. 56 K.F. Olwig 2011 ‘Integration: Migrants and Refugees between Scandinavian Welfare Societies and Family Relations’ in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37.2.

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century, respectively, 12, 6.5 and 6.5% foreign-born). There was outmigration in the forties and fifties and then in the sixties and seventies there was an inflow in order to provide labour for burgeoning industries but thereafter, there were increasing restrictions on inward migration. Inward migration was read in terms of Nordic Welfare Model, that is, universal tax funded provision on the basis of citizenship or residence and so incoming migrants could access welfare and in turn were expected to conform to local norms. In practical terms, integration was via workplace links or welfare agency links (job and family). There were differences: Sweden stressed multicultural tolerance of difference; Denmark stressed integration; and Norway followed a middle path. Swedes congratulated themselves on being open and tolerant whilst Danes stressed integration and disliked parallel migrant societies, operating a policy of dispersal. Olwig reports that state policy varied. In Sweden, multiculturalism meant that incomers could keep cultural styles and enjoy access to welfare as citizens. In Norway, an ambivalent multiculturalism saw differences acknowledged, but there were also problems. And Denmark rejected multiculturalism and stressed integration or assimilation. Olwig tackles the issue of welfare regimes. The Nordic Model supposes state intervention in a homogeneous population but with migrants from various places new issues emerge. One such, somewhat differently addressed in the three countries, has been arranged marriage where residents find spouses in their originating countries. All three host populations show falling tolerance for this practice. Olwig notes the responses of migrants. Some sought to assimilation, others did not; some settled, others sustained diaspora networks and there are also changes in generations and some of those born and raised in the three countries are prompted—perhaps by media stories—to investigate their backgrounds, but their understandings of places of family origin are often stylized. However, all that said, the flows of migrants were such that border restrictions were imposed early in 2016; elites were dismayed but had to bow to popular pressure. Central European countries typically did not welcome inward migration. The historical trajectories of these countries—the Visegrad Four of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic—have included inter-war fascism, war, Cold War, independence and recently membership of the European Union. In the 1930s, the countries of Eastern Europe embraced nationalism, there were problems with minorities and a slow drift into authoritarian or fascist governments that were unsympathetic to minorities within their

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state borders. The Second World War occasioned much loss of life and political upheaval, first as parts of the short-lived racist National Socialist Empire in Eastern Europe, thereafter as parts of the Cold War Soviet bloc. Finally, recently, these countries have emerged as independent states lodged within the frame of the European Union. Local political elites must acknowledge these histories but they are disposed to a nationalism that is more pronounced than other parts of Europe. Many of these countries have seen young people migrating for work to other parts of Europe, in particular the North-Western parts, but there has been no welcome for inward migration as local national reconstruction takes priority. In the case of the recent 2015/2016 flow of inward migration via Greece and Italy, recent arguments made by the German government about redistribution by quotas were not well received and border fences have been rebuilt. This strategy of coping with migrant flows, that is, blocking them, has been criticized in other European countries and by Brussels but, paradoxically, it serves the interests of these critics precisely by slowing the flow of migrants. Southern European countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain have had to contend with the inflow of people across their borders, as they were points of access to the European Union. Italy and Spain had difficulties coping with the numbers. Greece had greater difficulties. In the period between 2015 and early 2016, state authorities facilitated the northwards movement of these refugees with the bulk of them heading for northern Europe. At this point commentators were looking at Greece as a prospective ‘failed state’ (the euro crisis austerity programme was the background to the task of coping with massive inflows of migrants from Turkey57 ). Commentators also look at Italy and speculate about the state’s ability to deal with yet more influxes of refugees. The European Union has three large powerful core countries; France, German and somewhat detached, Britain. These three core countries had different but awkward responses. France, with its constitutional republicanism—all are citizens—also has a large unassimilated Muslim North African population. Germany, with a post-war experience of large-scale population movements from former eastern lands and via guest worker programmes but which otherwise seemed unwelcoming (thus citizenship 57 Paul Mason in the Guardian May 10, 2016 ‘The choice for Europe: rescue Greece or create a failed state’; see Mark Urban in BBC News —https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-36246816

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laws and naturalization procedures). Britain received inward migration from some areas of former empire territories and has adopted a restrictive policy (coupled to a very leaky practice). The sum total of the reactions of countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in brief, re-erecting fences and sharply limiting permitted numbers transiting borders, plus the efforts of the Turkish government (discussed below), had the effect of restricting the inflow of migrants. The opening four months of 2016 saw around 185,000 arrivals by sea—down on the million or so of the previous year. The main sending countries were Syria (43%), Afghanistan (27%), Iraq (14%) and Pakistan (3%) with a host of others contributing 9%. Of these, 45% were men, 20% women and 36% children.58 The Slow Rise of Populist Right-Wing Political Parties All European Union member states run variants of liberal-democratic party political systems and so there are regular competitive elections, indeed, such systems are a condition of membership (Copenhagen criteria), but the pattern of voting is changing. First, in regard to the post1945 period in Europe, to simplify, class-party alignment has been stable. In regard to the post-1945 period in Europe, to simplify, the political centre of gravity has been Christian Democrat and/or Social Democrat; that is, parties have been committed domestically to a mixed economy and a welfare state and internationally to the global trading and security system centred on the USA and supplemented by the machineries of the United Nations. Second, these arrangements were challenged in the 1980s by celebrants of neo-liberalism with a stress on the beneficial properties of free market competition (claims to maximize benefits59 ). Third, the politics of phase two had a number of effects: thus state policies favouring the corporate world (markets) meant increased insecurity

58 Data from UNHCR ‘Refugees/Migrants Emergency Responses—Mediterranean’— https://www.data.unhcr.org/Mediterranean/regional.php. 59 See P. W. Preston 2009 Arguments and Actions in Social Theory, London, Palgrave, p. 36; more generally P.W. Preston 1994 Discourses of Development, Aldershot, Avebury, chapter five.

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for employees; also established parties came to be seen as interchangeable60 ; and this hollowing out of the party system coupled with increasing flows of migration (within and into the EU) opened the door to a variety of right-wing populist parties.61 To simplify, they stressed nationalism, opposed corporate power and resented inward migration. Over the last decade, they have become increasingly influential within European Union member state politics. Recent elections in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Denmark have seen right-wing anti-immigrant parties score between 13 and 35%. The Visegrad countries all have governments sceptical about migration. In France and Britain anti-immigrant parties are influential. The populist right-wing is represented by a number of parties: • • • • •

In France—the National Front; In Germany—the Alternative for Germany62 ; In Austria—the Freedom Party63 ; In Britain—UKIP; In Scandinavia and the Low Countries—Danish People’s Party, Sweden Democrats; • In Central Europe—the Visegrad countries.64

60 The Economist newspaper joked ahead of one UK General election that they did not know which party would win but it would be a conservative party, that is, the parties were interchangeable. 61 Not all newcomers have been right wing—thus Greece or Spain—there are also regional parties that are successful—thus Scotland or Catalonia. 62 M. Amann, R. Neukirch and R. Pfister in Spiegel International May 10, 2016 ‘The AfD Wedge: Bavarian Conservatives Weigh Split from Merkel’s CDU’. 63 A. Thurher 2016 ‘The Austrian Malady: Turning Right in the Refugee Crisis’ in Spiegel International May 02, 2016. 64 The four Visegrad countries are Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic—all

four governments are hostile to inward migration and German inspired plans to impose refugee quotas—in Hungary the Fidesz Party is led by Victor Orban, an outspoken figure, who has a far right party to his right (Jobbik)—in Poland the Law and Justice Party, led in practice by Jaroslaw Kacznski is similarly right wing—for a note see the Economist January 30 2016 ‘Big, bad Visegrad’.

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Merkel’s Error and the Downstream Consequences In the summer of 2015 the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared, seemingly without formal authority, that the country’s borders would be open to migrants from the wars in the Middle East. In the event, the authorities in Greece, the Balkans and parts of Central Europe were overwhelmed by a surprising and unwelcome flow of migrants and over the late summer and autumn months a million or so migrants flowed into Germany. The operation was regarded as a success until a New Year’s Eve festival in Cologne during which many local women were molested by foreigners. The authorities and press responded slowly but as the news broke both popular and elite-level opinion shifted and many now had second thoughts about Merkel’s stance.65 Merkel’s announcement of open access for Syrian migrants was made in the summer of 2015 and commentary66 suggests a number of factors informed the decision (some personal67 ): it followed a mis-handled PR exercise; it followed media reports of deaths amongst migrant travellers; it was influenced by worker shortages in local industry; it was shaped by resentment at foreign media treatment of German government during Greek economic crisis; and it was shaped by domestic party political calculations. Merkel decided seemingly without clear authority68 to have Germany show a ‘friendly face’ and domestic German law was set aside, so too European Union agreements on handling migrants (Dublin Convention69 ). At first, sections of the German population welcomed the stance but in practice the upshot was to give the go-ahead for people smugglers to ramp up their operations and flows of migrants from camps in Turkey

65 Wolfgang Streeck 2016 ‘Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow’ in London Review of Books 38.7 March 31 2016; Wolfgang Munchau 2016 ‘Gloom Gathers Over the Challenges that Germany Faces’ in Financial Times January 17 2015. 66 English language press—period late summer 2015 through to early summer 2016— see in particular, Financial Times, Spiegel International, Economist, Guardian—they did not speak with one voice but the general burden of their commentary was negative—both Merkel’s initial decision and the subsequent attempts to recover situation. 67 M. Feldenkirchen and R. Pfister 2016 ‘What is Driving Angela Merkel’ in Spiegel International January 25 2016. 68 Streek 2016. 69 Agreed in 1990—came into force 1997—subsequently amended—it is the policy/

legal position around which debate at state level revolves.

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and jumping-off points in North Africa (Libya)70 increased rapidly. The migrants moved through Greece (and Italy) up through the Balkans, into parts of Central Europe and thence into Germany (and via Denmark, into Sweden). Other European countries received much smaller numbers of migrants. The flow of migrants produced unexpected stresses and strains in both transit countries and in the favoured destination countries, particularly, Germany, but over the autumn months these were not widely discussed. The New Year party in Cologne marked a change and the decisions of Merkel and the inflow itself were now read as problems. A sequence of moves followed: burden sharing, border controls and a mooted deal with Turkey. Merkel moved to advocate European burden sharing; that is, distributing quotas of migrants around the EU, but many EU member states opposed both the plan and the manner in which the German government had made the proposal. At the same time, the issue of control of state borders was revisited. Schengen was weakened as those states most directly impacted by the flow of migrants (slowly imposed ‘temporary’ or ‘emergency’ controls; that is, sought to control of deflect the flow of migrants). Over the same period, other member states revisited their border controls and their policy towards migrants; in all cases seeking to control or block or redirect the flow. The German government acquiesced in these moves as they helped Merkel recover from her earlier error. Commentators wrote of cynicism.71 Merkel moved to make a deal with Turkey, the key jumping-off point for the wave of migrants. The deal involved payments and other benefits to Turkey in exchange for choking off the flow of migrants. The key benefit proposed was to offer Turkish citizens visa-free access to the European Union.72 This line of action was criticized; it was said to be

70 W. Mayr 2016 ‘Refugee Crisis Focus Shifts to North Africa’ in Spiegel International April 27 2016. 71 C. Hoffman 2016 ‘Merkel’s Humane Refugee Policies Have Failed’ in Spiegel International February 26 2016. 72 Spiegel International April 01 2016 ‘Erdogan’s Big Prize’.

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a matter of offering bribes to an unsavoury government,73 or perhaps worse, submitting to a species of blackmail.74 Merkel’s manoeuvrings over inward migration compounded certain domestic political problems.75 One critic, Wolfgang Streeck,76 tagged her a ‘post-modern politician with a pre-modern, Machiavellian contempt for both causes and people’. Adding that ‘the refugee crisis offered Merkel another opportunity to demonstrate just how fast she can change tack’. However, the manoeuvring has created problems: first, the issue of refugees has joined other concerns (euro, economic policy) and Streeck comments that ‘very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world and are puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do’. And second, Merkel’s actions have made a political space for a resurgent right wing—the Alliance for Germany—and the knock-on effect has been to raise doubts about her leadership in the CDU’s sister party the CSU.77 The whole episode has also fuelled the rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe. The episode thus fed into wider problems within the European Union.

Migration as Crisis: Current Political Problems in Europe The European Union is now a significant player in global affairs: it is a major economic trading area; it spends a large amount on defence machineries; and it is a major player in drawing up international regulations (financial rules, trading rules, environmental rules and so on). However, in the last decade or so the European Union has found itself embroiled in a series of crises and cumulatively these crises are weakening popular support (or tolerance) of the Union and they are also creating elite-level conflicts. 73 Ibid. 74 BBC News May 10 2016 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36246807. 75 W. Munchau in The Financial Times April 25 2016 ‘Gloom gathers over the

challenges that Germany faces’. 76 Streeck 2016. 77 Amman, Neukirch and Pfister 2016.

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The Failed Constitution Henry Kissinger once remarked that when it came to Europe he did not know ‘who to call’ as the political system was not merely complex (as might be expected from a club of around 500 million) but was simply confusing. It was not clear where power lay and it was not clear who had responsibility. Power and responsibility were spread around the various organizational parts of the Brussels machine plus their member state counterparts plus the member state’s political and administrative machines plus sub-national state organizations plus the international bodies to which these agents belonged. The criticism is often repeated and it points to the current situation of the EU. It is more than a multi-lateral international organization but it is less than a nation-state. The project of writing a constitution for the Union was intended in part to remedy the problem of ‘who to call’ by providing a coherent constitutional document, however, as the project unfolding numerous long-standing debates were rehearsed and then after much deliberation (led by Valery Giscard d’Estaing) the Constitutional Treaty was agreed in 2004 and ratification was to follow. However, in referenda held in 2005, the French and Dutch electorates vetoed the treaty. First, the debates opened up the long-standing general issue of the nature of the Union: was it a supranational or an intergovernmental organization? This raised a key practical question with respect to the extent of commitment of member states to the goal of unification. If a member state is committed to a goal then it needs Brussels to be effective in pursuing that goal, but on the other hand, if a member state is not committed to the goal then a Brussels less effective in pursuing that goal is acceptable. Cast in these terms, thus many see Germany as committed to the goal of unification. Many see France as significantly less committed to the goal of unification. And many see Britain as hostile to the goal of unification. For all member states there is some mix of pragmatism and idealism; the former pulls in the direction of short-term economic concerns and the latter looks more to the future. Second, the debates opened up long-standing worries about the efficiency and reliability of the Brussels machinery. First, there is criticism that it is too remote from the European population and criticism that it operates in a restrictedly technocratic fashion. Supporters reply that the Brussels machinery is small (relatively few employees) and that it does as it is told by the member states; thus, if it is remote from population that is

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because of the way the member states have built it and the tasks entrusted to it. Second, there is criticism that it is corrupt, evidenced in issues of the salaries of employees and the expenses of parliamentarians. Supporters reply, yes, in the past, there have been problems but these are now under control. Third, there is criticism that it is over-staffed and too expensive; and again, the reply, it has relatively few staff when compared with the administrations of member states. Fourth, there is criticism that core staffing is inefficient, for example, all member states have a commissioner and this means 28 commissioners but there are not enough portfolios to go around and moreover, member states often use power to nominate commissioners to off-load redundant politicians. Supporters reply that member states take the view that all need a figure in a position of power. And fifth, there is widespread criticism of Brussels spending priorities as a large percentage of money raised from the levy on VAT goes to underpin agricultural prices and this is an error say critics. Commentators reply that when EEC began Europe had many peasants and in the wake of war they were poor and the continent needed the food; so whilst the criticism has weight, the issue is how to revise the system of price supports. All the above are played into domestic member state politics, and domestic member state politics flow into discussions of the EU. European politics works at three levels (Brussels, member states and sub-states) and they interact in multiple fashions so it makes tracking these debates difficult and it means that any resolution to these debates is as much a matter of political expediency as it is a principled argument (in itself, another failing). The project for a constitution was designed in part to give the EU a more coherent and significant role within the international system— including a ‘president’ and a ‘foreign minister’. The rejection of the Constitution in referenda in France and the Netherlands brought the process to a halt. A replacement treaty, which played down the constitutional elements but kept many of the reforms, was agreed upon in Lisbon Treaty 2007. The treaty also gave the EU a legal personality so it could join international organizations and sign treaties. Lisbon 2007 was ratified by member states via parliaments, except in Ireland where the government held and lost a referendum and had to run a second, successful, referendum; however, the entire episode looked uncomfortable for pro-Europeans and gave further evidence for anti-Europeans that

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the project was an elite-led nonsense imposed on the unwilling populations of Europe. All this leaves open the question of how to move the constitutional apparatus of the EU forwards. The Ukraine Crisis The European Union has run a ‘neighbourhood policy’ for many years— it offers a set of ideas about how the Union can relate to those countries adjacent to its borders in the East and along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. However, this policy framework is not the only one created in the West and looking to the East. The end of the Cold War and the surprising disintegration of the USSR was met with misplaced celebration amongst Western conservatives. The European Union embraced new members from the former post-war Soviet bloc but at the same time the military organization NATO expanded to include these self-same countries. All this made the Ukraine a new buffer state between NATO and Russia. Ukraine has been the subject of outside pressures both from Russia, concerned with an element of its historical territory and its present security and from sections of Western opinion; in particular American neo-conservatives, who saw the Ukraine as one more territory to prize away from Russian connections. The descent into the current conflict began with conflict between outside powers in regard to the Ukraine’s proposed links with the European Union. Russia offered cash incentives to the government in Kiev to encourage them to turn down overtures from the EU in favour of Moscow’s plans for a trading bloc. The Kiev government accepted and was met by street demonstrations and the upshot was a second ‘colour revolution’ which drove the government from office and provoked armed resistance in eastern parts of the country. The situation now is unresolved. Russia has annexed the Crimea and has supported Russian speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine, whilst the Western powers have denounced these activities and imposed economic sanctions on Russia. It is a debacle occasioned by outside meddling.

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The Financial Crisis The financial crisis of 2008/2015 had its origins in the behaviour of Wall Street and London banks (the latter include branch offices of the former) and the impact has been felt widely as mainland European banks had allowed themselves to be drawn into the speculative credit bubble and many have had to be bailed out in turn.78 There has been much debate amongst member states about how to respond. One general response has been to look to the re-regulation of the banks in the form of new rules/ laws to curb the out of control lending. Thereafter responses have varied. Amongst members of the euro currency, the ECB has been strengthened and all members have been required to cut government debt levels; a general policy of ‘austerity’. In contrast, non-euro members with their own currencies and central banks have been free to determine their own policies (typically a mix of currency devaluation and slower reductions of government debt levels). The non-euro currency members seem to have recovered from the financial crisis somewhat more quickly than the euro members. The question of ‘who should be blamed’ and ‘what should be done’ continues to fuel a vigorous debate amongst commentators and an increasingly sharp political debate around German insistence on ‘austerity’. The whole business has raised a series issue: the design of the euro, the role of the ECB and—with an eye on Germany—the question of the distribution of power within the European Union. And the Issue of Migrants As discussed above, there are two areas of discussion in regard to this awkward topic: migration into the European Union (foreign-born people moving into the EU both legal migrants and illegal migrants (voluntary and trafficked) and migration within the EU as citizens of one member state choose to move to another member state. Migrants comprise a number of flows—legal migrants, those coming for employment and these people can be from anywhere—those coming to settle (dependents or family members or spouses) and these people

78 The crisis in Greece has seen German and French banks bailed out—on this see Financial Times—newspaper reports in late May suggested that the IMF was finally about to insist upon a species of debt relief for Greece

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tend to be from former territories of empire—once inside the EU they have documentation and can live like anyone else—and illegal migrants must perforce live without documentation and their lives are thus more precarious—asylum seekers must seek permission to remain so their lives are more precarious—migrants from outside the Union can often be identified in routine social life—culture or ethnicity or religion—they can suffer discrimination—they can experience generally lower levels of living to native born. The visible presence of migrants within a community can be a source of political concern—thus, typically right-wing nationalist or racist parties. The summer and autumn of 2015 saw strong flows of migrants from the war zones of the Middle East and North Africa—the situation was difficult but it was only turned into a crisis with Angela Merkel’s inadvertent invitation for migrants to come to Germany—over the subsequent months as popular doubts began to be expressed, the European Union elite has struggled to find a satisfactory response.

Migration: One More Problem for the Union The EU has developed over some fifty-odd years—a multiplicity of actors—long-term interactions—interlocking sets of institutions—these institutions in turn shape further interactions—the cycle runs on—it is all contingent—it is also robust—it is difficult to see the process of integration going into reverse—but integration might proceed flexibly— that is some member will integrate faster than others—the various crises have had various impacts—there is no single simple story. The euro crisis has divided members (German ordo-liberal preferences for austerity versus other Keynesian-inflected arguments for collective debt and investment) —the euro crisis has also driven the euro zone members closer together (via bank regulation and the extension/deepening of role of ECB)—and the crisis has somewhat paradoxically driven the euro zone members closer together as they engage in discrete but crucial arguments about broad economic policy (no longer the preserve of member states). The crisis in eastern areas of Europe has driven France and Germany closer together (as they seek to mediate in Ukraine’s Civil War)—it has caused divisions in Central and Southern Europe where some national governments are not unsympathetic to Moscow’s position (thus Hungary, Greece and Italy). The crisis over migration has caused further divisions (thus Angela Merkel’s invitation to migrants to come to Germany—the

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problems caused to countries along the migration routes—the negative response to Merkel’s subsequent demands that European Union member states help share the burden (caused by her actions) in Central Europe and in France, Britain and Nordic countries). The crisis in migration is causing severe strains on cooperation; in particular the Schengen Agreement and the Dublin Accords on handling migrants (process at the point of entry) and on plans/proposals for a common European Union border authority. In respect of this last noted problem, commentators note its public visibility—unlike the other crises impacting the European Union, it cannot be easily kept off the front pages of the Union’s newspapers or television screens—and thus it’s capacity to blend with the extant spread of crises so as to undermine popular consent to the elite-level project of the European Union—collapse is not mooted, rather scenarios look to a slow-moving process of disintegration.79 Member states of the European Union have a combined population of around 500 million and so assimilating a million or so migrants should not present problems but the manner of their arrival, the ways in which elites responded plus the accumulated anxieties of a couple of decades of neo-liberalism have combined to produce a backlash; against the migrants; and against the European Union elite. Populist parties mainly on the right have made these interlinked issues their own and they have gathered electoral support. Migration has turned out to be one more problem for the European Union.

Afterword80 The 2015 migration crisis saw columns of refugees struggling to reach core areas of the EU. The key route was via the Balkans and the mass media made all this visible to a wide audience as refugees walked, took buses and trains and headed north. Mainland European authorities reacted with dismay; some facilitated the onward movement of refugees northwards, others erected fences; and the governments of the new member states of CEE were particularly anxious to deflect these flows.

79 See for example the commentator Wolfgang Munchau 2016 ‘Europe Enters the Age of Disintegration’ in Financial Times February 28 2016. 80 Written June 2023.

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The visible nature of these flows of people impacted popular opinion in Britain. A likely genuine sympathy for their plight was counterbalanced amongst sections of the population by a desire not to receive what was seen as further81 large numbers of inward migrants. Sobolewska and Ford track the post-war history of inward migration, noting a split between the elite, finding reasons to support82 and the masses, much more sceptical. A divide opens up, they argue, between ‘identity conservatives’ and ‘identity liberals’ (conviction and necessity). This is the domestic background to the Brexit vote when these latent identities find expression in anti-EU leave voters and pro-EU remain voters. The latent identities find related expression in the parallel rise of nationalist right-wing political parties in mainland Europe. A further twist to the tale is added by the crystallization of self-conscious minority groups, acknowledging the labelling and affirming their status; finally, the authors, like others, speculate that ‘identity politics’ might well become a feature of politics over the next few years.

81 Earlier flows and their reception are discussed by M. Sobolewska and R. Ford 2020 Brexit Land, Cambridge University Press—they note a divide between elite and mass with the former finding reasons to admit new people whilst the latter group voiced doubts. 82 Thus filling gaps in the labour market rather than training and paying locals—the inflow of migrants acted to hold down pressures for pay rises.

CHAPTER 6

Brexit Crisis: Unpacking Some of the Lessons, 2016–2022

Since joining the European Union in 1973, the organisation has figured in domestic British politics in an ambiguous fashion with elite, factional and popular opinions in evidence; a referendum on continuing membership was held in 1975 which the government of the day won, but doubts persisted. In 2016, these latent tensions came to a head when elite factional divisions, opened the way to a popular referendum on membership. Domestic politics shaped the debate whilst events in Europe provided a wider context, in particular, the spill-over of the 2008 financial crisis had dogged elitelevel political actors across Europe and Chancellor Merkel’s summer 2015 invitation to migrants caused considerable political trouble. In Britain, a long-mooted referendum on membership of the European Union was finally held in June 2016, and the status quo was rejected by 52 to 48 per cent. The result shocked the London-centred elite and provoked a blizzard of commentary from politicians, journalists, broadcasters and numerous figures of authority drawn from the usual roll-call of the great and the good. Amongst the elite opinion was divided between those anxious to remain and those concerned to complete the process of leaving. These divisions were echoed amongst the general public where there were genuinely held beliefs both for and against EU membership. All this unlocked a drama characterized by repetitive and seemingly sterile factionalized debates in Parliament, with the wider population bemused on-lookers. Commentators took to quoting

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_6

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Antonio Gramsci; familiar systems were in process of changing, morbid symptoms were emerging. The 2016 referendum in regard to continuing membership of the European Union produced an unexpected result when those disposed to leaving the organization won a narrow majority, 52%–48%. The result provoked extensive debate. Some commentators began writing about identity and a ‘new populism’. But the debates of the period could as well be characterized as a return to ‘real politics’ after a lengthy period of managerialist non-politics. At present, a number of strands within the sprawling discourse can be identified: some elements are obvious, thus elite dismay at the result along with contempt for the masses; other issues are clear, thus the inability of the remainers to think forwards, preferring an unattainable status quo ante; whilst other aspects of the episode are surprising, thus, the extent to which leave voters identified themselves as ‘English’.1 However, in sum, as elite-level politics continued divided, the route to the future is unclear.

Brexit: The 2016 Referendum The 2016 referendum2 was not the first referendum to be held within the UK; in recent years, there had been votes in Scotland (on independence) and votes in Britain (on electoral reform) and both produced clear, unequivocal results. The 2016 referendum was one further exercise but this time the result was less clear and it was immediately contested.

1 Disclosure—this author did not participate in either the campaign or the vote regarding the whole business as absurd and in earlier work had already declared, so to say, for Europe; see P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England: Enlishness in the New Europe, Manchester University Press. 2 Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision, announced to press, February 2016; on this, H. Thompson 2022 Hard Times in the 21st Century, Oxford University Press, pp. 154–157, suggests Cameron was backed into a corner in an EU meeting in December 2011 when he failed to secure protection for City of London from implications of mooted Treaty changes.

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The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2016 EU Referendum The 20143 referendum in Scotland was turned to the question of independence and the process involved extensive community discussion over a lengthy period and the result was narrowly in favour of remaining in Britain, 45/55. Commentators made three observations: that the turnout in the vote was very high, around 85%; that the share of the vote in favour of independence was, for the London-based elite, disconcertingly high, around 45%; and that the vote for remain was secured using two techniques, first, a long-running ‘project fear’ that warned of the economic consequences of a vote for independence, and second a last minute anxious offer of promises of deals for Scotland including more autonomy, more money and even, perhaps, more affection from the English. The 2016 referendum in regard to membership of the European Union can be compared with the earlier Scottish experience. The referendum campaign in respect of the European Union was different. The campaign was relatively short-lived and did not involve any grassroots civic involvement. The campaign took the form of a standard general election campaign: that is, a relatively short campaign; a highly ritualized campaign; substantively, comprising one set of advertising campaigns confronting another set of advertising campaigns. The contribution of people on the ground was merely to distribute leaflets and so on. The one campaign offered promises of greater freedom of action for the British parliament—unhindered authority over domestic and international affairs—plus a chunk of available cash, monies no longer sent to Brussels, that could be spent at home, in particular on the NHS.4 The other campaign recycled ‘project fear’ from the Scottish referendum and painted a picture of the dire economic consequences of a vote to leave; there was no attempt to offer any nuance in respect of the economic consequences of a vote to leave (which was a genuine issue), there was only bad news and more bad news; in brief, the economic consequences would be so bad that in effect, as witty journalists put it, ‘the sky would fall’.

3 An earlier 1997, referendum on the Labour government’s devolution proposals failed to reach the specified majority of electorate notwithstanding a majority of those who voted. 4 Hence the bus with the slogan written on it side promising money for the NHS.

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Politics as Advertising The referendum, as slowly became clear over the following couple of years, was dealing with a deeply serious issue. Britain had been a member of the European Union in its various incarnations for some forty-odd years and the referendum opened the possibility that this would come to an end with a consequent re-orientation of the state’s policies, economic, social and political, yet, in this context, what was on offer from the two campaign organizations were two advertising campaigns; variants on the business of selling soap powder or other consumer goods. It may be that this style of public politics was familiar, as it is used routinely in general elections, but that does not detract from its deep un-seriousness, criticisms that attach, obviously, to the usual processes of elections.5 In brief, both campaigns insulted the population. The campaigns revealed something of the logic of the British political system. The public face of politics comprises Westminster plus the mainstream media, together in Britain’s public sphere, but what is noticeable is the highly restricted nature of popular access, with parliamentary elections held roughly, every five years, their competitive nature finding expression in competing advertising campaigns. The referendum merely recapitulated this style of competitive advertising campaigns. When the deeper structure of politics in Britain is considered attention turns automatically to the flows of trans-state power which find their domestic interlocutors in the machineries of the state, that is, Whitehall/Westminster, and which thereafter have domestic expression as the domestic population is coached in this or that view of the world, the process of popular legitimation.6 The general population has no access to these spheres; access is via invitation or co-option (soft oligarchy7 is happy to recruit from the general population where useful/appropriate) and in this context, the direct electoral democracy inherent in the referendum process is both non-standard and, as turned out this time around, risky.

5 Hence routine calls for electoral reform (in itself a modest change to the political

system, but seemingly out of reach); for a reading of the result as a call for reform, Anthony Barnett 2017 The Lure of Greatness, London, Unbound. 6 P.W. Preston 1997 Political/Cultural Identity: Citizens and Nations in a Global Era, London, Sage; 7 On oligarchy, see Mount, F. 2012 The New Few: Or, A Very British Oligarchy, London, Simon and Shuster;

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The leave campaign was minimally positive in orientation. The slogans used looked to the future and the phrasing, ‘take back control’ was positive as was the promise of extra cash. These claims might have been vague and open to challenge but they did imply that a future was available outside the sphere of the European Union, so, finally, by implication, optimistic about the local population. In contrast, the official campaign for remaining in the EU was quickly dubbed ‘project fear’ as it was designed to frighten people into supporting the status quo; it offered no future prospect; it presented no positive arguments. Project fear had worked in Scotland and the elite clearly took the view that there was no reason to suppose that it would not work in Britain as a whole. William Kornhauser,8 writing in the late fifties on mass societies, suggested one characteristic would be that the populations were available via elite manipulation; a possibility now ambiguously upgraded with the resources of social media. The remain campaign’s focus was narrowly on economics, the default setting of the British elite’s dealings with Europe. The remain campaign drew on projections made by nominally authoritative and independent bodies, thus the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England. These economic assessments, along with others from business associations local and international, all painted a very gloomy picture of post-Brexit Britain. Major multinationals were also recruited to argue against leaving; even President Barack Obama chipped in support for remain. In all, the remain campaign painted an un-relieved picture of economic distress as the likely consequence of a leave vote; in the event, the predicted economic distress conspicuously failed to materialize and the various economic units making these predictions emerged with tarnished professional reputations. One implication of this line of argument was a deep pessimism about the talents of the local population; it seemed that there was no alternative to making the country ‘open for business’; that is, selling off assets, easing regulatory and tax demands and forcing down wages and conditions. Not a simple race to the bottom but a clear surrender to the neo-liberal ideology of globalization-plus-austerity9 ; the interests of international

8 W. Kornhauser 1959 The Politics of Mass Society, New York, The Free Press. 9 W. Streek 2014 Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London,

Verso.

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business are promoted, those of domestic populations downgraded (or disregarded10 ) whilst promises of trickle-down benefits are offered.

Subsequent Events I: The General Public The general public’s reaction seems to have been flat. There were many genuine remain supporters, but over the two years following the referendum there were no signs in polling data of any great changes of mind and opinion amongst the population remained more or less split and one new group was evident, the ‘get on with it’ group.11 In the immediate aftermath of the vote, contrary to the claims of the remain camp, the sky did not fall, and the British economy continued pretty much as before. Of course, after a short interval, those supporting remain began to argue that now or the next day or at the latest very soon the economic problems would be revealed. In this vein, in December 2018, the Governor of the Bank of England produced a ‘scenario’ sketching a future so dire that it was promptly dubbed ‘project hysteria’.12 At the time of writing these advertised disasters have failed to materialize but these arguments are now routine in the pro-remain press; recycled day-by-day. The general population, having voted, went on with their ordinary routines; there were no street protests; there was no reported flight of capital; and there was no slowing in inward migration. Nothing much happened as people continued their apparently untroubled routines. However, amongst the political classes, there was consternation.

10 European member states in recent months have seen a number of responses to these policies—tagged by the elite as ‘populism’ they include the results of elections in Germany and Austria and Italy—most recently the ‘yellow jacket’ protests in France—these last aimed directly at an elite-sponsored investment banker turned president—tagged as ‘president for the rich’. 11 For reliable and smart polling data, see the web site of John Curtice—he records that over 2018 the percentages for and against leaving hardly changed—with remain scoring 52/48—mainstream press reports in 2023 suggest that opinion is shifting. 12 From Jacob Rees-Mogg—a good joke, but it did call attention to the unhelpful nature of the Governor’s interventions.

