LONDON, 30 July 2003 — The Newspaper’s silly season approaches. The UK government is closing down. And a battered prime minister is about to go on vacation.
His now infamous remark that “History will forgive us” did not stem from any profound interest in the subject. If anything, it only illustrated yet again his lack of understanding of what history is — and this has been part of his problems. Why and how, future historians will surely ask, did such a consummate politician, possessed of an impregnable parliamentary majority, as well as intelligence, industry and fundamental decency, get himself into so much controversy and mess? What went wrong? Of course, the pundits and politicians have been asking these questions incessantly too, and coming up with all sorts of highly specific answers.
“There has never been a time,” Blair declared during his recent visit to Washington, “when... a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day,” and he was utterly wrong. History cannot tell you what to do. But in Blair’s case, it might have warned him what to avoid — and expect.
It might have made him more cautious, for instance, about what Richard Hofstadter famously called, “the paranoid style in American politics”. America is a great country. But, ever since independence, Hofstadter demonstrated, sections of its political class have repeatedly viewed “conspiracy as the motive force in historical events”. At different times, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, Jews and communists have been identified as the conspirators in question. Whatever the perceived enemy, the “central preoccupation” has always been with “a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character”. As a result, Americans have been regularly prone to seeing a “wrestling match between good and evil” as the “archetypal model of the world struggle”.
This kind of paranoia occurs in many countries and groups. But in America, Hofstadter argued, it has usually been prompted by religious and ethnic tension, and is particularly characteristic of the political right. Does any of this ring bells? It should. Sept. 11 was an atrocity, and there are doubtless still more to come. Heightened security and improved intelligence are certainly called for. But by representing all this as an epic, ongoing war against “shadow and darkness” that requires pre-emptive attacks against sovereign states, it seems likely that Blair, like Bush, has succumbed to the paranoid style in American politics, and with far less partisan benefit.
Embarking upon war is always dangerous for national leaders because it makes them more than ever at the mercy of events. When domestic opinion is acutely divided, however, war can be politically lethal for its makers. In Washington, Blair joked that at least he wasn’t like Lord North, the prime minister who lost the American colonies. But one of the main reasons for this historical defeat was that North’s fellow Britons were split over the merits of the war. And North not only lost the colonies; he lost his job.
For Blair, the past is irrelevant, because this is a new world facing entirely new dangers. Globalization and WMD mean, in his view, that all freedom-loving peoples must necessarily unite under American leadership to defeat the “virus” of terrorism. Individuals at home, and foreign countries such as France, which analyze the world and its dangers differently, are briskly dismissed as anti-American. Yet it could simply be that their understanding of the past — and consequently of the present — is rather better than his.
Globalization is not remotely new; it has been occurring, at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for centuries. But in the past, as now, it has not always produced a community of interests. To employ this phenomenon as a reason for freezing Britain into the role of battered Boy Wonder to America’s global Batman is therefore distinctly questionable. Much of the British public’s alienation, not just from Blair, but from politicians in general, stems from a sense that, as one man put it to me: “We’ve been sold.” There is deep resentment that politicians have proceeded so far with the European Union without consulting the public. And there is anger that so much British policy — as over Iraq - seems to be determined in Washington, and not always for obvious national interests.
This failure to carry the people along is in part due to Labour (and Conservative) politicians’ arrogant and self-serving notion that voters don’t care about foreign affairs. But the more fundamental reason, once again, is structural and historical. Over the past century, Britain has moved from being a “disguised republic”, as Walter Bagehot called it, to having a barely disguised and insufficiently provided-for presidency. Many of Blair’s current problems are due to the fact that he is much more than a prime minister, without being an acknowledged, full-blown president.
At one level, this means that he can disregard large sections of Parliament and the public and embark upon a deeply controversial war, and that, unlike the Americans, we lack the means to interrogate him and call him to account. But the insufficient transformation process from prime ministership to presidency also means that Blair is desperately overstretched and unable to govern as well as he might. His ravaged face, as well as his uncertain record of reform in his second term, makes this point. Were he to have a proper vice president, and the massed ranks of expert advisers a president can command, Blair might be more able to make the trains run on time at home, and perhaps be less inclined to embark on messianic adventures abroad.
However satisfying it may be to some to shower criticism on him, we badly need a deeper, longer view. And so does he. Blair may be in part responsible for his current problems. But it is long-term trends and failings abroad and at home that underlie them. Blair is instinctively impatient of history. But like the US troops in Iraq, who are now wrestling with the same sort of problems British imperial occupiers experienced there last century, he is still constrained by, and entangled in, history. As are we all.
