Dr Robert Saunders
Right. Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Chatham House. It’s wonderful to see such a packed audience. I know that a lot of people are also watching the livestream of this event, so wherever you are, however you’re participating this evening, it is very good to have you. This is part of a series of events, taking historical perspectives on current affairs, to make the 100th Anniversary of Chatham House in 2020. And what we want to do this evening is to take a very contemporary event, and Brexit is almost inescapable in the world around us, and to think about how we can historicise that, where it might sit in the past.
So we’re going to think about the different ways that Brexit might – sorry, that history might be used in the Brexit debate, or think about how memories of empire or the Second World War or the idea of Britain as a country that stands alone, might feed particular visions of Britain’s place in the world. We might also think about how Historians tackle a question like Brexit, and what questions it might pose for the study of history itself. We’ve got three excellent speakers this evening, who are going to steer us through these questions, and each of them brings an expertise in a different aspect of Britain’s historical relationship with the wider world. So I’m going to introduce each of them, and then they will each speak for exactly nine minutes, I’m assured, and then we’ll open up the floor for your questions.
Just before I introduce them, I’ve been asked to remind you that this evening’s event is on the record. You are warmly encouraged to tweet along using the #CHEvents. And if we need to vacate the building for any reason, or if we need any kind of technical assistance, there are a number of members of staff from Chatham House, dotted around the room. So I’m going to introduce our speakers in alphabetical order by surname, although they’ll be speaking in a slightly different order. So, Dr Helen von Bismarck is a Writer, Historian and Public Speaker, who I think has become one of the most interesting and insightful Commentators on Brexit and on Britain’s place in the world and she brings a number of very interesting perspectives to that. So her first book was about British policy in the Persian Gulf, but she’s recently completed a second book…
Dr Helen von Bismarck
I’m working on it.
Dr Robert Saunders
You’ve almost completed a second book on Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Delors, of course, one of the great architects of the modern European Union. And she’s written about British policy for The Times, for the British Scholar’s Society, for the UK in a Changing Europe, and a range of other media outlets. Dr Priyamvada Gopal is a Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge, and she brings a particular expertise on the histories and legacies of empire and of colonialism. She’s published on literary radicalism in India, on the idea of anti-imperial amnesia, and her most recent book, which is for sale in all good book shops, and in the corner over there after this event, is called Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Descent, and it’s a really fascinating study that thinks about how ideas move from the colonies to the metropole, and not simply as often recounted, in the opposite direction.
Professor David Reynolds is the Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Cambridge, and someone who’s published very widely on Britain and its place in the world. In, I think, 1991, he published a book called Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th Century.
Which remains really the core textbook for thinking about British foreign policy in the 20th Century and should be essential reading for all policymakers today. But his most recent book is called Island Stories, Britain and its History in the Age of Brexit. It’s again, going to be available after this event, and it thinks about the stories that are told about the past and the power that they develop in the present, and in Britain’s Brexit narrative. And uniquely, on this panel, David is not on Twitter.
So, we’re going to begin with Professor David Reynolds, and then each speaker will have about nine minutes, and then we’re very keen to hear your views, so David.
Professor David Reynolds
Thank you, Robert. Thank you for the invitation to be here, thank you for coming. The – this book Island Stories started because of my concern about the way that I thought history was being used, misused, misrepresented, caricatured during the Brexit debate. And it gradually grew into a feeling that we are, Brexit has opened up a whole series of fissures in our national life, our institutions, our practices, which are much more than simply the question of Britain and Europe and raise fundamental questions about where we are, as a country, historically, today. And I want to talk just a little bit in two ways about both those points.
First of all, and briefly, the use and misuse of history. One of the things that has concerned me in a number of books and certainly in this book, is I think our peculiar obsession, unusual obsession, as a country, with the two World Wars. Meaning by that, compared with other countries in – who were participants in those wars, major belligerence. And for us, the First World War is, if you like, interpreted as a tragedy, a tragedy focused on the trenches and interpreted by Poets.
The Second World War is a triumph. A triumph, which has become focused on one year, 1940, a story of standing alone, and I’m not going to go into that in detail. We could talk about it in the questions, but it seems to me, it does feed into the Brexit debate, in many ways, and particularly into our particular narrative of our history in the 20th Century, compared to that of, if you like, the Founders of the European Union. All the countries, the six countries that signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, were, in a sense, countries that had no interest in dwelling on the Second World War as their finest hour. On the contrary, they wanted to move away from their history, move away from their past and think about something different. And one of the things that I think has been persistently misunderstood in this country is the degree to which the European Union is rooted in a peace project that grew out of that different experience of the Second World War compared to our own. So we could talk about that if we want.
What I’d like to talk a little more about, and it takes me onto this question of deeper problems, deeper issues that have opened up, is if you like, the other union, not the European Union, but our own union, the United Kingdom. Because I think that has come under strain and in a way that we had not expected or at least we and the we in this is often as it were, metropolitan English Britain. Because one of my concerns in this book is the degree to which we understand our history from an English, London centred, Home Counties centred perspective. So that issues such as the backstop, issues such as Scottish nationalism and so on, are reported often as a kind of surprise or a problem or as a shock, and so on, whereas they are actually quite rooted in explicable history, if we think about it, in a historical sense. And the history is, in a sense, the persistent project of English rulers going back to the medieval Kings, to control these islands. Meaning by that this island and the other one, the island of Ireland, always seen as a unit, in terms of – or security issues for rulers in London. And in particular, the period from the 16th Century onwards, and this is connected up with Europe of course, where the reformation in this country, the persistence of Catholic Christianity on the Continent, and a series of wars against Spain, later on France, inscribed in the sense of English identity.
