Authors: Ian Buruma
Berlin’s England was, however, not just about the United Kingdom. At one of our Italian lunches, the subject of “Europe” came up. Somewhere between an anecdote about Stephen Spender and an exposition on the arrogance of German Jews, he asked me whether I thought a European federation would ever come about. I answered that I rather thought it would. After a rare moment of silence, he said he rather thought so too, and immediately launched into a story about Verdi attending a Wagner opera in Paris—and hating it. It was impossible to tell whether the prospect of a federal Europe pleased or alarmed Berlin. I don’t think the problem exercised him much one way or the other. He wouldn’t live to see it, and his England would survive anyhow, while he lived, if only as an ideal.
T
HE IDEAL OF
a united Europe is old and stained with blood. Since the collapse of Rome, it has been predominantly a Franco-German enterprise. Hitler, like the kaiser before him, saw himself as the successor of the German kings who ruled over the Holy Roman Empire. Those kings had behaved as successors to the Roman emperors. And Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself in a quasi-Roman ceremony, after transferring the imperial center from the German lands to Paris. Britain was on the periphery of these developments and usually hostile to them. Napoleon regarded Britain as his archenemy. His dream was to unite Europe as a federation of “free” peoples, clustered gratefully around glorious France and ruled by Napoleonic laws. And this, in his view, excited the envy of perfidious Albion, whose eternal goal was to keep the Continent divided.
Something of Napoleon’s attitude persists in France to this day. And so does the British distrust of Franco-German schemes to unite Europe.
This distrust owes much to the central myth of Berlin’s England, the island of freedom facing a Continent of darkness. But it has become as threadbare as the idea of enlightened upper-class rule. For Voltaire has been proven more right than wrong. For the first time almost all Europeans have the right to speak freely and elect their own governments. Absolute monarchy has vanished everywhere, and, apart from some rare exceptions, dictators no longer rule. The examples of Britain and the United States have played a part in this. But there is an irony in the result: other European nations have written constitutions, encoding citizens’ rights, while Britain, the model of the
philosophes
, does not Europeans are citizens, the British are still subjects. And yet it is the British, above all, who see “Europe” as a threat to their freedom.
The postwar attempts to build a united Europe were not, in fact, made in a spirit of Anglophobia. The European Economic Community was conceived not to unite Europe against Britain but to stop France and Germany from going to war again. Jean Monnet, the debonair diplomat from Cognac who designed the foundations of a federal Europe, was an Anglophile with an intimate knowledge of British and American institutions. In 1940 he suggested to Churchill that France and Britain should merge into one nation. (Churchill showed a flicker—no more—of interest.) Monnet wrote in his memoirs that Britain’s greatest contributions to civilization were the respect for liberty and the functioning of democratic institutions. “What would our society be,” he wondered, “without
habeas corpus
and the parliamentary system which keeps the executive power in balance!”
Monnet simply believed, very much in the enlightened spirit of Voltaire’s coconuts, that European institutions would function as well as the British ones. Indeed, they would function better, because they were rational, unencumbered by national prejudices, and designed to guarantee not just the prosperity and freedom of Europe but peace for all time. It made sense, Monnet might have said, in the way the union of England and Scotland made sense in 1707. The European Union is a belated product of the Enlightenment. That is why Monnet was convinced that the British, though temporarily deluded by a false sense of grandeur and untouched by the traumas of military defeat, might resist it for a while but would surely see sense in the end.
And yet rationalism, however civilized and enlightened, is not
enough to build a home where citizens feel free. Isaiah Berlin was a Zionist because he wanted Jews to have a country of their own, where they could feel at ease. In this sense, he was more a man of the nineteenth than of the eighteenth century. He recognized a human need to feel attached to a nation. Having lost his native land as a child, perhaps he recognized it more readily than most. The trouble in the last two hundred years of nation-building is that nationalism was associated not just with democracy but with the exclusion and persecution of minorities, and with wars. The reason so many “rootless cosmopolitans” became Anglophiles is that Britain was unusual. It combined a strong national culture with a relatively open, liberal society. That is why Anglophiles, like Isaiah Berlin, have been prone to idealize the culture that produced that society.