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Subsequent Events II: The Political Classes, Shock and Confusion The initial reaction of parliamentarians was to acknowledge the vote; ideas of electoral democracy are key parts of the official legitimating ideology of the British state and over-riding this principle would have costs. But shocked acquiescence in the result did not last long and conflicts began more or less immediately as to the legitimacy of the vote, the extent to which it bound the actions of parliament and the manner in which it might be overturned, or its impacts elided. After the shock of the referendum the political classes had to take stock. In June 2016 Prime Minister Cameron resigned. After a brief intraConservative Party election campaign, Theresa May became party leader and automatically Prime Minister. The key step in leaving the EU was triggering Article 50.13 This would open a two-year period for Brussels and—in this case—London to agree terms. Ahead of triggering Article 50, a Court challenge was made14 as to whether the Prime Minister or Parliament had the requisite authority. The Court resolved that it was Parliament. Parliament duly voted for Article 50, and with both main parties in support, the vote to trigger the withdrawal process was overwhelming. After these confusions, Article 50 was triggered in March 2017 and this opened up the two-year period during which withdrawal and future relations were to be sorted out. To add to the domestic political confusion, Prime Minister May called an election for June 2017; she claimed that she needed a strong majority in order to push through legislation in respect of leaving. At the start of the election campaign opinion polls showed the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, had little chance of success and commentators suggested she had a fine chance to seriously damage Labour. In the event, Mr. Corbyn ran an unexpectedly effective popular campaign15 and Prime Minister May lost the majority in parliament that she had enjoyed; after 13 Article 50 of Lisbon Treaty—specifies procedures for member state to withdraw. 14 By Gina Miller—a Guyanese-British businesswomen with links to the London finan-

cial industry—see for example The Daily Telegraph January 28, 2019—Ms. Miller who won her case in court was reportedly heavily and unpleasantly attacked in social media. 15 Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 election as leader of the party was a surprise—the PLP and Labour HQ were not amused—multiple leaks in the mainstream press suggest a sustained attempt first to undermine his leadership and thereafter to dilute the influence of socialists within the party—this is the latest of a long-running internal disagreement—by early

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some hesitation, she secured the support of a minor fringe party from Northern Ireland, the DUP. In the following months, the legal challenge in respect of Article 50 turned out to be the first of a string of elite-level challenges to the referendum result. Now the elite-level opposition signalled by the earlier court case became familiar and was pursued down a number of tracks; some legal, some parliamentary and others via the media. These various manoeuvres included parliamentary motions canvassing a variety of ideas: revoking Article 50, postponing the March 2019 deadline, shifting focus to continued membership of the customs union, plus inviting the Prime Minister to renegotiate the withdrawal deal so as to remove the ‘Irish backstop’ which aimed to secure an open border between north and south—all accompanied by dramatic media reportage. The referendum result had revealed split opinion within the country (52/48) and subsequent opinion polls surveying the general public suggest that little had changed by the time Prime Minister May’s November 2018 deal with Brussels was made public; popular opinion remained split. Commentators suggested that opinion in respect of the referendum result within the political class was also split between at least three groups: enthusiastic pro-leave, enthusiastic pro-remain and a large body of people who seemed to think the result whilst regrettable should be respected—or be seen to be respected. The split in the ruling Conservative Party reflected both deep-seated beliefs (political scientists have noted the steady shift to euro-scepticism amongst party members and their parliamentarians), residual memories of the time of Mrs.Thatcher (dismissed by her party because of her strident views on Europe) and contemporary personal ambitions, where the press reports suggested that there were ongoing calculations about who might replace Mrs. May; notwithstanding her survival in a December 2018 party confidence vote. The divisions within the Labour Party were roughly analogous. The September 2015 election of Mr. Corbyn to the post of leader of the Labour Party was met with hostility from the established cohort of parliamentarians. The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) passed a vote of no confidence in June 2016 and a second leadership election was held in 2023, this had become a full-on purge of the left—see Guardian February 2023—topdown ameliorist welfarism versus grass roots mobilization for sweeping change—a familiar issue, see Ralph Miliband 1961 Parliamentary Socialism, London, Allen and Unwin.

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September 2016 and Corbyn was again elected. A number of reforms to the party organization coupled to dramatic membership increases had given Corbyn a strong position vis a vis his opponents in the PLP and core party machine. In this situation, the parliamentary leadership was both under-enthusiastic about the European Union, reading it as fundamentally neo-liberal, and minded to respect the referendum result, whilst leaving the ruling Conservative Party to carry the can for Brexit. Nonetheless, groups within the PLP opposed Corbyn and argued for continued membership of the European Union. Out of this confusion—in both parties—a loose grouping of parliamentarians, media figures and assorted grassroots bodies emerged that was committed to remaining in the European Union. The remain advocates noted at the outset, as reported in the mainstream press, that the focus of their activities was with overturning the result of the referendum. Their efforts were supplemented within the elite sphere of Whitehall-Westminster through a second line of attack, that the withdrawal negotiations could be stymied, in effect running the standard administrative strategy of ‘dilute, delay and obfuscate’ until the perceived problem—in this case Brexit—could be safely managed away.

Subsequent Events III: The Failure of Prime Minister May’s Deal The British government had a team of negotiators working with Brussels to devise a programme designed to order the country’s withdrawal from the European Union. So far as can be judged, these negotiations did not go well. After a lengthy period of negotiation, Brussels and the British government in November 2018 reached an agreement about the process of withdrawal; it was legally binding and a declaration in regard to the subsequent necessary talks about future trade relations was appended. Prime Minister May was obliged to present this agreement— the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018—to parliament and secure its agreement; that is, parliament had to vote on the deal and if parliament voted against the deal, then it could not go-ahead. In the event, Parliament overwhelmingly rejected the deal (15 January) insisting in subsequent votes that the Prime Minister return to the negotiating table (29 January).

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An Unhappy Sequence Unfolds Article 50 was triggered in March 2017. This opened up a two-year period during which London and Brussels had to organize the terms of both the divorce and the future relationship of the parties, producing a deadline of March 2019—in the event of no deal being reached Britain would leave the Union and trade links—the key issue—would default to WTO rules. As the period drew to a close, commentators remarked that whilst Brussels had been clear in its negotiating objectives and hardheaded in its protection of the interests of the continuing 27 members, whereas in contrast, the British government had been unclear as to its objectives and irresolute in negotiations and—as government ministers resigned one after another—the opening grand claims slowly dissolved away into retreat in the face the clarity and resolution of Brussels. Prime Minister May returned to Parliament in December 2018, a few months before the automatic deadline of March 2019, and the deal that she had secured with Brussels was presented. The deal had to be approved by Parliament. But during the debates, the plan was excoriated by all sides, Conservative, Labour, Scottish Nationalist, Ulster Union and so on. In the mass media, the plan received a similar response. Jokes were now made to the effect that Prime Minister May had finally united not only her party but the wider population—all rejected her deal. At this point, rather than put the deal to the vote—a vote the government was clearly going to lose—the Prime Minister cancelled the vote (10 December) and further uproar followed. The Conservative Party members triggered a no-confidence vote (12 December), which she survived but with over a hundred of her MPs voting against her she was forced to declare that she would leave office before the scheduled 2022 general elections. A whistle-stop tour of mainland capitals followed, but no amendments to the deal were secured. The obligatory parliamentary vote was rescheduled for January; parliamentary critics and commentators were scathing. As the Prime Minister’s debacle unfolded the opposition Labour Party sought ways to collapse the government and force a general election; the parliamentary party leadership’s preferred outcome. Commentators noted the difficulties of such a course (logic of no confidence motion); commentators also noted that its likely failure would oblige the Labour Party to embrace those groups that were calling for a re-run of the referendum (albeit disingenuously, speaking instead of a ‘people’s vote’). These

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groups included some parliamentary party members and other associated organizations, but the difficulty was that many Labour constituencies were home to clear leave majorities, plus it was by no means clear in December 2018 that opinion amongst the population had shifted in favour of remaining so a second referendum was a risky option. That said, the Labour Party clearly had its own problems with Brexit; at the time, no overt split or hostile factions (as with the Conservatives), but some significant differences of opinion. And so, elite-level politics revealed multiple lines of confusion and disagreement; meanwhile the March 2019 deadline moved closer. Trying to Make Sense of the Episode Commentators argued that the Prime Minister’s deal amounted, in substantive effect, to continuing membership of the European Union but without a voice and vote and without any compensating freedom of sovereign action—it was tagged ‘BINO minus’. The only claimed plus was the end of the free movement of people, in itself an unfortunate nod to the more intolerant members of society. The so-called ‘Irish border back-stop’ presented further problems. In brief, the Prime Minister’s deal was worse than the terms of existing membership. It was difficult to understand how such an evidently poor deal could have been made; commentators offered a number of answers to the question. Sympathetic commentators suggested Prime Minister May had sought to plot a course of action that was acceptable to all sections of her party (leavers, remainers and the get-on-with-its) but had managed to please none of her party factions. That said, there is some opinion polling evidence that her deal would accommodate enough of the wider population to survive a referendum.16 Then, less sympathetic commentators suggested that whilst she was dutiful and hard-working, she was simply out of her depth as a politician when dealing with Brussels. More unsympathetic commentators have suggested that her manoeuvrings reveal a politician adept at short-term adjustments to events (tactics) but with no overarching goal to shape the day to day business of politics (strategy). Finally, conspiracy-minded commentators suggest that she ‘played to lose’ in order to open the way 16 There is opinion polling asking respondents what they would settle for—see also Economist estimates of results using single transferable vote—May’s deal wins on second preferences.

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to remaining in the European Union, but this reading requires the Prime Minister to be both thoroughly Machiavellian and also ready to embrace the personal odium such a course of action would generate; not much of a ‘legacy’. Prime Minister May’s January 2019 The parliamentary vote on Prime Minister May’s deal was finally scheduled for 15 January and the government’s proposed deal was rejected; the majority against was very high (432–202) and the collapse of Prime Minister May’s authority was once again asserted, and as before, she simply carried on, clearly living politically day-by-day. All that said, the defeat in parliament was widely expected and so the vote did have something of the flavour of a ‘free hit’; a prelude to more serious discussions. Indeed, the following day, her government successfully weathered a formal vote of no confidence; Tory dissenters and the DUP duly voted in support of government. Towards the Fall of Prime Minister May Further parliamentary debates coupled to arcane parliamentary manoeuvring followed. January 29 saw a series of options considered in parliament and Prime Minister May was mandated to return to Brussels to re-work her deal; in particular to resolve the contentious issue of the Irish ‘back stop’. March 12 saw a further vote on a revised withdrawal deal and the government was defeated (391–242). A third attempt to pass the withdrawal deal was made on March 29 and again rejected (344–286). On May 3 local elections were held in England (and Northern Ireland); the Conservative Party lost 1330 seats, Labour lost 84, the Liberal Democrats gained 705, the Greens gained 194 and Others gained 660. This was read by commentators and party spokespersons as a bad result for the Conservatives, disappointing for Labour and good for Liberal Democrats and Greens.17 In late May 2019, the government announced a new revised deal would be brought forward—a fourth vote—but widespread opposition in parliament scuppered this idea. Mrs. May’s phased resignation was announced 24 May 2019. 17 Data from John Curtice—‘Local elections: The main parties have been punished’— BBC News Online May 3, 2019.

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The European Parliament election was held on 26 May. UK turnout was low, around 35% (in rest of EU, around 55%) but there were dramatic headline shifts in results18 : • • • • •

Brexit Party—31.6 Liberal Democrats—20.3% Labour—14.1% Greens—12.1% Conservative—9.1%

In response party spokespersons and media commentators offered three main comments: (i) the two main parties had been punished for not delivering ‘Brexit’ (in some form or another); (ii) that the result for recently formed Brexit Party was remarkable and not likely to be a flash in the pan and (iii) these results would occasion a response from two main parties. Mrs. May’s phased resignation, which had been announced on 24 May 2019, opened the way to a drawn out Conservative Party election and it also opened up a further flurry of internal dispute within the Labour Party. Matters became ever more surreal when, following her resignation, Mrs. May received President Trump on his state visit to the UK, 3–5 June. She then made a further visit to a Brussels summit on 8 June 2019; more visits followed, the G20 in Japan 28 June, later a final visit to Brussels in July. It was a drawn-out resignation. Boris Johnson won the party ballot and became Prime Minister on 24 July 2019. Parliamentary Manoeuvres, Party Splits and Lawfare Prime Minister Johnson faced considerable difficulties in fulfilling his campaign promise to ‘get Brexit done’. The Conservative Party was split (leavers/remainers—conservatives/liberals) and the Labour Party had similar cross-cutting splits (leavers/remainers—pro-/anti-Corbyn). At this time, parliamentary business was difficult to manage: the government did not have a majority (as a result of PM May’s 2017 election); the parliament was bound by law requiring a majority in parliament to agree 18 Data from BBC News Online May 27, 2019—see also John Curtice ‘What do voters make of Brexit now?’—BBC News Online March 26, 2019—see also Anand Menon ‘What do the EU elections mean for Brexit: Its Complicated’ in The Guardian May 27, 2019.

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on an election (as a result of Cameron/Clegg coalition); the parties were split; individual initiatives were taken and the issue of Northern Ireland was difficult. The Prime Minister suggested that it was either his agreement or it would be no agreement with Brussels in which case all trading laws would default to WTO rules. These manoeuvrings continued; press commentary was alarmist and commentators spoke of a ‘zombie parliament’, but eventually, Prime Minister Johnson was able to call a general election for 12 December 2019; he was successful, gaining a large majority in parliament and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2020 is passed in January 2020. The period 24 July 2019, when the new Prime Minister took office through until Parliament passed the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2020 in January 2020 was one of considerable confusion in parliament. Commentators debate the legacy of this episode plus the years of Prime Minister May’s government. It has been suggested that both parties were damaged by the very public display of splits, plus within a few years both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn were forced out of their party leadership roles. The Conservatives Party in the country elected Elizabeth Truss, who proved to be a failure and was replaced by the party in parliament by Rishi Sunak. In the same period the Labour Party as a whole elected Kier Starmer who promptly moved to purge the party of Corbyn influence and then waited upon events.

Subsequent Events IV: The Work of Remain Groups The shock of the referendum loss extended to wide swathes of the population; many people had looked to the EU, over the forty-odd years of membership, as a plausible and attractive route to the future for the country; mainland Europe was read by urban social liberals as an attractive model. This was in sharp contrast to the USA and in contrast to contemporary Britain, read as backward-looking, declining, fundamentally reactionary. It is unsurprising that the result was called into question; not the vote itself or the published results, but rather the plausibility of the judgement it offered. For remain groups, turning away from Europe was not an option and the leave group’s talk of a ‘Global Britain’ was dismissed as simply foolish rhetoric. An initial focus from groups in favour of remaining within the EU was to look directly at ways of overturning the Brexit referendum result. This

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would not be a simple matter.19 The procedure of competitive elections is a prominent element of popular ideas of democracy, often read as a synonym. It is a restricted notion of democracy, which acts to facilitate the status quo, nonetheless overturning the result of the vote would be highly visible and risky with unknown consequences; notwithstanding, remainers advanced a number of arguments in favour of overturning the referendum result. Overturning the Result: Re-vote, Elide or Disregard Firstly, project fear reiterated that the economic future is bleak, so vote again. The argument is made that economic projections show that the result of withdrawal will be to weaken the economy and therefore there should be a second referendum; that is, the facts have changed, so a new referendum should be held. Secondly, a democratic polity can change its mind, so vote again. This is a parallel supporting argument to project fear; as the difficulties of Brexit become clear, it is reasonable for a democracy to change its mind so a new referendum should be held. Judged by published opinion polls, there is no sign that the population has changed its mind (the more politically sophisticated look at this argument and say that a second referendum would require two prior conditions: first, clear evidence from polls that there had been a significant change of opinion (because a second lost referendum would bury the issue for good and all) and, second, one party choosing to run the argument (thus able to mobilize a weight of opinion, perhaps in the context of a general election). However, all that said, a rerun with a remain vote the second time around does not mean a return to the status quo ante, rather it means a further exchange with Brussels about picking up the threads of membership.20 Thirdly, only old, uneducated provincial dim-wits voted to leave, so disregard and vote again. The statistics of the referendum have been subject to analysis. An early cursory conclusion was that the leave vote was down to the old, the ill-educated and the poor, plus a leavening of racist bigots. The very early formulations mentioned Labour voting areas of the 19 D. Runciman 2018 ‘Too Few to Mention’, in London Review of Books 40.9—an issue Runciman returns to—D. Runciman 2019 ‘Which way to the exit?’ in London Review of Books 41.1 January 3, 2019. 20 Runciman 2019.

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North, a claim that later faded from view as it became clear that the bulk of leave voters lived in a place that came to be labelled ‘England-withoutLondon’,21 that is, Conservative Party voting areas. The statistics have been subject to other analyses including a plethora of mechanical arguments looking at how the numbers could be tweaked so as to produce a different result, a popular, if pointless exercise.22 Fourthly, leaving the European Union does not entail leaving a single market, so elide the referendum result.23 A related argument seeks to insinuate a distinction between leaving the European Union and leaving the single market; but given the centrality of the single market in EU law,24 this is low-grade sophistry; there have been many such efforts. Another line suggested that as parliamentarians are having a vote on the final deal, then so too should the people, there should be a ‘people’s vote’, which, in practice, simply meant a re-run of the referendum. Other crude arguments focus on re-running the referendum but with the franchise fixed; that is, old people should be denied a vote as they won’t be around to experience the consequences of their actions, or as an alternate route to the same end a second referendum could be held in a few years when many of the presently old will be dead (this is a coarse argument but also sociologically unsophisticated as generations don’t just drop out of the population, they are made and remade and so disappearing cohorts of the old are followed by more newer cohorts of the old, so no reason to suppose their ideas about Europe would be radically different and every reason to suppose their concerns—age, infirmity, personal memory and etcetera—would be the same). Fifthly, parliament can and should decide, so disregard the referendum and decide to remain. Proponents of this line of action argue that now that projections show the economic damage withdrawal would wreak on the economy, Parliament should do its job and reverse the referendum decision. It is an argument that combines realist politics (power) with 21 Barnett 2017. 22 Adjusting the franchise was a popular idea amongst remainers—get rid of the old

voters, with various cut-off points mentioned—lower the voting age to draw in more young people—on this last, David Runciman in London Review of Books offered the satirical suggestion that the voting age be lowered to six. 23 Naïve; on EU law Horspool, M, Humphreys, M. and Wells-Greco, M. 2018 11th Ed. European Union Law, Oxford University Press. 24 Horspool 2018.

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formal authority (sovereignty rests with the crown-in-parliament) and is nominally oriented towards reason-of-state (the decision to leave is so damaging it has to be reversed). But this line of argument has costs; the legitimating apparatus of the British state includes an idea of liberal democracy, specifically, competitive elections and so having parliament decide entails not merely overturning a particular vote but also casting doubt on a key part of the apparatus of legitimation. Sixthly, the vote was illegitimate (lying, cheating and Russians), so vote again. A more unlikely attempt at undermining the referendum result has been to point to alleged deceit in the leave campaign, alleged cheating (the Leave campaign allegedly over-spending (and in one case fined)) and more recently hints have been made that somehow the Russian state had interfered with the vote (arguments most likely borrowed from the Democrats in the USA following Hilary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump and with equivalent plausibility). Melancholia: Looking Backwards What was noticeable about all these efforts was that they were backwardlooking. They aimed at overturning or subverting or rendering null the referendum result. They signal a refusal to acknowledge the result. Three general comments can be offered. First, the remainers were seeking to overturn a decision already taken but the past was not available; there was no return to the status quo ante, neither in regard to the domestic political scene (where there seem to be cultural divisions between those looking to ‘leave’ and ‘remain’) nor with regard to links with Brussels. In regard to Brussels, overturning the Brexit vote via parliament or a second referendum would merely open up a new round of negotiations with Brussels; there would have to be negotiations as the European Union machinery is embedded in law, plus the 27 member states might not be well disposed to British after a dramatic change of mind. In brief, there would likely be a price to pay for resuming membership25 ; and setting these difficulties to one side, none of the remain proponents makes a political argument that looks to the future. Second, the remain supporters disrespect the leave voters; there was no sign amongst distressed remain adherents of any appreciation that the

25 Runciman 2018.

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leave voters might have had reason to vote as they did; remain arguments were all cast in terms that appeal to alleged narrowly economic damage and dismissed leave voters as misguided (or cast them patronisingly as those ‘left behind’). Other issues were either not pursued or treated as secondary (in particular, sociological, political or cultural concerns around elite policy disinterest, evidenced, for example, in patterns of state spending where London takes a disproportionate share, with the provinces taking less26 ). Third, the remainers disrespect key public political ideals; the remain proponents sought to overturn the result of a procedure routinely characterized within Britain as central to democracy, that is, a competitive election. No matter how unwelcome to some remainers, it can be recalled that there was a referendum and one side won the vote, the other lost. It may be that competitive elections are an unsatisfactory way of taking decisions; compared with, say, China, with its mix of party-state along with debate and consultation,27 or Singapore, where popular consultation buttresses an electoral system,28 but the procedure figures centrally in the official legitimations of the British political system. Overturning this familiar legitimation would have consequences and whilst it is unclear what these might be, weakening legitimating ideas necessarily makes space for other ideas; perhaps the widely remarked rise of European ‘populism’ or perhaps, a more thoroughgoing drive for democratization. As noted, following Mr. Cameron’s referendum supporters of the losing side refused to accept the result; jokes were made to the effect that judged against the supposed seven stages of grief many were stuck in two of the early stages, denial and anger. Be that as it may, what is clear is that their attention turned to overturning the vote but this was an error as they were trying to repair the past; a better strategy could have been found by looking forwards.

26 On the distinction between ‘some-where’ and ‘any-where’—D. Goodhart 2017 The Road to Somewhere, London, Hurst. 27 S.C.Y. Luk and P.W. Preston 2017 The Logic of Chinese Politics, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar. 28 Chua B.H. 2017 Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore, Singapore, National University of Singapore Press.

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Brexit: Some Interim Lessons? It is possible to identify some general lessons of Brexit-related debates; they point to issues to be pursued by scholars and commentators. It is also possible to identify short-term lessons, maybe already noted by discomfited elites. General: The End-Time of Neo-Liberalism Thirty-odd years of neo-liberalism have produced a noticeably more divided society29 ; inequality has widened and assumed clear geographical patterns. These divisions have been sharpened by the economic and social impacts of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent actions of the government, that is, rescuing the financial sector whilst instituting the policy of austerity for the general population. There is surely some merit in David Goodhart’s distinction between ‘no-where(s)’ and ‘somewhere(s)’; the referendum result, where each vote counts, unlike standard corrupt general elections, can be read as a sharp protest from those who have not prospered over recent decades. The referendum result revealed a divided country and it also flagged the weakness of the current oligarchic political system; the elite failed to read strands of opinion within the wider population, hence the shock of the London-based elite at the result. Barnett reads the opinions of ‘England-without-London’ as a displaced demand for constitutional change, that is, a measure of democratization; at a minimum, changes to the electoral system. The lengthy negotiation period with attendant commentary plus the spectacular parliamentary debates of December, all evidence a reappearance of ‘real politics’ in place of the previous decades’ ‘managerialist politics’30 (welcomed by those sections of the population that had given up on regular elections, reading them as empty rituals31 ).

29 R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett 2010 The Spirit Level, London, Penguin. 30 Widely discussed, see Peter Mair 2013 Ruling the Void, London, Verso. 31 Economist Editorial, November 17, 2018; Bagehot, Economist, November 17, 2018

(Bagehot also notes that the EU ‘played it hand brilliantly, particularly when it came to Northern Ireland’).

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Most generally, the leave voters disregarded ‘project fear’32 ; one line of commentary has suggested that as they had little to lose, they were ready to disregard arguments cast in material terms; a related argument casts the matter in terms of material interests and cultural interests, suggesting that the leavers had concerns about cultural change—sometimes this line was cast in terms of leaver’s alleged racism. But more intriguing was a report noted by Anthony Barnett to the effect that the denizens of Englandwithout-London were more disposed to self-identify as ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. Narrowly: A Revival of ‘Real Politics? The logic of referendums is not the same as the logic of parliamentary general elections33 ; the former gives the population and one-off chance to say yes or no to whatever question is put to them. In these circumstances further debate or action around the result of it is designed to revisit the vote or continue the debate is a matter of raw power politics for there is no agreed procedure for revisiting the result of a referendum; any further referendum will depend on building up a head of political steam within the population and running these demands through the machinery of parliament. In contrast, in the case of a general election, the losers can console themselves with the knowledge that they will automatically have a further opportunity to press their case in the next scheduled general election. David Runciman’s further point was that in respect of Brexit the only way to satisfactorily resolve the issue, in procedural and thus standard political terms was to bring the result of the referendum into the regular general election process and then it could be (re)debated and the issue brought within the logic of general elections; here, if you lose, you have an automatic further opportunity to press your case—and finally, Runciman pointed out that for this to happen one of the political parties had to embrace the cause of Brexit—the other would then be open to oppose or offer a variant course of action—at which point

32 A mix of sensible and non-sensible—for specimen former, Economist, ‘Free Falling’, November 24, 2018—for a specimen of the (very familiar) latter, see Economist ‘How to be poorer’ December 1, 2018. 33 Runciman 2018, 2019.

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the episode of direct democracy would have been drawn into the business of representative democracy—as an issue, Brexit would have been normalized. However, whilst this argument was clear, the reality in Westminster was one of confusion, split parties and unclarity about a route forwards—manoeuvring but no clarity. Finally, most narrowly of all: for the elite, don’t call referenda as direct electoral democracy is unpredictable; and for the masses, don’t underestimate the determination of the elite to maintain their position—even when seriously divided in respect of important political issues. Specific—Some Casualties? The rolling inconclusive Brexit debates have produced some casualties: • Parliament—factions—posturing—incompetence—presents itself as an inward-looking ‘village’—a radical departure from its more routine self-presentation to the public; • Mainstream media (print)—early response to referendum was to invent a distinction—hard/soft Brexit—and thereafter to cheer for one or the other team and there were few attempts to either unpack the structural occasion of the results or to detail the policy choices under consideration; and • Public sphere—the Brexit debate—mainstream media and private conversation show an appetite for politics—but the public sphere is mal-formed and thus dysfunctional.

Ongoing Questions The Brexit result caused surprise amongst many commentators—explanations were offered—one influential line pointed to reactions against the losses inflicted by globalization: loss of local control; free markets; foreign owners; along with elite indifference. More generally, the debates surrounding the issue of Brexit have given rise to a number of ongoing political and intellectual problems: the relationship between elites and masses; the nature of contemporary patterns of inequality within society; plus, most clearly, the nature of electoral democracy. Both leave and remain supporters have combed through the data—in the mass media instrumental argument has figured—percentage data added this way and

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that, so as to support or not this or that position. However, the data can be disaggregated in another way, that is, an interpretive search for deeper, structural reasons, but here again, there are different lines of analysis; three general lines seem to have emerged, explanations cast in terms of culture, economics and politics. Sobolewska and Ford offered a detailed discussion of the demographic and sociological underpinnings of the vote. They look to structural factors and identify the demographic change in the guise of significant postSecond World inward migration where the influx of new citizens in the fifties and early sixties provoked a reaction amongst sections of the resident population; often cast in negative and racist terms. The authors suggest that after joining the EU an influx of mainlanders provoked an analogous response. In both cases, the issue of identity came to the fore. It signalled a change in a basic political activity where identity cast in terms of the class falls into the background whilst identity understood in terms of subjective group affiliation comes to the fore— otherwise ‘identity politics’. Two groupings are picked out: first, identity liberals, either ‘conviction liberals’ or ‘necessity liberals;’ then second ‘identity conservatives’ (which might be further unpacked—‘mainstream (home34 )’ and ‘radical right (neo-liberals and libertarians)’. Amongst these groups, conviction liberals are young, educated, cosmopolitan and sympathetic to inward migration, whereas necessity liberals are found amongst minorities where liberal norms act as protection.35 The identity conservatives tend to be white, low education, ethnocentric and anxious. All this, the authors argue, feeds into the referendum where the binary choice—for/against—allowed deeper political cleavages to surface. Other analysts cut into the material in rather different ways. Eatwell and Goodwin36 argue that whilst a number of current political leaders have been tagged as ‘populists’—thus Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Orban and so on—and whilst mainstream liberal-democrats view them negatively, it remains the case that, viewed in a wider context, ‘national populism’ is both easily explained and a reasonable view of the world. The key background factors are summed: one, distrust in standard liberal-democratic

34 Wendy Webster—Roger Scruton—recently a new group of conservatives. 35 Recall Karl Popper on the Vienna of his youth—tolerant of Jewish people. 36 R. Eatwell and M. Goodwin 2018 National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, London, Penguin.

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politics, read as effectively dis-enfranchising voters; two, the impacts of large-scale inward migration, read as threatening established communities; three, the demands of neo-liberal globalization which serve elites whilst discounting the situation of the masses; and four, the phenomena of class de-alignment which makes the political world much more fluid. Cast in these terms, the Brexit vote was a species of revolt—the authors suggest that national populism is both rational and here to stay—question is, how will it develop in the future. The politics of Brexit are pursued by David Goodhart37 who casts matters in quasi-identity terms, distinguished ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’. The former group being based in a particular place, perhaps tied by work or family and unable to leave; whereas, in contrast, the latter group were mobile, with high skills, few ties, cultural capital and so on. Goodhart tracks this value distinction through available survey data: economic (class), social (status/education), employment (blue/white collar), location (metropolitan/small towns) and ideological (liberal/ communitarian). It is found in all these areas; the anywhere group tends to be more educated, have better jobs and look outwards to the future they are pro-inward migration. They are pro-Europe. They are also unreflective, taking their views to be self-evident, and not disposed to consider the alternate views of the somewhere groups. And their profile, so to say, is quite different; they are rooted in place, sceptical about mass inward migration and typically living in poorer non-metropolitan areas. Goodhart writes of ‘decent populism’—their revolt fed into the pro-Brexit vote. It is an intriguing argument, and in an analogous fashion Anthony Barnett turns to explanations cast in terms of politics—he casts matters in terms of identifiable political communities: thus, on the one hand, Scotland voted remain, Northern Ireland voted remain and London voted remain; whilst on the other hand Wales voted to leave and ‘Englandwithout-London’38 voted to leave. It was this last noted group with some 46 million inhabitants that was decisive in the leave vote. A series of underlying factors are cited—the state/government’s deceit in regard to the 2013 Iraq war, their subsequent incompetence in dealing with 37 D. Goodhart 2017 The Road to Somewhere, London, Penguin; see also A. Barnett 2017 The Lure of Greatness, London, Unbound; for a similar distinction, ‘market folk’ and ‘state folk’, see W. Streek 2016 How Will Capitalism End, London, Verso; see also review by Adam Tooze in London Review of Books 39.1, January 5 2017. 38 Anthony Barnett’s formulation—Barnett 2017.

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the aftermath, the financial crash and the mix of bail-outs and austerity that followed. All pointed towards a self-serving elite out of touch of a wider population which had few means to make its voice heard—in the referendum, they had a chance and took it. Barnett reads the ‘Englandwithout-London’ result in terms of identity; the English rebelled, and the further questions revolve around the possible institutional vehicle of Englishness where such questions point in the direction of sweeping constitutional reform with electoral reform as a starting point.39

Sketching a Possible Future It is not difficult to sketch out a forward-looking strategy; indeed, over the two-year-period many recipes have been proposed; distilling these commentaries produces three main themes for a forwards-looking response to the referendum result. First, grant that the leavers had a point, having been disregarded by the elites (as unpacked by Barnett/ Goodhart); second, note that the European Union is less than perfect (as unpacked by Streek) and, third, insist that any plausible future for Britain can only be conceived in terms of more, not less, Europe.40 Available Work There is a wealth of available critical work on the political structure of Britain; in general, this work notes the post-Second World War creation of a ‘welfare state’, goes on to note the 1980s onwards impact of neoliberalism—and runs to an end with the present of multiple crises, failing institutions and pervasive unclarity in respect of the future.41 A sketch of a possible route to the future can be made utilizing three ideas, taken from various political commentators: democratization, modernization and—notwithstanding Brexit—Europeanization.

39 For a somewhat unsympathetic review, see D. Edgar 2018 ‘Jailbreak from the old

order’ in London Review of Books 40.8 April 26, 2018. 40 P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England, Manchester University Press; P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire, London, Palgrave—the idea of Europe is not the same as the idea of the European Union so deeper integration remains an open issue—for example, culturally, see Kenneth Clark’s Civilization showing the depth of Europe’s cultural record. 41 D. Marquand 1988 The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana.

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First, political power is concentrated in Whitehall/Westminster— the situation reflects the route into the modern world taken by the polity—elite-led, London-centred42 —subsequent reforms have been piecemeal; thus the ‘Nairn-Anderson’ thesis—the realm of public politics is degraded—claims to rights are put to bureaucratic state—an ‘emotivist’ culture.43 An agenda for democratization can be assembled—decentralization to create new centres of power outside London. Second, although Britain is one of the richest countries on the planet, key social indicators are falling behind plausible mainland comparators—for example, social welfare where inequality is rising. And third, looking to the mainland examples to inform domestic upgrading; crudely, borrow the best from Europe44 with German research/manufacturing, French indicative planning, Nordic social care, and so on. However, it can be argued that elite political agents only act when three sets of circumstances are aligned: principle, that is, what ought to be done; pragmatism, that is, what could be done; and opportunism, that is, what can be gained. Acting in line with the noted lines of reform would require a quite remarkable set of propitious circumstances to fall into alignment: the chances are slight, the elite secure. Nonetheless, against the reactions of the remain supporters, the Brexit vote is not something to be reversed or subverted or evaded—against the reactions of the leave supporters, the Brexit vote is not the end of the process; so, for both groupings, the referendum result is a chance to have a much fuller conversation that usual about the future of the country—notwithstanding that expectations of significant change must remain low. So, a forward-looking—utopian—strategy would embrace two interrelated elements: first, dealing with the issue of the referendum result, a broad programmatic response—withdraw, institute domestic reform and then re-join; second, in regard to the issue of domestic reform, an outline of a possible course of action can be built around an agenda comprising three ideas: democratization, modernization and Europeanization, together a trio of lines of inter-twinned reform that could turn Britain into a thoroughly European country and thus prepared

42 See Doreen Massey on malign consequences of London as primate city. 43 A. MacIntyre 2007 3rd ed After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of

Notre Dame Press. 44 Marquand 1988 offered Germany as a model.

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for re-joining. This utopian programme would have considerable costs for the British elites, the central one being the crucial requirement to upgrade the country’s nominal democracy; ideas, institutions and practice.45 The British political system is oligarchic in structure (as argued by Mount46 ) and there are no signs that controlling elites are minded to embrace reforms; the European Union, to recall, is primarily a trading bloc and such trade is likely to continue one way or another (hence Brussels’ preoccupation with protecting the ‘four freedoms’); so either Brexit will go-ahead with relatively few domestic changes (perhaps in the form of Mrs. May’s proposed deal, BINO-minus) or Brexit will be blocked (perhaps via a re-run referendum or a simple withdrawal of Article 50), again leaving existing arrangements largely intact. It should be said that these remarks are offered with no expectation of such changes being introduced—or even considered—rather, this writer’s guess is that little will happen either in respect of links with Europe, notwithstanding the current waves of heated rhetoric filling the politico-media air, or with any domestic reform proposals, no matter how desirable they might be; however, no matter, arguments for reform can be constructed even if there is no obvious audience.