The notions, as Linda Colley has written about, and others have written about, that what was distinctive was Protestantism and Parliamentary Government, compared to absolutism – Catholicism and absolutism on the Continent. And that, those notions of what was English identity, affected the sense of what was necessary to be done to control the islands. The islands, as a whole, had to be brought within this project of Protestantism and Parliamentary Government. And the notion of a union, a formal union was not one that was readily embraced by rulers in London. The two celebrated acts of union 1707 with Scotland and 1800/1801 when it came into existence with Ireland, were acts of necessity or perceived necessity, arising from security crises with the wars – with wars against France. And there is no historical reason why that union should remain in perpetuity, if time and circumstances and conditions change.
Now, what I say about the union with Scotland, obviously, would be disputed by Scottish Nationalists, but it seems to me on whole, that was a reasonably profitable union on both sides. Scotland was brought into what is effectively, a common market. In other words, Scottish traders could deal and trade with England and they could also penetrate England’s colonies in the Atlantic, which was one of the most important parts of the Atlantic Seaboard and West Indies Atlantic. Scottish traders were particularly successful in the tobacco trade, for example. Scotland had the capacity to hold its own in the union with England because if its own commercial resources, its education system, the heritage, if you like, of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, all the various things, and it was therefore, able to hold its own.
Ireland was a colon – was treated as much more of a colonial country, agrarian and not developing in the same way its industrial base and the divergence between the two became apparent in the First World War era. The Irish demands for home rule, which were shared in Scotland and also, to a lesser extent, in Wales, led to a, what I would call, Great War settlement, where Ireland was divided, the island of Ireland was divided, and Britain was consolidated. The strains within the union in Britain were healed, to some degree, by the sense of shared sacrifice. The Welsh and Scottish regiments, in the First World War and the Second World War.
The Ireland – that settlement, the divided Ireland, the consolidated Britain, lasted, I think, through much of the 20th Century, until we had, if you like, another settlement, which we’ve not ever really come to terms with, at least the ‘we’ meaning the Home Counties. In the sense of the Devolution Agreement in Scotland and Wales and the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland. Both of those were fundamental changes to the nature of the union. They suggested a completely different, a looser union, and that is the background, which has never been really properly explored, with which Brexit hit us in 2016. So there is an unex – there’s a set of issues about the union and how we handle it, which are there before Brexit. Brexit has forced us to face up to, I think, or ought to force us to face up to in a new way.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you very much, Helen.
Dr Helen von Bismarck
Well, thanks, Robert, for the introduction, and I’d also like to thank Amrit Swali and Chatham House for inviting me to this event. I feel very honoured to be speaking here in this company. What is this concept of a global Britain, what does it mean? And what does history have to do with it? Before we tackle this question, in precisely nine minutes, I think I must first point out or acknowledge a very basic fact, and this is that there is a significant difference between history and memory. Politically, the latter, memory, is at least as influential as the former, history, and I think we see this in the debate about Brexit. The hope for a Global Britain or Global Britain as post-Brexit strategy, is not an inevitable result of Britain’s past, or at least though I would argue, it is a political choice, which results from the way that history has been remembered, interpreted, and also how it has been used rhetorically, in the Brexit debate, which arguably, began decades ago.
In preparation of this event, I looked up statements, articles and speeches made by prominent and influential Brexiteers, like Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg and indeed, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. And what struck me was how their idea of a global Britain is not just a vision or project for the United Kingdom, it also constitutes the rejection of something, Europe. Daniel Hannon, in a speech he delivered at Eastbourne shortly before the Referendum, argued that the EU, and I quote directly from his speech is, “Clearly not – no place for a country like ours to find itself in.” So what is this place that is so unsuitable for Britain, for global Britain? If we are to understand the idea of a global Britain, we must not only ask how the proponents if this view the United Kingdom and its history. We must also understand their perception of Europe and the EU, and this is what I would like to focus on in my remarks today. And since my time is very limited, I’ll single out and engage with two prominent arguments in the Global Britain discourse. One about Europe as a Continent, and the other about the European Union as an organisation.
Now, Europe and the EU are obviously not the same, but the Brexiteers’ rejection of the EU runs deeper than mere discomfort with Britain’s participation in the European integration process. Underlying the Global Britain worldview, is the assumption that historically, the United Kingdom is not a European country or at least, not quite. In stressing the historic ties, which Britain has undeniably built with large parts of the world, over centuries of imperialism, the United Kingdom is presented as a country, which has traditionally kept its distance from the messy affairs of the Continent and looked outward, rather than inward. Now it would, of course, be absurd to deny the enormous importance that Britain’s interactions with the wider world have had for this country, and indeed, the many countries it once colonised. But what I would question however, is the notion that Britain’s imperial history makes it exceptional in a European context, let alone unsuitable for membership in the European Union.