The difference between Britain and other European nations is not, however, that British institutions are natural and that French or German ones are not. All political arrangements are a mixture of historical accident and human decisions. The difference is that most Europeans, having seen their nations occupied, humiliated, impoverished, or taken over by thugs, had lost confidence in the nation-state as the only, or indeed the best, guarantor of liberty, prosperity, and peace. Britain never had this problem. So perhaps de Gaulle was right. Perhaps Britain never should have joined “Europe” in the first place. The fact that Britain did so anyway, largely for commercial reasons, only confirmed the old suspicion that the British are nothing but shopkeepers at heart. As the exiled French politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin put it in 1850, England “has never raised its eyes or its heart above its masts and its cargoes.”
It was, of course, an unfair accusation; British ideas have had an profound and usually benign influence on Europe. And some of the best ideas are linked to commerce. The two most liberal nations in Europe, Britain and the Netherlands, have always been accused by their enemies of thinking of nothing but gold. But the accusers were seldom people who prized liberty. Suspicion of commerce tends to go with a love of authoritarianism. The Europe of commercial cities—Venice, Hamburg, London, Lisbon, Amsterdam—has enjoyed more freedom and prosperity than the European hinterlands, dominated by autocrats, and by the lures of blood and soil.
Today’s “Europe” is neither a commercial empire nor a tyranny, nor anything that the kings of the Holy Roman Empire, or Napoleon, or Hitler would recognize. It is certainly not a democratic state either. It is the half-finished outline of a political ideal, fueled by fear of war and by a dream that a unified Europe would replace the failed nation-states. The fear is passing with the generation that lived under Hitler. The idealism, too, is fading. But what about the British myth of unique insular freedom? Myths can serve different, even contradictory ends. So it is with the British myth, which can serve liberty, but also a resentment of anything foreign. When Britain joined “Europe,” there could be no more splendid isolation. But the myth was given a longer life by British misgivings about the European ideal. The desire of other Europeans to unite made Britain feel more exceptional. It was as though it had to fight the old European dream of the Holy Roman kings, Napoleon, and Hitler once again, but from the inside.
There is something grand about British resistance to Continental ideals, something of Baudelaire’s tragic dandies affecting an aristocratic style in a mediocre bourgeois age. The heroic myth of insular freedom has been useful, not just in wars against foreign tyrannies but also in defense of a conservative, inegalitarian, deferential, harsh, archaic, and sometimes absurd system of government, which has still been more decent than most. But more decent than most is not good enough. “Europe” will change Britain, and, I hope, vice versa. It will speed up the end of Britain’s ancien régime, and with it some of the grandeur Anglophiles admired. But if “Europe” is always seen as a threat to unique British liberties, the phantom of European idealism can be used to resist any change for worse, but also for better. “Europe” does not have to end up as an authoritarian superstate. It could be a federation of free nations.
Britain has many allies on the European continent. That Anglophile arc of trading cities from the Baltics, via Hamburg, down to Lisbon and Milan still exists. That Europe, my Europe, could not survive without Britain, as the champion of popular sovereignty and free trade. I do not want to live in a Europe dominated by French technocrats and anxious Germans, hiding behind the federalist flag. But Britain cannot cultivate its allies by fighting “Europe” in the spirit of Dunkirk. For European democracies to survive, Europeans must regain the confidence to govern themselves, and that cause is not helped by the notion that only
Britain, by some historic miracle, has the organic, homegrown political traditions to sustain a liberal state. For Europe to become more Anglophile, the Anglophile myth must go.
M
YTHS DIE HARD
, however, and the dying process can be painful. At a meeting of historians in Amsterdam, I heard a young Dutch historian lay into the myth of Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation. It was a touching myth: the nation of heroic resisters who stood up for the Jews when no one else did, the one candle that refused to be snuffed in a continent of darkness. Touching, but alas, largely untrue. The next speaker was an Israeli journalist. He had heard the young historian, and praised him for his honesty. He would do the same in Israel, destroy every myth in sight. But at the same time, he was dismayed. For he had always taken comfort from the Dutch myth, which held out a last hope for humanity. He would continue to cherish it, whatever the facts of history might reveal. He had grown up with it. It was part of him. That is rather the way I feel about the Anglophile myth too. I grew up with it. I salute its grandeur. Part of me would like to live in Berlin’s England forever.