45 An issue mentioned in Gordon Brown’s 2022 report ‘A New Britain’—but, as commentators immediately remarked, there was no mention of electoral reform for parliament—for many, the key to reforming UK politics—still, apparently, beyond the imaginative reach of the Labour Party. 46 Mount 2012; also, F. Mount 2012 Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, London, Short Books.

CHAPTER 7

The Covid-19 Pandemic, Spring 2020

In 2020 the British state/government was obliged to respond to the arrival of an hitherto unknown disease, Covid-19, which presented itself as a worldwide pandemic. The SARS-Cov2 virus likely originated amongst native wild bats in Yunnan Province, China, jumping the species barrier at some point and discovered infecting humans in Wuhan from where it spread rapidly around the planet. The disease had a relatively high mortality rate amongst infected populations and so governments were obliged to respond. The British state/government initially seemed disposed to let the disease run through the population—as with MERS—but as deaths in care homes rose and formal models predicted large numbers of deaths, the authorities changed direction and issued regulations enforcing a lockdown. This was met with widespread compliance amongst the population but it also entailed colossal support costs to the state, which, in the event, were funded easily (to the bemusement of a population used to tales of spending restrictions). The discussion here tracks the debates in Britain during the early phase of the pandemic. The British government initiated a lockdown on 23 March 2020 and this lockdown continued for three weeks and was further extended on April 16 until the first moves in relaxing the lockdown were made on May 10, 2020, when Prime Minister Johnson spoke on television and announced some relaxation of the rules. A number of strands of debate

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were opened up and during this period many scholars made preliminary contributions. The debates during this period focused on how to deal with the virus. These debates suggest that the government was illprepared and slow to react. As the post-lockdown phase unfolded over the summer months the extent of state/government failures became steadily clearer; by the autumn it was apparent that the state/government had been ill-prepared in advance of the epidemic and dis-organized in its response and the social, economic and politico-cultural consequences continue to unfold. The state/government’s response to the local effects of the pandemic can be grasped—in outline—via a simple chronology; that is, the response of the authorities moved through a number of phases; roughly, initial confusion, lockdown and then a slow relaxation of the restrictions imposed on the population. As these phases unfolded, so too did informed debate and in time questions in regard to the government’s performance began to be asked.

The Early Phase: Recognition of Disease Emergence in Wuhan The disease first drew the attention of medical professionals on 31 December 2019 when China informed the World Health Organization1 and other states were informed early in January 2020 with human-tohuman transmission confirmed in mid-January, the 21st.2 On January 23 the Beijing government implemented a lockdown in the city of Wuhan and adjacent areas of Hubei Province with a total population of around 57 million.3 Notwithstanding the widespread domestic travel during the Lunar New Year holiday, January 24 to February 2, the lockdown was successful in bringing down rates of infection and related deaths. The actions of the Chinese government alerted the people of China and the wider international community: thus, internationally, the WHO, 1 WHO January 12, 2020. 2 Sridhar March 23, 2020 Sridhar, D. March 23, 2020 ‘Britain Had a Head Start on

Covid-19 But Our Leaders Squandered It’ in The Guardian March 23, 2020 [Sridhar, D. is Professor of Global Public Health, University of Edinburgh]. 3 Sridhar March 15, 2020 Sridhar, D. March 15, 2020 ‘Britain Goes It Alone Over Coronavirus. We Can Only Hope the Gamble Pays Off’ in The Guardian March 15, 2020.

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and various state governments, including the British government.4 However, the British government seems not to have taken this opportunity to prepare and the UK recorded its first case on 29 February 2020.5 First Response Phase: Test, Isolate and Contact Trace The initial response was low-key. The advice to the public centred on personal hygiene: people were advised to wash their hands frequently, advised to avoid touching their faces and to maintain a distance from other people. There was some testing, isolating and contract tracing in line with WHO advice. The state/government gave their response strategy a name, suggesting that it was a part of a coherent policy, the ‘DHSC Coronavirus covid-19 action plan’, issued on 3 March.6 This plan sketched out three phases: ‘contain’, ‘delay’ and ‘mitigate’. The first note involved some testing, isolating and contact tracing but only limited resources were used whilst much larger local government expert resources in environmental health were not used.7 The strategy was abandoned fairly quickly on 12 March 2020. But it is unclear how or why the decision was made.8 The Financial Times 9 quotes the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England as saying, ‘There comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention’— adding that testing focus was now on patients and health workers and that all this ‘…is entirely consistent with the science’. The British government had decided to chart an independent course on 12 March 2020; that is, so-called ‘herd immunity’ whereby vulnerable 4 Sridhar March 15, 2020. 5 Sridhar March 23, 2020. 6 Gaskell, J. and Stoker, G. April 16, 2020 ‘Centralized or Multi-level: Which Gover-

nance Systems Are Having a Good Pandemic?’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics. 7 Shabi, R. April 6, 2020 ‘UK Missed Coronavirus Contact Tracing Opportunity, Experts Say’ in The Guardian April 6, 2020. 8 Costello, A. March 15, 2020 ‘The UK’s Covid-19 Strategy Dangerously Leaves Too Many Questions Unanswered’ in The Guardian March 15, 2020. 9 Clark, P. et al March 27, 2020 ‘How the UK Government Got Testing Wrong’ in Financial Times March 27, 2020.

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groups are isolated whilst disease is left to run through the population until general immunity has been achieved.10 This strategy was not in line with WHO advice and nor did it follow successful examples from East Asia. It was also argued that the government’s approach neglected available public health advice, which was rooted in long practical experience, in favour of abstract mathematical modelling.11 Second Response Phase: Herd Immunity Herd immunity was announced indirectly by Boris Johnson on 12 March.12 The phrase itself was used by government experts.13 The WHO-recommended public health style testing, isolating and contact tracing would stop in favour of herd immunity. Sridhar14 comments that the government seemed to have decided that Covid-19 was low risk: At this point, testing was ended for all those with minor symptoms (including front line health staff), contact tracing stopped, airports remained open without checks on incoming flights or passengers, and physical distancing measures were ruled out. Large events involving tens of thousands of people went ahead a few days later, and non-essential travel continued.

One medical scholar commented that the strategy was a poor one, reading the announcement as ‘satire’. Herd immunity does exist, and it is how vaccination drives work but SARS-Cov2 was not a well-known virus and it had not been subject to the usual medical research work and nor had there been the usual testing of possible vaccines. So, letting the virus run freely was an experiment on the population.15 As the pandemic runs its course herd immunity will take care of itself, in the meantime, 10 Sridhar March 15, 2020. 11 Ibid. 12 Sridhar March 23, 2020. 13 Butler, J. ‘Follow the Science’ in London Review of Books 42.8. 14 Sridhar, D. April 22, 2020 ‘Better than Flattening the Coronavirus Curve is

Crunching It, as New Zealand is Showing’ in The Guardian April 22, 2020. 15 Hanage, W. March 15, 2020 ‘I’m an Epidemiologist. When I Heard about Britain’s Herd Immunity Coronavirus Plan, I Thought it Was Satire’ in The Guardian March 15, 2020.

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commentators insisted, surveillance and strong social distancing as in the East Asian cases should be adopted so as to slow the spread of the disease.16 Medical professionals told the government that not reacting along WHO lines quickly was a mistake,17 and they also cautioned against relying on formal epidemiological models. These models are only as good as their assumptions, and these rest in part on data, and as this is a new virus the data are scarce and liable to revision, and, based on mathematics, any projections can rapidly produce large, implausible and, in this context, frightening numbers. It was also pointed out that following a decade of reform and hollowing-out of local and regional public health organizations, there was little by way of the institutional mechanisms necessary for a coherent response18 : The public health function in England has been removed from the NHS and incorporated into local government, where its budgets have been systematically raided to prop up local councils that have suffered catastrophic cuts in the name of austerity. Local authority functions closely aligned with public health, such as environmental health and social services have also been notable casualties.

And the same organizational confusion is found at the regional level19 : The result [of reorganisations] is the absence of any integrational, coordinating or management function at a regional level in England that could operate between Whitehall departments and the various bodies, often very local, that are charged with implementing government policy.

Others noted the negative impacts of cuts in public health spending.20 There were also cuts to the NHS, despite claims to the contrary. 16 Hanage March 15, 2020. 17 Sridhar, D. March 16, 2020 ‘Britain Must Change Course—and Resume Covid-19

Testing to Protect Frontline NHS staff’ in The Guardian March 16, 2020. 18 Scally, G. March 30, 2020 ‘England’s Ravaged Public Health System Just Can’t Cope with the Coronavirus’ in The Guardian March 30, 2020. 19 Scally March 30, 2020. 20 Gibson, P. June 24, 2017 ‘Health Inspectors Used to be Proactive—Now All We Do

is React Once Disaster Hits’ in The Guardian June 24, 2017; Campbell, D. December

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The nature of British politico-administrative structures was also noted21 and in a contrast with decentralized and cooperative relations in Switzerland and Germany found to be unsatisfactory. In Britain the central government issued plans on 3 March, seemingly abandoned them on 12 March and then opted for lockdown on 23 March. The Swiss federal authorities were slower but did work with Cantons and Communities. In the case of Britain, …it is not clear what role or agency local councils, or other bodies have in the UK’s response to the crisis on the ground. Local authorities in England have through the austerity measures of the last decade lost a great deal of capacity.

The authors further note: … relationships between local and central government departments and agencies in the UK have notoriously been characterized by a lack of trust, conflict and competition.

Commentators have linked the issue of underfunding to the Conservative Party’s ideological commitment to the neo-liberal ideal of slimming the machinery of the state in favour of the private sector.22 The link between Covid-19 and neo-liberalism is picked up by Bourgeron23 who argues that the original relaxed view of the government—the 12 of March herd immunity decision—fitted their neo-liberal ideological predilections. Thus, the government took the view that as the virus spread was inevitable in an open global system and given that the British population would not accept East Asian style restrictions, then herd immunity was the only option, hence, protect the vulnerable and NHS capacity, otherwise let the disease run through population.

5, 2019 ‘Poorest Hit Hardest By Cuts to Public Health Spending—Research’ in The Guardian December 5, 2019. 21 Gaskell and Stoker April 16, 2020. 22 Toynbee, P. April 28, 2020 ‘The War on Coronavirus Should Be Led by Councils’

in The Guardian April 28, 2020. 23 Bourgeron, T. April 2020 ‘UK Risked All on a Virus Experiment’ in Le Monde Diplomatique April 2020.

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Some public doubts were noted but then on March 17 the government’s science advisors at Imperial College updated their formal model and its predictions and now large numbers of deaths were predicted.24 The model shocked the government with predictions of up to 250,000 deaths. Government policy was changed, and lockdown was introduced but without the WHO-recommended test, isolate and contact trace. In fact, it became clear that the British state did not have the requisite capacity.25 Third Response Phase: Lockdown The government initiated a lockdown on 23 March. Legislation was passed by Parliament on 23 March 2020; the Coronavirus (Covid-19) Act 2020, which gave the government extensive power to direct the behaviour of the population.26 But the government was very late to act.27 And lockdown is not a cure as it only slows transmission and so it needs to be supplemented with public health strategies; that is, test, isolate and contact trace. The disease has to be slowed until medical science understands its impact on people and constructs a treatment regime or a vaccine; these rest on medical science and so cannot be done overnight. The current phase has seen no significant research into the spread of virus within population. On April 23 the government announced a survey. The current phase has seen no significant increase in testing only a slow increase from a low base and the full WHO policy triad of test, isolate and contact trace is nowhere in sight. Fourth Response Phase: Starting to Lift the Lockdown By mid-April China, some East Asian and a number of European countries were starting to lift lockdowns or restrictions. The strategies of 24 Ford, J. April 15, 2020 ‘The Battle at the Heart of British Science Over Coronavirus’ in Financial Times April 15, 2020. 25 Sridhar March 23, 2020. 26 Jackson, J. et al April 27, 2020 ‘The Lockdown and Social Norms: Why the UK is

Complying by Consent Rather than Compulsion’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics. 27 Sridhar, D. April 1, 2020 ‘The Lockdown Only Buys Us Time: To Really Defeat the Virus We Need Mass Testing Now’ in The Guardian April 1, 2020.

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relaxation varied from country to country, but the key criteria was lockdowns or restrictions had slowed virus transmission to the level that the local health system could deal not only with current problems but also with any likely second wave. This recalls that lockdown is not a cure, rather it is a way of slowing disease so governments can prepare their health services and pursue test, isolate and contact trace.28 It is conceivable that there will be a second wave as lockdown or restrictions only suppress the spread of virus, but this is not enough and lockdown or restrictions need to be accompanied (or in time superseded) by test, isolate and contact trace. All this will restrict the virus spread and if/when the infection rate falls below R1 then the disease will slowly die down. But only long-term solution is a vaccine or treatment protocol and cannot be done overnight. With Covid-19, by mid-April, in Britain, there were reports of early human trials and also by mid-April large-scale sample testing to find out basic data about the spread of the disease through the population (better than using biassed sample of hospital admissions). In the event the Prime Minister spoke on television (to an estimated audience of around 27million) and announced a new phase in dealing with the pandemic: the lockdown was to be relaxed. The key aspects of the new rules involved a phased return to work (construction and manufacturing first), the partial reopening of schools (primary schools first, then some secondary), the opening up of facilities for open air leisure and the fuller implementation of WHO style regimes of testing, isolating and contact tracing along with avoiding crowds and where appropriate wearing face masks.29

Popular Reactions to Disease, Government and Fellow Citizens In Britain the lockdown has been observed by most people most of the time. Newspaper reports suggest that this has surprised the Whitehall/ Westminster elite. The same newspapers note that it has not surprised the general population who have ‘pulled together’. Academic research pointed to a mix of government signalling and popular acquiescence 28 Economist April 18, 2020. 29 Editorial, The Guardian May 11, 2020.

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in local-level social norms.30 A more optimistic response would note that key figures in the public sphere were natural scientists and medical personnel; in brief, trusted sources and once an explanation was given and understood appropriate action followed.31 Some Occasional Issues Were Aired in the Press There were claims of over-enthusiastic police action. In the early phases of the lockdown as the police tried to make sense of the law and government advice (both unclear) there were episodes of police forces using drones to shame people walking in open air or police officers banning people from sitting on park benches or police making roadblocks to question drivers—and so on. Contrariwise, some people have been reported as spitting at the police and some have been using the unusually quiet roads for speeding in their cars and some have been reporting neighbours for rule-breaking as a way of settling scores. But all this is minor stuff, even if for many annoying, as lockdown is a blunt instrument which is indiscriminate in its reach. There were reports about the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospital staff. Throughout the lockdown period there has been a shortage of equipment in hospitals. The popular press has treated this as a key issue whilst simultaneously lauding the dedication of medical staff. There was reported neglect of care home residents and by late April the situation in care homes commanded attention as many frail old people were dying and that the data was not being collected as a consequence of inadequate testing. Henwood32 comments that any suggestion that these people have ‘lived their lives’ is ‘poor comfort for those dying’, adding:

30 Jackson et al April 27, 2020. 31 Unsurprising, see P. Winch 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation

to Philosophy, London, Routledge, who uses the example of ‘germ theory’ to illustrate the relation of thought and action—reasons, not causes—the state/government’s use of ‘nudge theory’ is thus an error—manipulation preferred to conversation. 32 Henwood, M. April 14, 2020 ‘Care Home Deaths: The Untold and Largely Unrecorded Tragedy of Covid-19’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics.

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Deaths in hospital from this epidemic are shocking; those occurring behind the closed doors of care homes, hospices and in people’s own bedrooms, are the untold and apparently largely unrecorded tragedy.

The social care sector has been marketized in recent years and is in a parlous state to the disbenefit of those who work in the sector and those for whom it offers care.33 Commentators identified two interrelated problems: first, the divide between central and local government with the former directing the later whilst neglecting to provide adequate funding; and second, the decade-long shrinking of staff and budgets in local government, that is, austerity. The upshot has been the creation of an organisationally fragmented underfunded social care sector. None of these problems are new, or not known to central government, however, the impact of Covid-19 on the care sector has been bad and it is likely to have raised the political costs of sticking with the status quo. Late in the day the central government asked local governments to take over the important task of testing for the virus in Care Homes.34 There was reported fading confidence in government. There has been doubt as to whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson was the ‘right man for the job’. His public record suggests a fundamental non-seriousness. Worse, as one party critic was reported as saying, Prime Minister Johnson is not first amongst equals in government, but the only leader, rest are ‘nodding-dogs’. And to compound these problems, the Prime Minister’s illness removed him from office for around two weeks and it was unclear who was in charge and for how long and with what authority (Britain has no written constitution and there was no precedent for the situation). Against these sorts of commentaries, a better criticism would be that lockdown is a consequence of government failure in preparation and their subsequent reactions have been slow and confused.35

33 Rowland, D. April 28, 2020 ‘To Protect Older People from Covid-19 State Coor-

dination of the Social Care Sector is Urgently Needed’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics. 34 Brindle, D. May 8, 2020 ‘Public Health Directors in England are Asked to Take Charge of Covid-19 Testing’ in The Guardian May 8, 2020. 35 Jenkins, S. April 24, 2020 ‘Newspapers are Enjoying a Surge in Popularity but They’re Struggling to Survive’ in The Guardian April 24, 2020.

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Unpacking the Data: First Cuts The sociology of the epidemic can be seen in the data in respect of the differential impact of the virus and a number of issues can be addressed. At the outset, the question of the accuracy and reliability of the data as they were presented in the public sphere.36 The ways in which the data can be collected and displayed vary. In the UK during the epidemic three distinct sets of data were presented and whilst none of them were wrong, all of them told a particular story. The same was true of other countries because strategies of collecting and presenting data varied. In general, the data are unclear. On May 10 as UK’s lockdown began to be eased, the global figure was around 200,000 deaths. For Britain the headline figure was around 20,000 deaths. But these figures depend upon testing and then the medical practitioner’s identification of the disease followed by subsequent official record keeping.37 What is available rests on medical certificates of death (that is, the manner of recording). Raw data records those deaths where Covid-19 was cited on the individual death certificate and the aggregate data is published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). In respect of the UK the early data points to the following: a gender imbalance (more men than women get the disease); an age imbalance (more old people get the disease); an ethnic imbalance (BAME people are disproportionately represented in the data); and, also evident, an imbalance related to obesity (obese citizens are overrepresented in the data).

The Lockdown Statistics: March 23 to May 10, 2020 As noted, on May 10 as UK’s lockdown began to be eased, the global figure was around 200,000 deaths. For Britain the headline figure was around 20,000 deaths. For UK the data on pandemic is in the process of being collated. What is available rests on medical certificates of death (that is, the manner of recording). Raw data records those deaths where

36 Amongst professional statisticians and epidemiologists there would be many more debates about the data—sources, analysis and presentation—here the concern is with the ways the information about the epidemic was presented in the public sphere. 37 As UK moved towards fuller easing on July 4 the global figure of deaths was around 500,000 whilst in the UK deaths were around 45,000 with excess deaths around 60,000.

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Covid-19 was cited on the individual death certificate and the aggregate data is published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). It can be assumed that all countries have similar issues about generating data. Total Covid-19 Cases38 Place UK England Scotland Wales NI Spain Italy Germany France USA South Korea Singapore Japan China Hong Kong

Confirmed cases 143,464 105,225 9,697 8,601 3,122 219,764 192,994 155,054 122,577 927,150 10,718 12,693 13,050 88,423 1,023

Deaths 19,506* 17,372 1,120 751 263 22,524 25,9679 5,767 22,245 52,400 240 12 348 4,632 4

Recovered 1,918 – – – – 92,355 60,498 99,928 49,493 101,315 8,638 956 2,536 81,785 –

The Statistics: Counting, Analyzing and Presenting For Britain the headline figure just after the ending of lockdown was around 34,000 deaths.39 The official data is collected by Public Health England, a part of DHSC and the Office of National Statistics. A third set of data is available from

38 ONS April 26, 2020 *Updated April 29, 2020 to include all Covid-19 related deaths (hospitals, care homes and community; total 26,097. The data for May 10, 2020, when relaxation to lockdown signalled was 31,855. These figures are likely an underestimate as a result of non-testing of some victims and thus non-recording. 39 The DHSC website for May 18, 2020, listed 34,636 deaths.

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statisticians and epidemiologists which deals with ‘excess deaths’—the methodologies for these three strategies differ.40 The immediately available official data records those deaths where Covid-19 was cited on the individual death certificate and this is released day-by-day by the DHSC: The advantage of the PHE data series is that it includes deaths in anyone with laboratory confirmed COVID-19, including those who die outside of hospital settings. It is a more timely and complete measure by combining information from multiple sources. The PHE data series also aligns England’s COVID-19 death reporting with how deaths are reported in the rest of the UK.41

Data for UK PHE/DHSC42 UK England Scotland Wales N.I.

34,636 30,866 2,103 1,203 473

Data for global comparisons43 USA Spain UK Italy Germany France

88,889 27,563 34,636 31,908 79 27,625 (continued)

40 Cuffe, R May 12, 2020 ‘Coronavirus: How Many People Have Died in the UK’ in BBC News Online—on different figures and the excess death figure which is much higher than recorded deaths—this figure was 50,000 plus. 41 PHE Technical Summary Public Health England Data Series on Deaths in People with Covid-19 April 29, 2020. 42 Data drawn from DHSC website ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) Statistics’ May 18, 2020. 43 Data drawn from BBC web May 17, 2020 ‘Coronavirus Pandemic: Tracking the

Global Outbreak’—original data sourced to John Hopkins University—similar data on DHSC website ibid—see ‘Global Cases’.

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(continued) China Singapore South Korea Taiwan Japan

4638 22 262 7 725

A second set of data is published later by the Office of National Statistics (ONS)—this data corrects and updates the daily reports and gives weekly data. These data are published later than PHE/DHSC and tend to record slightly larger numbers—the ONS claims that their data are more comprehensive. Our data are based on deaths registered in the stated period and include all deaths where “COVID-19” was mentioned on death certificates. They differ from those published by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which are based on deaths occurring to date among those who have tested positive for COVID-19.44 DHSC figures are valuable because they are available quickly and give an indication of what is happening daily. Our numbers are slower to prepare because they have to be certified by a doctor, registered and processed. But once ready, they are the most comprehensive.45

A third set of data is available from statisticians working with long-run data sets. These record deaths amongst the population. These data can be presented as running averages (five or seven year) of deaths and this can then be read as a ‘normal’ death rate, that is, what would be expected other things being equal. The data for the epidemic can be compared, and presented graphically, it shows a smoothly fluctuating normal average line overlain by a sharply peaking line drawn during the current epidemic. The gap between the two indicates ‘excess deaths’ and this generates a third figure for deaths; the figure can be read as summing all those deaths that had some relation to the epidemic.

44 ONS ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) roundup’ May 15, 2020. 45 ONS May 15, 2020.

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The total UK deaths per annum equals roughly 600,000.46 These deaths are concentrated—as might be expected—in the over-70 s and in particular in the over-80 s. On that basis, the total UK deaths per week equals roughly 11,500—the figures vary over the year—there are typically flu outbreaks in the early winter months and these push up the figures for deaths per week. The total UK deaths for the week ending 3 April 2020 equals roughly 16,000. So, the ‘excess deaths’ for that week were around 6,000. The figure for excess deaths is typically higher than either of the official figures—it captures all deaths over and above what would, other things being equal, be expected. EuroMoMo epidemiological data suggested that reported UK Covid19 deaths could be only approximately 70% of actual total excess deaths47 —implying a much higher number for all Covid-19-related deaths. All that said, the data for Covid-19 deaths remains fundamentally unclear. At the end of the initial lockdown, the data suggested that the epidemic seemed to be culling the weaker members of the population (old, ill, overweight). A better measure of the impact of the epidemic would be in terms of premature deaths or years of active life lost, but such figures are impossible to generate. Problems of Estimating Excess Deaths in Britain As indicated, the data around Covid-19 is not easy to understand. The basic recording depends upon medical doctors signing a Death Certificate and thereafter the data is collected by Public Health England (PHE) which is a part of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). These data give a day-by-day report (available on government website). These data are then supplemented by late reports and an updated set of data are published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). At first the official data only reported on deaths in hospitals and it was only later that deaths in the community (that is, at home) and deaths in Care Homes for the elderly were added. This gave a better picture. However, all these

46 Data from Nick Triggle 2020 ‘Coronavirus: How to Understand the Death Toll’ in BBC News Online April 16, 2020. 47 Economist April 28, 2020.

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data record deaths where Covid-19 was present but they do not indicate the precise cause of death (for example most men in England die with prostate cancer, but very few die because of prostate cancer). Most of the Covid-19-related deaths are of old people, that is, over 70 years, with underlying health problems. The data on excess deaths are unclear but it seems there is a significant excess of deaths over historical averages, the figures are higher than the usual ‘seasonal flu’ and the deaths are concentrated amongst old people over 70 with underlying medical problems. The UK Record: Comparisons with Mainland Europe The UK record in reading and reacting to the pandemic can be compared with other countries—data is given above—what is most striking is that the record in Europe and the USA compares very unfavourably with that dealing with East Asia; thereafter, the UK record within context of neighbouring Northwest European countries is weak. The data for Italy record an early phase of severe problems. The virus took hold in the rich north, likely introduced by tourists, and the life-style of the population with crowded towns and multi-generational families, provided many vectors for the virus to spread. A severe lockdown was introduced and the disease was under control by late April and in early May there were tentative moves to exit the lockdown. The trajectory of the virus in Spain is similar. The disease spread rapidly until a severe lockdown brought it under control. In early May there were some small steps to relaxing the lockdown. The data from France tell a similar story of an initially hesitant response followed by lockdown, slowly eased from early May. In Germany the experience of the epidemic was different. The government moved quickly to test, isolate and contact trace and this produced good results with lower rates of infections and deaths compared to other European countries. In late April there were moves to relax restrictions. In Sweden the experience was different again. They adopted a strategy of herd immunity—the old and vulnerable were protected and thereafter the government advised the population about social distancing and largely left implementation to the general good sense of the citizens. There was occasional unease about the strategy but as the UK government began relaxing lockdown rules, it seemed to have worked.

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The European Union machinery has only a limited responsibility in regard to pandemics and the institutional apparatus in these matters is very new. The actual reactions of the European Union apparatus were slow and most of the work in responding was organized at the national level with Brussels playing catch-up. However, one key area of engagement was via the European Central Bank which acted to steady the financial markets.48 The Data Unpacked—Age, Gender, Ethnicity and Etcetera Age—the early data suggest that there is a very obvious age-gradient in respect of deaths from Covid-19—under 45 years of age the risks are slight—over 45 years of age the risks increase rapidly—over 70 years of age the risks are high—over 80 years of age the highest risk. Deaths by age/gender (ONS49 —approximate cumulative figures up to May 01, 2020). Deaths Deaths Deaths Deaths Deaths Deaths Deaths

under one year one to fourteen fifteen to forty four forty five to sixty four sixty five to seventy four seventy five to eighty four eighty five plus

None None 400 3,200 6,200 11,000 13,000

The age distribution is clear, the virus impacted older people to a much greater extent than younger cohorts. The ONS table also records that more men than women died, except for the final cohort. The ONS50 also recorded that there was a spike in Covid-19 deaths from mid-March onwards—from that date to May 1 deaths from Covid19 outstripped other deaths. The data also show ‘excess deaths’ over and above a running average for the period 2914–2019—and most of these are Covid-19 related.

48 Dimitrakopoulos, G. and Lalis, G. April 1, 2020. 49 Data derived from ONS May 15, 2020 ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) round up’—the

data is presented in a bar chart. 50 ONS May 15, 2020.

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The ONS51 also reported on deaths in Care Homes—reporting that for the period March 2 to May 1 around one third of deaths in Care Homes were Covid-19 related. Data were skewed towards men. Ethnicity—the data record differences in death rates amongst the various ethnic groups that make up the total population of the UK. The data on hospital deaths per 100,00 in England by ethnic group record these figures52 : Group one: Chinese, Bangladeshi, White British and Other White plus Mixed ethnicity all record figures less than less than the overall hospital death rate of approximately 28 per hundred thousand. The group two: Black African, Pakistani, Other Asian, White Irish and Indian all record figures slightly above the hospital average at around approximately 30 per hundred thousand. Group three shows higher figures: Black Caribbean, Other black and other ethnic groups show figures ranging from approximately 52 per hundred thousand up to 80 per hundred thousand. The raw data are skewed by age, residence and location of deaths (hospital, care home or community). The authors produce figures for predicted expected deaths relative to white majority and these data allow for age, residence and location; the expected deaths can then be compared with actual deaths and for ethnic minority groups the actual figures are higher than the predicted expected deaths: …all minorities continue to face higher risks of death than we would expect on the basis of their age and where they live. For Black Africans the rates are nearly three times those that would be expected, while for Pakistanis they are two times, and for Bangladeshis and Black Caribbeans one and a half times expected rates.

Unpacking the data further: – employment in health/care work—Black Africans, Black Caribbeans and Indians are over-represented—thus at greater risk;

51 Ibid. 52 Platt, L. and Warwick, R. May 12, 2020 ‘At Greater Risk: Why Covid-19 is Dispro-

portionately Impacting Britain’s Ethnic Minorities’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics.

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– loss of employment—Pakistani and Bangladeshi are overrepresented in shut-down sectors of the economy—poor living conditions produced greater risk. Underlying health conditions. ONS data suggest that 90% of patients who die from Covid-19 had pre-existing underlying health problems53 : heart disease, dementia, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes plus a percentage with no pre-existing conditions. Other commentators have noted links between diabetes and obesity; the latter is now a significant public health problem. Commentators record that the epidemic in Care Homes has been a significant failure in state/government action—roughly, a dis-organized semi-private sector treated by state/government as secondary to the NHS—resulting in many deaths—with perhaps evidence of moral/legal culpability. Hudson, remarks54 : The longer the impact of Covid-19 has continued, the more the focus of concern has fallen upon adult social cared. While the NHS has been relatively protected, social care has been overwhelmed: supplies of PPE have been unavailable; testing has been patchy or non-existent; patients have been discharged from hospitals into care homes and proceeded to spread the virus; deaths amongst residents have reached somewhere between 3040% of all coronavirus-related deaths; and fatalities amongst social care staff are outstripping those of healthcare workers and the wider working population.

Hudson notes the fragmented nature of adult social care—the pressures on local authorities—the idea of herd immunity—transfer of infected patients to care homes—all pointing to the neglect of the sector with the suspicion that the old and sick were being written-off.

53 Nick Triggle April 16, 2020 ‘Coronavirus: How to Understand the Death Toll’ in BBC News Online—data is from ONS 54 Hudson, B. May 14, 2020 ‘A policy Scandal of Epic Proportions: Why a Public Enquiry into Adult Social Care and Covid-19 is Necessary’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics; Willis, M. and Glendinning, C. May 11, 2020 ‘Covid19 and Social Care Funding: A Window of Opportunity for Reform’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics.

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Critical Public Debates to May 10, 2020 Preparation and resilience are now an issue. The government was clearly caught out by the epidemic. There had been a ten-year run down of public health organizations and the Cygnus 2016 report on epidemic preparedness was ignored (and has not yet been published). Plus, more immediately, there was a shortage of capacity (beds) and equipment (PPE) and in regard to the PPE it was noted that domestic capacity for manufacturing PPE had run down and that it was difficult late in the day to order goods from overseas. Economy policy is now in question. The lockdown had immediate impacts on business and consumer activity as business were obliged to close, workers were laid-off and consumers found themselves in difficulties. The government was quick to make funds available, but it is not clear how effective these measures will be or how long all these costs can be sustained. Adam Tooze55 tracked the shockwave running around the global economic system as markets and governments woke up to the scale of the problem. Financial markets collapsed in mid-March and states made huge sums of money and credit available to banks and business. There are many estimates of the reductions in economic activity, but all agree the shock is severe. There is now a recessionary spiral. The question now is how governments will respond; good in East Asia, poor in Europe and worse in America. Tooze concludes ‘The worst is just beginning’.56 Social resilience is now an issue. The impacts on ordinary life have been dramatic. In the short-term lockdown has entailed risks of isolation and damage to mental health, damage to children’s education and increased domestic violence. There are clear signs of age-discrimination against the old and the growing scandal of the neglect of care homes for the elderly. The failings in public hygiene are noticeable. There are suggestions that public awareness of the security risk of pandemics was low.57 And it seems that the lockdown has had a differential impact, bearing more heavily on the relatively poor. Commentators have also noted that public obedience to restrictions has been met by elite surprise; illustrating, it might be thought, the class division of British society with is elite/mass split. 55 Adam Tooze 2020 ‘Shockwave’ in London Review of Books 42.8, April 16, 2020. 56 Tooze April 16, 2020. 57 Stevens, D. and Vaughan-Williams, N. April 14, 2020 ‘Was the UK Public Prepared for a Pandemic?’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics.

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The role of natural scientists in advising the state/government has been queried. The claims of natural science do not translate mechanically into policy advice. Advice is just that and politicians must decide. Commentators speculate that natural scientists would do well to avoid becoming ‘human shields’ for otherwise inept politicians.58 The government has shifted ground from an earlier ‘enough of experts’ (in regard to debates about the economics of Brexit) to hugging them close. The shift is partly technical, that is, tackling the epidemic requires expertise rooted in medical and natural sciences, and at the same time, the epidemic is a political and administrative disaster. There will be a reckoning; hence, amongst the denizens of Whitehall/Westminster bringing in experts affords the various players a measure of protection, a way of evading direct culpability.59 Anthony Costello60 proposed a number of questions for the ‘inevitable public enquiry’: (i) it was not clear who was in charge, responsibilities are scattered around a number of organizations and coordination ‘appears chaotic’; (ii) it was clear that administrative incoherence was not all the story, rather over recent years there has been a systematic downgrading of public health; (iii) the reliance on contracting out to the market-place has been tested and found wanting, that is, it does not work; (iv) the pool of experts used by the government was very narrow; and (v) the government acted slowly and on 12 March ‘…effectively gave up on containing the spread of the epidemic’.

The Post-Lockdown Phase: From May 10 Into Summer and Autumn The question of when to lift lockdowns or restrictions was widely understood to be difficult. It could not be a total overnight lift, rather it had to be done in stages and again this depended on a mix of evidence of which 58 Wickham, A. and Baker, K. April 22, 2020 ‘Scientists Advising the UK Government on Coronavirus Fear Boris Johnson’s Team is Using them as Human Shields’ in Buzzfeed April 22, 2020. 59 Flinders, M. and Dimova, G. April 3, 2020 ‘Bringing in the Experts: Blame Deflection and the Covid-19 Crisis’ in British Politics and Policy at London School of Economics. 60 Costello, A. April 1, 2020 ‘A Public Enquiry into the UK’s Coronavirus Response Would Find a Litany of Failures’.