The main intellectual problem with exceptionalism is, in my view, not so much the perception of Britain, but that it is based on a superficial reading of European history. If Britain was the exception, then what’s the rule? What is a normal European country? If you dive into the historiography in Germany about German history, or in France about French history, you’ll find out that most countries have a historiographic tradition, which singles out this country as special, as not quite like the others, and compares it to all the others. So why is Britain so exceptional? And it’s by no means a criticism, I’m a very – fully stand up anglophile of Britain ,if I point this out, why do Portugal and Poland have more in common than Britain and France? Spain, Portugal the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria France and Italy, they all look back on the history of imperialism.
From the point of view of historical methodology, it is highly questionable to isolate the conflicts and diplomatic struggles on the Continent from the affairs on the global stage. To give you just one example, the Seven Years’ War from 1756 just 1763, which German schoolchildren used to study as a conflict between Prussia’s famous King Frederick the Great and Austria’s Maria Theresa was, in reality, an early modern World War, in which Prussia and England stood together against Austria and France, in a conflict that extended to North America and India.
So, if the argument that the UK is just too different from the Continent to be an EU member state, does not hold up, then maybe it is not so much Europe as a continent, but the European Union as an organisation, which is the real problem for the proponents of Global Britain. Listening to Jacob Rees-Mogg, who referred to EU membership as a yoke in the House of Commons, or to Boris Johnson who wants to rebrand Brexit Day as the United Kingdom’s Independence Day, you would think so. A Britain that needs to be unleashed, as current election pamphlets inform us, must have been held in bondage for decades. Tempting as it would be for me in the face of this rather overblown rhetoric, I think it is important not to dismiss the sovereignty argument for Brexit out of hand.
It is plainly a fact that European Union membership limits the United Kingdom’s sovereignty at least, and this is a rather important caveat, if you define sovereignty as the ability to make independent decisions, an ability that ought not to be confused automatically with the power to shape international events. In other words, sovereignty and power are not the same. It is also a fact that the EU, as an international structure, does contain some elements of statehood. But to describe the European Union as a superstate, or worse, to compare it to earlier, violent attempts by Napoleon, Hitler, or the Soviet Union to exercise power over large parts of the Continent as factually inaccurate, and displays a staggering lack of nuance and proportion, never mind sensitivity. The perception of the EU, as an oppressor of the United Kingdom, is based on an extremely selective reading of the history of British membership in the European Union.
As far as political untion was – unity was concerned, it is fair to say that the United Kingdom’s participation was indeed half-hearted, and the sovereignty argument has always held a lot of sway here. But this does not change the fact that British diplomacy within the EU was often extremely successful. The rebate that Margaret Thatcher secured in the fight about the European community’s budget, and the longest of opt-outs the United Kingdom was granted in the Maastricht Treaty, were examples of this. I know that Brexiteers tend to see the Maastricht Treaty rather differently, but if you ask a French person about the opt-outs that Britain was granted, they regard it as a huge British success to get this, ‘special treatment’. The drama of the last four years should not make us forget that the United Kingdom was much more than just an awkward partner in the integration process.
The United Kingdom was an important champion of the Single Market, and Eastern European enlargement. The European Union is what it is today, not just in spite, but also because of the United Kingdom, and I would say this is not a bad track record, for a hostage, which needs to be unleashed. To conclude, it is not to deny the United Kingdom’s global past, to point out that the Continent will now swim away after Brexit. Neither side will be able to avoid the other for long. When, or if, I think when, but possibly if, Brexit goes ahead, some of its enthusiasts will probably celebrate Britain’s return to its natural place, the global stage, but when that happens, it may be worth remembering that the choice between Europe and the world has never been binary for the United Kingdom and that it cannot be expected to be so, in a post Brexit future. Thank you.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you very much [applause]. Priya.
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
Thank you, Robert. Thank you also to Chatham House and Amrit Swali for inviting me. Unlike my two colleagues here, I’m not a Brexit expert. I was asked to sort of think about the book that I’ve just published, in relation to Brexit, and I’m going to pick up on something David said about the, sort of, unique obsession here with the two World Wars, and I would say that that obsession is matched on the, other hand, by amnesia around empire and the end of empire. So, in a sense, the obsession with the Second World War, in particular, replaces or renders the empire opaque.
In the book, which is polemical, in part, I argue that Britain was not the only site in which ideas of freedom and emancipation were theorised, and that’s such things as freedom were generally forged through struggle and resistance and not bestowed from above. Even if they were appropriate and repurposed, as such, later. My argument, towards the end of the book, is that British public life and political discourse has been mired in a colonial mythology, in which Britain, followed by the rest of the geopolitical West, is the originator of ideas, of freedom, either bestowing it, as it were, on slaves and colonial subjects or teaching them how to go about obtaining it. And I draw on the insight of the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglas, that power concedes nothing, without a struggle, and the historical record actually shows us that the enslaved and the colonised of the empire were not gifted their freedom, but achieved it through complicated and protracted struggle. And the second point I make is that they found allies within Britain, British dissidents on the question of empire and aspects of imperial policy and practice. And I argue too, that these dissidents were influenced or even radicalised by anti-colonial insurgencies, movements, campaigners and campaigns.