As a child, going back and forth between the Continent and Britain on ferryboats that often stank of vomit, disgorged by drunken British soldiers, I used to get a little sentimental at the sight of the Dover cliffs looming up on cold winter mornings or disappearing into foggy nights. Crossing the Channel was an adventure. The sea was like a moat between different worlds, where people wore different clothes, ate different food, abided by different rules, and weighed with different measures. We would leave the Continent from the coast of Belgium, where the land was industrial and flat, the streets were lit by sinister yellow lights, and the air smelled of seawater and frying fat. Britain just smelled of smoke, curling from countless Victorian chimneys. The roads were narrow and twisty. Children wore uniforms. Cars looked old. Double-decker buses gurgled and screeched. There were signs that read
KEEP ON THE LEFT
. I noted these differences with a mounting sense of excitement. For I knew we were on our way to my grandparents’ house.
My grandparents are no longer there. And I no longer take the ferry.
It is too inconvenient, the crossing too long. I take the tunnel instead, by train. You pass through Folkestone without seeing a cliff, and Calais without a glimpse of the sea or a whiff of
frites
. An announcement is made in English, sometimes with a French accent, and French, sometimes with an English one. You open your
Herald Tribune
, take a sip of espresso, wonder what it would be like to get stuck in a tunnel under the sea, halfway between Britain and the European continent, marvel at the way the train speeds up as soon as it enters France, and before you know it you’re there.
S
OURCES
2. V
OLTAIRE’S
C
OCONUTS
For a general overview of Voltaire’s life I used Theodore Besterman’s
Voltaire
, first published in London and New York in 1969. The account of Voltaire’s arrival in England, and his subsequent adventures there, I found in Archibald Ballantyne,
Voltaire’s Visit to England: 1726–1729
(London, 1893). The story of Voltaire’s encounter with Bolingbroke in France is from A. Owen Aldridge’s
Voltaire and the Century of Light
(New Jersey, 1975). Two excellent books on Voltaire’s early life are René Pomeau’s
D’Arouet à Voltaire: 1694–1734
(Oxford, 1905) and André Michel Rousseau’s
L’Angleterre et Voltaire
(Paris). Montesquieu’s observations on English politics are in his
Esprit des loi
(Geneva, 1749). Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary was published in London in 1764. Quotations from his
Letters Concerning the English Nation
are from the 1994 Oxford University Press edition, introduced by Nicholas Cronk. Eighteenth-century French Anglomania, with its crazes for roast beef, elaborate ladies’ headgear, and garden parks, is described in Frederick C. Green’s
Eighteenth Century France
(London, 1964). Fougeret de Monbrun’s counterblast,
Préservatif contre L’Anglomanie
, was published in Paris in 1757. The views of French Anglophobes and Anglophiles, such as Marat and Linguet, are set out in Gabriel Bonno’s
La Constitution britannique devant l’opinion française de Montesquieu à Bonaparte
(Paris, 1931). On Voltaire’s life in Ferney and his influence on the French Revolution I consulted Gustave Lanson’s
Voltaire
(Paris,
1906) and André Maurois’s book of the same title (Paris, 1933), always bearing in mind that Maurois’s gift for telling a good story is not always matched by a keen eye for accuracy. Thomas Carlyle’s comments on Voltaire’s century and Voltaire himself are in his
Heroes and Hero-Worship
(London, 1841), and in his
Essay on Voltaire
, reprinted in
A Carlyle Reader
(Cambridge, 1984). His comment on “Herr Voltaire” is quoted in Gerald Newman,
The Rise of English Nationalism
, (London, 1987). For eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century British Gallophobia I consulted Linda Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837
(London, 1992).