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groups were at risk and how virus was transmitted and what might mitigate transmission such as hyenine procedures and politics, that is, what do members of the government elite think.61 Prime Minster Johnson addressed the nation on television on May 10 and announced the start of a gradual relaxation of lockdown restrictions—some industries resumed— some school opened—some open air leisure—plus calls for better social hygiene (including testing, tracing and quarantine). The broadcast was not well received but a lengthy document followed. In Britain the process of emerging from lockdown was unlikely to be easy. In early April Britain was in line to be the worst affected country in Europe,62 but the statistics on all the deaths were not yet clear: it was a new virus, not the usual flu, there were questions about record keeping, Care Homes seemed to have been neglected and it seems that other non-Covid-19 aliments were being pushed to one side, thus reduced cancer treatments or numbers of arrivals at Accident and Emergencies Departments. After the early abandonment of the test, isolate and contact trace strategy, the government was playing catch-up, in part trying to build up the institutional machinery necessary to follow the WHO’s recommended strategy, but these efforts were hampered by a decade of underfunding along with the consequent running down of public health capacity63 The pace of testing did pick up in late April but improving the level of testing was very slow and insufficient. All that said—‘In most people infected with Sars-Cov-2 the immune system is quite capable of dealing with the virus: that is why they do not get sick’.64

State/Government Failure In the light of the public debates noted above it seems that there are a number of contemporary issues requiring attention. And, turning to the future, there are more speculative issues to consider.

61 Economist April 18, 2020. 62 Economist April 18, 2020. 63 Scally March 30, 2020. 64 Economist April 18, 2020.

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Looking to the Present Concerns On preparedness/responsiveness: it is clear that the British government was not prepared. Here there are questions about long-term neglect and short-term slowness in response. More specifically, the British government did not pursue the WHO line of test, isolate and contact trace. On public hygiene/public education: it is clear that Britain has relatively weak public hygiene routines. There is a lack of basic hygiene (hands, face touching and mouth covering when ill); emergency epidemic hygiene (lockdown requisites such as PPE); routine epidemic hygiene (test, isolate and contact trace); and procedures for exiting lockdown hygiene regime (different social groups are at risk, social routines to be monitored).65 On the government’s preference for private firms: commentators argue that the run down of local authority funding has weakened their ability to deliver services to their local populations. But it has not totally removed it; this being so the government’s apparent disregard of local authority skills—thus environmental health—seems perverse. On the widest scale, the decades-long political and policy preference for so-called ‘market solutions’ has received a second real-world rebuke—in 2008 the state bailed out the banks, now, in 2020, it is the state that must deal with the pandemic. On the relation of politics/science: policymakers invoked natural science, but the relationship is not straightforward. It seems this can be either a defensive manoeuvre as natural science does not mechanically unpack into policy, or an available simple answer to otherwise difficult policy questions (thus formal models look good), or politicians cherry pick the advice that resonates with their ideologies (thus Whitehall/ Westminster is averse to local-level administrations so local public health resources avoided), or politicians can invoke science to veil their responsibilities for taking decisions. Relatedly, it has been argued that there has been an over-reliance on mathematical modelling of epidemic dynamics whilst the public health approach has been side-lined.66 Plus, there are

65 Klepac, P. March 17, 2020 ‘What Scientists Have Discovered About How Each Age Group Spreads Covid-19’ in The Guardian. 66 Costello, A. April 27, 2020 ‘The Government’s Secret Science Group Has a Shocking Lack of Expertise’ in The Guardian.

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the inevitable professional debates within the scientific community about how to deal with the epidemic.67 On resilience overall: the general theme of the public debates has been the lack of government preparedness and the slowness of response; these are basic failings. Looking to Future Issues On easing the lockdown: unpacking medical/social scientific data in order to determine how the restrictions can be lifted: (i) which age/ethnic/ gender groups are at risk or not; (ii) which social activities are risky or not; and (iii) whether to involve the public in these decisions or not. On future preparedness: (i) providing better local authority resources; and (ii) making use of digital mechanisms, such as contact tracing and use of ‘big data’, matters which raise issues of control, access and privacy. On future economics: (i) paying for lockdown incurred state debts and the Economist mentions three macro-strategies, namely tax and cut, default or delay68 ; (ii) manufacturing re-balancing (resilience implies some on-shoring of vulnerable supply chains); and (iii) financial rebalancing, because resilience implies changes (some re-regulation, questions of how to support large state debt, questions of how to curb marketled speculation, and questions of how to restrict take-over activity). On future society (possible changes in social norms): (i) discovering which elements of lockdown era will persist such as practising social distancing or supporting neighbours, or working from home, or working less (80% furlough scheme could be read as an ‘unintended experiment’ in UBI) or the persistence of shopping online; (ii) discovering which elements of lockdown will be abandoned, thus, reopening of sports and leisure facilities or a return to 9–5 working or travelling; and (iii) impunity, addressing the issue of elite responsibility for their handling of a major public health emergency.

67 Sample, I. April 24, 2020 ‘Who’s Who on Secret Scientific Group Advising UK Government’ in The Guardian. 68 Economist April 25, 2020.

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More Remote Matters Arising The reactions of people to the crisis offered a number of interesting relatively minor lessons; here three could be noted. The British population acted on the advice and demands of the government. The claims of one recently popular theory were thereby challenged. Nudge theory became briefly fashionable in Britain over recent years and its essence is manipulative; it seeks to change behaviour by subtly managing their social environment. One central government administrator was quoted in the press as saying he/she was surprised at the compliance of the population to state/government requests, but, of course, the crucial point here is that the demands were made on television each night by a politician flanked by two medical or scientific experts; plus, the government repeatedly sought to legitimize its action by invoking ‘the science’. As Peter Winch69 would argue, if a concept is understood, action follows automatically, and so it is quite likely that the widespread compliance was a matter of understanding the arguments of respected authorities. Conspiracy theories were also voiced. In the USA it was suggested that the virus entered the human population as a result of a lab accident in Wuhan, where, it was noted, there was a biological sciences research laboratory. This suggestion quickly had a party political slant and it was claimed, seemingly on no evidence that the Chinese were covering up an accident. It was also suggested, again on no evidence, that their scientists had been conducting ‘gain of function’ experiments, seeking to make the virus more virulent and thus potentially useful in germ warfare. These theories were rejected by mainstream commentators—but they reappeared from time to time, seemingly embraced by sections of the population leaning towards the Republican Party. It would seem that in popular discourse the anti-China theme can prosper; aspects of a possible new cold war. More positively, the lockdown encouraged ‘working from home’, the machinery of the state could in some areas be run from home offices (converted spare rooms); so too the operations of the corporate sector.

69 Winch, P. 1990 2nd ed. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London, Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. 1953 Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell.

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There were doubts expressed about this new pattern of work, but it has endured; a gesture towards a more civilized form of political-economy. State/Government Failures in Retrospect As noted, in the early months of 2020 the British state/government was confronted with a crisis of unanticipated and unclear scale; the initial reports from Wuhan were muted and the authorities arrested one local medical scientist for contacting colleagues through social media. Shortly thereafter they were obliged to acknowledge an outbreak of an hitherto unknown disease—Covid-19—and Wuhan was locked down, a draconian measure in a city of millions. The disease was also found in Italy, perhaps introduced by tourists. Eventually, the British state/government was obliged to respond. At first in a rather relaxed fashion, but when faced with increasing numbers of infections and deaths in care homes plus some very alarming formal model projections, the government implemented a nationwide lockdown. It was assiduously enforced by the police but, in the event, it was widely followed; a product, it might be thought, of presentations made in the mass media by figures of authority, that is, medical scientists, not politicians. The epidemic ran for several months before being brought under some sort of control, a mix of rapidly designed vaccines, home diagnostic tests and upgraded routines of public hygiene. In time, ordinary life resumed, but now the costs of state/government support to both the corporate world and individual citizens had to be acknowledged and lessons drawn. It was noted that pandemics might become somewhat more familiar as an interdependent world with easy travel for humans also made it easy for novel viruses—in this case, a virus from native bats in Yunnan Province in China.

CHAPTER 8

The Disaster in Ukraine: Tracking the Failures of Political Elites, 1991–2022

The familiar story of the war in Ukraine which is presented by Whitehall / Westminster elites and found in the bulk of the mainstream media, and which is also discretely echoed by local security think-tanks, is that the disaster has its occasion in the Russian military intervention made in February 2022 and the lesson is drawn that this must be resisted by Britain and its allies, and this in turn has led to the provision of diplomatic support, financial aid and military assistance. But this characterization is wrong. The disaster did not begin in 2022 and earlier dates reaching back to 2014 or 1989/91 are more plausible. The current conflict Ukraine involves three overlapping strands: (i) unresolved problems in post-91 state making; (ii) a local, regional civil war; and overlaying both (iii) a foreign sponsored proxy war. This trio of overlapping conflicts offers no direct security threat to Britain and involvement is an elite-level choice. *********

This piece was written in early autumn 2022—an effort to understand how Europeans had managed to organize an old-style war in their own continent—it was updated marginally in spring/summer 2023 after just over one year of fighting—coincidentally, it was the twenty year anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq—now acknowledged in mainstream media as a disaster. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_8

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with dismay by wide sections of European society; this is unsurprising, as any recognition of Europe’s blood soaked twentieth century cautions against the use of force1 ; a lesson underscored for Europeans more recently in the case of the former Yugoslavia. But immediate outrage is not enough; confronted with daily reports of fighting in Ukraine, it is necessary to step back and try to place these events in a wider context, to note the key players and unpack their understandings of events. Only then can lines of rational policy argument be sketched. The alternative is to let the fighting run on, with more death and destruction in the Ukraine, with more millions displaced and with Europe and the wider international system under rising indeterminate stress. The disaster engulfing Ukraine has been read as a straightforward Russian invasion but the current situation can be put into a wider context. The 1991 unexpected formal independence opened the way to attempts to create an autonomous country but there were many difficulties. The country was divided between east and west and successive elected presidents sought to manage this divide whilst at the same time dealing with the initiatives of outsiders. In time, domestic tensions came to a head in the 2014 Maidan coup/revolution. This secured change in Kiev but precipitated fighting in the Donbass region; a low-level civil war began, deepening internal dissention and drawing in ever greater foreign intervention. Efforts at mediation failed, outsiders, in particular the USA/ NATO and EU, became more deeply involved and local level fighting slowly modulated into USA/Russia proxy war. The US administration was the key Western player and in the summer 2023 seemed intent on managing the conflict, perhaps with a longer-term goal of moving into the background in favour of Germany and the EU.2 Ukraine has faced multiple problems of state building, imagining a nation and pursuing development and it has done this in the context of unplanned formal independence, internal dissention and foreign meddling. Against the focus on 2022, it is clear that a richer analysis is available.

1 N. Davies 2006 Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory, London, Macmillan; P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge. 2 W. Streek 2023 ‘Europeanizing the War’ in Sidecar May 01, 2023 (accessed August 2023).

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Cast in these terms the current conflict in the Ukraine involves three intertwinned strands. In the first place, the domestic problems of state building as the 1991 elite-level decision to dissolve the Soviet Union3 left the ruling groups of the nominally independent Ukraine with a schedule of daunting tasks: state making, nation building and thereafter the pursuit of growth and welfare. There were many pre-requisites to this task; a key concern was to build a local state, disentangled from existing overarching Soviet systems, that is, remaking the machineries of government. Further, a technically competent ruling group would have to disentangle the local economy from the wider Soviet era networks within which it was integrated. Then they would have to foster a sense of Ukrainian identity amongst a population that embraced both Ukrainian and Russian speakers with both familiar with Soviet era schemes oriented towards integration. And they would have to pursue growth and welfare, that is, rebuilding their inherited economic base. In this, commentators suggest that by and large they failed.4 Then second, one outcome of the post-91 domestic problems of the Ukrainian elite was the interference of outside powers, the USA, EU and Russia; each seeking to secure their own interests. In this context, a financial bidding war between Moscow and Brussels further disturbed local politics and helped precipitate the 2014 coup/ revolution which inevitably added further problems when areas of the Donbass resisted the new Kiev leadership. Rival militia groups began fighting, occasioning a civil war in the Donbass. And then third, the situation of the Ukraine was further overlain by military-diplomatic tensions between USA/NATO and Moscow and when Moscow in early 2022 sent troops into Ukraine these tensions quickly turned into a proxy war; the USA/NATO and Russia fought over the territories of the Ukraine. The post-1991 situation of Ukraine was never going to be easy and, in the event, domestic failings, thus, government by oligarch, right-wing militias, extensive corruption and so on, coupled to outside interference, with assorted Western players and Russia, precipitated a catastrophe in

3 V.M. Zubok 2021 Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, Yale University Press, tracks collapse in system failing, key figures in elite seek change; A. Brown 2020 The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War, Oxford University Press, system failing, elite-level conflicts, in particular Yeltsin seeks power. 4 An argument by analogy—from the dissolution of British and other empires post1945—buttressed by survey data—Freedom House, V-Dem Institute—plus World Bank and UNDP.

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the form of old-style industrial-scientific warfare with consequent heavy human and material costs.

Lines of Available Argument The major players in the unfolding disaster in Ukraine, and in the wider territories of Europe, all have ways of reading the situation; the regime in Kiev, looking to reinvent their polity as part of the West; their counterpart in Moscow, concerned to resists the incursions of NATO/EU; and the USA/NATO taking the opportunity to further advance into the sometimes Soviet sphere. There are minor players such as the European Union or Britain, which cleave to the position of the USA/NATO. These understandings, in particular those current in the West, both inform and legitimate elite-level action. In the case of the disaster in Eastern Europe, two broad sets of assumptions can be identified, thus, two lines of argument, two ways of reading events and two sets of policy prescriptions; the one focused on Moscow and the 2022 invasion, the other looking at a spread of events downstream from the disintegration of the Eastern bloc and the USSR in 1989/91. The first line is available in various formulations in Washington, Brussels and London and it argues that the present crisis in Eastern Europe began when Russian armed forces crossed the border and advanced into Ukraine and that these events constitute the unequivocal root cause of the present crisis. These events were read, so far as one can tell, as an unprovoked aggression which in public demanded an ethico-political response, a judgemental stance; this was articulated by President Biden: ‘For God’s sake this man [Putin] cannot remain in power’. The European Union’s Brussels machinery ran down a similar line. The response was cast in terms of defending European values. These are taken to be enshrined in the founding treaties, and whilst that may be so, representing the European Union as a coherent polity with core values is a stretch. And in Britain, in Prime Minister Johnson’s terms, ‘…Russia must fail and be seen to fail if it invades Ukraine’. Thereafter, the patterns of support unfold; diplomatic, financial and crucially military, plus, as an unacknowledged corollary, acceptance of the ongoing killing in Ukraine.

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In February/March 2023—one year into the war—it was noted5 that the military casualties were estimated at around 200,000, roughly split between the combatants, to which could be added, in regard to Ukraine, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 civilian deaths, plus, of course, the millions of inhabitants displaced from their hometowns, with many million refugees in neighbouring countries. However, notwithstanding these data, political leaders in the USA and EU continued to pledge aid to Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’. The second line, affirmed by at least a section of informed opinion within the public sphere, seeks a broader historical context, seeing the current disaster as the product of three distinct processes. So, firstly, the downstream consequences of the 1989/91 collapse of the Eastern bloc and USSR. As with the post-1945 collapse of European overseas empires, the disintegration of the familiar political institutions of the USSR, a geographically extensive, multi-centred, multi-ethnic unit, left local elites within this dissolving space competing for power. In Russia the immediate consequence was gangster capitalism and the immiseration of the great majority of the population. It took until the early years of this century for the state to recover. And it was a process seemingly never completed in the geographical territory of Ukraine which remained plagued by internal divisions.6 Then secondly, a post-2014 drawn out civil war in the Eastern parts of the country, with outside powers, USA/Russia, trickling in support. The efforts of the former are detailed on NATO’s web page and have involved weapons supplies, training programmes and participation in military exercises. And thirdly, the current 2022 intervention involving outside powers which have shifted from limited support to the contending parties to a more direct engagement, that is a proxy war

5 Multiple reports in the mainstream press—declarations of support came from key

leaders—Stoltz, Macron, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen—and, of course, the British. 6 On this, Paul Goodman 2022 ‘Ukraine: Welcome Victories, Dangerous Possibilities, Uncertain Consequences’, Conservative Home, (accessed September 2022), tags Ukraine as an ‘emerging democracy’, taken from Freedom House ‘Nations in Transitions Report 2022—the country scores 39/100—problems with lack of rule of law, personal networks, oligarchs, elite-level manoeuvring—not a neat-tidy liberal democracy; similar characterizations are available from V-Dem Institute 2022 Democracy Report 2022 (accessed October 2022); however, Philip Short is more direct, ‘It [Ukraine] is deeply corrupt, the rule of law is non-existent and its billionaire oligarchs wield disproportionate power’, see P. Short 2022 ‘After Six Months of Bloody and Terrible War, What Exactly Does Putin Want From Ukraine?’ in The Guardian August 22, 2022.

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between the USA and Russia with fighting on the territory of the Ukraine and spill-over effects for Europe more broadly. The former set of assumptions, vigorously publicly affirmed by Western officialdom, are implausible. It is not clear that they are held in Washington. Adam Tooze7 argues that John Mearsheimer’s ‘realist’ analysis8 is the de facto position of ‘a large part of the US foreign policy establishment’ and it is difficult to believe that the eurocrats in Brussels are less well-informed. In the European Union there is perhaps, deference, not merely to Washington, but also to the rising influence of CEEs. And in the case of Britain, the denizens of Whitehall/Westminster celebrate their security links to the USA; an institutional fealty to Washington. On the other hand, in contrast, the second set of assumptions has greater merit as they open the way to understanding just how Europeans got to this point of open, old-style, scientific-industrial warfare in Eastern parts of the continent, with significant casualties, civilian and military, extensive physical destruction and millions displaced internally and as cross-border refugees.

Roots of Crisis---A Timeline If it is argued that the roots of the present crisis in the Ukraine are to be found in the collapse of the USSR, then attention has to be turned to those events in order to see what insights can be drawn. The roots of the ongoing disaster can be found in shifting patterns of politics over the last couple of decades: first, the slew of reforms triggered by Mikhail Gorbachev, including domestic reforms, dismantling the Eastern bloc coupled to an opening to the West, along with the American response, initially one of accommodation; and then, second, the Boris Yeltsin years when elite-level apparatchiks plus assorted opportunists acted to collapse the governing system whilst at the same time asset stripping its resources; plus, again, the American response, this time, hubristic exploitation.

7 See A. Tooze 2022 ‘John Mearsheimer and the Dark Origins of Realism’ in the New Statesman March 8, 2022. 8 J. Mearsheimer 2022 ‘John Mearsheimer on Why the West is Principally Responsible for the Ukraine Crisis’ in the Economist March 19, 2022; John Mearsheimer 2023 ‘The Darkness Ahead: Where the Ukraine War is Headed’ (Web, accessed August 4, 2023); J. Mearsheimer 2023 ‘Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism’ in Le Monde Diplomatic, August 2023.

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Gorbachev’s Reforms and His Opening to the West Cast in developmental terms, events can be read in terms of the slow process of the collapse of the USSR and the wider sphere of the Eastern bloc9 The formal dissolution may have taken place in stages over the period 1989/91, but the Soviet space was integrated, with deep economic, political and cultural links between the various regions. Here, as in the case of the post-1945 collapse of European empires, the breakdown of the overarching system of the Soviet Union left the resultant space contested by well-placed aspirant replacement elites. In many territories, these were typically nationalist and they, along with well-placed local economic players, opened the way to the emergence of influential oligarch. The masses were left to deal with events as best they could. It is clear that the formation of coherent nation-states within the postSoviet space was never going to be straightforward and these multiple domestic tensions plus the involvement of outsiders, in particular the West, constitute the deepest background to Ukraine 2022. Turning to the central elite players, Vladislav Zubok10 offers a discussion of events over period 1985/91 arguing that the keys to the collapse are to be found in the internationalist optimism of Gorbachev and the opportunism of Yeltsin as the Russian elite more broadly struggled with efforts to upgrade their economy, reform their politics and find an end to the cold war. There are many twists and turns in domestic elite debates but Zubok argues that the central thread is the determination of Gorbachev to bring about change whilst being routinely undermined; he is opposed by conservatives in the CP and by assorted public figures including intellectuals, liberal reformers and new party-like groupings. Yeltsin emerges as a leader of this collection of opponents, but they have no better ideas than the man they oppose. Gorbachev, in this view, got the economics wrong; the partial liberalization of the centrally run command economy left sub-federal agents (SOEs, cooperatives, local banks and other local enterprises) free to run their own affairs, which they did, but in the absence of overall direction profits were used for consumption or squirrelled away overseas. The federal centre was left with the bills for the basic elements of state, thus 9 A. Kortunov 2022 ‘Ukraine Conflict in the Last Act in a Long Soviet Collapse’ on Russia Today, nd (accessed August 2022). 10 Zubok 2021.

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the army and welfare and assorted subsidies, but little by way of income. Gorbachev also got the politics wrong as he prioritized a top-down process of democratization, which took the form of both relocating decision making authority downwards from the federal centre of the USSR to constituent parts, and in removing restrictions on public debate, where upshot was the rise of populism and nationalism where both were hostile to the political centre and its institutional machineries, that is, Moscow and CP. And so, the USSR drifts towards dissolution. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia agreed its dissolution although their motivations differed; for Yeltsin it was careerism/opportunism. A rush of dramatic changes follow and the issue for USA was how to respond. In a 1992 address to the US Congress Yeltsin seeks a deal to allow Russia into the US-centred global system. Pozner11 suggests there were two ways for US authorities to respond to this opening: firstly, after the style of Marshall Plan, offer aid, draw Russian into system; secondly, inform them that they had lost the cold war and must bear the consequences. The opportunity was lost. In early nineties the ‘Bush Doctrine’ calls on USA to ensure that it will always be the sole super-power. George Kennan12 characterizes the doctrine as the start of a new cold war, suggesting that the Russians will react. Yeltsin reacts to these events negatively, arguing that Russia had been tricked. Putin becomes president in 2000; informal discussion take place about joining NATO and also the European Union but these tentative approaches are rebuffed. Putin offers help after 9/11/2001 with bases in Central Asia but he becomes disillusioned in regard to such cooperation and eventually criticizes NATO expansion, claiming it breaks undertakings and that it is provocative as it can only be aimed at Russia. Pozner argues it is around now, with failed Western promises, that Putin ceases to look to US; there is now distrust; a new cold war.

11 V. Pozner 2018 ‘How the United States Created Vladimir Putin’, lecture given at Yale University (accessed August 2022). 12 T.L. Friedman 1998 ‘Foreign Affairs: Now a Word from X’ in New York Times May, 2 1998.

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The Ordered Dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the Collapse of the USSR In the autumn of 1989 change swept through Eastern Europe and in 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved. Zubok argues that standard explanations of the dissolution of USSR: Cold War pressures made collapse inevitable; glasnost undermined party ideology so doomed USSR; USSR failed because economy collapsed; peripheral nationalisms fostered collapse; local elites were not on board for reforms, do not do enough work. The key is the mix of pressures on the Moscow elite and their responses, which were confused, impractical and doomed to failure. It could have been otherwise: top-down economic reform, handled slowly, plus minimal political reform and certainly no European style liberal democracy implemented overnight. Thereafter from 1999 onwards Vladimir Putin reassembled the basic elements of the old system. The West had no great inclination to assist reforms. Cold war thinking continued and the collapse of USSR was conflated with the end of cold war and read as a victory for liberalism. In Russia the Yeltsin era was a failure: life expectancy for Russians dropped from 69 to 64.5 years; there was demographic decline as a result of illness and poverty; and USA/ NATO intruded into post-soviet areas, the CEE (1999), later the Baltics (2004). American proposals in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia be invited to join NATO finally provoked a reaction in Moscow: a short war against Georgia in 2008 and following the coup/revolution in Kiev, the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The fighting in Donbas started in same year. Faced with these events, the West defaulted to familiar cold war rhetoric such that Russia was alien to European ideas, expansionist and must be resisted. The crucial role of Gorbachev is also stressed by Archie Brown,13 plus, in particular, the antagonism of Yeltsin. More broadly, Brown notes the undertakings given by the USA and German government to the effect that NATO would not expand eastwards; an issue subject to debate. Here M.E. Sarotte14 offers a somewhat different take on this crucial period arguing that the key player was Helmut Kohl who took advantage of

13 Archie Brown 2020 The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher, and the end of the Cold War, Oxford University Press. 14 M.E. Sarotte 2009 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, Princeton University Press.

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Gorbachov’s utopianism to secure German reunification and the ‘prefab model’ was adopted and existing institutions were used; that is, East Germany was absorbed as returned lander and thus Germany moves East, so too NATO, so too the European Union, with later moves into CEE area. Sarotte argues it was all done rapidly with little chance for longterm planning but it is clear that Gorbachev’s utopianism—the ‘common European home’—was disregarded and the pre-fab model left the USSR on the outside. Ukraine Independence in Context, 1991 The unplanned, unprepared formal independence of the Ukraine left successor elites with a difficult task: in general terms, as in the case of the post-war dissolution of European empires, the new elites had to build a new country. In the case of the European overseas empires, local nationalist elites were in the main well prepared but in Ukraine, not so, plus, the economy and culture of the country were both heavily interlinked with that of the wider Soviet Union. The pursuit of development by the Ukrainian elite was beset by difficulties. The nominal borders of the territory have shifted and changed over the centuries and the geographical territory of Ukraine had never been lodged in an independent state; earlier attempts had ended in failure with the place of the territory in the USSR confirmed.15 But the collapse of the Soviet system sees the emergence of a formally independent sovereign Ukraine. The new country faced daunting tasks: building a state (separated out from former Moscow-centred governance systems); inventing a nation (a Ukrainian national identity had to be made hence, issues of citizenship, language and de-Sovietization); and pursuing the development (where local economies had been elements lodged in the wider Soviet command system and where now corruption flourished). The local elites, evidently divided with nationalists and Russophiles, were confronted with the task of development in the post-Soviet world but they failed. Keith Gessen16 argues that the country was poor, corrupt 15 D. Kiryukhin 2016 ‘Root and Features of Modern Ukrainian National Identity and Nationalism’ in A. Pickulicka, W. Czewska and R. Sakwa 2016 Ukraine and Russia, Bristol, E-International Relations. 16 K. Gessen 2022 ‘Was it Inevitable: A Short History of Russia’s War on Ukraine’ in The Guardian March 11, 2022.

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and politically unstable. Elites have sought to remodel the populations they nominally control, with Ukrainian nationalists in restricted Western areas whilst other areas have run with received ideas pointing to links to Russia.17 In addition to these manifold domestic difficulties—incoherent politics, regional disputes, ligarchs along with active ethno-cultural nationalists and also Russophiles—one issue has been crucial: the nature of the state. After 1989/91 Russia collapses into an era of gangster capitalism but the Russian political elite managed to rebuild the state. In contrast, after 1989/91, the Ukraine machinery of government collapses, but the elites are unable to rebuild it: ‘Ukraine continued to have a state that was weak, corrupt and penetrated by oligarchs’.18 Over this period, the issue of identity was raised. A survey of Ukrainian identity offers three versions19 : Pan-Slavic, Ukrainian ethno-cultural and Little Russian. The USSR fostered national movements within the USSR, including Ukrainian, and Soviet administrative routines helped, such as census taking, official languages, acknowledged cultures and so on. It produced in Ukraine an ethno-cultural identity subsumed within the wider USSR idea of ‘soviet man’. More directly, the idea of a Ukrainian identity is created by intellectuals in the late nineteenth century.20 Otherwise, historically, the geographical territory has been a part of various regional entities: the Polish-Lithuanian empire, Austria and the Tsarist empire.21 After 1991 the issue of identity assumes prominence. The country was bi-cultural and bi-lingual22 but Ukrainian ethno-cultural

17 N. Petro 2016 ‘Understanding the Other Ukraine’ in A. Pickulicka, W. Czewska and R. Sakwa 2016 Ukraine and Russia, Bristol, E-International Relations. 18 P. D’ Anieri 2009 Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War, Cambridge University Press, p. 19. 19 D. Kiryukhin 2016 ‘Roots and Features of Modern Ukrainian National Identity and Nationalism’ in A. Pickulicka, W. Czewska and R Sakwa 2016 Ukraine and Russia, Bristol, E-International Relations. 20 B.A. Duben no date ‘There is no Ukraine’: Fact Checking the Kremlin’s Version of

Ukrainian History’, published on London School of Economics website (accessed August 2022). 21 N. Davies 2011 Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half Forgotten Europe; London, Allen Lane. 22 M. Pogrebinskiy 2016 ‘Russians in Ukraine’ Before and After Euromaidan’ in Pickulicka, Czewska and Sakwa 2016.

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nationalists23 move to affirm the use of Ukrainian language and this feeds tensions, both domestic and with Russia. The local nationalist elite tried to find a way of dealing with Russia and failed, and in this context, worse, they slowly turned their attention to the West; part alternative, part insurance and part ideal model. D’Anieri24 argues that the post-45 bloc system offered a set of rules within which communities or states could act but the collapse of the Soviet Union 1989/91 left central and Eastern Europe without these rules and with no agreement on a replacement. Early on, power politics counted, and so, as post-1989/91 Russia was weak, the USA(NATO) took advantage. Russia looked to some sort of continuity of its great power status whilst USA and allies looked to expansion of liberal-democratic system; Ukraine sits in the middle. Russian doubts about the post-1991 developments were voiced; in particular in respect of security, that is, the NATO expansion. In 2008 President G.W. Bush flagged formal membership of the organization as inevitable. Contentious at the time, in retrospect, a gross error. Conflicts with Russia produced further difficulties for Ukraine. The 2014 annexation of Crimea coupled to war in the Donbas. Then, the 2022 invasion radically disturbed the post-Cold War situation in Europe and there was an immediate negative reaction from the USA/NATO with sanctions imposed on goods (prohibitions of trade, restrictions on the use of technology and so on) and finance (SWIFT, Central Bank funds frozen). The issue of energy supplies proved more difficult. As the war developed within a few weeks European Union member states were hosts to several million refugees, mostly in countries bordering Ukraine. The European Union member states followed the USA in supporting the Ukraine elite with finance and weapons; but the key players in the war, and necessarily the key players in talks about ending the war, are the USA and Russia.

23 Elements of Ukrainian society with decidedly unhappy histories—sympathetic to European inter-war fascism and played a small part in the destruction of Eastern European Jewish communities—nationalist figures from this period are celebrated in contemporary Ukraine—on this, B. Wasserstein 2023 A Small Town in Ukraine, London, Allen Lane; D. Cesarani 2016 Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–49, London, Pan. 24 D’Anieri 2009.

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Outside Involvement In the context of the dissolution of the USSR and the related bloc system, the issue arose of creating a new system of security; one idea was Gorbachev’s ‘common European home’, and another mooted a role for the OSCE, but these attempts at bloc-reform faded. In particular, crucially, the NATO military alliance, historically turned towards the designated enemy Russia was kept intact. Other episodes cut against future-oriented plans. The disintegration of Yugoslavia. The membership of NATO of a trio of CEE countries. Finally, in 2008, the USA pressed for eventual NATO membership for Ukraine. The domestic politics of Ukraine have been beset with conflicts which have fuelled the descent into civil war.25 However, that said, the involvement of outsiders has been crucial; the USA/NATO, the European Union and Russia. John Mearsheimer,26 an IR realist, focusing on US policy making, argues that the USA/NATO expansion into the former Eastern bloc was crucial as its involvement in Ukraine was read as a threat to the security of Russia and as protests from Russia were ignored, the territory becomes a site of conflict. Mearsheimer notes that this does not help Ukraine or anyone else. Key dates were 2008 Budapest Declaration opening up the issue of Ukraine joining NATO. And the 2014 Maidan coup which triggered conflict in Crimea and Donbass. The fighting in Donbass has run on from 2014; part revolt by local separatists after the coup, and thus a species of civil war, but also, part low-level proxy war. In a more recent publication, Mearsheimer repeats this general line of analysis; the USA is principally responsible, in particular, via the steady expansion of NATO in disregard of Russian protests. On a wider canvass other analysts offer related lines of commentary. Firstly, most directly, they present a post-Cold War line that looks at changing global patterns of power; the post-1945 system is in flux and in this perspective the USA is declining hegemon, China is a rising power and Russia is a regional power. Then, secondly, the current conflicts in Ukraine should be understood in the context of the disintegration of the USSR and the ill-advised expansion of USA/NATO. The war sees Russia 25 P. Rutland 2016 ‘An Unnecessary War: The Geopolitical Roots of the Ukraine Crisis’ in Pickulicka, Czewska and Sakwa 2016. 26 J. Mearsheimer 2022 ‘John Mearsheimer on Why the West is Principally Responsible for the Ukraine Crisis’ in the Economist March 19, 2022.

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pushing back at this expansion, whilst the USA is taking the opportunity to inflict a defeat on Russia (military, economic and diplomatic); as the USA provides money and arms to Ukraine, the country becomes the site of a proxy war. And analysts, thirdly, suggest that whilst the European Union is a bit-player, it is also paying a high price economically, as trade with Russia is restricted and damage ripples through established networks. At the same time, politically, the declared goal of ‘ever closer union’ fades, with internal divisions along with the growing influence of the link between the USA and key CEE countries.27 Then, finally, fourth, it is widely noted that opposition to Russia is limited; it is true that the West has objected and provided money, weapons and diplomatic support to the Ukraine regime, but China, India and wide swathes of the Global South have not followed this Western stance; the Global South, in the main, remained studiously neutral and in particular they did not rally to the side of the West. USA/NATO Expansion and the Misreading of Russian Anxieties Moscow had warned against USA/NATO but the Americans disregarded their objections. Stephen M. Walt,28 writing just before the war began, comments, in realist terms, that the US administration of President Biden did not recognize Russia’s situation. However, in the immediate run-up to the war, they did offer concessions (talks about missile deployments and the like), but these were trivial when measured against Russian anxieties. The Americans also pressed the leadership in Kiev to negotiate seriously, but to no avail. The war could and should have been avoided. Walt also suggested that the Ukrainian regime should make its own moves to reach a modus vivendi with Moscow, likely some species of neutrality, as war on its territory can only maximize the costs to the citizens and sooner or later peace talks will have to be held. After the 2022 invasion the response of the West, led by USA/NATO, has been a carefully calibrated response with weapons to match Russian

27 W. Streek 2022 ‘Pipe Dreams’ in Sidecar September 12, 2022 (accessed September 2022). 28 S.M. Walt 2022 ‘Liberal Illusions Caused the Ukraine Crisis’ in Foreign Policy January 19, 2022.