So, in a sense, there’s anti-colonialism within Britain and without. And it really interests me, and Helen just referred to the ways in which the discourse of anti-colonialism has resurfaced in Brexit, and I’m going to talk about the ways in which that is slightly problematic. But my argument is that there can really be no conception of Britain as exceptional or British values as exceptional, if you – least of all liberty and tolerance, or even human rights, you can’t really give these a purely insular definition. There were home-grown traditions, of course, but a country with an empire of that size and duration, can never just be itself. The famous Theorist, Frantz Fanon, spoke about the ways in which Europe is literally a creation of the Third World and I would argue that that applies to Britain, too. Fanon was speaking about the wealth that was the foundation of Europe. He was talking about Holland and Bordeaux and Liverpool, and I would say that we want to think about the ways in which Britain is the product of its empire, but also, the ways in which it is the product of anti-imperialism. I think it’s really interesting the ways in which anti-colonial discourse wielded against Britain by the colonies, has come back now and it’s being kind of re-purposed in thinking about Britain’s relationship to Europe.
I’m going to jump now to talking about the forgetting or the perverse rewriting of imperial history in which Britain, although in some versions, are aligned with America across the Atlantic, stands alone in the centre of the sea and the world, dispensing gifts of freedom and values. And I say that this was one of the mythologies that has never quite gone away, but has been resurrected with vigour, in the context of Brexit. In other words, British exceptionalism is founded on a paradox that was also important to the imperial project. On the one hand, Brexit is described to us, in terms of Empire 2.0 and on the other hand, as an anti-colonial movement against Europe. But I would argue that this is a paradox that was already at the heart of empire, there are shades of Lord Macaulay’s pronouncement that Britain – “that her peculiar glory,” as he put, it “was that coat she has ruled only to bless, and conquered only to spare.” And this very interesting appropriation of the language of anti-colonialism today confirms my stance that anti-colonialism, in the colonies, impacted and was an influence on Britain.
Brexit, however, is not an anti-colonial project. While nations emerged out of anti-colonial struggles, anti-colonialism is not congruent with nationalism. Indeed, in many cases, nationalism has resulted in an arrested de-colonisation, replacing the expansive vision, internationalist vision of many of the anti-colonial figures I talk about in my book, replacing that expansive vision with ethno-nationalism. [Inaudible – 28:20] in my home country of Britain as an example, and this was nationalism not as anti-colonialism, but as majoritarianism, as exclusivity, racism, religious chauvinism, border making, authoritarianism, and even aspirations to ethnic cleansing. And I would argue that the ideology of hardcore Brexiteers has much more in common with this form of majoritarianism and authoritarianism, than it does with anti-colonialism, which was at its heart and at its finest redistributive project, which didn’t just seek sovereignty in the narrow sense of replacing one set of elites, by another set of elites, but actually wanted to depart from existing templates and existing hierarchies. And my view is that even the left-wing argument for Brexit or so-called Lexit, which one presumes would wish to achieve version of socialism, is misguided. Because anti-colonialism, particularly of the socialist variety, is constitutively internationalist and understands the centrality of alliances and organising across borders, which Brexit I don’t think does.
So, in short, if Britain really does wish to be anti-colonial, and I’m not sure that that is the case, if Britain wishes to decolonise, then you would need to channel the spirt of actual historical anti-colonialism, and that project cannot involve my opaque inward looking retrenchment, nor refuge, in some kind of transatlantic special relationship. Europe and Britain would both need to decolonise, and this would mean embracing internationalism, redistribution, workers’ rights, ending racialised borders, not just within Europe, but also, beyond. I’ll just stop there, thank you.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you [applause]. Well, thank you to all three of our speakers, and especially for keeping so wonderfully to time, which means that we do have a lot of time for discussion. Before I open it up to the floor, it struck me that there were three points that recurred in all three of your remarks, which I’d just like to explore a little bit further, and they are: exceptionalism, memory and amnesia. So firstly – and they’re obviously related ideas, so firstly, I wonder, is there a danger that we actually construct an exceptionalist history of Brexit, in that we suggest that there is something peculiarly pathological about Britain’s relationship with its past, and Britain’s idea of its place in the world, when we might in fact say that Euroscepticism has been rising across much of the Continent, and that the histories that we should locate this in a perhaps more broader populist western history? So that’s just one thought to throw out.
A second one is about memory. Is it possible that memories focus on things like the two World Wars, so extravagantly, because Britain has never constructed a positive memory of its time in the European Union that it hasn’t constructed the kind of success story that you might associate with the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, or that you might associate with de-Sovietisation in Eastern Europe? And if so, why Britain has never really constructed a compelling story. I think it was very evident, in the Remain campaign, that there wasn’t a compelling narrative to tell about Britain and Europe. And then just finally, on the point about amnesia, Bill Schwartz wrote a wonderful piece recently, where he said that “Brexit was a crisis of memory,” and he talked about this forgetting of Britain’s imperial past. So I wondered how remembering empire or remembering it differently, might make Britain think differently about its relationship with Europe? And I wondered if any of you would like to respond to any of those points? David.
Professor David Reynolds
Well, I mean, on the point about memory and the argument about the two World Wars and so on, yeah, I think it was striking, the Remain campaign did not have, did not offer a very strong enthusiastic vision of Europe. It was, you know, better to stay in, on the whole, and David Cameron was essentially a Eurosceptic, who came to that conclusion. But I think Ivor Rogers, for example, I think, who was our EU man in Brussels, brings out, I think, rather nicely that the British project was to be within the European Union, if you think of it as the circle, but right on the edge of it, though inside, with the opt-outs and things like that.
