The View From the Margins

More important for Britain and for Margaret Thatcher, much of whose prestige rested on her close American links and her revival of moribund patriotism, the year 1989 completely changed the European balance of power. Germany, more rapidly than anyone could have imagined, became one nation again, not quite "from the Maas to the Memel", as the now banned verses of its national anthem claim, but still sprawling mightily across the Continent, with its economic power spreading well beyond its borders. A worried France, still hag-ridden by Sedan, Verdun and Vichy, sought to contain and control this reborn monster by binding it into a multinational system intended to remove the source of Franco-German conflict forever. Out of this came the Franco-German desire for a rapid integration of the European Union, an integration that Margaret Thatcher mistrusted on the old British grounds that no one power should dominate the Continent, but which many in her party supported because they had lost confidence in the British na tion-state.

European integration was seen in France as a profoundly anti-American project, whose aims included the reduction of U.S. power and influence in Europe, and a challenge to the pre-eminence of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. The effects on Britain were an unintentional by-product of something much larger, but no less earthshaking for that. England's weakness or danger has always been Ireland's opportunity; and the shift in relations with both Europe and the United States has led to the largely unacknowledged defeat of English power in Ireland after eight hundred years, not by military force but by the ingenious diplomacy of Dublin and of Sinn Fein, the political mouthpiece of the "Irish Republican Army."

The disappearance of an external enemy has, especially in Scotland, obliterated Britishness and the belief in a united Britain, already threatened by a sweeping cultural revolution in all areas of life. Nationalists in Scotland, and even in Wales, have recognized the opportunity that European federalism gives them, to break the bonds with London and pay allegiance directly to the new Euro-capitals of Brussels and Frankfurt. Tony Blair's creation of devolved assemblies, which he claimed was meant to strengthen the United Kingdom, has actually hurried the departure of Scotland and Wales from the UK. They already exist as administrative "regions" of the new Europe--while England, far too large to be fed into the Euro-blender in one piece, has been divided into several such regions, whose inhabitants mostly do not yet know that they exist or what they are called.

Davies seemed a little shy when British supporters of the European Union adopted his book as one of their texts, which several of them hurried to do. It is certainly nothing like as hostile to the current British state as Linda Colley's deconstruction of Britain in her 1992 volume, Britons, nor is Davies much of an enthusiast for the wobbly euro, which many otherwise keen federalists see as far less urgent than the eastward expansion and reform of the EU. Yet this book does give powerful support to the idea that Britain was a temporary country, formed by empire and fatally undermined by the end of that empire. It also hints at a belief that Britain ought not to continue to exist. It is, for instance, harshly dismissive of the embattled Protestants of Northern Ireland, the most self-consciously British people in the Isles. It is disappointingly modish on the subject of the British House of Lords, speaking of the "running sore of continuing hereditary privilege", as if there were no respectable arguments in fa vor of a revising chamber that was independent of the executive, and which embodied the principle of inheritance that is central to private property and therefore to liberty. It predicts, with a certain amount of Jacobin relish, the approaching abolition and humiliation of the monarchy--again without any consideration for the dangers involved in such a step for a finely balanced constitution.