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capabilities provided (anti-tank, anti-aircraft and, in the summer, antiartillery systems).29 Commentators argued that the weapons supplied were enough to block Russia, but not enough to fuel a full-scale Ukrainian counter-advance. The autumn victories of Ukrainian forces suggest either a significant change in USA/NATO plans or a failure of ‘calibration’. On the drawn out nature of the fighting, Wolfgang Streek30 tries to make sense of Russian objectives. It is clear, given the gross military/industrial disparity between USA/NATO and Russia that Russia attacked from a position of weakness. Several answers have been mooted. Most point to failure: elite delusions (Ukraine as really part of Russia), or elite diplomatic incompetence (attacking whilst politics ongoing), or simply elite military incompetence (attacking with inferior forces inappropriately deployed). Others are neutral in tone, thus, in general, ‘push-back’, the IR realist line. Some point to more restricted goals: thus, the invasion demonstrates that Ukraine cannot be defended by USA/NATO; plus, the invasion demonstrates potential costs to Europe of unconditional support to Ukraine regime; and finally, the invasion demonstrates a measure of Western isolation (thus, many countries stand aside). The key for Russia is a rejection of Ukraine being absorbed into the USA/NATO sphere and in this case, it is enough to occupy/annex parts of southern and Eastern Ukraine to have achieved a kind of success. The EU’s Neighbourhood Policy in the Balkans and Ukraine The period 1981/91 created a new political pattern in Europe comprising a number of new nation-states along with a radically changed overall balance of power. In 1991 these changes produced a formally independent Ukraine; a country that was relatively poor, ethnically diverse and uneasily situated between the expanded territories of the West and a now geographically much reduced Russia. The politics of independent Ukraine were unstable. One key aspect of the domestic politics of the Ukraine was the issue of relationships with its key neighbours; with some favouring the West, others Russia.

29 A. Tooze 2023 ‘The West’s Limited Support for Ukraine Fails to Measure Up’ in Financial Times, February 2023; A. Lieven 2023 ‘For Years Putin did not Invade Ukraine. What Made Him Finally Snap in 2022’ in the Guardian February 24, 2023. 30 W. Streek 2022 ‘Means of Destruction’ on Sidecar (accessed August 2022).

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In 2004 the Orange Revolution, on the basis of alleged electoral fraud, blocked the assumption of power by pro-Russian V. Yanukovych. A re-run election installed pro-Western V. Yushchenko. An election in 2010 saw Yanukovych take power and now the external aspect of politics came to the fore. There was an episode of financial bidding and counter-bidding. As the European Union offered a package of assistance, so too the Russians. The president initially favoured the European offer but then chose the financially superior Russian offer. Shortly afterwards the 2014 Maiden revolution/coup took place. In Eastern Ukraine militia groups amongst the majority Russian population declared independence and at the same time Russia annexed Crimea. The upshot has been a longrunning low-level civil war. The issue flared up once again in late 2021 when there was Western anxiety in respect of a possible Russian invasion; it was notable that the discussion on security involved the USA and Russia with neither the Ukraine nor European Union directly involved. In early 2022 Russia invaded. The costs to Ukraine have been high, not only the casualties but also the local economy and commentators have detailed these costs in lost production, lost exports and collapsing tax revenues; the country now relies on finance from the USA/EU in addition to weapons. In a pithy commentary, published just after the current phase of war began, Corina Stratulat,31 looks at the performance of the European Union and asks, so how did we get here? The answer is threefold: first, too much self-confidence, the EU thought it could organize or order changes its neighbourhood (Balkans, East Europe) but it couldn’t put its own house in order (Poland, Hungary); second, too much hypocrisy, EU dams Russia for democratic failings, but is itself widely criticized within Europe, failings lately evidenced in rising national populism; likewise international law, Russia is criticized but America’s war in Middle East and Libya were not sanctioned by law; and so, finally, third, the European Union was complacent and when problems were recognized they were not addressed. The upshot is that European Union is not much of a model but it did manage to mislead itself; the upshot, for Stratulat, is that less posturing and more realism are needed.32 31 C. Stratulat 2022 ‘War Has Returned to Europe: Three Reasons Why EU did not See It Coming’, discussion paper of European Politics and Institutions Programme, April 28, 2022. 32 A similar argument was made before the fighting began, see D. Teurtrie 2022 ‘Standoff over Ukraine: Why This, Why Now’ in Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2022.

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China and Global South Edward Luce, interviewing head of CIA, reported that initial US doubts about the ability of Ukraine regime to withstand attack have been confounded; analysts have come to reverse their views. The material and intelligence aid that has been provided has helped Ukraine resist. These successes have changed the mood in Washington, from caution to bragging: ‘The US, in other words, would like nothing more than a regime change.’33 That said, Luce adds two points; first, that whilst the invasion has united the West, the rest of the world ‘has given a collective shrug’, and second, that US policy is driving Russia and China into a closer relationship. Indeed, prior to the fighting, Beijing and Moscow announced a ‘no limits friendship’. China has not condemned the Russian move, whilst it has issued diplomatically standard calls for an end to fighting, and neither has it lent overt support to Russia (no flows of war materiel). The British Involvement The British state/government has over the period of the conflict laid claim to a significant role—money, arms and diplomatic support have been made available—but, realistically, they are bit-players and their response seems to be a mix of available anti-Russian sentiment34 plus opportunism.35 However, first, the key player is the USA. Its security influence in Europe is articulated primarily via NATO and the USA’s core position is a species of familiar cold war thinking, to which could be added the domestic political influence of émigré groups: Ukrainian, Polish and those from the Baltic States. Second, a second important group is provided by the EU. The organizations political centre of gravity changed post-Brexit with more CEE importance within the organization.

33 E. Luce 2022 ‘What the CIA Thinks: William Burns on the New World’ in The Financial Times May 13, 2022. 34 Seemingly ingrained; see, for example, Wright, P. 2007 Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, Oxford University Press; J. Haslam 2021 The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II , Princeton University Press; P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire, London, Palgrave, see chapter four on making enemies. 35 A diplomatic chance to recover influence in Washington and Brussels (failures in supporting US wars and Brexit)—by mobilizing claims about military capacity/prowess.

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The slide to war has reinforced the influence of CEE36 and EU officials have become steadily more active in promoting military assistance to the Kiev regime. Thereafter, third, the British offers some support. The stance of the British state/government seems to be a compound of elements: the desire to sustain long-term security links with the USA; the chance to recover political credit in Washington in the light of military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq37 ; and a desire to make post-Brexit links with mainland states using the military card, hence the official enthusiasm for NATO along with related initiatives such as the ‘Joint Expeditionary Force’ (JEF) linking regional countries and with it the talk of securing NATOs northern flank.38 Viewed dispassionately, the current stance of the British government is fundamentally in error. The fighting in the Donbass offers no direct security threat to the British state/government and whilst British involvement is marginal, it does inevitably contribute to the ongoing human and material costs of the fighting.

Unfolding Consequences At the time of writing,39 summer 2023, looking to the consequences of this muti-layered conflict can only be an interim report coupled to futureoriented speculation. It is clear that the global system is reconfiguring. Over the eighties and nineties change had been discussed in terms of an optimistic US-entered theory of ‘globalization’, plus the ‘end of history’. The network of interlinkages that comprise the ‘global system’ endures; raw materials and so on are shipped around the planet, trade goods flow, money moves, so too people; but these flows are reconfiguring with ‘deglobalization’, ‘on-shoring’, ‘friend-shoring’ and so on. All flag a loss of faith in the neo-liberal creed alongside a heightened concern for security.

36 N. Davies 2011 Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half Forgotten Europe, reviews the modern era exchanges between various ethnic groups as state boundaries change around them—unhappy tale—argues that there is more to region that ethno-nationalist conflict overlain by great power rivalry. 37 F. Ledwidge, 2012 Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yale University Press 38 A. Billon-Galland and T. Jermalavicius 2022 ‘Why the UK Must Deliver on NordicBaltic Security’—Chatham House, December 16, 2022 (accessed July 2023). 39 First text, autumn 2020—updated spring/summer 2023.

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In recent years successive American governments have focused on China. President Donald Trump called attention to the costs to ordinary Americans of the corporate world’s use of the manufacturing resources of Chinese firms; the American economy was said to be ‘hollowed out’. The administration of President Biden has gone much further, not merely trade but also security drive policy and many more restrictions have been placed on links with China. Washington evidently sees China as a major threat to its presently unrivalled power. In this context Russia is less important. The present war serves to weaken it economically, militarily and diplomatically. At the same time, the role of the USA within Europe is enhanced. It is the key paymaster and weapons supplier for the Kiev regime whilst EU commentators reaffirm the key security role of the USA, hence, the uprated status of NATO. This is a standard view, however, a rather different take in respect of Europe is available.40 The USA is carefully managing its military support to Kiev and this has been read as part of a policy of ‘European-ization’ (on the model of ‘Vietnam-ization’) and is a precursor to some measure of disengagement, leaving Germany as the key economic and military support for Kiev. In respect of Europe, recent decades have seen the European Union dealing with a series of crises, all, arguably, foreseeable and all, arguably, dealt with albeit slowly: first, the financial crisis of 2008/15, originating in the banks of Wall Street and the City of London, but replicated across the European Union; second the 2015 migration crisis, again, triggered outside the Union but made worse by careless elite statements such as Germany’s ‘welcoming culture’; third, relatedly, the crisis of British withdrawal, which, perhaps, could have been avoided had the European Union given Prime Minister David Cameron some assistance; fourth, the Covid-19 crisis, where the European Union’s tardy response did not help. And, currently, fourthly, the unfolding disaster of warfare in Eastern territories of Europe. The economic costs of the proxy war in Ukraine are high. The immediate, widely reported, impact is on supplies and thus costs of oil and gas. These materials are traded worldwide and costs in trading markets have spiked. The supply of Russian gas to Western European markets has sharply reduced. All this has knock-on effects within Europe as oil and 40 Wolfgang Streek 2023 ‘Europeanizing the War’ in Sidecar May 01, 2023 (accessed May 2023).

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gas supplies are sourced from new suppliers (USA, Gulf) with Brussels trying to ensure that responses to the crises are not narrowly national, but, instead, acknowledge general European problems (thus sharing supplies, maintaining physical interlinkages, coordinating national energy subsidies and so on). In all of this, the costs to Germany are high. In recent decades an economic/trading bloc has formed around Germany, linking neighbours in the West and East, and using Russian raw materials and transport links to the markets of China. The fighting in Ukraine and the new cold war have cut against this pattern. Thereafter, the economic costs ripple out worldwide: thus, the USA prospers, so too Gulf states; the Global South struggles with high energy costs and food scarcity (due to the loss of grain and fertilizer supplies from Ukraine and Russia). And then, downstream from these immediate impacts, there are likely to be a long-term issues for Europe to address: a severe reduction of links with Russia, along with an analogous slowing of otherwise developing links with China,41 which to recall is a key centre of global manufacturing industry; plus, a renewed interest in ‘strategic autonomy at the global level’. How Might the Fighting End? Paul Goodman42 sketches these in simple terms: • Russian withdrawal—nlikely (without anti-Putting coup); • Russian victory—unlikely (beyond present capacity of army); • Ukrainian victory—possible, (but unlikely (army capacity, US caution); • Partition—possible, it is conventional position (Kiev likely hostile). To which could be added: • Partition plus neutrality—a variant of partition plus Ukraine becomes officially neutral as with Austria and Switzerland and until recently, Sweden and Finland (all prosperous liberal democracies); 41 On EU/China relations, see A. Xing and P.W. Preston 2024 China and Europe Relations in the Twenty-first Century, London, Routledge. 42 Paul Goodman 2022 ‘Ukraine: Welcome Victories, Dangerous Possibilities, Uncertain Consequences’ on Conservative Home September 12, 2022, (accessed September 2022).

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• Minsk 3—restitution of pre-2014 borders, internal devolution, state neutrality; • Frozen conflict43 —a mix of annexations, nuclear threats and US recalibration or diminution of support in order to focus on China. S. M Walt,44 writing in the autumn, turning to look towards the possible response of USA to a military victory for the USA/NATObacked Ukrainian armed forces, remarks that it would be a success of sorts for USA after thirty years of failure (Middle East, Afghanistan and so on), adding, however, that this invasion should not have happened in the first place. Its roots are to be found in the 1989/91 collapse of the Soviet Union where the USA response was hubris (‘we won’) coupled to the institutional expansion eastwards of NATO/EU. A repeat would not be helpful. ******** Finally, and obviously, after the fighting subsides, which in time it will, Russia will still be there and some sort of modus vivendi is inevitable; an ongoing ‘cold war two’ which simply moves the late 1940s line eastwards with all its attendant restrictions and propaganda profits no-one in Western Europe, or Russia, or, in longer run, the CEEs or Ukraine, and in the meantime the risk is that the conflict could intensify and spread; a first step as many have pointed out is to begin talks45 —initially for a cease fire, then an armistice and finally talks for an enduring settlement.

43 John Mearsheimer 2023 ‘The Darkness Ahead: Where the Ukraine War is Headed’ (Substack Web, accessed August 4, 2023; L. Lynch 2023 ‘Imperfect Unity’ on Sidecar (accessed August 2023) comments on recent NATO meeting in Vilnius that the USA is managing the war whilst talking tough—an awkward stance—plus the USA Presidential Elections loom and some Republicans see the war in Ukraine as a distraction—see S. Halimi 2023 ‘Ukraine Gatecrashes the Next US Election’ in Le Monde Diplomatique August 2023. 44 S.M. Walt 2022 ‘Russia’s Defeat Would be America’s Problem’ in Foreign Policy September 27, 2022 (accessed September 2022). 45 C. Chivvis 2023 ‘Talks between Russia and Ukraine Would Save Lives’ in the Economist January 29, 2023.

CHAPTER 9

Re-imagining Britain: Crises, Identity and Representation, 1973–1998

One theme running through reflections on the financial crisis , migration and Brexit has been the issue of identity—rich/poor or local/migrants or urban/rural—and picking up these themes one characterization of the Brexit vote spoke of leavers as inhabiting ‘England-without-London’.1 A little more broadly, recent years have seen a run of ‘insurgencies’ in domestic politics which have had it in common that they challenged the London-centric structure/image of the Union. Together these have produced significant changes in the politics of the public sphere: thus, the debates about Brexit, Scottish independence, regional devolution, populism and the like. These debates may be read as symptoms attending the end time of neoliberalism; a rejection of the celebration of the overarching character of the marketplace as local identities re-asserted. These episodes might also signal an effective re-engagement with the lop-sided character of British politics,

1 A. Barnett 2017 The Lure of Greatness, London, Unbound, chapter 10 (and the following chapters); see also R. Scruton 2017 Where We Are: The State of Britain Now, London, Bloomsbury.

Kilbrandon Commission Report, October 1973; parliaments/assemblies in Scotland and Wales in 1998. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5_9

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that is, London-centred, conservative and institutionally decrepit.2 One aspect of these debates has been a rejection of the intellectual centrality of familiar received ideas of ‘British-England’, along with its equally familiar placement amongst the thinking of political conservatives, in favour of the identification of a number of discourses variously embracing ‘England’, each affirming a quite different political-cultural identity. Starting with the official British-England the discussion here turns to ideas of a rural England, an industrial England, a radical England, and finally, a multicultural England. A brief reflection follows on the possibilities of the idea of democracy figuring in arguments in favour of reforming the structure of British politics. This chapter3 turns to recent reforms in the political structure of the UK. Political commentators routinely characterize Britain as highly centralized in contrast to most of its mainland peers. There are various diagnoses of this circumstance: early transition, club government, or as a variant, a creative elite which combined with a demobilized population has been able to finesse problems and sustain its position. However, as Norman Davies4 points out the historical trajectory of the polity is not a simple linear path and there have been major reorientations; geography and polity have rarely coincided. The last major reorientations saw the 1922 Irish Free State established in southern Ireland, followed by the 1937 Republic of Ireland, and thereafter the sweeping impacts of the Second World War—diplomatic, military and economic—meant that the longestablished British Empire dissolved away in a couple of decades. At which point the present form of Britain emerged; nominally four nations ordered as one political unit and centred on the London-based Whitehall/Westminster apparatus, the key institutional elements of the broader ruling elite. Arguably, the system was a successful construction in the long postwar era, the period of ‘Butskellism’ and the post-war consensus. The idea of devolution was only picked up by the government of Harold Wilson, 2 Thus, for example, A. King and I. Crewe 2013 The Blunders of Our Governments,

London, Oneworld, see Part IV System Failures. 3 This chapter draws on earlier published work: P.W. Preston 1997 Citizens and Nations in a Global Era, London, Sage; P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England: Englishness in the New Europe, Manchester University Press; P.W. Preston 2012 England after the Great Recession: Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis, London, Palgrave. 4 N. Davies 2000 The Isles: A History, London, Papermac.

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then ignored by Edward Heath and not pursued by the Thatcher regime, until picked up by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It has not been a key issue for subsequent governments; instead, post-Brexit, the idea of levelling-up has been deployed, in itself a return to a species of familiar territory of regional development. Nonetheless, recently Gordon Brown,5 in a report to the party, advances the idea of democracy whilst blurring the distinction between regions/nations; nonetheless, the issue of internal governance of Britain is ongoing.6

Insurgencies: Formal/Polite and Informal/Impolite As modern bureaucratic-rational states take shape, so do calls for nations7 ; hence in Europe the 1848 ‘Springtime of nations’. These mainland movements found counterparts in Britain; in Ireland, in Scotland and in Wales. In general, these early activities had a focus on language and culture as the basis of claims to some sort of independence from London. They gained relatively little traction in the metropolitan core. But the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century activism—political/cultural—did gain traction; the Great War and Versailles Treaty acted to promote the status of nations. In Britain, members of home nations had rallied to the flag and at Versailles with the influence of President Wilson, the status of nations— large and small—was affirmed against the claims of empires of one sort or another. Ireland: A Violent Struggle to Independence The island of Ireland had a pre-modern parliament; part of administrative system installed after Norman Conquest, thus feudal and peripheral. The island was conquered in the mid-sixteenth century by Tudor England and its early mediaeval history involves assorted conflicts and rebellions; reconquered by Cromwell in mid-seventeenth century and (in simple terms) divided between Scots protestant settlers and a rural Catholic peasantry; 5 Gordon Brown has returned to these issues; see The Labour Party 2022 A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy, London, The Labour Party. 6 J. Williams 2023 ‘English devolution back on the political agenda’ in Financial Times, January 2023. 7 E. Gellner/B. Anderson.

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thus, absorbed into English realm but never finally pacified and so periodic rebellions continued; but, formally, the 1801 Act of Union absorbs the island into the newly integrated UK. In early modern period of the mid-nineteenth century ideas of nation flow around Europe, including Ireland. The Irish Famine in 1840s saw population decline but then a species of resistance to British rule took shape; thus, the Gaelic Revival movement with civic type organizations in football, local sports and the like. The cultural elite continue agitation for recovery of Irish independence. Political agitation continues; thus the 1870 Home Rule League, and other organizations follow, making the start of ‘Irish Question’ in British politics. Irish War of Independence 1919–1921. Government of Ireland Act 1920. Free State—a dominion (as others) 1920. Northern Ireland formed 1921. Irish Civil War 1922–1923. Ireland—independent 1937. The independence settlement did not fix the problem and tension continued; Northern Ireland became a protestant-dominated mini-state which was sustained by a rigged electoral system, discrimination against Catholics and buttressed by force (protestant-dominated police). At the same time, in the south, Ireland remained poor, rural, catholic and deeply conservative. The 1960s American civil rights movement was copied in Northern Ireland and an active civil rights movement developed from 1968; it was met with force and this marked the start of the recent episode of ‘the troubles’ in the north, a species of low-level civil war. In regard to nationalists and British government it was a species of ‘dirty war’ and around 3000 people, mostly civilian, were killed. There were multiple attempts to settle the issue but with no success until the 1998 Belfast Agreement (otherwise, Good Friday Agreement) which established a devolved power-sharing government; plus, the Irish state relinquished its claim on the territory whilst the British state declared it had no selfish interests in these matters. A measure of normal politics was established albeit marked by residual tensions. At the time of writing—early 2023—these tensions seem likely to continue; Sinn Fein polled well in recent elections in both the north and south. The two southern conservative parties—Fianna Fail and Fine

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Gael—are under pressure, so too the long-dominant unionist parties in the north. These changes plus demographics, with younger people in the south, and the shifting balances between nationalists and unionists in the north, point towards a reunited island of Ireland. A long period of joint membership of the European Union signalled the economics of such a deal. Brexit has introduced difficulties with a new internal British border in the Irish Sea. The difficulties of early re-unification are many; for example, the north has better welfare whilst on the other hand the south has a vibrant economy, links to the European Union and the power of the catholic church has been weakened.8 However, whilst it is easy to sketch scenarios, the practical politics are much more difficult. Scotland: A Civic and Political Route to Devolution Mediaeval Scotland was recognized as a discrete polity in the Declaration of Arbroath 1328 and it was an independent kingdom until the 1707 Treaty/Act of Union when the Scottish polity became part of the energetic polity, Britain. However, it retained key institutions: church, law, finance and universities. However, after the unification, London became a new focus, and the commercial sphere reoriented its attention towards the new archipelago wide marketplace; at the same time, for a brief period, an intellectual space opened in Scotland which created work of European significance, the Scottish Enlightenment. Thereafter, as the British Empire developed, Scotland and Scots prospered.9 But, in the late nineteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe, the idea of nationhood was raised. The idea of an independent Scotland was revisited, with civic organizations in the lead, thus, in 1853, the foundation of the National Association for Vindication of Scottish Rights. Later, in 1920 the Scots National League, then in the 1920s the Scottish National Movement and finally in 1934 the Scottish National Party and a long-running debate opens up within the movement; independence or devolution. All these ideas resurfaced after the Second World War and were acknowledged by successive London governments. In 1969 Harold 8 A number of public scandals weakened the hitherto powerful church—sex abuse— restrictions on abortion care—care homes—plus a younger Irish population can access mainland Europe and its social mores. 9 L. Colley 1992 Britons: Forging the Nation 1701–1837 , Yale University Press; the link-up created a common market in UK and Scotland prospers.

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Wilson set up the Royal Commission on the Constitution which produces the 1973 Kilbrandon Commission Report which is presented to Edward Heath. The following Wilson government was split on the question of independence but passed Scotland Act 1978 and Wales Act 1978 providing for assemblies if supported in referenda. A 40% rule was introduced as a spoiler and it undermined the Scottish vote (positive, but not 40% of electorate) whilst Welsh referendum failed. After the result the SNP in the Westminster parliament pulled the plug on Labour government; it was succeeded by Thatcher’s government which had an altogether different political agenda. Debates continued; usually cast in terms of devolution, but there was little progress. The 1989 Scottish Constitutional Convention organized a wide-ranging debate in Scotland and reported in 1995. The Blair government legislated for a referendum in 1997—Scotland Act 1998—and the Scottish Parliament re-convened10 in 1998. The parliament has been a success despite having restricted powers. Arguments for independence continued. In 2014 a referendum on independence was narrowly lost. But the SNP then sweep the board in 2015 elections to London parliament and repeat this success in 2016 elections to Scottish parliament; the Labour Party in Scotland was reduced to a rump. The SNP dominated the political scene. The debate on independence rumbles on; then 2016 Brexit where Britain voted to leave but Scotland voted to stay; the issue of independence was rekindled. But London is not interested and so the SNP is presently stymied. In 2022 Gordon Brown reports to the Labour Party advocating general democratizing reforms, including more devolution, and commentators suggest that there could be a route to the future in there somewhere. Wales: A Civic and Political Route to Devolution The territory was effectively absorbed by English kings in the sixteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, an idea of Wales is rekindled11 ; again, as with Ireland and Scotland it is initially civil society activity; sports, arts, religion and so on. The 1973 Kilbrandon Commission

10 Asserting a link with pre-1707 parliament. 11 G. Williams 1985 When Was Wales, London, Penguin; idea linked to industrialization

in South Wales.

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Report opened the way to a referendum on devolution but the idea was rejected; the issue was raised once again by Blair government and a referendum was held in 1997; the Government of Wales Act 1998 established a National Assembly for Wales; commentors record that the institution has been a success. Britain: Forging the Nation Linda Colley12 tracks the early period of the creation of modern Britain; the ensemble, agents, institutions and ideas (together a ‘project’13 ), was constructed over the period 1707–1837 when isolated from North America and mainland Europe, the local elite turned outwards and created an empire, which over time came to accommodate numerous—now subordinate—forms of life. The empire covered a vast geographical territory, it encompassed multiple local forms of life, it was ordered as a dispersed series of cores and peripheries14 which, in total, finally, revolved around the metropolitan core in London and it was the vehicle within which both cores and peripheries made the shift into the modern world; together a multiplicity of interrelated historical development trajectories. Colley makes it clear that key ideas are interlinked: the British Empire encompassed ideas of Britain, and in turn ideas of Britishness. The notion of ‘England’ offers a rather different spread of ideas.

Britain and the Idea of England15 In parallel with discussion and action in regard to devolution and independence commentators typically make two points: first, that within the existing system England dominates numerically and so ideas of a federal 12 Colley 1992. 13 Darwin, J. 2009 The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System,

Cambridge University Press. 14 Thus, for example, moving East: London—Cairo—Bombay—Calcutta—Singapore— Hong Kong 15 This treatment of ‘English-ness’ revisits the earlier arguments and it draws

extensively on all that material in the company of some elementary remarks on the role of the arts and humanities—see P.W. Preston 1997 Citizens and Nations in a Global Era, London, Sage; Preston 2004; Preston 2012; P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire: Constructing a Post-War Political-Cultural Project, London, Palgrave.

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system do not look plausible and so other routes to reform have to be found; second, in the existing system, the losers thus far appeared to be the English as they have no specific recognition or parliament. Seemingly, this is not a concern. However, as noted at the outset, the ruling elite finessed the political crisis of the dissolution of empire by confecting ‘Continuing Britain’, a programme of retaining domestic control whilst embracing subordination to the USA. This package has been normalized; affirmed by elite, affirmed by Whitehall/Westminster, affirmed by mainstream media and accepted by the bulk of population; hence, the identity of official British-Englishness, but these arrangements are not fixed and whilst direct discussions of reform in England are difficult, devolution, plus more recently, Brexit, has opened a space for discussion. Collective Memory and the National Past As noted earlier, the past can be read into the present in a number of ways; two ideas are familiar: collective memory and the national past. In the former case, there are a multiplicity of ways in which individuals and communities remember (itself a mix of active remembering and active forgetting) including personal, family, organization, local community, region and so on; and in the latter case, the process is a mix of elite level preferences and popular recollection so the national past is a species of contested compromise but the exchange is asymmetric and whilst elites cannot directly control popular opinion they can and do control the formal means of distribution of ideas—law, regulation and the media—print, broadcast and digital. The literature on Britain/England is vast and setting aside the popular media stuff, what Michael Kenny tagged as ‘lists’,16 there are two broad approaches: (i) historical narratives that plot the shifting patterns of structures, agents and projects plus self-understandings; and (ii) interpretive surveys of one sort or another that begin with the claim that cultural tradition informs praxis in a process which is reiterative, where action, informed by ideas, reaffirms and advances the tradition.

16 Lists of putative ‘characteristics’, see M. Kenny 2014 The Politics of English Nationhood, Oxford University Press, pp. 9–10.

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In the case of the first strategy, it produces a narrative. It can be roughly summarized.17 The pre-modern Isles were home to a succession of disconnected discrete polities, many of which overlapped with polities on the mainland. The early seventeenth century saw a southern elite build an English empire which asserted its control over the population of the archipelago; later, this elite built the British Empire. The elite understood themselves in terms of empire; an imperial self-understanding which the subaltern classes, post-Chartism, accept. The whole sequence is wrapped in the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ whereby British/English history, its origins lost in the mists of time, is in essence evolutionary, unitary and always progressive. After the 1942–1956 crisis of the loss of empire, a still creative elite contrive the notion of ‘Continuing Britain’; the empire hangs on, Europe beckons, migrants arrive and contemporary politics continue confused. Or in the second strategy, as an over-view of the resources carried in inherited cultural tradition a number of identifiable discourses are available. Most obviously (again summarized, roughly): an official Anglo-British England, a rural/pastoral England, commercial/ industrial England, a multicultural England and radical England. Kumar18 makes the point that asking for a clear idea of what it is to be ‘English’ opens up a thankless task; Britain/England are deeply intertwined and disentangling the elements is difficult.19 These two strategies of narrative and survey can be run together (using related terms): (i) the national past, which points to formal official characterizations of Britain/England centred upon post-1945 ‘Continuing Britain’, a long-established nation-state, recently victorious in a morally laudable war and consequently something of a model for other countries (thus ‘the war years’, narrowly, a stock of cliches and many evasions20 ); and (ii) collective memory, a part of the above, that points to the realms of informal memory—people, groups, organizations and the like. All these

17 A mash-up of Davies 2000; K. Kumar 2003 The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge University Press; Kenny 2014. 18 Kumar 2003. 19 Kenny 2014 adds that neither the elite nor the mainstream political parties are

inclined to open up these debates. 20 See Judt, T. 2005 Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945, London, Allen Lane; see P.W. Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and Asia, London, Routledge; for comparative data see N. Davies 2006 Europe and War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory, London, Macmillan.

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materials, formal and informal, run through contemporary culture and they are combined in various ways and give rise to a spread of discrete discourses, and these, in turn, inform contemporary debates; the process is reiterative, ideas are passed on, hence, ‘available Englands’. The Idea of England A standard story is available, ‘Anglo-British identity’. The roots of British identity are located in a remote island past; thereafter there is a single line of progressive development which runs down to the present day. In sharp contrast to this tale, Norman Davies21 reviews the interchange of geography and polity in the archipelago and in adjacent areas of mainland Europe and makes it clear that there is no simple linear route from the remote past to today’s Britain, rather, the archipelago has been the site of numerous polities with shifting borders and linkages to the mainland. Davies notes the construction of a stylized England during eighteenthcentury Hanoverian period when the Tudors are invoked and linked up to a confected ‘mediaeval’ England. This polity in turn is overtaken by events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is successful. Linda Colley22 tracks the creation of the British Empire, Britain and the British in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century. Colley’s discussion makes it a construction, with obvious implications for reconstruction; the identity is not fixed and immutable, it flows from an elite reading of its place in the wider system. It is open to the pressures of international and domestic tensions. In respect of mid/late nineteenth century Krishnan Kumar23 identifies a moment of English nationalism centred on romanticism, but it was absorbed, and the mainstream line of Anglo-British identity moves forwards. As indicated, the nature of Englishness can be approached after the manner of historians; tracking forms of life as precursors to the present day, each carrying ideas that have endured and ideas that have been marginalized or forgotten. However, as noted, the nature of Englishness can be approached in culture-critical fashion, surveying received tradition and identifying various strands; each carrying a particular discourse,

21 N. Davies 2000 The Isles, London, Papermac. 22 Colley 1992. 23 K. Kumar 2003 The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge.

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a variety of what it is to be ‘English’. In this fashion: (i) an official BritishEngland (ii) a rural England; (iii) a commercial and industrial England; (iv) a radical England; (v) a multicultural England. However, any discussion of these ideas/practices cannot be restricted to the intellectual realms of political commentary but must also embrace the work of the arts and humanities, so these discourses will be pursued here with some attention paid to these related resources24 : visual artists, writers, occasionally architects. An Anglo-British Official England Norman Davies25 considers the official national past, the claims to a long-established polity rooted in the island, reaching back to a remote past and insists that the tale will not do. In contrast, Davies sketches a history of the political communities located in the Isles and adjacent areas of the mainland in discrete phases: a start point, shading into pre-history, the Celts; then the assorted British tribes; the Romans; Germano-Celtic period; Norman England, subsumed in feudal France; then separation from France, the break with Rome and Tudor England; later this state further developed in Dutch/German England, until the nineteenth century and the British Empire. Anglo-British England emerged in the early nineteenth century.26 It prospered in the context of a burgeoning British Empire. The Welsh, Irish and Scots had no problem distinguishing their identities from the overarching notion of Britain, but the English see their identity slowly blurred into Britishness as a more political English national identity—offered via Chartism in the 1840s—is suppressed.27 The subaltern classes acquiesce, building the civic machineries of the working classes.28 The elite becomes Anglo-British and England and Englishness continue, now an elite specified or preferred version, one reaching far back in time. Davies notes that

24 On these resources, see BBC film available on-line, Kenneth Clark’s Civilization and/or Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New; for post-1945 British culture, see Preston 2014. 25 Davies 2000. 26 Kumar 2003, pp. 202–4. 27 Kumar 2003 stresses the role of empire—imperialism over-rode nationalism. 28 Kumar 2003, p. 169; see also Nairn-Anderson versus E.P. Thompson.

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the national past celebrates Tudor England whilst omitting most of rest of the history; the imported Hanoverian monarchy was anti-French, so a history of England minus France was required and a line reaching back to mediaeval times was needed so the idea of ‘old merry England’ emerged; England is half remembered, half invented. The confection rolls down to the present day, a part of metropolitan core thinking, now a residue, an element in the post-Second World War, post-empire, confection of ‘Continuing Britain’. Patrick Wright29 has discussed the creation of a national past in Britain. It is a tale that purports to explain who we are, where we came from and so by implication where we are going. It is a complex package, made and remade, advertised in formal public demonstrations (flags, parades and anthems), exemplified in sacred sites (sites judged ‘historical’ or made into memorials), and official truths, those claims repeatedly made, in particular, in Britain, the invocation of ‘war time’—a period when moral action made a difference. In the visual arts , picking up from Wright, there are a mix of images, including (in no particular order): official portraits (Royals,30 Prime Ministers, Archbishops, Generals and other miscellaneous elite figures); official memorials (statues, fountains and the like); official buildings (Palace of Westminster, Portcullis House,31 SIS Building and so on32 ); official stationary (letter headings, web sites, postage stamps and so on); official currency notes (more royal portraits plus officially acknowledged significant figures); and so on. In related arts there are many examples. In architecture, the Great Houses maintained by the National Trust33 ; or in landscape, sites such as

29 P. Wright 1985 (2nd ed. 2009, OUP) On Living in an Old Country, London, Verso. 30 The National Portrait Gallery reports 968 portraits—the earliest a 1926 photograph. 31 www.parliament.uk/portcullishouse. 32 Portcullis House by Michael Hopkins; SIS Building by Terry Farrell—blown up to the reported applause of its inhabitants at a special showing of the Bond film Skyfall 2012 (Interviews, TV documentary on Star-architects). 33 On the National Trust, see Wright 1985; an alternative take on ‘heritage’ is given by R. Samuel 1999 Island Stories, London, Verso.