And possibly the Leave project was to be just outside that circle, but still, with the aspirations that you could actually engage, you know, get the benefits of a Single Market, and so on. It’s not clear what they imagined. But I think that the impulse to join was really to say – by governments of both parties in the 50s who did not think the European project would get off the ground, when it did, there was the feeling that we could not afford to be outside it. And the reason for that was not so much economic arguments which were still evenly balanced, it was that if we didn’t, there was a danger that our ‘special relationship’ with the United States would be prejudiced, and Washington would look to Europe, rather than to us, as its principle interlocutor. So there’s always been a sense that we didn’t quite intend to be in Europe in the way that we were, and that came out in the Remain campaign.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you, Helen?
Dr Helen von Bismarck
I’m not sure I have your points in the right order, but just talking about exceptionalism, well, I think I’ve said that in my remarks, but it also – the question whether Brexit is pathological is certainly, I mean, a strong word, which maybe isn’t very helpful. What I would agree with is that it’s certainly important to see Brexit, to stop isolating it and looking at it as a question of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. Because in my view, it didn’t only bring out lots of other problems here on the surface, but it needs to be contextualised in the rise of popularism, in the rise of, and I say that it needs to be contextualised within it. I’m not saying it’s happening here, but in the rise internationally of strongmen policies. And – but I still think that there is something peculiar about Brexit, in the sense that even those on the Continent, critics of European integration, they want to change the European Union, they don’t want to leave it. Alban doesn’t want to leave the European Union, he just wants to reshape it entirely.
And as for the question of the two World Wars, I mean, that’s something which also struck me, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that just because some of these arguments are completely overblown and frankly, offensive, doesn’t mean that there is some foundation somewhere to them. I mean, it is a fact that Britain wasn’t occupied, that there wasn’t displacement in occupation, and the complete destruction of the political system in this country, as there has been, in the vast majority of European Union member states. So, it’s logical that there this idea of a peace project would be less attractive here than it is in a country like the Netherlands, for example.
So – but acknowledging that it is still absurd to compare European integration, I mean, to what Hitler did with Europe. And so – but I think that’s my last point, goes also to the question of how this debate is – I think we need to talk about the role of the press, and the relationship between Politicians and the press in this country. The op-ed culture, so to speak. I think it’s also something to do with, you know, clickbait culture and everything that’s happening so fast. Arguments are getting more and more extreme and we spoke – before this panel, we spoke about how we were all annoyed by how history is being instrumentalised and weaponised in this debate, and how it’s just incredibly superficial, and if you are going to be superficial about history, then please don’t make such a crass conclusion. But that’s what you see all the time on all sides.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you, Priya.
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
Well, the questions have been answered very fully. I actually have never seen Brexit as exceptional. I – for me, and I’ve said to people that if people had been paying attention to what had been happening in India from 2014 onwards, neither Trump nor Brexit would have come as a particularly big shock. I would place Brexit precisely in the global rise of extreme right ideologies, majoritarianism, and not just populism, but majoritarianism, authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, kind of retrenching into kind of nationalism of a very unhelpful and myopic variety. So it’s not exceptional, although there are obviously particularities to the British case.
The other point is, how does the empire make us think differently? Well, for one thing, Empire 2.0 presumes that there is a grateful Commonwealth waiting to receive Britain into her arms. I have not seen that sense anywhere, with anyone. The Commonwealth was busy doing its own thing, and you can only imagine a grateful Commonwealth, if you’ve really forgotten aspects of empire and the bitterness around aspects of empire that still remain in memories and postcolonial context. But the other thing I would say is that internationalism, and I am sorry to say it in this context, it didn’t just come from Wilson. It isn’t a Western idea, internationalism was forged in the crucible of anti-colonialism. So I would like to see a degree of humility when words like ‘colony’ and ‘yoke’ and ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ are bandied around, in a return to how Britain’s colonies actually did think about breaking from the colonial yoke and think about what a future, after colonialism ,might look like. And I think a degree of humility in that narrative might be very helpful.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you very much [applause]. We have 20 minutes now for audience questions, so if you could raise your hands nice and high if you’d like to ask a question. I’m going to take them in batches of three, so that we can gather questions together. We do have some microphones moving around the room, so when I pick you out, if you could wait ‘til a microphone reaches you and then give us your name, that would be very helpful. It would be great to get through as many people as possible, so if you could keep questions reasonably brief, and as questions, that would be wonderful? Thank you very much. So we’ll start with the gentleman over here.
Ned Cedric
Hi, Ned Cedric, Member, I’m just wondering just to touch on the point you just made, do we have any friends in the world?
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you, and then the lady at the front here? So if we could have the microphone over at the front.
Isobel Hills
Thank you very much. Isobel Hills and I’m a Member of Chatham House. I was very interested in memory amnesia and all those things, and particularly in David Reynolds’ comment about this being a Home Counties problem. I was brought up and educated in Scotland and certainly find the most exotic element of this whole affair are the Home Counties, which are completely alien and mysterious to me. But my quite is, what – the question of why Scots remember empire differently, if that is part of your case, is I think, worth – it’s not just the Nationalists. I think if you look at how Scotland voted in this, it’s not just an SNP vote, this is a vote which is rooted in a very different memory and a different, sort of, cultural sense of who you are in the world, which I’d like I hear you comment on?
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. We’ll take one more question and again from this side of the room, before we move over. There was a gentleman over here. Yes, behind you there.
Ricky Walker
Thank you. Ricky Walker, Member of Chatham House. Seems to me that the media debate about Brexit has overemphasised about the trade and non-tariff barrier side of things, the economic side of things at the expense of history. And I would like to support what Professor Reynolds was saying about the need for seeing Europe as, I forget his words, a peace process, but not just going back to the two World Wars, but going back to 1870. 1870, 1914, 1939, we had three terrible wars, essentially, based on Franco-German hostility. The European Union has bound Europe together in such a way that wars between us are now unthinkable and on a historical scale, it’ll be a huge mistake to break it up.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you very much. If we take those in reverse order, so Priya, would you like to kick off?
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
I’m not sure I have a lot to say. I’m a literary critic, so I’m afraid I have to say depends on your definition of friendship. You know, I think there are large swathes of Britain that have – that resonate with people in – both in the Commonwealth and in Europe. But if we think about friendship as Farage and Trump, you know, that’s a very different kind of friendship. So I slightly think it depends on what kinds of alliances a country wishes to make and there are lots of alliances open to Britain, but you’d need an expansive vision for that. And I think the other question was addressed specifically to David, so I will siege my place.
Dr Helen von Bismarck
About the friendship question, you have plenty of friends, it’s just that they feel a bit jilted at the moment. But – and – but on a more serious – I mean, Donald Trump seems to be thrilled with Brexit Britain and I think this friendship is available, it’s the question, what’s the price for that friendship? As for the Scotland, I will leave to David Reynolds, but for your comment about the peace project, I can just, as a German, wholeheartedly agree with you.
Professor David Reynolds
On the question of Scotland and the union, let me just briefly follow by saying, I was very struck by the – some of the work of J. G. A. Pocock, John Pocock, about the islands. And the idea that, and I kind of paraphrase this, but it’s the idea that the assumption tends to be we made the union, England shaped these neighbouring countries, and we have neglected the degree to which those countries have shaped and changed us. And one of the things that struck me in writing this, the particular chapter on Britain, was a slightly throwaway comment in one of Linda Colley’s books, where she said that – and I was just trying to find it, but you know, if you take 700 years from probably the mid-11th Century to the Battle of Culloden 1746, in that time, only three English Kings or English rulers did not either invade Scotland or try to repulse an invasion from Scotland or do both.
So that’s 700 years of warfare, and you know, out – the English perception of the Scots, since their own nation, is that, you know, they get wound up and do Braveheart for, you know, a Six Nations rugby game. But if you think about that degree of conflict, that is, you know, profoundly significant and important, and it’s not surprising that there is a sense of identity, a separate identity, which I was alluding to briefly in my comments, you know, that the Scots maintain that within the union, within the – after the 1707 Treaty. They also maintain their own legal system and church, and things like that. That that is something that we have not taken seriously enough.
It’s true of Ireland, as people like Sinjin O’Toole have brought out, it’s true of Wales.
So my shorthand is, you know, that the union made us, meaning the English as much as the other way round, and the same is true for the empire. I mean, that, in the sense of the shorthand of the empire chapter in the book, which I tried to pick out which is that sense yes, the empire made what it is to be British, as much as the idea that we made the empire, you know. So this is a plea. This book is, in part, a plea for a much less parochial view of our history. And as I say, the ‘our’ is, if you like, this – and I’m caricaturing here, but a kind of metropolitan way of looking at, well, the whole thing, the whole world, if you like.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. Let’s take another round of questions, If you can wave nice and high, so that I can see, that would be good. So we’ll start with the lady at the back there.
Anya
I’m Anya. I was wondering if there’s a way that we could combat imperial amnesia?
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. A wonderfully concise question. There’s a gentleman in a brown jumper over there. That’s the one.
Will James
Will James. One of the themes of memory and forgetting that perhaps hasn’t been brought out here, seems to me the – that the perhaps unresolved history we have with our position as a trading nation and the politics of trade in Britain, over the past 200 years, the repetitive theme of whether we are an open trading nation or a closed protected country, comes from the Corn Laws, the tariff debates, in the early 20th Century, imperial preference. And then, our entering to the EC and our departure from the EU. I wonder whether the panellists have any thoughts on why we seem so unwilling to reflect or analyse that part of our politics and history?
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you, and I’ll take one more question from the gentleman by the door there?
Martin O’Neill
Martin O’Neill, I’m a Member of Chatham House. I just wanted to ask Profession Reynolds to comment further. I think you started your remarks with sort of this is almost a tale of two unions, where it’s failed relationships in two unions. And what intrigued me is, is there something about the Good Friday Agreement, devolution, that in fact, fed the Brexit phenomenon in domestic British politics, that most of us have missed, frankly?
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. Helen, would you like to start?
Dr Helen von Bismarck
I think I’ll leave the imperial amnesia question, you’re probably best equipped to answer that.
I think it’s – and you may disagree, I think it’s already happening, to a certain extent. I mean, there was this great exhibition about the British Empire at the Tate Britain, I think, last year, for example, which is, I think, an example of looking at the history of empire in another way. And I think this exhibition didn’t only deal with the history of empire, but also, by the way, how it’s been presented and how it’s been remembered in Britain. But – and I also think that looking at the Brexit debate, you rarely – I mean, you don’t have anybody saying openly, “Let’s go back to being an empire.” People talk about anglosphere, they talk about being global, they talk about being a free…
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
Or empires [inaudible – 48:32].