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Stonehenge, Tintagel or Glastonbury Tor.34 In literature,35 A. ConanDoyle, Rudyard Kipling or Robert Baden-Powell. In responses to the Great War with Robert Owen, Vera Brittan.36 In the inter-war thirties37 the critiques of J.B. Priestly or George Orwell and the putative moral Canon of English Literature, F.R. Leavis.38 And in contemporary popular media, the production of costume drama in film and television, thus, Brideshead Revisited or Downton Abbey. All this along with a steady stream of films invoking the Second World War: In which we Serve (1942), Dunkirk (2017), 1917 (2019). And in 2023 the BAFTA best picture was ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, a film taken from a German novel of the same title; the business of war figures centrally in Anglo-British ideas. Linda Colley’s text on Britain39 is illustrated with paintings, many of them show British soldiers being killed as they seek to build the empire; Colley writes of ‘heroes in their own epics’ and the images capture this ethos; the heroic construction of empire. A Rural England: Land, Place and People Contemporary England is home to an overwhelmingly urban population living in cities, small towns, suburbs and the like, yet a familiar image of ‘England’ is found in the work of artists whose gaze was turned to the land. Thus, rural landscapes, the agriculture of small farms, rural people, 34 Reaching back to a mythical past of both early Christianity (Joseph of Arimathea) and also to the land-mysticism of Lay Lines—see A. Watkins 1925 The Old Straight Track, London. 35 On these writers, R. Williams 1961 The Long Revolution, London, Chatto; R. Williams 1958 Culture and Society, Columbia University Press; on Victorian scene, Lynda Nead 2000 Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London, Yale University Press; on reading empire, Edward Said 1993 Culture and Imperialism, London, Chatto. 36 See also the painter Paul Nash—he recorded landscapes ruined by industrial warfare— trenches and shelling or fields made up of fragments of downed aircraft—this is pursued by Andrew Causey 2013 Paul Nash: Landscape and the Life of Objects, Farnham, Lund Humphries. 37 Explored by Alexandra Harris 2010 Romantic Moderns, London, Thames and Hudson. 38 See Preston 2004, p. 164. 39 Colley 1992.

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animals, crops and the like, where this imagery is only tangentially related to modern industrialized agriculture. In this work, urban England is set to one side, whilst rural England is (mis)characterized as an arcadia. The rural version of England finds widespread expression: in the visual arts , John Constable or the recent work of David Hockney; in literature, Thomas Hardy, Laurie Lee celebrating the Cotswolds40 ; John Fowles, celebrating Dorset41 ; in popular music, traditional folk songs42 ; and in architecture, with garden cities, suburbs of houses-with-gardens43 plus charities such as Council for Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) or Woodlands Trust—and so on. In the visual arts, John Constable painted the landscape local to the River Stour in Suffolk; the period is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Robert Hughes44 argues that Constable, a rural Tory, offers the viewer a romantic vision of agriculture during the earliest phases of the nascent industrial revolution, it is a rural scene devoid of tensions as his paintings depict England as an arcadia.It was an England already falling into the past. His images are both romantic and nostalgic and very popular, one painting is reputedly the general public’s favourite, The Hay Wain (1821), but Hughes also points out that they are distinctive technically, that is, Constable dispensed with the very controlled, smooth finished style sought by the official salon in favour of a rougher, more direct way of applying paint to canvas and he also dispensed with quasiclassical subjects in favour of ordinary life and all this impressed the early impressionists. Constable made many oil paint sketches and relatively late he made what he called ‘six-footers’ in order to make a reputation for himself. One theme in the later work is the attempt to grasp the transient quality of the natural world; an anticipation of later Impressionism. Overall, Constable’s work has proved lastingly popular amongst the English general public.45 40 Laurie Lee 1962 Cider with Rosie, Harmondsworth, Penguin. 41 John Fowles 1977 Daniel Martin, London, Jonathan Cape. 42 Discussed at length in Kenny 2014, see chapter 4—in practice, begun by Cecil Sharp creating in 1911 the English Folk Dance Society. 43 Key figure in this design tradition, Ebeneezer Howard 1902 Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London. 44 R. Hughes 2001 Nothing if Not Critical, London, Harvil, pp. 78–81. 45 Hughes 2001 cites ‘The Hay Wain’ as ‘the most reproduced landscape in English

painting’.

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A contemporary figure, with a working-class background, David Hockney was born in the late thirties in Yorkshire. Hughes46 unpacks his public persona—Yorkshire, gay, direct and dyed blond—and notes that he was popular early on in his career, much more popular later. In his earlier career he made a series of paintings of California which together have fixed an iconic image of the place: warm colours, trees and beautiful people, all exemplified by paintings of swimming pools; with these images he has constructed California as ‘landscapes-of-theimagination’.47 These made his name amongst a wide public. Then, late in life, he returned to Yorkshire, living with a family member in the small seaside town of Bridlington, where he engaged with the landscapes of the area, which is largely rural and agricultural, producing many sketches, along with some large multi-part paintings, for example, ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire’, 2011.48 A large exhibition was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, January/April 201249 ; once again, Hockney made another landscape-of-the-imagination, North Yorkshire; once again, his work was welcomed by the general public, less so by fashionable metropolitan critics.50 Roger Scruton51 offers an analysis of this version of England. The imagery celebrates a particular version of England: an essentially organic community, long established, enduring and subtly made in its social aspects. Scruton unpacks the logic of the position and four key institutions are identified and they carry the country’s great tradition: the English Common Law, the Crown, the Church of England and the Westminster Parliament. These institutions inform an official ideology of country, place and patriotism and in turn these ideas find popular expression in home, clubs and societies, which bind people to place. Scruton mourns the passing of this pattern of life; the English are now urban, but the myth 46 Hughes 2001. 47 Hughes 2001 remarks that Hockney gave LA its iconic images (pp. 36–41). 48 D. Hockney 2012 David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, London, Royal Academy of

Arts, pp. 226–40—a series of i-pad drawings and one multi-canvass oil painting. 49 Royal Academy of Arts January/April 2012 ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Picture’. 50 Alastair Sooke in the Telegraph, January 16, 2012 ‘unthinkingly happy … vision of

arcadia … ignores century of modern art’; or Laura Cumming in Observer, January 22, 2012 ‘radiantly bright … garrulous, gaudy and repetitive’. 51 R. Scruton 2001 England: An Elegy, London, Pimlico; discussed at length in Kenny 2014.

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of a rural arcadia persists and he unpacks it, helping identify an available England. Scruton makes much of the notion of ‘home’, remarking that there are many ways in which individuals can be tied into groups—religion or dynasty and so on—but for the English it has been the experience of place, of home. The English were those people who were born in the place, who lived in this home.52 England means place, to be English is to have come from that place; the idea of England does not signal a state or a doctrine, it signals home. Scruton’s home is linked to institutions and lodged in a slow unfolding time; it is lodged in history. The home was ordered by common law and this linked it to the land of a rural economy. This land and its law endure; whilst political regimes come and go law accumulates slowly in the guise of case law. Scruton emphasizes its practicality. It accumulates material. It is an instrument for resolving disputes between members of the community. It is not a top-down code (it is not European). It is an instrument for solving problems, not imposing social control.53 The land and law and home are inter-twinned and together they construct a place. The Crown symbolized hierarchy, and so the place, home, is organized, stable and enduring.54 Scruton adds that the law can treat organizations as persons; clubs and societies link individuals to wider networks: ‘England … was a land saturated with a sense of membership’.55 And the Church of England played a role,56 it bound together land and people and it endowed place with a sense of the sublime: ‘[It was an] Arcadian landscape enchanted by laws and institutions and made holy by ritual and prayer’.57 Finally, the parliament played a role. Scruton argues that the key to English political life is representation, not democracy. The former is the way in which multiple clubs and societies press their case with the authorities; the machinery of the state was distrusted,

52 Scruton 2001, pp. 2–7. 53 Scruton (chapter 6) argues that English society centred on common sense and on

law—the usual structural tales told about class are false—classes are groups in cooperation. 54 Scruton 2001, pp. 9–21. 55 Scruton 2001, p. 72. 56 Scruton 2001, p. 85. 57 Scruton 2001, p. 111.

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so too officialdom, but the law was important; thereafter, the multiplicity of clubs and societies that together made the home, the place.58 Nonetheless, Scruton thinks the whole ensemble of ideas and institutions is failing as a result of the demands of the contemporary world— consumerism, globalization, calls for democratic reform and so on—and so this particular England is slowly being overwhelmed.59 Scruton’s text is sophisticated, with multiple strands: the conservative historiography,60 the role of key institutions and the links to an old strand of Conservative Party politics.61 But the whole ensemble is implausible, it is timeless; it is an aesthetic, romantic vision, compelling, but only in the way of personal, soft-recollection; that is, we can all recall these sentiments in respect of elements of our own biographies.62 Scruton uses the idea of ‘place’ very well; his is a lyrical version, as is that offered by Richard Hoggart,63 or Terence Davies,64 or Laurie Lee,65 but it is no longer a site of dense social interaction, it is an element in a conservative tale about England. Now the place is linked to key state institutions (law and parliament and crown and church) and the ensemble is wrapped in the Anglican religion; England is a rural arcadia.66 It is a

58 Scruton 2001, p. 57. 59 Scruton 2001, pp. 242–49. 60 One comparison—Peter Ackroyd 2001 2nd ed. London: The Biography, London,

Vintage; a similar celebration of place; not the changing patterns of life of people, as with Patrick Wright on Dalston Lane (P. Wright 1991 A Journey Through the Ruins: The Last Days of London, London, Radius), but place as meaning-drenched or past-drenched; Wright speaks of ‘auratic sites’—the place which is particularly exemplificatory of the ideas of the community—Scruton wants the whole of rural England to be auratic—just as Ackroyd’s London is auratic. 61 The party of today, downstream from a mis-understood Mrs. Thatcher, is not conservative, rather it is (neo) liberal—Tim Montgomerie 2019 ‘The Future of Conservatism’ in Prospect, July 15, 2019—argues precisely that this position should be rejected—abandon ‘the market’ in favour of ‘the home’. 62 Rose Tremain speaks of becoming a writer having stopped one evening in a field of hay and watched as the light faded into evening—R. Tremain 2018 Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life, London, Chatto. 63 R. Hoggart 1958 The Uses of Literacy, London, Penguin. 64 T. Davies 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives. 65 L. Lee 1962 Cider with Rosie, London, Penguin. 66 The role of the land is pursued in R. Scruton 2004 News from Somewhere: On

Settling, London, Continuum.

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curious confection: part religious (the land is enchanted), part aesthetic (an arcadia) and part political (it is a conservative stance). It is also, it might be noted, a set of images that have gone deep in received culture; they remain potent. A Commercial/Industrial England: Innovative, Entrepreneurial and Expedient There is a version of England that calls attention to the worlds of natural science, industry and commerce—one key being the seemingly relentless advance of natural science67 —and in the early modern period all this gave rise to an energetic society, and along with it, national advance. Familiar treatments of the industrial and commercial version of England make a series of claims about social history: hence the rise of towns, the development of industry, the conflicts with religion, the emergence of class division and so on; in all, it is a descriptive tale of the construction of an industrial and commercial society where trade and commerce come to the fore, along with, later, empire. In the visual arts , in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the slow process of creating the modern industrial and commercial world was marked directly: the drama of industrial production, the experience of speed in railways; the ways in which the old, slow, essentially agricultural world was being pushed aside. The visual experience of early modern industrial society was new; P.J. de Loutherbourg made paintings filled with the light and flame of the early sights of industrial production in ‘Coalbrook Dale by Night’ (1801). These changes had costs; William Hogarth anticipates this theme in his engravings: rural life is left behind and, in its place, there are mass urban spaces populated in part by the poor with hard lives eased by self-destructive recourse to alcohol, as in Gin Lane (1751). But it was the work of W.M. Turner who caught the public’s imagination. Turner also saw the costs of these changes as the old essentially agricultural world was pushed aside as wooden ships with sails gave way to metal ships propelled by steam in The Fighting Temeraire (1839). And he illustrated the drama of a nascent modernity with trains rushing through 67 D. Edgerton 2006 Warfare State, Cambridge University Press; see also D. Edgerton 2011 Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, London, Allen Lane.

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the countryside, their passage blurred by speed in Rain, Steam and Speed (1844)—both paintings, like Constable’s Hay Wain, popular with the general public. These became standard themes addressing the benefits/disbenefits of industrial capitalism; they were rehearsed in various ways.68 Thus, L.S. Lowry, detailing the life of the northern industrial working classes69 ; or the early advertisements for the London Underground, with modernist posters celebrating the new suburban life of leisure travel with images of trains and landscapes. More recently some of these early industrial sites have become museums: Iron Bridge Gorge, Dudley Black Country Museum, York Railway Museum, plus dozens of others all recalling an industrial past. But science, industry and the anticipated future have their new celebrants in, for example, the architecture of Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid. All these images are part of today’s common culture. They are images that many would recognize and the claims being made can be unpacked in today’s circumstances with industry and commerce in large anonymous sheds, motorways, ports, airports and the like; all parts of elaborate transnational systems of production, distribution and consumption; the system demands the discipline of regular work but rewards with material prosperity, with some arguing that lately discipline has given way to the seduction of ever greater material wealth.70 Roy Porter71 offers a celebration of industry and commerce.72 Porter cites the 1688 Glorious Revolution which strengthened parliament, and the 1707

68 Sometimes the ideas were over-stated; thus Vorticism—discussed by David Peters

Corbett 1997 The Modernity of English Art, Manchester University Press—chapter 1. 69 T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner 2013 Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, London, Tate—shows how Lowry’s work recorded the lives of northern industrial towns— reveals links to late nineteenth-century French realist/impressionist work via his teacher P.A. Valette—Lowry is also working the same theme as Richard Hoggart—the forties and fifties—the end-time of the classic nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial working classes; for the social history, Peter Hennessy 2006 Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, London, Allen Lane. 70 Claims associated with postmodernism; on this see F. Jameson 1991 Postmodernism:

Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press. 71 R. Porter 2000 Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London, Allen Lane. 72 Similar remarks in regard to Britain are offered by D. Edgerton 2006 Warfare State, Cambridge University Press; D. Edgerton 2018 The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, London, Allen Lane.

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Act or Treaty of Union. The upshot is a common marketplace, a permissive environment within which commerce can flourish along with multiple civil society groups.73 The episode of wars against France create confusions in mainland and thus more opportunities for commercial advantage and once again multiple groups move to take advantage: commercial companies, scientific clubs and the wider civil society (newspapers) and these three are the keys to what Porter calls the English/British Enlightenment with its ideas of materialism, empiricism, science and progress. Porter remarks that this enlightenment74 : ‘embodied a philosophy of expediency, a dedication to the art, science and duty of living well in the here and now’. Porter notes that commercial England was liberal and its centre of gravity was London. Early commercial Britain comprised diverse strands: the merchant traders, factory owners, provincial magnates and city trading houses. As the modern world deepened its reach within society the older institutions adjust; the church falls away and the landed property owners become commercially minded improvers, or they too fall away; and ordinary life is slowly more or less remade; in sum the social history of the development of the modern world. Porter offers a compelling tale. It is easily recognized as noted in the visual arts, in literature,75 and so on. But it can be objected that the use of the notion of ‘enlightenment’ is misleading; Tom Nairn76 argues that this world was not forward looking, the core claim of ‘the Enlightenment’, rather it was backward looking, as these figures looked to the Renaissance city state or the Dutch Stadholderate; essentially, pre-democratic oligarchic systems. A Radical England: The Common Man, Progress and Democracy There is a radical version of England. It does not figure in the mainstream media. It is not part of elite thinking or popular opinion. To simplify dramatically, it is available in two versions, For the first, generically, ‘romanticism’, returning for inspiration to pre-industrial times; by 73 Linda Colley—makes this point—plus, for Scotland, the removal of the political centre in Edinburgh opened the way to the Scottish Enlightenment; see D. Daiches, ed 1987 Hotbed of Genius: Scottish Enlightenment 1730–90, Edinburgh University Press. 74 Porter 2000, p. 15. 75 Williams 1958. 76 Tom Nairn 1977 The Break-up of Britain, London, New Left Books.

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way of example, the Arts and Crafts Movement, associated with William Morris, which offered craft-based work in opposition to mass factory production. The second with its gaze turned to the future, generically, progressive, looked to the possibilities of the new albeit unequal77 scientific world; by way of an example, in the late eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood or in Germany in the early twentieth, the Bauhaus. In the visual arts the former tradition of romanticism typically looks back to an imaginary past in order to identify a (perhaps utopian) route to the future. In England it produced a radical line in the arts William Morris, (1834–1896), artist, designer and socialist whilst the social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) looked to the recent work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose themes looked back to an imaginary realm of medievalism. A particular concern was to affirm the aesthetic and moral value of craft work in contrast to the mechanized mass production of industry. All this gave rise to the Arts and Crafts Movement in paintings, furniture, soft furnishings and the like; in Scotland, the work of Charles Rennie MacIntosh; and the movement was influential overseas, in Vienna and Paris.78 In respect of the second line, progressive, looking to the future, commentators looking at the inter-war period in England find little to celebrate in the visual arts.79 They note that the period saw English artists responding to European modernism and failing to make it their own: the Bloomsbury group of self-conscious modernists are dismissed, others tagged as inward-looking provincials. Efforts are made to rescue some of these artists80 : thus John Piper81 making landscape paintings and working as a war artist during Second World War picking up on the experience of bombed and broken buildings; so too Stanley Spencer, finding God in Cookham and also making war pictures, notably of industry. However, in the wider arts, after the Second World War there were new ideas. In the fifties the virile working classes were celebrated; thus, kitchen sink 77 And a line of criticism opens up—Engels—Mayhew—Rowntree—Beveridge— Townsend—Pickett and Wilkinson. 78 Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau. 79 An uneasy response—borrowed styles, deeper critical agendas disregarded—see David

Peters Corbett 1997 The Modernity of English Art 1914–30, Manchester University Press. 80 Robert Hughes 2001 ‘English Art in the Twentieth Century’ in R. Hughes 2001 Nothing If Not Critical, London, Harvill. 81 See A. Harris 2010 Romantic Moderns, London, Thames and Hudson.

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dramas with novels and films centred on the working classes. Literature had its moment of overt rebellion in the 1960 Chatterley trial and popular television contributed with the BBC’s Wednesday Play, exemplified in Cathy Come Home. More broadly, optimistic post-war reconstruction, slum clearance and New Towns. The more prospective radical groups, those who argued for progress, looked to the organizations of the working classes—those who argued the case for progress. The vehicles for these arguments are found in the organizations of the working classes: trades unions, corresponding societies, parties, newspapers, non-conformist churches and so on. These groups made various arguments for democratic reform and their visions, one way or another, has been for a species of republican democracy with various institutional vehicles such as a reformed parliament, works councils, cooperatives and the like. The visions are of a democratic polity that is free of inherited hierarchies and thus a decisive shift into the modern world (for radicals, a process long successfully delayed by the elite). The contemporary intellectual strand is most obviously associated with a group of historians who addressed the business of class formation and class conflict in the process of the shift to the modern world: thus, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. This tradition of reflection looks to popular struggles and a trajectory is sketched out with the Levellers, Tom Paine, Chartists, Trades Unions, ILP, CPGB and so on. In sum, there is an available radical England but, arguably, it is not well represented in the visual arts notwithstanding the wider bodies of critical work on offer. A Multicultural England: Empire, Migration and Diversity Historically, the country has been home to waves of inward migration. More recent migration belongs to the post-Second World War period. There has been extensive migration from the sometimes peripheral territories of empire, in particular, the West Indies and South Asia. These migrants arrived after the Second World War with one group recently celebrated as the ‘Windrush generation’. These migrants have made settled communities, now second or third generation. In some cases, there has been extensive inter-marriage with the sometime host population. There is now an official version of England built around claims to an established multiculturalism; however, the term signals a policy that is designed to foster the integration of what are taken to be distinct cultural groups;

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the policy is contested, some groups are openly hostile to the policy of multiculturalism, preferring ideas of anti-discrimination, whilst others keep their view discretely veiled.82 In the visual arts a number of painters have looked at the issues surrounding inward migration, in particular the demands made upon families and communities as they relocate across thousands of miles, matters made particularly challenging by virtue of the simple physiological visibility of recent migrants amongst the host population. Artists have addressed these experiences: migration, the creation of settled communities, links to the lands of forbears, matters, in brief, of social memory and personal identity. In Birmingham in the seventies a group of young artists established the Black Arts Movement.83 It has involved a number of noted artists, including Keith Piper, Sonia Boyce, Rasheed Araeen, David Bailey, Marlene Smith, Maud Sulter and Lubaina Himid. The group took shape around work done at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, where, in 1982 a convention was held to address issues of ‘Black identity’. Later, in 1985, an exhibition was held at the ICA, entitled ‘The Thin Black Line’. However, the key exhibition, according to commentators, was a 1989 exhibition entitled ‘The Other Story’ at the Hayward Gallery which brought together a number of artists concerned with these issues; it was curated by Araeen and was direct in its criticisms of racism and the relative neglect of the work of ethnic minority artists.84 Twenty years later, the issues had moved on—communities were settled—another figure with a Birmingham background has explored these issues, Hurvin Anderson.85 With his paintings, Anderson has investigated his childhood locale, the people and places he knew as a boy, thus, images of Handsworth Park and local barber’s shops. Anderson has noted that his painterly inspiration involves the Europeans Seurat and Monet, along with the work of

82 Y. Alibhai-Brown 2001 Who Do We Think We Are: Imagining the New Britain, Harmondsworth, Penguin. 83 A loose alliance of artists concerned to investigate the situation of settled migrant

communities in Britain—Keith Piper, Sonia Boyce, Rasheed Araeen, David A. Bailey, Marlene Smith, Maud Sulter, Lubaina Himid—see web tate.org.uk—see You Tube Marlene Smith on establishing the Black Arts Movement 1982—key exhibition The Other Story 1989. 84 Jean Fisher 2009 ‘The Other Story and the Past Imperfect’ in Tate Papers 12. 85 Hurvin Anderson 2013 Reporting Back, Birmingham, Ikon.

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Constable, and these cultural resources are put to the task of unpacking a sense of somehow not quite belonging. So, he paints pictures that let the viewer do some of the work; he paints reveries and nostalgia; he paints the Handsworth of his childhood; and returning to Jamaica, he takes note of the legacies of colonial days with tennis courts, dilapidated old hotels and buildings put to ad hoc use as Hindu temples; the paintings are often semi-abstract, stylized; they draw in the viewer and he or she can make the cross-comparisons, Birmingham, Jamaica. This work in the visual arts has found expression in the mainstream media and (even) in architecture. In novels, television and film, Hanif Kureishi86 ; in similar media, Andrea Levi 2004 Small Island and 2011 The Long Song 87 ; or, again, Monica Ali’s 2003 Brick Lane 88 dealing with Bangladeshi migrants and with its dazzling final line as one character tells another as they go ice-skating ‘this is England, you can do whatever you want’.89 Or, buildings, thus the Georgian House Museum, Bristol (deals with slave trade), or statues overturned (Bristol’s Colston) or the debate about the Cecil Rhodes statue in Oriel College, Oxford. In the post-war period there were flows of inward migrants from former peripheral territories of the British state-empire: West Indies, South Asia and Africa and generally they were not made welcome; there were social tensions and this became a political problem. In the sixties two official responses were made: anti-racist legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race; and at the same time the idea of multiculturalism was promulgated. The intention was to aid integration, and in some respects, this has been successful, thus some inter-marriage, but in other areas it has not been successful as the social profiles of ethnic groups differ in education, health, jobs and so on. The recent experience of inward migration has flowed not from residues of empire, but from membership of the European Union, in particular, the last rounds of expansion that drew in the CEE countries of former Eastern bloc Europe. The overall experience of inward migrants is that integration does occur, but it is slow

86 Multiple works—see novel—H. Kureishi 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia, London, Faber; and films—My Beautiful Laundrette 1985, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid 1987. 87 Andrea Levi 2004 Small Island, London, Tinder Press; Andrea Levy 2011 The Long Song, London, Tinder Press. 88 Monica Ali 2003 Brick Lane, London, Doubleday. 89 Ali 2003, p. 413.

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and can be reversed,90 and so experience suggests that a diverse multicultural society is not one to choose, rather it is one to acknowledge as it develops.91

England---No Settled Image---Future Is Open Anthony Barnett,92 checking through the Brexit referendum data identified a place called ‘England-without-London’ and cited other opinion surveys that report that the people who dwell in this place are happy to call themselves ‘English’.93 This might seem inconsequent, another artefact of the body of data, but it is at a piece with other reports made in recent years; an English nationalism is taking shape. It is not surprising. The notion of Britain/British designated a political project, a coming into being, never a fixed entity liable to essentialist-type characterizations. The British Empire, Britain and the British were intertwined.94 But the empire is long gone and domestically the Scots have a parliament, the Northern Irish have Stormont and the Welsh have their assembly. The recorded inclination of the denizens of England to identify themselves as ‘English’ is not surprising. Other surveys suggest that there is support for an institutional vehicle for these sentiments, hence the debates about EVEL,95 and moreover that this group is happy to let Scotland float gently away from the Union. An English nationalism is in the process of effective assertion within the public sphere; however, it is not clear what should be understood by that label as the idea of England has been subsumed (or confused with) the idea of Britain for many decades. Kumar96 argues that this was engineered by an elite alarmed at subaltern political sentiments and the upshot was the creation of an official ‘British-England’. 90 Recently—CEE countries—Balkans. 91 December 2022 press reports noted the death of Mr. Ali Aslam in Glasgow—the

inventor of ‘chicken-tikka-masala’—reputedly Britain’s favourite dish. 92 Barnett 2017. 93 Barnett 2017, chapter 11, p. 119. 94 Colley 1992. 95 ‘English votes for English laws’—written parliamentary procedures 2015/21 and then set aside. 96 K. Kumar 2003 The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge University Press.

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Kumar,97 tracking the detailed twists and turns of long debates, notes the familiar confusion between British and English, and asks how this came about. Accepting Linda Colley’s argument in respect of the construction of Britain, Britishness and Empire, Kumar argues that the English elite embraced a Whig view of history—progressive, evolutionary—and subsumed the national in the imperial whilst unpacking the national in rural-cum-mediaeval terms. The essence of England was to be found in rural life, in landscape and in a history that led back into the realms of myth and these were the English who populated the core of the project of empire, whilst the modern world of natural sciencebased industry was set aside. Kumar adds that this image of England plus the associated confusions (Britain/England or rural/industrial and so on) runs down to the present day or, in terms of this piece, it is one available England—and it too is in question—further twists and turns of debate.98 There are multiple versions of what it is to be English. And with Brexit discussions rolling on99 —and likely to do so100 —it would seem that there is a real possibility that these seemingly abstract general discussions about England and Englishness might—perhaps in the not too distant future— become rather more practical and a lot more urgent101 —in which case artists will have new circumstances to interpret, new images to make.

97 Kumar 2003, chapter 7. 98 These twists and turns are further detailed in Michael Kenny 2014 The Politics of

English Nationhood, Oxford University Press. 99 Economist 2019 ‘Briefing: Britain and Brexit’, June 22, 2019—article is pessimistic— the issue of nationalism acknowledged and set to one side in favour of diagnosing a deep division between leave and remain. 100 Runciman made the point that there is no return to the status quo ante; similarly, any parliamentary resolution to the Brexit debates will in practice only signal the next phase of debate; D. Runciman in London Review of Books 40.9, 41.1. 101 Thus, Gordon Brown’s 2022 report to the Labour Party floating ideas of devolution.

CHAPTER 10

On Living in a Rich Country

The 2008–2022 sequence of crises—finance, migration, Brexit, covid and presently Ukraine—can be read as signalling a more general crisis for Britain; one that could be subsumed within the wider crisis of the West. On the one hand, the collapse of the optimistic post-cold war era of neoliberal globalization whose sets of ideas/institutions had been a way for the local elite to read and react to enfolding circumstances, hence liberalizing markets and prioritizing finance with the population appropriately disciplined by restricted welfare and proffered consumerism, individually, ‘the active consumer’, more generally, ‘coping, hoping, doping and shopping’.1 And, on the other hand, the end-time of the unchallenged global pre-eminence of that group of primarily North Atlantic states familiarly tagged as ‘the West’, as China, India and the Global South more generally read the Ukraine war as a restrictedly European problem, one with which they need not engage. In regard to the British elite, it is clear that this is not the first such general collapse: in the late 1940s the elite finessed the crisis of the end of empire and in the seventies as the post-war settlement failed, ideas and institutions were remade in line with the nostrums of neo-liberalism. The present imbroglio is thus the third such episode. Unpacking its logic opens the way to understanding state/government concerns for de-globalization, resilience, 1 Wolfgang Street, cited in Deutsche Welle online July 3, 2017 (accessed January 2020).

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security and the like, plus, prospectively, it offers, a chance to consider the possibilities for a measure of democratization. ********* Over the last thirty or so years successive the British state/government has followed a political–cultural project informed by neo-liberal ideas; it has preferred the market to the state and has in consequence sold-off state assets, out-sourced state functions, reduced state expenditures and sought generally to encourage—with exhortation, sympathetic regulation and straightforward subsidy—the market, that is, the private sector, be it local or international. The detail of the record can be variously unpacked but, overall, the long-term trend has been a mix of increasing social/ economic inequality with the standard IFI data revealing a slow falling behind the development standards of comparator countries on the mainland. This model of development, neo-liberal globalization—is in the process of collapse and whilst trade in goods and services continues, these are slowly shrinking. The neo-liberal globalization paradigm no longer carries conviction. This loss of faith in a governing set of ideas and associated institutionally carried policy stances is not new and in the case of Britain over the long post-Second World War two earlier general crises of this type can be identified. In the late forties the dissolution of the state-empire system presented the elite with the task of responding; this they did, creatively, fashioning the project of Continuing Britain—in domestic policy terms, the welfare state. In the seventies the collapse of this Keynesian-informed policy consensus presented the state/government with a further demand for a response; the elite turned to long-available doctrines in regard to the market, hence, what became neo-liberalism and ideas of globalization. In both cases the elite read and reacted to these demands with creativity and forward-looking policies, with, it should be added, a deeper measure of underlying continuity; that is, problems were finessed. The current episode involves interlinked crises—finance, migration, disease, relations with the post-referendum EU and overseas war—all of which serve to confuse understandings and sharpen debates about the condition of the country. These assorted confusions have had a particular focus, a point around which they have come to revolve: Brexit. In 2013, Prime Minister Cameron, bowing to populist/right-wing pressure, in particular within his own party, announced that there would be a referendum in respect of Britain’s membership of the European Union. The

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referendum was held in June 2016 and the result was a narrow vote in favour of withdrawal, 52/48%. The result of the vote was met with astonishment amongst the elite along with surprise and dismay amongst sections of the population. The assorted strands of unhappiness were not eased with the political manoeuvrings that followed Prime Minister May’s March 2017 triggering of Article 50. The main traditional political parties were split and polls reported that opinion in the country remained divided. Parliamentary confusion followed. Prime Minister May having failed to secure a withdrawal agreement that could command assent of parliament, stepped down in July 2019 to be replaced by Prime Minister Johnson. A general election followed on December 12, 2019. It turned out to be a landslide victory for the Conservative Party. The new government finalized a withdrawal agreement in 2020; formal withdrawal was on January 31, 2020. However, this was not the end of the matter as further detailed issues remained to be agreed between Britain and the EU; plus, in Britain, unreconciled ‘remainers’ continued to lobby to reverse the referendum.2 Much subsequent commentary in the print media and online in social media has been tribal, often vituperative and generally unhelpful. Further confusions in political discourse followed as the Covid-19 pandemic swept through Britain giving rise to lockdowns, excess deaths and significant economic costs. The country emerged from these crises only to find the state/government had rallied to the support of Western involvement in the war in Eastern Europe; the sequence of rolling crises continued. However, as the residual plausibility of claims to special status within the global system fade, changing circumstances could open up more optimistic routes to the future; externally, global pressures for resilience imply a greater role for the machineries of the state and given the familiar critiques of the politics a complimentary domestic pressure might involve a process of democratization.

2 Anand Menon in The Guardian June 24, 2023, reporting on latest research—polling showing growing doubts about leaving the EU.

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The Failure of Globalization and the End of Claims to Western Pre-eminence In the eighties and nineties, theorists offered the idea of globalization as an interpretation of structural changes in the global system; they pointed to a series of factors: increased flows of international trade (flows of materials and goods); increased integration of financial systems (flows of money); increased extent of internationalized production (production networks plus logistic chains); increased efficiency of international communications (digital systems); and increased mobility of people (airlines/travel). Plus, more contentiously, increased political convergence on a liberal-democratic model coupled together with increasingly common patterns of consumption amongst all peoples, along with, finally, highly contentiously, the slow creation of a common culture around the globe. In this long period, roughly, 1979–2008, successive British governments bought into these ideas and shaped policy accordingly; shrinking the state, selling off state assets into the private market, and so on. It was contentious and met with some domestic opposition along with a more general popular support/acquiescence. However, from 2008 onwards—as the series of crises unfolded—the plausibility of that model plus associated policy faded. Globalization Falters Theorists offered these ideas about globalization as an interpretation of unfolding socio-economic change, but the ideas also functioned as exhortation to action; that is, they became aspects of an ideology, hence, the package, ‘neo-liberal globalization theory’. The package was produced during a period of American self-confidence, superiority in regard to its cold war opposite the USSR and leadership in regard to European Union nations (Bretton Woods machinery plus NATO). After 1989/91 there was talk of a uni-polar global system3 but the optimism did not last. 3 An earlier phase of self-confidence in late fifties and sixties had produced ‘modern-

ization theory’ which ran together ideas of the logic of industrialism, convergence on a single model of development plus the end of ideology as all became wealthy—the ideas collapsed as USA became embroiled in domestic conflicts around race and overseas war in Vietnam—key statement, W.W. Rostow 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge University Press.