Dr Helen von Bismarck
Yes, but it’s more this free trading nation and it’s more, sort of, a euphemism for imperialism. So I think this idea of amnesia is actually much more prominent than looking at Brexit as a neo-imperialist project, I wouldn’t look at it that way. I think that the – in terms of memory and history, I think that the two World Wars are actually more important than the empire, but that’s obviously controversial and we can discuss that.
For your free trading question, well, I don’t really know, but why this is such a prominent stereotype, if you will, about British history. I mean, it’s of course, in part, true, but what I will say is, it’s not just the British who say that. I mean, what Napoleon said about Britain, “This nation of shopkeepers,” that’s how lots of people have, for a long time, perceived the United Kingdom. And again, and I think this is – it’s general frustrations Historians have, how memory and stereotypes are incredibly hard to fight and get rid of. Speaking about Brexit generally, what I find is that this whole drama of the last three and a half years, has actually reinforced stereotypes in the European Union about Britain. So, people are moving away from a more nuanced view of British history towards a cliché view of, “Oh, they are just these new imperialists,” or, “They’re just arrogant.” I’m quoting, I’m quoting, okay? So people are so sort of annoyed and enraged and tired by this whole toing and fro of Brexit, that they don’t bother so much engaging with the nuance of history and sort of go back to the stereotypical thinking about Britain, which I find is a huge shame.
Dr Robert Saunders
David.
Professor David Reynolds
Well, I’ll leave imperial amnesia, to some extent, to Priya, but I mean, it’s something I’m really wrestling with in the book, because it’s something I am starting to think about, the need for us to really rethink our notion of imperial history, if we want to understand our identity. And indeed, this book is really a work in progress and it’s – I’m thinking out loud, and that’s been a strange experience of writing a book in that way. But let me address the two questions that were perhaps more specifically addressed to me. One was about the – what I was saying about the Good Friday Agreement and devolution, and so on. I’m not saying it caused Brexit, what I’m saying is that what we had, in what, my shorthand to the kind of millennium settlement of the late 90s, the devolved governments in Cardiff and Edinburgh and a tentative precarious, but usually significant moving on of the Irish question. That presaged a much looser United Kingdom, and that trend has been placed in jeopardy by, I think, unthinking actions, in the process of trying to accomplish Brexit. And that I think is really worrying and really, you know, concerning, and it may be, in some ways, irretrievable now, I don’t know. So that’s what I’m saying.
In terms of the question of trade and open trade, free trade and protection and so on, this was something I did start to think about a lot in the book, and I have one of the epigraphs is from Lord Palmerston, in 1860, and he says, “Trade cannot flourish without security.” Trade cannot flourish without security, and you know, it’s a cliché that, you know, countries become free traders, and advocates of free trade when they’re strong enough to shape the market. That was our position in the 19th Century, it was the American position to flipflop in the 1930s, in the era of Cordell Hull, was of a country that was suddenly in a position to say, we can challenge imperial preference. We can challenge the empire project. And so, part of my puzzlement, genuine puzzlement as an Historian about Cobdenites like Steve Baker for example, who do believe, and he’s on the record as saying, you know, “Free trade will bring us world peace,” and all the rest of it. I don’t think you can embark on a trading project ,without feeling secure. And it will be interesting to see whether Global Britain unyolked from the European Union, is going to be more able to trade and to trade in an advantageous position. I’m historically, very sceptical of that. I think Palmerstone was right, trade doesn’t flourish without security.
Dr Robert Saunders
It’s perhaps interesting there that so much modern Euroscepticism really incubates from the 1990s, which is a moment where you seem to have a world in which global trade is guaranteed and a Washington consensus is very secure. But can I just bring in Priya?
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
Oh yes, the imperial amnesia question. I mean, one thing I always ask my students to do, and I think that in particularly in the wake of Brexit, this is important, who is the we? So when we say, you know, how do we do this, or do we have any friends? There are multiple wes in Britain and Britain is a diverse enough society now that the we really changes from not just from metropole to beyond, but across regions and across communities, cultures, races. But if we really want to examine the British we, then I think the answer to your question like this is very simple, you have to first of all teach the empire. My students repeatedly tell me that they have no idea. They’ve done very, very little and this manifests, for instance, just in the discourse around Ireland. I mean, it’s just – you know, the Irish remember very clearly, you know, what the last 100/200 years has felt for them. But it’s a privilege within England, and I don’t say Britain, I say within England, that it can be forgotten and a kind of casual return of the way in which the Irish are talked about. It seems to me that if there was some basic teaching on Britain’s relationship with Ireland, some of this would actually be very, very different. So what is the answer to a very simple but good question? Read, teach, debate, but talk about the empire and don’t talk about the empire like it’s just gone away. It has a very, very living, powerful afterlife. The rest of the world has not had the option of forgetting the empire, and again, to go back to India, Kashmir is back in flames and there’s no way to understand the situation, without thinking about the ongoing life – afterlife of empire. So, it’s not just a question of the past or, you know, and Britain no longer being an empire, it’s everybody’s still very, very centrally situated in that project.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. We’ve got to time for just, I think, a couple more questions. So I’m going to come to the gentleman in the middle here, and the lady at the back over there. So you, first, sir.
Steve Gooding
Hi, I’m Steve Gooding, excuse me, a Member of Chatham House and I remember very well Jacques Delors, worked with them. But let me just say just one thing very briefly about this fantasy of globalism, and I’m an American ,as you can tell by the accent, and I mean, you can forget about a – you know, the chlorinated chicken issue, and the – all this other stuff that they talk about here and Frankenfoods. I mean, that is going to be accepted by the UK, if you’re going to have a global society. I’m – that’s – I’m telling you that. I’ve worked on US trade policy for a long time, and we’re not going to give up this stuff. So, you know, just put that in your pipe and smoke it, but you’d better accept it, it’s going to happen.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you very much. Then, at the back, please.
Jackie Row
Hi, my name is Jackie Row. I just had a question, based on a remark that you made, Dr Bismarck, right at the beginning about how what we have in common with many other major European states is our imperial past as a nation. And I’m wondering how that feeds into this debate around Britain’s engagement with its colonial past, with imperial history and to what extent are other European nations engaging in these debates, to what extent is the EU engaging in this debate, and as far as I’m aware, doesn’t have any decolonialisation initiatives in place? And do you think there’s any hope that actually, removing Britain from that club of many ex-colonial powers, do you think that there will be actually more space perhaps for a more honest, self-reflection? Or do you think that actually, the nature of the Brexit campaign and the spirit in which many people voted leave, will just write that out of the question and there’s not going to be space for that kind of self-reflection?
Dr Helen von Bismarck
Wow, it’s a brilliant question, and that’s actually one of the many injustices of Brexit, we are all – because of the political drama, we’re all focused on rich politics and we see all these debates and these argument being put forward. But if we look closely at the way some continental countries have dealt with their imperial past, you’ll see that there is also an element of, certainly in Germany, there was for a long time an element of amnesia. But that’s also because our past, in this century, is so horrific that we’ve concentrated on that, and that the empire sort of paled in comparison, if you see what I mean? And the focus – I mean, so – and it’s just, over the last ten years, that there’s really been a push, and also at the university, so the History Departments to deal more with just German imperial history. Now there is quite a lot happening, lots of, sort of, research going on and there is a push to put more in schoolbooks, you know, get the debate out there.
There’s a huge debate about the way German imperialism is going to be presented in German museums, for example. So, at the moment, this debate is really happening, but that’s a recent development. So, in Germany, I mean, obviously the empire is lot smaller, but it was compared – I mean, Britain spoke a lot more and dealt with a lot more with its imperial past than Germany has, the question is, how? What I find interesting is the example of France. Macron gave an interview to The Economist last week, which made a lot of waves, in which – because he said that NATO was braindead and now everybody’s up in arms. But what I found interesting, as someone who’s also been an Imperial Historian, he spoke about France’s overseas territories and colonial his – past, and he said that this past was actually the reason why France was primed to be an international broker on the global stage, and to play a large role on the world stage.
And I found that fascinating, because just, you know, in France and Britain, this is just Brexiteer language really, and I found that fascinating, so there is absolutely – or in that interview, you didn’t see any, sort of, being apologetic, in any way, for French imperialism. So, you’re absolutely right, it’s not like the countries of the Continent are naturally wanting to talk about, you know, how you deal with your past. It’s just that there are different conclusions drawn from it, when it comes to European integration. Just finishing up on the question on the European Union, I think that this is very much, in a way, a national issue, in the sense that the debate will probably take place, and has to take place, in the individual countries before you’ll see some kind of joint effort. That’s what I would expect anyway. And I don’t think that Britain leaving or remaining in the EU will make much difference, on that score, actually.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you. Can I just request one final quick thought perhaps from the panel. We were asked at the outset to think about the future as well as the past. We’ve talked about perhaps our criticisms of how the past has been used in foreign policy, but what would – what can history or a historical understanding contribute to rethinking Britain’s place from the world after Brexit, or does anyone have any thoughts on that?
Professor David Reynolds
I would like us to think about our history in a much more comparative way. To be more aware of the history of other countries and the way that we’ve been talking about it, they have wrestled with, in some ways, similar problems. For me, it’s that kind of, if we could break out of a certain narrowness in the way we think about our history that would be, I think, a really creative part of the process.
Dr Robert Saunders
Thank you.
Dr Helen von Bismarck
I would fully agree with, you know, I think it’s very important this comparative perspective and I think that language learning is also really, a very important question. And if you talk about how you tackle that in the long-term, what you teach in schools as well, and so forth, I mean, being able to look at different viewpoints, language learning, is just a huge issue.
Dr Priyamvada Gopal
Well, it’s been amply covered. I’m in complete agreement with my colleagues here. I will say that the world needs to decolonise. The world is in a state of arrested decolonisation. I don’t think, going back to the previous question, that Europe is an innocent self-evident entity, Europe has its own reckoning to make, and former colonies have their own reckoning to make. So, looking towards the future, I think we need to initiate a demanding process of decolonising across the globe.
Professor David Reynolds
Thank you. I think we’re out of time there. That’s a good place to stop, but thank you all for coming this evening [applause]. Thank you for your questions and thank you to our panel.