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In regard to globalization theory there were problems intrinsic to the idea/programme. The intellectual basis of the programme was found in the model of the self-regulating liberal market, and a number of claims were lodged in this idea-complex: that free markets maximized wealth; that free markets maximized moral value; that free markets maximized political freedom and that free markets maximized knowledge.4 The first claim rests on characterizations of liberal markets, buttressed in turn by ideas of rational economic man, buttressed in turn by idea of widely distributed market knowledge, and so on, but all markets are lodged in institutional, juridical and cultural contexts. The claim to maximize wealth cannot be secured. The second claim revolves around liberal models of man, presented as an individual rational agent, with the extreme version found in libertarianism. But all humans are fundamentally social, that is, deeply embedded in social networks. The claim to maximize moral value cannot be secured.5 The third claim fails for similar reasons. The liberal preference for the minimum state disregards the social nature of political life offering instead a model of nominally autonomous ‘free’ individuals but this disregards not merely the social nature of human political life but also the demands of the political-economic system underpinning particular political systems; in the contemporary world, natural science-based industrial capitalism. The fourth claim looks to buttress the economic package with claims to knowledge of a type produced by the natural sciences; mainstream economics does not claim to be a quasi-physics but does claim to be the ‘hardest’ of the social sciences, but this claim has been routinely dismissed6 ; economics is a social science and its intellectual neighbours are not physicists but the denizens of the arts and humanities. The claims to the inevitability of globalization rested in part on these arguments and they were buttressed by the commitments of key organizations; the IMF, World Bank and the US authorities, together the

4 P.W. Preston 2012 England After the Great Recession, London, Palgrave, pp. 4–9; see also J. Ree 2023 ‘Opium of the elite’ in London Review of Books 45.3; Ree roots the tradition in anti-socialist work of L. Mises and F. Hayek—later picked up by Milton Friedman. 5 Alasdair MacIntyre argues that contemporary liberal ethics is an incoherent mish-mash of post-Christian elements; see A. MacIntyre 2007 3rd ed. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press. 6 Recently, for example, R. Skidelsky 2021 What’s Wrong with Economics, London, Penguin.

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Washington Consensus. These ideas were buttressed further by ambitious claims in respect of politics; the idea of the ethico-political ‘end of history’; again, the rich West was a model for all.7 But, against these arguments regionalization was presented as a more plausible idea.8 The global system, when examined, seemed to be home to multiple centres each with its own intrinsic logic,9 and whilst inevitably they worked within the global system, they were not variant forms of an abstract-general model of the USA/West and a distinctive historical development trajectory could be identified for each of these regions.10 The End of Claims to Western Pre-eminence Setting aside the over-familiar model of the USA, attention can turn to the European Union (EU) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These two regions could be described in terms of their historical development trajectories, their routes into the modern world. Thus, after the energetic accumulation of overseas territories, the European system of empires collapsed—metropolitan Europe was divided, absorbed within cold war blocs, and found a line of development in the project of the EU—in China, the depredations of empire, civil war and Imperial Japanese invasion were followed by a period of autarchy which modulated into a species of East Asian mercantilism until, presently, the country has become a rival for the USA (and a semi-engaged partner for the EU).11

7 Generalizing these ideas helped produce ‘post-modernism’, a political economy of plenty would permit the emergence of a diverse social world with, once again, the West as a model for all—see Jameson, F. 1991 Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso. 8 P. Hirst and G. Thompson 1992 2nd ed. Globalization in Question, Cambridge, Polity. 9 Particular configurations of political economy, social institutions and cultures. 10 Related ideas: ‘varieties of capitalism’—G. Gasping-Anderson 1990 The Three Worlds

of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity; historical sociology—B. Moore Jr. 1966 The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Harmonsdworth, Penguin; on regionalism P. Katzenstein 2005 A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium, Cornell University Press. 11 In both cases a distinctive development patterns have emerged—see A Xing and P.W. Preston 2024 China and Europe Relations in the Twenty-First Century, London, Routledge.

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These circumstances were not fixed but they altered only slowly. The European Union deepened its institutional integration (and thus its sense of itself as a polity); key dates could be 1985 SEA, 1992 Maastricht and 2007 Lisbon—these treaties set the EU on a clearly distinct path. The Union also embraced many new members from 1989/91 onwards as what had been a Western-European organization, became more broadly European. In China, the analogous dates would be 1978 with Deng Xiao Ping’s early reform programme and then, say, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, marking China’s emergence as a great power. In both cases, these regions were distinctive and the claims of globalization theory came to seem implausible or more directly, an ideological expression of American national interests.12 The intellectual collapse of globalization theory can be dated to the 2008 financial crisis, with its initial twin centres in New York and London, later embracing the banking systems of mainland Europe. But the deeper political-economic changes took time: the financial crisis had placed states at the centre of economic policy making with re-regulation, bail-outs and nationalization and greater state involvement meant greater attention to popular domestic demands and varieties of economic nationalism began to appear. These trends towards multiple centres within the global system were underscored in the early 2000s by sharp changes in the political landscape; two linked areas: trade and security. First, the administration of President Trump introduced restrictions on American trade with China and these restrictions have been extended and re-worked by the administration of President Biden; Trump’s geo-economic focus has been supplemented by geo-strategic concerns. The USA and PRC continue with the trade/financial links established post-1978 (flows of goods/ money) but these are now under close inspection and the trend is towards greater control, that is, state-mandated restrictions.13 Second the ongoing

12 Perhaps obscured by claims to ‘exceptional’ status—on this, A. Lieven 2004 America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, London, Harper; R. Aron 1973 The Imperial Republic, London, Wiedenfeld; plus, relatedly, there is a body of US scholarship criticizing the country for its imperial pretensions and their costs; see for example, Chalmers Johnson 2004 The Sorrows of Empire, London, Verso. 13 In particular in relation to high-tech—numerous reports in press, for example, in regard to the lithography involved in chip making, see Financial Times, January 28, 2023—Dutch and Japanese manufacturers fall in line; commentators (FT , Economist ) characterize these moves as designed to delay/block China’s economic rise.

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post-independence conflicts in the Ukraine turned into a complex military exchange, domestic and international. This last was crucial. The response of USA/NATO to the 2022 Russian cross-border invasion was (in brief) to reinstate cold war divisions in Europe (diplomatic, financial and economic sanctions) and to finance and arm the Ukrainian nationalist regime in Kiev (in brief) to inaugurate a proxy war against Russia. The upshot of these changes, 2008–2022. First, domestic concerns for economic security: focus on logistics chains (politico-geographical distribution, choke-points), raw materials (sources, transport), manufacturing (networks, re-shoring) and markets (access, tariff and non-tariff barriers)). Second, domestic concerns for trade security: focus on local regulations and law, concern for juridical extra-territorial reach. Third, domestic concerns for secure futures: focus on state-led investment in specified strategic industries.14 Fourth, all these, plus related international security concerns (shift from geo-economics to geo-strategy): military technology (direct restrictions on trade); military-related research (funding and monitoring of dual-use); military-related expenditure (tax increases, novel technologies and lessons from Eastern European war); re-animated alliance systems; and new alliance systems mooted.15

Interlinked Crises: The Domestic Scene At the outset it was suggested that these particular crises were more than a sequence of disconnected events but were interlinked; evidenced, in particular, through political ideas, institutional dispositions and organizational inefficiency; plus, a spread of impacts on the wider social world.

14 On President Biden’s plan to ‘reindustrialize America’ the Economist (February 4, 2023) characterizes the shift from globalization/liberalization to state-led industrial policy as ‘a huge reversal’, treating the matter as an error; a contrary opinion—Larry Elliot 2022 ‘The Pendulum Swing Against Globalization in 2022—And That’s No Bad Thing’ in the Guardian, December 26, 2022. 15 Hence novel think-tank talk of ‘Indo-Pacific’—attempt to draw-in India; or AUKUS offering nuclear technology to Australia—or British/Scandinavia talk of ‘Northern Alliance/Task Force’.

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So, politically: the crises have in common the state/government’s commitments to the priority of liberal markets,16 taken as rational, agentdispersed, self-ordering, benefits-maximizing and much to be preferred when considering policy making. All this in contrast to the alleged vagaries of state-led programmes which are characterized negatively—in the economy, picking winners, in society, namby-pandy interference and in the political arena an encouragement to authoritarianism, and finally in culture an invitation to woke posturing. Then institutionally: the dominant ideology carries over into the machinery of administration creating all the inhibitions of a conventional wisdom17 ; plus, organisationally: the machine is ill-prepared as resources and plans are lacking, funding has been cut and the market has been expected to provide.18 Then, finally, socially: responses the state-government to crises have definite patterns of impact and popular responses including resignation, resentment and maybe action (strikes/demonstrations). So, overall, accumulated practice is sustained whilst the machineries of the state slowly run down; the machine becomes less effective; together these produce an initial reaction—from those with nominal power, rituals of reassurance, meanwhile, the popular response is one of scepticism and withdrawal. Political Ideas: Elite Complacency and the Market Ideology The 1980s saw a clear shift in domestic power relations. These were advertised in both intellectual terms and political action. There were early experiments with monetarist policies, the upshot of which was significant de-industrialization along with a collapse in the opinion poll ratings of the government. But it was political events that opened the way to more radical economic and social policy changes. This second and long lasting 16 N. Malik 2023 ‘Britain was sick before Brexit’ in the Guardian, February 13, 2023; see also D. Edgerton 2023 ‘Britain—Here Is a Plan’ in the Guardian, January 26, 2023; more ambitiously, Martin Wolf who locates current political problems in economic policy failure since 1980s; see M. Wolf 2023 The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, Allen Lane. 17 The term is from J.K. Galbraith 1958 The Affluent Society, Harmondsworth, Penguin. 18 Commentators point to the early 2022 wave of public sector strikes—criticism emerged in regard to Independent Pay Review Bodies as their work is shaped by government—criticisms emerged in January 2022 of the failings of a semi-privatized Probation Service.

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phase was signalled by the decision of the Argentine military junta to seize the Falklands/Malvinas Islands. The Thatcher government responded militarily and after a brief war—April/June 1982—defeated this ‘external enemy’, subsequently supplementing this victory first in the June 1983 general election win against a divided opposition19 and later the more significant defeat of an ‘internal enemy’, in the guise of the British trade union movement, in particular the sometime iron triangle of steel, railway and mines. The 1985 defeat of the miners’ strike signalled the opening of a new phase of state/government economic policy making in the guise of privatization whereby state assets were sold-off at discounted prices. The rationale varied, in the case of utilities and industry, it was expected that the operations shifted into the market sector would prosper (and thus the economy as a whole) whilst in the case of social housing, in addition to transferring wealth, it was supposed that this would break the perceived link between occupying social housing and voting Labour. The list of sell-offs was long; the key utilities of gas, electricity and water; the postal service; railways; and assorted government functions; this process of economic re-ordering was further advanced in the mid-eighties with further privatizations and more social conflicts.20 A crucial reform was initiated in the mid-1980s; the so called financial ‘big-bang’ which saw the state-mandated regulations in regard to financial activity sharply changed; various restrictions, some in the guise of regulations introduced after the thirties Great Crash were removed. The upshot, running up to 2008 was the creation of many new complex financial products; in sum, a great expansion of credit as a bubble economy was created. Those with assets prospered, at least on paper. The macro-data looked good in terms of GNP per capita, employment, housing, consumption and so on, but the expansion of credit was risky, the relaxation of controls risky and the hands-off approach to the economy adopted by successive

19 Labour party split and formation of SDP helped ensure Conservative post-Falklands

win. 20 For example—Poll Tax riots—plus long-running conflicts in Northern Ireland— which had spill-over effects in England, that is, bomb-attacks, including an attempted assassination of the Prime Minister.

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governments was also risky; cast in these terms, the crisis of 2008 was inevitable; bubbles always burst.21 These ideas in one form or another were found throughout the West—in North America, Europe and Australasia—and in Britain. A broad package of ideas was assembled; globalization. The theory was a reworking of 1950s ideas about market-centred change which had been presented as modernization theory and the argument was now revisited: economic development plus political change plus cultural change all pointed in one direction,22 that is, the creation of a single more or less integrated global system; hence, globalization. Once again, a theory was constructed at a time of Western politico–cultural exuberance and, as before, the plausibility of these claims faded in the face of events.23 Institutional Forms: Conventional Wisdom and Organizational Rigidity In Britain, in the early post-war period the ideas of J.M. Keynes became widely invoked and the state was given a central role. These ideas and associated policies ran on until the early 1970s when a mix of inflation and stagnation marked the end of their utility. The ideas no longer worked. A situation flagged to the country in a speech by Prime Minister Callahan.24 An interregnum followed, then new ideas, which were driven initially by assorted free market think-tanks, and a few influential theorists, in particular, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and later Ayn Rand, were embraced by the new government of Prime Minister Thatcher. The political stance of the nominally conservative Thatcher government was a species of radical liberalism linked to an atavistic nationalism, theorized by critics as ‘authoritarian populism’.25 Thatcher’s appeal was 21 Gillian Tett 2009 Fools Gold, London, Little Brown, has a nice story about brokers hoping to be rich and retired before the inevitable crash; from the same period, J. Lanchester 2010 Whoops: What Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, London, Penguin. 22 F. Fukuyama 1992 The End of History, London, Hamish Hamilton. 23 Comparatively, for the former theory—end of fixed exchange system, civil rights and

Vietnam—for the latter, bank crisis, domestic tensions around race plus wars in the Middle East. 24 James Callaghan in a speech to the party, Blackpool 1976. 25 Stuart Hall 1988 The Hard Road to Renewal, London, Verso.

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to a putative common sense in economics, buttressed by adherence to the symbols of British constitutional government. This fundamentally free market ideology involved a mix of elements. Firstly, a radical individualism (in its extreme, the Russian-American novelist, Ayn Rand was invoked, producing ‘libertarianism’). Then secondly, a clutch of technical arguments in economic policy making (including monetarism to curb inflation and supply-side reforms to boost the private market), and in addition there were new marketplace products both wholesale within the banking sector and retail within the consumer market. Third, the related mix of state/government policies included selling off state assets, softening regulatory regimes, curbing trade unions and weakening local government. The 2008 financial crisis undermined its intellectual coherence and undermined its utility (as the state bailed out the banks) but the ideas/ practices ran on. The Labour government of Prime Minister Brown was dismissed but successive Conservative governments were resistant to any sharp changes until Prime Minister Cameron opted to address long-standing grumbling about the EU by holding a referendum. The population voted to leave. Cameron resigned to be followed by Prime Minister May whose administration was mired in confusion and which was in turn followed by Prime Minister Johnson who extracted Britain from the EU before becoming mired in another set of confusions.26 A third Prime Minister took power Liz Truss, who reprised the full-on free market experiment, only to provoke a financial crisis before herself being replaced by Prime Minister Sunak. At the end of 2022 it was clear that the old regime was dying but it was far from clear—given the paucity of ideas from the official opposition— that there was a new world trying to be born. Social Impacts: Differential Effects, Rich Ok, Rest Not So Good The 1980s neo-liberal experiment, now, some forty years, has seen a slow rise in general levels of living but the experience has been skewed and whilst elites have done well, the great majority have not, instead 26 Post-Brexit parliamentary confusion was extended to embrace a novel style of politics—thus, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and then Boris Johnson were all subjected to a process of ‘dragging the man down’—an earlier victim was the 2004 American presidential candidate John Kerry—‘swiftboating’.

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their levels of living have generally stayed pretty much the same. This lack of advance is in stark contrast to the baby-boom generation; the fifties and sixties saw steady improvements and the baby-boom generation has weathered the recent neo-liberal period. But subsequent generations have had a more difficult time; low rates of improvements in material living have been accompanied by increasing insecurity—in employment, in housing, in the local social world with low-level crime, dis-orienting inward migration and the like. In all this the rich have prospered whilst the poor have drifted down and these changes have impacted the political world in a paradoxical mix of disengagement and populist rebellion. One commentator27 drew a distinction between those citizens who had the cultural resources to live and work anywhere in the globalized world (the ‘no-wheres’) and those who lacked these resources and were thus restricted to a particular place (the ‘some-wheres’); an additional connotation suggested that the former group were socially rootless, whilst the latter group was embedded in communities. The idea flagged one of the deep-seated ills of contemporary society, namely, the disconnect between the elite and the masses; a disconnect with further consequences for politics and society.

Europe, Britain and Unfolding Trajectories European states took shape as industrial capitalism was developing; formally, it was a dynamic system, not only upgrading domestically but also expanding aggressively overseas; and substantively, the development of the system was attended by extensive violence in the process of the domestic creation of a novel class relations,28 plus the seizure of overseas territories. By the late nineteenth century Europeans had created large state-empires, that is, they laid claim to extensive overseas territories. In the early years of the twentieth century the European system of stateempires seemed to be very strong; the core territories of Europe were richer than any previous civilizations (this was the fruit of industrial capitalism); the core territories of Europe were home to centres of natural science, technical knowledge and modern industry and in addition these 27 D. Goodhart 2017 The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, London, Hurst. 28 Classic text: E.P. Thompson 1963 The Making of the English Working Class, London, Victor Gollancz; see also C. Hill, R. Hilton.

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core territories had polities with strong senses of their own achievements and the relative failures—as they saw it—of the peoples of other cultures. However, the system had inherent flaws, evidenced in two lines of political tension: first, the core states in Europe competed against each other and such competition led slowly towards war, plus second, there were radical reformers in the peripheral territories and they were looking for independence; thus, tension in both the core and periphery. In time, the system simply collapsed in great violence; the period 1914–1945 can be read as a ‘general crisis’ as it saw economic, social and political breakdown.29 The experience of the general crisis feeds directly into the impetus to build the European Union; the elites of Europe, in particular, France and Germany resolved to settle their long-standing conflicts; the early moves towards the European Union begins with the machinery of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) which put coal and steel production in Germany and France under the control of a supra-national authority so as to both rationalize the industry and remove control of a key military resource from direct control of either state; thus economics and politics are built into the European Union apparatus from the start; in the Treaty of Rome (1957) brings the European Economic Community into being; it is the first version of the European Union; there are further treaties including the Single European Act (1985), the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2007). However, the character of the Union is not fixed and it responds to events and two recent changes might be noted: first, the 2008 financial crisis had its counterpart amongst the member states of the Union; then second change is arguably of more import; the shift in power within EU towards the CEE countries, in particular Poland and the Baltics whose relations with Brussels are described by commentators as ‘transactional’. Commentators suggest30 this pulls the political centre of the Union towards the East, superseding the more familiar core pairing of Germany/France.

29 The breakdown also involved Asia—say 1911–1949—see Preston 2010—the human and material costs were similar. 30 Often noted—on joining EU, Poland’s purchases of arms from USA, recently more arms from USA and South Korea; on this see J. Eyal 2023 ‘Amid the smoke of war power in Europe is shifting decisively to the East’, RUSI web, Observer, January 29, 2023.

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Resilience: State Action for Security A debate has begun around the idea of resilience. In schematic terms the idea points to three areas of state policy concern: core functions, production networks and domestic resources. Core function resilience: the notion turns attention to the extent to which the core operations of the domestic political economy are exposed to disruption from untoward events or hostile actions. In either or whatever case, resilience implies that the state and core political economy can survive such shock; thus, for example: logistic chains, with stockpiles of raw materials (thus, recently, European Union advice about pre-winter stocks of gas); stockpiles of crucial imported engineering materials (thus, US and EU concerns to secure flows of micro-chips); and stockpiles of other manufactured goods (medicines, food stocks and so on). All of this is a sharp contrast to ideas of ‘just in time production’ which were imported from Japan in the eighties. Production networks resilience: the notion turns to securing production networks; withdrawing from those that might be at risk and moving operations towards those which are more secure—sometimes tagged ‘on-shoring’ or ‘friend-shoring’—the contrary strategy to previous liberal market-oriented strategies of ‘off-shoring’ which involved locating production at the cheapest location within the ‘rules-based global system’. Domestic resilience: the idea points to the strengthening the domestic sphere vis-à-vis nominated competitors; it suggests a greater level of domestic state action. Assuming compulsion or manipulation are likely to be ineffective, the issue becomes one of persuasion or consensus building, each of which implies significant change in both elite thinking and Whitehall/Westminster attitudes, with a shift from elite-specified manipulation to popular engagement as with the Covid-19 restrictions.31 Britain: Formal Withdrawal from the European Region The dissolution of the British state-empire in the years following the Second World War saw the elite re-invent themselves and their polity as a long-established successful nation-state. The subaltern population

31 Recall Winch on ‘germ theory’—once understood, action follows automatically; P. Winch 1958/1990 2nd ed. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London, Routledge.

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was presented with top-down sponsored welfare, thereafter, buttressed in the fifties with a first experience of consumerism. After some hesitations the elite opted to join the European Union. Britain has now been a member of this organization for some forty years—however, there has always been an undercurrent of elite displeasure and the wider population has shown no great enthusiasm for the project except insofar as it offers further opportunities for consumption. The crises of the early years of the twenty-first century have provided a vehicle for long-disregarded sectional elite and popular displeasure with the European Union to find expression and the opportunity was provided by the 2016 referendum—intended, it would seem, by Mr. Cameron to settle the issue of Europe, it has, instead opened up a mare’s nest of questions; the result has not merely called into question membership of the European Union, it has also opened up long-neglected debates about the future of the political–cultural project of Britain. The sequence of crises that have engulfed the British state/government has opened up issues of the long-term development of the polity. The reforms of the late forties created a welfare state, which has been wound back in part by recent decades of neo-liberal policy, but they did not address the nature of the political structure and so the system survived; the elite was able to finesse the crisis of the collapse of empire but the run of recent crisis reopens this issue. First, externally, changes in the global system point to a new concern for resilience—power shifting to the state—the character of domestic economy now read in part as a security issue (not just freely functioning liberal market).32 Second, domestically, the limitations of the Whitehall/Westminster apparatus have been made clear. Both matters point in the direction of democratization; not a panacea, but perhaps a contribution to a progressive future.

Contemporary Britain: Sketching a Possible Future---Democracy, Modernity and Europe The business of state/government adjustment to shifting structural circumstances has received attention; hence, some recent slogans: ‘Global Britain’ or ‘Making Brexit Work’. The withdrawal from European Union

32 Selling off ARM was greeted as evidence of ‘investor’s confidence in Britain’—it now looks like an absurd surrender of a valuable tech company.

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has captured elite and popular attention and particular concern has been shown for the economic performance of the country; but there have been criticisms of this narrow focus. It has been suggested that trade can and should be set to one side as it is not likely to be a problem and, in any case, there are other issues to discuss33 ; here, the three interrelated ideas of democratization, modernization and Europeanization. A simple historical development trajectory can be sketched for Britain, the process whereby the country shifted into the modern world, and in very rough outline this involves a movement from absolutism, to union, to empire and then post-1945 to a long period of elite-resisted decline. Thus, in 1707 England and Scotland agree the Treaty of Union; a common marketplace is created within the British Isles and this process coincides with the early phases of the emergence of the modern world of natural science-based industrial capitalism. The upshot is that the Union enjoys general prosperity and as shifting circumstances direct the elite’s attention outwards, a British state-empire system is created. But tensions are built into the system; with problems in both core and peripheral areas. Thus, the British compete with other empires—Dutch, French, German34 —and there is resistance to British rule from within the newly created empire territories. The Second World War finally destroys the British empire, leading to peripheral independence in the form of new states, together with a process of core re-definition. The British elite re-invent themselves. Britain is presented as a long-established nationstate, victor in a morally correct war and something of a model for other nations; the sometime state-empire is dismissed, the peripheral territories never counted for much and in any case have been granted independence. Commentaries on the political-institutional condition of contemporary Britain are now a commonplace in newspapers, scholarly journals, think-tanks and so on and they fall into two broad streams: on the one hand, those supportive of reformist policy advice, and, on the other, those turned towards critical diagnoses of the need for structural change. The

33 D. Edgerton, writing in The Guardian, January 26, 2023—new agenda needed. 34 Empires more generally—Czarist, Hapsburg, Ottoman are undermined by the Great

war—further afield, the Qing Empire disintegrates through nineteenth century as the power of Imperial Japan grows—a clash with the USA sees that empire destroyed, at the same time the territories of the Qing are reconstituted as the PRC—to the chagrin of the USA—the latest quasi-empire collapse was in Eastern Europe in the period 1989/ 91—leaving the USA and PRC to manage their relationship.

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latter assert that structural change is a necessary condition of any reform programme; here, three interlinked issues: first, democracy and democratization; second, modernity and modernization; and lastly, third, Europe and Europeanization. Democracy and Democratization In the British variant of liberal democracy the idea of democracy plays two key roles: first, it is central to a broad spread of ideas35 —parliament, public, individual, law, rights and elections—which together offer a general characterization of ‘democracy in Britain’; and then second, more directly, it is linked to the practice of competitive party elections. And here the idea of elections also serves multiple purposes. The idea has an ideological purpose insofar as it reassures the population that they have a legitimate government and their voice is heard, that is, a duly elected parliament is representative. However, the representative36 has a double meaning: (i) representing in parliament the diverse concerns of the population such that conflicts can be resolved (consensus building); and (ii) representing via parliament the wishes of the subaltern classes to the ruling elite (petitioning). In Britain, democracy runs down the second line.37 Nonetheless, the idea of elections serves to legitimate the system. And, at the same time, the procedure of elections is a way of recruiting the small number of formal position holders needed to staff the established state/government machinery.38 In Britain, calls for change are directed to non-system threatening procedural amendments. Hence, there are arguments about narrow electoral organization (thus, arguments about constituency boundaries); or arguments about voting procedures (thus, use of photo ID when voting); or arguments about election expenditures; or arguments about the role of

35 Great Tradition Ideas—unpacked and reworked as aspects of popular Little Tradition—see P.W. Preston 1994 Europe, Democracy and the Dissolution of Britain, Aldershot, Avebury, pp. 20–29. 36 This point from Runciman in LRB. 37 Nairn-Anderson—an early bourgeois revolution put the landed classes in the political

driving seat and mass involvement was not wanted but it was slowly accommodated whilst the old regime successfully defended its position. 38 A political ‘Cabinet’—a couple of dozen people—interacting with the elite level civil servants

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party grass roots, or arguments about gender balances—and so on.39 Plus, there is extensive commentary based on the data of elections.40 Commentators have seen the USA as an exemplary model and US think-tanks such as Freedom House have provided extensive research.41 These types of procedural-type criticisms are routine, but more thoroughgoing critical work is less familiar. More critical work is available, taken from political philosophy. And in this type of work, crucially, ‘liberalism’ is not taken to be the same as ‘democracy’, and, further, it has been argued that any attempt to fuse them together as ‘liberal-democracy’ does not work.42 So, in brief, the notion of democracy needs to be unpacked: first, as philosophy, then second, as institution and finally, third, in historically realized practice— and at that point it makes sense to return to substantive enquiry in respect of whatever polity is at issue. (i) Democracy as concept The idea is used within political philosophy43 ; it serves to grasp the relationship of members of society to the means whereby decisions about that society are made. Cast in terms of the unfolding shift to the modern world, in Britain, there are two broad intellectual traditions, accessible via history of ideas. Thus, first, liberalism: the tradition begins in the era of the English Civil War with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke who are concerned with the urgent issue of the nature of political order. In both cases the key is found in actors (agents) who seek their own goals or act within family units. Then relations with others are essentially instrumental. The social world is a network of contracts and role of the state is to enforce law. Then, second, democracy: the tradition begins in the optimistic era of the eighteenth-century enlightenment with Emile Rousseau, Tom Paine and others and finds exemplification in the revolutions in 39 For examples, see editions of Political Quarterly or the commentaries published online by scholars at the London School of Economics. 40 On this type of commentary, see John Curtice. 41 Colin Hay 1999 The Political Economy of New Labour, Manchester University Press. 42 C.B. Macpherson 1973 Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford University

Press. 43 A survey of the concept is available on Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

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France and the USA; the former pursued, the latter redirected in the context of a more or less empty continent towards Lockean liberalism. But in this democratic tradition, enquiry is concerned with the creative possibilities of fully social human beings—no longer read as fundamentally asocial, rather, the social nature of humankind is the starting point and so a form of political life is imagined that will both draw in people and facilitate their creative lives as citizens. In Britain, these lines of reflection continue (along with action, institution building and rhetorical debate): in the case of liberalism, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham and Mill—in political science post-war, it finds expression as pluralism—in Britain, post-1979 it found formal expression in the work of the New Right—ideas that run down to the early 2020s; and in the case of democracy, work from the Levellers, Tom Paine, Marx, leftcritics of ‘labourism’ and recently the critical work associated with the Frankfurt School. Clearly, much more could be said,44 but the broad distinction helps orient more substantive debates.45 The particular reading of the notion of democracy affirmed in the present text runs three main lines of argument.46 First, that liberalism and democracy are separate concepts. The former looking to individuals in pursuit of their own autonomously arising goals, their realization in the context of other individuals creating a social world understood as a dense network of contracts, finally underpinned by a body of law grounded in power. With the latter looking to persons lodged within the social world, a social world itself lodged within an historically rich culture, where individuals and groups can rationally order their social worlds, with these relationships formally underpinned by law which is finally secured

44 David Held 1987 Models of Democracy, Cambridge, Polity. 45 There are a trio of authors which this writer has found most useful—these three

recall a biographical route into these discussions—joining in—MacIntyre offers a critique of liberalism as a failed attempt to deal with the collapse of religious ethics—advocates recovery of ‘virtue’—right-living in community—Macpherson offers a critique of liberalism—possessive individualism—aims to maximize freedom from constraint—but such constraint is part and parcel of social life—democracy aims to maximize creative autonomy—Habermas offers a critique of impact of system on lifeworld—a reconstructed public sphere is a goal—a route towards a democratic polity. 46 These ideas have been pursued in other work—see P.W. Preston 2009 Arguments and Actions in Social Theory, London, Palgrave, chapter 4; key figures are C.B. Macpherson, K. Marx and the theorists of the later Frankfurt School plus A. MacIntyre.

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in deliberation. Second, that all political theories affirm directly or indirectly models of humankind.47 In the case of liberalism, persons seek to satisfy their own needs and others are either a help or an hinderance. In the contemporary world the model reduces persons to consumers. But an alternative is available within the democratic line. The humanist Marxist line develops the critical idea of alienation around the image of creative labour; in the terms of fine art, ‘the work of Monet’, here the term ‘work’ denotes creative human labour. Third, that humankind everywhere and always dwells within particular communities which are inevitably the immediate context for individual social life. It is within the ambit of community that cultural traditions have effect and ethics are shaped and work; liberal individualism seeks to deny this context in favour of a social individuals making contracts, but the communitarian line looks instead to relations between good citizens. (ii) Democracy as institution The idea is used in political theory; it serves to grasp the logic the institutional machinery of a modern state: the manner in which functionaries are recruited; the distribution of power within the machinery; and the relation of the state/government machinery to the wider population. The key questions revolve around the nature of access to the machinery (open or closed), the manner of decision making within the machinery (transparent or opaque) and the possibilities of adjusting the machinery (resistant or accommodative). The relationship of these governance machineries to the wider civil society is also considered; whether or not citizens have a means to influence the work of decision makers. Jurgen Habermas has looked at the circumstances of aspirations to democratic citizenship in contemporary European society; Habermas identifies a tension between the demands of ‘the system’ and the requirements of ‘the life-world’. The unrelenting drive to ever greater efficiency in the system, the natural science-based industrial capitalist political economy, places ever greater burdens on the realms of ordinary life. Habermas proposes a re-balancing; citizens in the polity must find a way to assert their needs over against the demands of the system. Habermas finds a clue to a possible mechanism in the idea of ‘open dialogue’, 47 M. Hollis 1977 Models of Man, Cambridge University Press.

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grounded in the intrinsic truth-affirming nature of human language, which could feed a process of the ‘reconstruction of the public sphere’; it is a programme for institutional reform in the service of the ideal of democracy.48 (iii) Democracy as a contingent historical achievement Historical sociology49 looks to lodge any polity within its historical context, domestic and international; the particular character of a polity will be determined by the local dynamic of structures and agents,50 so that the nature of any polity is contingent.51 And within this dynamic, the polity will create a particular form of state/government. Over time the polity will sketch out an historical development trajectory and this trajectory can be investigated: ‘democracy’ is not a simple given, nor is it in any sense obvious, it becomes a contingent historical achievement, its role in political life, an ‘active utopia’.52 In any polity, elites pursue goals and their records can be investigated. If democracy is a claimed condition or specified goal, then the performance of the country can be judged: first in line with local declarations, the claims that a polity makes for itself, then second in comparative philosophical terms, how the polity might be appraised in a wider considered scholarly perspective.53 As the global system comprises multiple discrete state trajectories, so it contains multiple political formations. So, there could be variants of the idea of democracy (and variant forms of

48 J. Habermas 1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Polity. 49 Classic text is B. Moore Jr. 1966 The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Harmondsworth, Penguin. 50 For the sociology, Anthony Giddens; for the IPE, Susan Strange—at back of both, Marx and the notion of historical materialism. 51 On contingency, R. Rorty 1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press. 52 Borrowed from Z. Bauman writing on socialism, Z. Bauman 1976 Socialism, the Active Utopia, London, Allen and Unwin. 53 On Southeast Asia, see William Case 2002 Politics in Southeast Asia: Democracy or Less, London, Curzon.

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liberalism) and thereafter, a multiplicity of other forms—assorted dictatorships, theocracies, gangster states or narco states, failed states and so on. As regards the idea of democratization, in Britain power is concentrated and elections are in significant measure simply ritual. The situation reflects the route into the modern world taken by the polity: structural pressures embraced but turned outwards to empire54 ; domestic political reform has been piecemeal (thus ‘Nairn-Anderson’ thesis) and whilst postSecond World War reforms drew in working classes, more recently the neo-liberal era has shifted many decisions away from any public democratic scrutiny into quasi markets such as the privatized utilities or the corporate sector; politically, Britain looks like a ‘soft oligarchy’. An agenda for democratization can be assembled55 : decentralization to create new centres of power outside London; the transfer of tax-raising powers from London to new centres; the reform of systems of popular involvement so as to draw in more people; the regulation of media ownership and practice56 so as to encourage the creation of an effective public sphere. At the centre critics have diagnosed an oligarchic form of government, others have spoked sarcastically of a ‘chum-ocracy’.57 More critically, at the centre David Marquand58 diagnosed the need for a British developmental state—that is, an institutional set-up that draws people in so as to create an agreed vision of future for the community. In the meantime, more narrowly focused suggestions look to the voting system—FPTP—Britain is the only country in Europe to use this system. It is routinely criticized as systemically corrupt in the sense that it produces absurd results with parties enjoying large parliamentary majorities on small percentages of the popular vote; that being so, it might also

54 L. Colley 55 Multiple readily available solutions—key, however, is the mechanism. 56 A vast and very difficult issue: thus, in the UK, domestic broadcast is regulated,

print much less so and the trans-state online world seemingly hardly at all—see John Naughton in the Observer March 11, 2023 on the degradation of its promise, a process of ‘enshittification’; on all this, P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire, London, Palgrave, chapter 9 ‘Amongst the bullshit Industries’. 57 See for example Bagehot column in the Economist, December 22, 2018. 58 See for example, D. Marquand 1988 The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana;

see also the journalism of Will Hutton.

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be systematically corrupt, in the sense that both main parties know it is flawed but keep it because it serves their narrow party interests. Modernity and Modernization Modernity can be understood as the cultural condition of today’s world of natural science based industrial capitalism; thus, sceptical, irreligious, forward looking.59 In respect of modernization, the broad business of upgrading, two broad issue areas might be cited: official ideologies and patterns of administration. In regard to the former the impact of the package of ideas summed as ‘Continuing Britain’ encourages hubristic posturing (thus, claims to be ‘punching above our weight’, or joining in America’s wars, or more recently joining Aukus60 ) and misdirects comparative analysis so that the polities of mainland European neighbours are not routinely cited as exemplars, rather the metropolitan elite looks to the USA.61 In regard to the latter, Britain is one of the richest countries on the planet however, key social organizations are falling behind plausible mainland comparators. By way of a number of simple examples: social welfare (inequality is rising); demographics (percentage of old is rising); health services (underfunded and overburdened); transport facilities (stressed); utilities (privatized, stressed); education (uneven provision, teachers stressed). An agenda for modernization can be assembled: state infrastructure spending raised; state R&D spending raised; coupled to dispersal of state functions (shift from London); dispersal of state tax-raising powers (from central Exchequer to regions and cities); plus, routine localization of state purchasing. Europe and Europeanization In the debates about Brexit a distinction was drawn between the European Union and Europe; the one pointing to a bureaucratically ordered trading area, the other to a two-thousand year old culture, embracing 59 Peter Gay 2008 Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, New York, Norton. 60 A deal linking USA, UK and Australia—aiming to deploy nuclear submarines in the

Asia–Pacific area—aimed at China, which, predictably, objects—see Amy Hawkins in the Guardian, March 14, 2023. 61 Hay 1999.

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multiple local forms of life. The deeper unity of the resultant cultural tradition can be illustrated in the arts, with both Kenneth Clark and Robert Hughes tracking a rich and diverse achievement. Europe, in this richer sense, offers a wealth of opportunities for judicious borrowing, for picking up and utilizing best practice, or, put another way, various strategies for ‘joining in and catching up’. In this sense, Europeanization, in respect of upgrading politics and modernizing social/economic issues, points to learning from Europe. An agenda for Europeanization can be assembled62 ; copy mainland best practice, thus, by way of a casual list: German mittelstand businesses, German technical school system, German pattern of dispersed cities (no equivalent primate city such as London), French indicative planning system, French administrative universities, Nordic social care, Dutch euthanasia law, Portuguese recreational drug policy, plus a domestic educational policy of universal multi-lingualism; language as access to Europe. Principle, Pragmatism and Opportunism It could be argued that elite political agents only act when three sets of circumstances are aligned: principle, that is, what ought to be done (established by reasons or ideologies or ethics); pragmatism, that is, what could be done (established by characterizing contingent circumstances); and opportunism, that is, what can be gained (established by judging how events might unfold and whether the group to which agent belongs will prosper [and whether opponents will be damaged]). So, for example, Mrs. May called an election in June 2017 (principle, having a direct personal mandate, pragmatism, if there ought to be an election, then now is a good time so that it is out of the way in the context of Brexit talks, and opportunism, now is an especially good time as Labour are in a mess and opinion polls suggest that they would lose many votes and seats in a general election). Unfortunately for Mrs. May, events did not unfold as anticipated as she lost her parliamentary majority when support for Mr. Corbyn and the Labour Party rose sharply.

62 All these points—and many others—have been made many times in commentary; in summary form Marquand offered Germany as a model; Marquand, D. 1988 The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana.

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Acting in line with the trio of lines of reform to Britain noted above would require a quite remarkable set of propitious circumstances to fall into alignment and the chances are vanishingly slight; there is no sign in Whitehall/Westminster of any interest in meaningful democratic reform that is, redistributing power within Britain.63 The ruling elite are secure, they are wealthy,64 the population is acquiescent. It is difficult to see the elite promoting agendas of change; the future seems to be one of slow relative decline, fine for the elite, comfortable for most.

63 Even relatively minor changes, such as to electoral law, do not find favour—opinion within Whitehall/Westminster seems to have been slanted against change—the 2011 referendum on electoral reform was widely seen as a sectional party political cause for Liberal-Democrats—it was rejected by 68/32—on a low 40s turnout. 64 Caroline Knowles 2022 Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, London, Allen Lane.

Afterword

Reviewing the period of crisis offers a few impressions—informal summaries—problems arrive and accumulate and the state/government seems surprised each time; responses are made but they are made ad hoc and there is little sign of pre-planning; banks fail, migrants arrive unexpectedly, disease strikes and all seemingly take the state/government by surprise. Amongst the wider community, popular responses encompass a range of responses; shock at the bank failures, surprise at state support as an hitherto unavailable magic money tree suddenly appears; disquiet at the arrival of migrants, some advertise their doubts, others are apparently utopian, welcome all. Brexit is a popular revolt. But the disease gets a different response as authoritative figures with claims based in natural science are accorded a hearing but politicians again dismissed. The war in Ukraine is different again; the state/government embraces the war, the response is clear, but where there is popular sympathy for Ukraine initial response wanes and the war drops out of regular media reportage. In a little more detail, it is clear that over recent years have seen the British state/government embroiled in a run of crises and whilst it might be that these are un-related events, it seems more plausible to treat them as interrelated and attempt to unpack the common factors, offering thereby something of an explanation. The 2008 financial crisis most directly involved both American and European banks. The problems first emerged in Wall Street and the City

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5

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of London whilst later similar problems were found in mainland European banks: excessive debt formation; over-reliance on highly technical debt/insurance instruments—all permitted by lax regulation. The banks were bailed out by their domestic state machines at which point further problems emerged. These state bailouts (loans or nationalization) transferred private debts onto the public accounts and some states could not carry such debts and for a time members of the euro currency area lacked a functioning equivalent to a state bank, they had no lender of last resort, delaying responses. In Britain, as elsewhere, the transfer of debts onto the books of the state produced demands for expenditure cut-backs from the money markets worried about the state servicing the now much larger sovereign debts. In Britain, the ordinary public looked on bemused: banks were supposed to be safe, bankers were supposed to be sensible but, it seemed, they were both collectively incompetent and safe from any retribution for their collective errors, which now impacted a wider population subject to policies of austerity. The crisis undermined the claims to the preeminence of the private sector; it undermined trust in the competence of elite players; it also deepened inequalities within society; and the divide between elite and mass was made clear. The 2015 migration crisis underscored the limited organizational reach of the British state/government. The main line of migration flowed from the Arab Middle East, via the Balkans and into Northern Europe, in particular Germany; other routes fed migrants into Italy and Spain. In Britain, these flows made little direct difference as the migrant flows into the Britain was largely legal, mostly from sometime colonies and from mainland Europe, the EU,1 but as numbers rose they rekindled anxieties from earlier periods. Overt racism had been brought under control with legislation but latent prejudice conjoined with structural racism and illustrated by occasional particularly woeful cases in the media,2 made the flow of inward migration potentially politically toxic.

1 Viewed by the majority somewhat uneasily—comments on ‘Polish plumbers’questions about imported labour in agricultural East Anglia—questions about ‘gang masters’—novel issues, picked up in the press. 2 Police behaviour in regard to Stephen Lawrence or deaths of black men (see Forensic Architecture)—or Bristol and the statue of Colston, thrown into the harbour.

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Again, sections of the population looked at the elite askance,3 attitudes which many commentators argued fed into the leave vote in the EU referendum where ‘taking back control’ was read as applying to Brussels and—sotto voce—to migrants-in-general. These responses along with many long-simmering tensions came to the political surface in the 2016 referendum when, commentators suggested, the binary vote sharpened their expression; thus, the loss of trust in the state/government, perhaps more specifically, the public face of these organizations, namely parliamentarians; likewise, those experts who had served the remain campaign, tagged ‘project fear’, read, accurately enough, as manipulative in intent.4 That same scepticism in regard to elites was evident in the general publics’ response to the Covid-19 epidemic: the elite were taken to have been slow to respond; unable to deal with crisis as it impacted care homes; overly relaxed about making emergency contracts for health equipment and broadly, not to be trusted. But here there were novelties, when, in nightly television updates, political figures were flanked by medical scientists. There were also extensive reports on the efforts of research scientists to produce a vaccine; the population was persuaded, they complied; the reasoning was preferred to manipulation. Finally, the sum of all failures, so to say, was visible in the state/ government’s response to fighting in the Donbass and whilst this was, in itself, a deeply regrettable episode, occasioned by local ethnic nationalisms supplemented by outside interference, it offered no plausible security threat to Britain. Nonetheless, the local elite chose to become involved, offering diplomatic, financial and military assistance, whilst advertising loudly in the domestic media their aid to Kiev and their consequently renewed,5 upgraded6 and continuing7 international status.

3 Data—population in 1950 around 50 million—population in 2023 around 65 million—one women noted the change in her area of Lancashire talking with Gordon Brown—later overheard labelling her a ‘bigot’—he went back and apologized. 4 Cutting into the episode in a different fashion—the vote also showed clear regional patterns—in England, key urban centres voted to remain, whilst small towns, suburbs and rural areas generally voted leave—on the data—see M. Sobolewska and R. Ford 2020 Brexitland, Cambridge University Press. 5 After episodes in Arab Middle East. 6 Post Brexit attempts at recovering status amongst EU members—citing NATO 7 From ‘continuing Britain’ to ‘global Britain’—an enduring status claim.

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The run of intermingled crises was linked: politically, the ideological commitments of the governments of the day were pro-market, disposing core machinery government to a hands-off stance; institutionally, responses were slow, years of market-celebration had dimmed the collective intellect of the machinery; and organisationally, plans were lacking, action was often ad hoc; with the upshot that socially, there was an unequal distribution of policy-mediated impacts through society.

********* The run of crises signals the end of two claims recently influential amongst Western commentators. The overarching official ideology favouring the neo-liberal marketplace is now rejected; shrinking the state has not resulted in a better marketplace (rather, there has been a slow falling away of British economic performance measured against mainland peers); shrinking the state has not been evidenced by less ‘red-tape’ or ‘bureaucratic interference’, rather, the capacity of the machineries of the state to deliver on public expectations or the specific claims of politicians has been reduced; and the claim that the rising neo-liberal tide would lift all boats has been shown to be untenable; inequality and insecurity amongst the wider population have increased. Globalization is no longer routinely affirmed by agents of the state; the mood music has changed: resilience (plus disengaging from Russia and China); on-shoring (moving manufacturing capacity back to homeland); state-led investment programmes (building domestic manufacturing capacity); state-led drives for domestic security (vetting outbound and inbound investment). The period has also seen an unexpected illustration of the limited reach of the idea of the West; routinely presented as universal, responses to the war in the Donbass have shown this is not the case. Expectations of universal condemnation have not been met, rather, China, India and most of the Global South have seen the war as a primarily European issue, not one with which they must engage.

*********

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Reading and reacting to the unfolding general crisis will require extant elites to be imaginative and politically nimble. The domestic elite is made up of shifting networks of players—corporate—financial—administrative (Whitehall)—parliamentary (Cabinet) -juridical (law)—military— monarchy—it is a relatively closed group—but it is not hermetically sealed—subaltern players can access it—in all this competitive elections to parliament serve to engender popular legitimacy8 —the monarchy which serves as an ideological cap-stone of the system9 —it is best characterized as a ‘soft-oligarchy’—this elite interacts with global flows of power—it is a membrane—it manages the ways in which trans-state structures of power run through the domestic domain. The elite have proved adept at sustaining their position. The elite finessed the crisis of the collapse of state-empire system by relinquishing peripheral empire holdings whilst reinventing the now much reduced metropolitan core as a long-established sovereign nation-state; the idea of Continuing Britain. It was successful. The elite finessed a further crisis as the post-Second World War settlement failed and, as before, the response was creative and future-oriented; neo-liberal globalization. It was successful. The recent run of particular crises from 2008 to 2022 can be read as a further, more general crisis—it clearly involves Britain, it has a domestic aspect, but it also finds a more general variant in the circumstances of the West—in both cases—the end of neo-liberal globalization and the end of claims to unquestioned global pre-eminence. At the time of writing, it is not clear how the elite will react. The line to the future for the British polity is unclear—but scenarios can be mooted—earlier arguments can be recalled. An earlier text10 offered these summary comments along with alternative scenarios. It was noted that Britain had a powerful elite but it was also noted that the historical shock of 1989/91 would require a response. The text posited the EU as obvious route forwards and then noted elite responses:

8 A. King and I. Crewe 2014 The Blunders of Our Governments, London, Oneworld, observe that parliament ‘…might as well not exist’, p. 361. 9 Tom Nairn. 10 P.W. Preston 2004 Relocating England: Englishness in the New Europe, Manchester

University Press, pp. 172–73; pp. 198–99.

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(i) deepen links with USA—or, more dramatically, renegotiate links with EU (ii) deepen links with EU—core domestic elite should end vacillation and commit (iii) Europe is inevitable—question becomes the nature of any accommodation (iv) Europe has its own logic—it is not dependent on Britain—but EU future also cloudy A further text11 returned to these themes. Once again, the presence of a powerful entrenched elite was acknowledged but nonetheless it was argued that there were pressures for change—international (shifting power relations) and domestic (peripheral nationalism, local pressure groups and so on). Three broad scenarios were offered: (i) affirming the status quo • the core elite manage change—minimal change—ad hoc adjustments • deeper engagement with USA—elite content—little change implied • reinventing the past—change in Europe, British independent agents—modestly, EFTA II12 (ii) muddle through • status quo evolution—low-level realism points to using inherited linkages with global system and London’s continuing significance (finance, City of London; diplomacy, UN security council; culture, English as a world language) (iii) Europe option • elite change of heart is unlikely so more foot-dragging • utopian idea—miscellaneous comparisons with mainland feed domestic reforms

11 P.W. Preston 2014 Britain After Empire: Constructing a Post-War Political Cultural Project, London, Palgrave, pp. 211–17. 12 UKIP and referendum and withdrawal were not considered.

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Reviewing the whole period 2008–2022 there seems to be no reason to radically change these options. The elite is solidly established: it is internationally well placed (global structures of power13 ); it is domestically well placed (the institutional machinery of the state has been crafted over many years14 ); it is secure ideologically/culturally (the elite has created an elaborate set of justificatory ideas15 ). And for the mass of the population routine politico-cultural ideas signal deference, not rebellion.16 The current domestic social world is non-threatening; the rewards are material, with elaborate schedules of consumption; the rewards are social, with extensive welfare provision serving to buttress the intimate sphere of private life amongst family and friends; the rewards are cultural, all the intellectual, creative benefits of living in a rich country. So, the future would seem to be slow, mostly comfortable, relative decline.

13 Susan Strange 1988 States and Markets, London, Pinter. 14 Slow accumulative development of core state machineries—Nairn/Anderson. 15 P.W. Preston 1997 Political/Cultural Identity: Citizens and Nations in a Global Era, London, Sage. 16 An early discussion, Frank Parkin 1972 Class Inequality and Political Order, London, Palladin.

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Index

A Ackroyd, P., 207 Act of Union 1801, 194 Advertising, 56, 119, 120, 245 Africa, 28, 41, 87, 92, 94, 95, 214 Alibhai-Brown, Y., 213 Ali, M., 214 America, 3, 9, 16, 19, 21, 24, 47, 52, 61, 72, 73, 76, 86, 87, 162, 184, 240 American War of Independence, 18 Anderson, H., 213 Arab world, 3, 99 Aron, R., 223 Article 50, 56, 123, 124, 126, 142, 219 Artists, 18, 201, 203, 211, 213, 216 Arts and Crafts, 211 Assimilation, 27, 28, 96, 101–103 Asylum, 54, 94, 97, 98, 100, 114 Atlee, C., 24, 29, 36 Austerity, 8, 36, 53, 54, 61, 67–69, 77–79, 104, 113, 114, 135, 140, 147, 148, 152, 244

B Bail-out, 65, 140, 223 Bank, 2, 7, 9, 11, 15, 32, 34, 52, 53, 65, 67, 68, 70–74, 78–80, 113, 114, 121, 122, 162, 165, 175, 180, 187, 243, 244 Barnett, A., 3, 120, 136, 139, 191, 215 Barnett, C., 15, 30 Bauman, Z., 238 BBC News Online, 128, 129, 155 Beveridge, W., 29 Big-bang, 226 Black Arts Movement, 28, 34, 213 Bloomsbury, 211 Boundaries, 17, 25–27, 29, 46, 55, 186, 234 Brexit crisis, 35, 55 Britain, 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16–20, 22, 24–26, 28, 32–34, 36, 37, 41, 45–47, 52, 53, 60, 61, 66–69, 72–75, 77–79, 96, 99–101, 104–106, 110, 115–121, 126, 130, 134, 140, 141, 144, 146,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. W. Preston, Britain After the Five Crises, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43650-5

261

262

INDEX

148, 150, 152–154, 160, 164, 165, 167, 169, 172, 174, 192, 193, 195–203, 209, 210, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228, 232–236, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248 British, 1–4, 6, 9, 10, 13–16, 18–23, 25–29, 32, 34–37, 46, 47, 55, 60, 62, 68, 71, 74, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 117, 119–123, 125, 126, 133, 134, 136, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 162, 165, 168, 171, 173, 185–187, 194, 195, 198–201, 203, 210, 215–218, 220, 224, 226, 228, 231–234, 239, 243, 244, 246–248 British Empire, 9, 14, 18–20, 25, 26, 33, 36, 47, 60, 192, 195, 197, 199–201, 215, 233 British Nationality Act, 27, 28 Brown, A., 43, 50, 171, 177 Brussels, 3, 28, 39, 43, 44, 50, 53, 56–63, 77, 95, 97–99, 101, 104, 110, 111, 119, 123–131, 133, 142, 159, 171, 172, 174, 185, 188, 230, 245 C Callaghan, J., 15, 66, 227 Cameron, David, 3, 29, 61, 118, 123, 130, 134, 187, 218, 228, 232 Care home, 8, 143, 151, 152, 154, 157, 160–162, 164, 168, 195, 245 Case, W., 11, 238 Casino banking, 71, 73, 80 Causey, A., 203 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 4, 49, 51, 55, 57, 63, 84, 89, 115, 177, 178, 180–182, 185, 214, 215, 230

Central bank, 11, 53, 74, 78, 113, 159, 180 Chartism, 201 China, 10, 14, 19, 21–23, 30, 42, 45, 68, 71, 77, 86, 90, 93, 100, 134, 144, 149, 167, 168, 181, 182, 185, 187–189, 222, 223, 240, 246 Chinese Civil War, 22 Chinese Revolution, 22, 42 Citizens, 25, 27, 28, 54, 72, 95, 98, 103, 104, 108, 113, 138, 153, 158, 168, 182, 229, 236, 237 City of London, 61, 67, 70–72, 74, 118, 187, 244, 248 Civil servants, 11, 73, 234 Clark. K., 59, 140, 201, 241 Clark, T.J., 209 Cold War, 5, 23, 30, 43, 47–51, 63, 92–94, 103, 104, 112, 167, 175–177, 185, 188, 189, 220, 222, 224 Colley, L., 17, 18, 26, 87, 195, 197, 200, 203, 210, 215, 216, 239 Colonies, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 27, 87, 96, 244 Command economy, 175 Common European home, 178, 181 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 28 Commonwealth of Nations, 31 Congress, 23 Conservative Party, 3, 4, 11, 15, 29, 61, 76, 106, 124–126, 128, 129, 132, 148, 207, 219 Consolidation state, 77 Constable, J., 204, 209, 214 Constitutions, 26, 58 Contact tracing, 145, 146, 150, 166 Continuing Britain, 13, 17, 23, 31, 32, 34, 37, 47, 60, 198, 199, 202, 218, 240, 245, 247

INDEX

D D’ Anieri, P., 179, 180 Darwin, J., 16, 17, 19, 88, 197 Davies, N., 16–19, 22, 40, 48, 49, 59, 170, 179, 186, 192, 199–201 Davies, T., 207 Declaration of Arbroath, 195 De-globalization, 11, 186, 217 Democratization, 10–12, 50, 134, 135, 140, 141, 176, 219, 232–234, 239 Denmark, 102, 103, 106, 108 Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), 154–157 Dominions, 16 Dublin Regulations, 98

E Eastern bloc, 172–175, 181, 214 Edgerton, D., 14, 15, 18, 30, 34, 47, 208, 209, 225, 233 Efficient markets, 2, 52, 70, 73 Elite, 2–8, 10–26, 31, 32, 34–37, 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 54, 56, 60, 62, 69, 73–77, 80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 93, 100, 103, 104, 107, 109, 112, 114–119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 134, 135, 137, 139–142, 150, 162, 164, 166, 169, 171–175, 177–180, 183, 187, 192, 194, 197–202, 210, 212, 215–219, 221, 228–234, 238, 240–242, 244, 245, 247–249 Empire Windrush, 27 End of history, 6, 9, 65, 67, 186, 222 England England-without-London, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 191, 215 English, 3, 107, 118, 119, 136, 140, 193, 194, 196, 198–201,

263

204–206, 210, 211, 215, 216, 248 Europe, 2–5, 8–10, 16, 18 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), 98 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 57–59, 98, 99 European Union (EU), 3, 28, 39, 40, 43, 49, 50, 53–55, 57–59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 77, 84, 85, 95, 96, 98–100, 103–109, 112–115, 117–121, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 140, 142, 159, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180–182, 184, 187, 195, 214, 218, 220, 222, 223, 230–232, 240 Excess deaths, 4, 153, 155–159, 219

F Fianna Fail, 194 Financial crisis, 1, 6–8, 11, 34, 35, 52, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 113, 135, 187, 191, 223, 228, 230, 243 Financialization, 74 Fine Gael, 195 Form of life, 41, 44 Fortuyn, P., 96 Foster, N., 209 Freidman, T., 6 Fukuyama, F., 6, 227

G Gaelic Revival, 194 Galbraith, J.K., 10, 69, 225 Gasping-Anderson, G., 222 German reunification, 178 Germany, 41, 42, 45–48, 50, 51, 83, 84, 87, 96, 97, 100, 104, 106–110, 113, 114, 122, 141,

264

INDEX

148, 154, 155, 158, 170, 178, 187, 188, 211, 230, 241, 244 Globalization, 1, 5, 6, 9, 13, 16, 34, 35, 65, 67, 70, 73, 121, 137, 139, 186, 207, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 246, 247 Global South, 10, 88, 100, 182, 188, 246 Good Friday Agreement, 194 Goodhart, D., 134, 135, 139, 140, 229 Gorbachev, M., 43, 50, 174–178, 181 Government, 1–12, 15, 24, 26, 30, 33–36, 39, 46, 47, 52, 53, 56, 58, 60–62, 65–78, 80, 84, 90, 103–109, 111–113, 119, 125, 126, 128–130, 135, 139, 143–152, 157, 158, 161–168, 171, 177, 179, 185, 186, 192, 194, 196, 197, 218, 219, 225–228, 232, 234, 237–239, 243–246 Great War, 45, 47–49, 193, 203, 233 Greece, 16, 40, 49, 61, 72, 83, 84, 86, 95, 97, 104, 106–108, 113, 114 H Hadid, Z., 209 Hall, S., 28, 34, 66, 227 Hampshire, J., 98–101 Harris, A., 46, 203, 211 Hayward Gallery, 213 Held, D., 236 Hennessy, P., 209 Herd immunity, 4, 7, 145, 146, 148, 158, 161 Himid, L., 34, 213 Hirst, P., 6, 222 Hitchcock, W.I., 92 Hockney, D., 204, 205 Hoggart, R., 16, 207, 209

Home Rule League, 194 Hong Kong, 19, 23, 27, 29, 30, 90, 93, 154, 197 Horspool, M., 57, 58, 132 Hubei Province, 144 Hubris, 189 Hughes, R., 87, 201, 204, 205, 211, 241

I Identity, 3, 19, 28, 31, 37, 85, 102, 116, 118, 138–140, 171, 178, 179, 191, 192, 198, 200, 201, 213 Immigration Act, 28 India, 10, 14, 16, 21, 23, 32, 90, 182, 224, 246 Industrial England, 192, 199, 201, 208 Inequality, 8, 36, 69, 79, 135, 137, 141, 218, 240, 244, 246 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), 213 Institution, 197, 235, 236 Integration, 7, 27, 70, 101–103, 114, 140, 171, 212, 214, 220, 223 International organisation (IO), 85, 110, 111 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 90, 91, 97 International Refugee Organisation (IRO), 92 Irish Civil War, 194 Irish Free State, 192 Irish War of Independence, 194 Isolating, 145, 146, 150 Italy, 41, 46, 72, 76, 83, 84, 97, 99, 104, 108, 114, 122, 154, 155, 158, 168, 244

INDEX

J Jameson, F., 6, 209 Japan, 14, 20–22, 41, 47, 93, 129, 154, 156, 231, 233 Johnson, C., 34, 223 Judiciary, 11 Judt, T., 17, 22, 49, 92, 199 K Katzenstein, P., 222 Kennan, G., 176 Kenny, M., 198, 199, 204, 205, 216 Keynes, J.M., 29, 45, 69, 227 Kiernan, V.G., 88 Kilbrandon Commission Report, October 1973, 191, 196, 197 Korea, 24, 30, 93, 230 Kornhauser, W., 121 Kumar, K., 199–201, 215, 216 Kureishi, H., 214 L Labour Party, 12, 15, 29, 34, 35, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 142, 193, 196, 216, 226, 241 Lanchester, J., 72, 227 Leave campaign, 121, 133 Lebanon, 83, 84 Lee, L., 204, 207 Legitimation, 120, 133, 134 Levy, A., 214 Libya, 97, 99, 100, 108, 184 Lieven, A., 183, 223 Little Russia, 179 Lockdown, 4, 7, 143, 144, 148–154, 157, 158, 162–168, 219 London, 2–5, 8, 10–12, 14, 16–22, 26, 29–33, 35, 40, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74–76, 79, 81, 87, 89, 92, 93, 97, 102, 105,

265

113, 119–121, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 138–141, 151, 170, 172, 180, 185, 191–193, 195–197, 199, 200, 202–205, 207, 209–211, 214, 221–223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 236, 238–241, 247–249 Lowry, L.S., 209 M Macmillan, Harold, 2, 14, 61 Macpherson, C.B., 235, 236 Maidan, 170, 181 Mair, P., 16, 36, 135 Mandate territories, 14 Marquand, D., 12, 35, 81, 140, 141, 239, 241 Massey, D., 141 May, T., 56, 77, 123–130, 142, 219, 228, 241 Mearsheimer, J., 174, 181, 189 Medieval England, 20 Merkel, A., 106–109, 114 Metropolitan core, 15, 19, 25, 33, 34, 36, 41, 193, 197, 202, 247 Migrant, 3, 27, 28, 54, 84, 85, 89, 91, 94, 96, 99–104, 107, 213, 244 Migration, 3, 27, 28, 33, 43, 52, 54, 61, 84–88, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 99–106, 109, 113–116, 122, 138, 139, 187, 191, 212–214, 218, 229, 244 Migration crisis, 1, 28, 54, 115, 187, 244 Military, 5, 10, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 22–24, 29, 30, 32, 47–49, 51, 59, 61, 81, 87, 93, 99, 112, 171–174, 181–183, 185–187, 189, 192, 224, 226, 230, 245, 247 Monarchy, 11, 15, 26, 49, 202, 247

266

INDEX

Monetarism, 69, 228 Moore, B Jr., 222 Morris, W., 211 Mount, F., 12, 35, 81, 120, 142 Multicultural England, 192, 199, 201 Muslim League, 23

N National Assembly for Wales, 197 National Health Service (NHS), 7, 119, 147, 148, 161 Nationalism, 51, 103, 104, 106, 176–179, 200, 201, 215, 216, 223, 227, 245, 248 Natural science, 7, 18, 41, 70, 84, 86, 88, 163, 165, 208, 216, 221, 229, 233, 237, 240, 243 Nead, L., 19, 203 Neighbourhood policy, 112 Neo-liberalism, 29, 34, 66, 68, 69, 105, 115, 135, 140, 148, 191, 217, 218 Neutrality, 182, 188, 189 New cold war, 167, 176, 188 New Right, 9, 16, 35, 236 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 4, 17, 40, 50, 51, 59, 99, 112, 170–173, 176–178, 180–183, 185–187, 189, 220, 224, 245 Norway, 102, 103 Nowhere(s), 70, 80, 149

O Office of National Statistics (ONS), 153, 154, 156, 157, 159–161 Official British-England, 192, 201 Oligarch, 171, 173, 175, 179 Open Door, 16, 21 Outward migration, 55, 87

P Pacific War, 22, 42, 47, 89, 90 Partition, 32, 90, 93, 188 People-smuggling, 29, 91 Personal protective equipment (PPE), 7, 151, 161, 162, 165 Peters Corbett, D., 209, 211 Pickulicka, A Relations, 178, 179 Populism, 76, 79, 118, 122, 134, 138, 139, 176, 184, 191, 227 Porter, R., 209, 210 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 211 President Biden, 172, 182, 187, 223, 224 President Putin, 176 President Wilson, 46, 193 Preston, P.W., 2, 10, 19, 20, 22, 26, 31, 34, 37, 40, 45, 47, 48, 52, 59, 67, 70, 89, 90, 93, 105, 118, 120, 134, 140, 170, 185, 188, 192, 197, 199, 201, 203, 221, 222, 230, 234, 236, 239, 247–249 Privatization, 65, 66, 226 Project cake, 56 Project fear, 3, 56, 119, 121, 131, 136, 245 Project hysteria, 122 Protectorates, 14 Provinces, 88, 134 Public Health England (PHE), 154–157 R Radical England, 192, 199, 201, 212 Refugee, 55, 84, 89, 106, 109 Regulation, 2, 5, 9, 11, 52, 65, 67, 70, 72, 80, 98, 99, 114, 198, 218, 239, 244 Republic, 46, 103, 192 Republican Party USA, 92 Republic of Ireland, 192

INDEX

Resilience, 6, 11, 162, 166, 217, 219, 231, 232, 246 Risk, 2, 52, 67, 70, 73, 146, 159, 160, 162, 164–166, 189, 231 Royal Navy, 14 Runciman, D., 131–133, 136, 216, 234 Rural England, 87, 192, 201, 204, 207 Ruskin, J., 211 Russia, 5, 21, 45, 46, 55, 84, 94, 95, 112, 170–174, 176, 177, 179–185, 187–189, 224, 246 S Said, E., 203 Sanctions, 112, 180, 224 Sarkozy, N., 96 Sarotte, M.E., 177, 178 Schengen, 28, 54, 61, 84, 95, 98, 99, 108 Scottish National Party, 195 Scottish referendum, 119 Scruton, R., 138, 191, 205–207 Second World War, 4, 9–11, 14, 20, 22, 36, 39, 42, 47, 48, 50, 55, 62, 89, 92, 104, 140, 192, 195, 203, 211, 212, 231, 233 Silicon Valley Bank (SVP), 80 Sinn Fein, 194 Soft-oligarchy, 247 Sojourners, 87 Somewhere(s), 7, 135, 139, 161, 196 Southeast Asia, 14, 19, 23, 85, 86, 90, 238 Sovereign, 4, 9, 17, 23, 25, 40, 49, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 78, 85, 88, 127, 178, 244, 247 Soviet man, 179 Spain, 41, 72, 83, 84, 104, 106, 154, 155, 158, 244 Springtime of nations, 193

267

Stagflation, vi State, 1–12, 14, 16–19, 25–27, 29–31, 33–37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56–59, 62, 63, 65–70, 72, 74, 78, 79, 84–95, 98, 101–105, 107, 108, 110–113, 120, 123, 129, 133, 134, 139, 141, 143–145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 161, 163, 165–168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 178, 179, 185, 186, 189, 194, 201, 206, 207, 210, 218–221, 223–235, 237–240, 243–247, 249 State-empire, 13, 20, 22, 23, 25, 31, 34, 36, 62, 85–89, 91, 93, 214, 218, 229, 231, 233, 247 State failure, 7 Streek, W., 57, 58, 77, 107, 121, 139, 140, 170, 182, 183, 187 Sub-prime, 52, 70, 71 Suez, 14, 16, 23, 32, 60 Super-diversity, 102 Sweden, 102, 103, 106, 108, 158, 188 Syria, 6, 95, 100, 105 T Taiwan, 90, 156 Tett, G., 2, 72, 80, 227 Thatcherism, 35, 66 Thatcher, M., 30, 52, 61, 69, 70, 73, 74, 79, 124, 193, 196, 207, 226, 227 Thompson, E.P., 87, 201, 229 Thorne, C., 22, 93 Timothy, N., 78 Tooze, A., 2, 6, 52, 67, 68, 71, 72, 162, 174, 183 Traffickers, 84, 94, 95, 101 Treaty, 28, 45, 52, 56, 57, 60, 85, 110, 111, 118

268

INDEX

Treaty of Union, 18, 210, 233 Tremain, R., 207 Tudor England, 193, 201, 202 Turkey, 83, 84, 95, 104, 107, 108 Turner, W.M., 208

U UKIP, 3, 61, 76, 106, 248 Ukraine, 4, 10, 29, 44, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 63, 95, 112, 114, 170–185, 187–189, 224, 243 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 92, 94, 97, 105 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 92, 94 USSR, 4, 23, 30, 40, 47, 50, 112, 172–179, 181, 220

V Valdez, S., 71 Versailles Treaty, 46, 193 Visual arts, 28, 202, 204, 208, 210–214

W Wade, R., 72 Wall Street, 46, 52, 53, 61, 67, 71, 72, 74, 113, 187, 243

Walt, S.M., 182, 189 Washington, 40, 42, 50, 60, 172, 174, 185–187 Weber, M., 87 Wednesday Play, 212 Weitz, E.D., 46 Welfare state, 13, 15, 24, 105, 140, 218, 232 Westminster, 7, 8, 11, 16, 61, 120, 125, 137, 141, 150, 163, 165, 169, 174, 192, 196, 198, 202, 205, 231, 232, 242 Whitehall, 7, 8, 11, 120, 125, 141, 147, 150, 163, 165, 169, 174, 192, 198, 231, 232, 242, 247 Wilders, G., 97 Wilkinson, R., 8, 135, 211 Williams, G., 196 Williams, R., 203, 210 World Health Organisation (WHO), 4, 7, 145–147, 149, 150, 164, 165 Wright, P., 12, 36, 185, 202, 207 Wuhan, 144, 167, 168 Y Yeltsin, B., 171, 174–177 Yugoslavia, 27, 170, 181 Z Zubok, V.M., 43, 171, 175, 177