There was no referendum in Britain to ratify the Maastricht Treaty; what mattered was the vote in Parliament. Parliamentary opposition to Maastricht was led by the so-called Bruges Group who hailed Mrs Thatcher’s speech of 1988 as the gospel of Euroscepticism. Norman Tebbitt argued that ‘Britain still carries the burdens (and some residual benefits) of the imperial past’ and warned that in the European Union ‘the British Chancellor of the Exchequer’s powers will be comparable to those of the treasurer of a permanently rate-charge-capped local authority’.48 More pithily, in The Sunday Telegraph Boris Johnson denounced a ‘Delors plan to rule Europe’.49 Whereas the French were refighting the wars of 1792 and 1870, the British were refighting the Second World War. Bill Cash, one of their key affiliates and chair of the Conservative Backbench Group on European Affairs, declared that Germany had ‘long wanted to establish a German-centred united Europe, based around a Deutsche [sic] Mark zone and a federal union modelled on herself’.50 ‘Britain and its democracy in Westminster’, said Cash, ‘played an absolutely fundamental role in the Second World War in saving Europe from German hegemony and dictatorship’. Once again they were fighting the ‘Battle for Britain’.51
Although there was no Maastricht referendum in Britain, Eurosceptic opinion was stirred up by the debates and pressure to hold one was demanded by a Referendum Party set up in 1994 by millionaire James Goldsmith. It secured a modest 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1997 general election. Goldsmith died shortly afterwards but his campaigning opened the way to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which would have much more of a future. UKIP was a 1993 rebranding of the Anti-Federalist League founded in 1991 by Alan Sked, a lecturer at the London School of Economics and former pupil of historian A. J. P. Taylor. It secured 3.7 per cent of the vote in the 1994 European elections and attracted the likes of City financier Nigel Farage, whose view of Europe was shaped by visits to First World War battlefields and who favoured Bomber Command ties. After UKIP was squeezed to 0.3 per cent of the vote in 1997, Sked was ousted by a group including Farage, who wanted a less constitutionalist and more populist approach, playing on monocultural British nationalism and hostility to immigration. Sked denounced Farage as a racist who was once quoted as saying, ‘We will never get the nigger vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.’52 The popular appeal of Farage was undoubted, and he and his party emerged as a powerful Eurosceptic voice, exerting huge pressure on the Conservative Party and British politics more widely.
By the 1990s the issue of Europe was becoming a real problem in Britain. Whereas the French embraced the European project as a way of extending French power and reducing the threat of Germany by locking her into federal institutions, the British increasingly saw those institutions as a threat to national sovereignty. Britain had a very different experience of the Second World War from France. For France, 1940 meant defeat and occupation, while Britain was entranced by the fantasy of ‘standing alone’ against Hitler, like the dome of St Paul’s rising above the smoke of the Blitz. If she had been rescued it was by the United States, not by Europe; indeed Britain claimed that along with the Americans she had liberated Europe from Fascism and Nazism. Isolation from Europe carried no fears because of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Besides, Great Britain’s calling historically had been outside Europe, a Greater Britain of white Dominions and an empire stretching from the Caribbean to India. In her empire she had been supreme; she had not had to take rules from anybody. As the European option became less palatable, so a fantasy of a global Britain that was in some way a reincarnation of her empire became more attractive.
7
Islamism and the Retreat to Monocultural Nationalism
Thinking about empire was radically changed in the last ten or twenty years of the twentieth century by a powerful phenomenon: the rise of global Islamism. This was the eruption onto the world stage of a political Islam with universalist claims.1 Its first breakthrough was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, its second the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion of that year. It came to the fore after the end of the Cold War which, it was hoped in the West, would lead to the triumph of democracy and human rights. Instead, it provoked a new phase of neo-imperialism by the Western powers, drawing on fantasies of their colonial past. These battles were fought not only along what had been the north-west of India and in the Middle East; they affected immigrant communities in the metropolis, who increasingly identified as Muslims. This perceived threat fired Islamophobia in the host societies and the refinement of monocultural national identities which excluded Muslims, much as they had done in the colonial era but now alienating or radicalising them.
The Rise of Global Islamism
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 toppled the Shah who had been backed by American power. It opened the way to the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the foundation of the Islamic Republic.2 This confronted the West not on the economic battlefield, although it paid US$8 billion for the release of the fifty-two Americans taken hostage during the revolution, but on the religious and cultural battlefield, where Islam was used to define opposition to America and the West, and to mobilise mass movements. In his September 1980 Message to the Pilgrims Khomeini declared of the ‘Great Satan’ that ‘America is the number one enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world. There is no crime America will not commit in order to maintain its political, economic, cultural and military domination.’ He announced that ‘Iran is a country effectively at war with America’ and its stooges and that its Revolutionary Guard was ready for combat.3
Iran’s riposte began with demonstrations but moved on to armed attacks. After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, 400 Revolutionary Guards were sent to support the Islamist militant group Hezbollah, and forced Israel out. They then organised devastating suicide attacks on the US embassy in Beirut on 18 April 1983, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, and on a barracks in Beirut on 23 October 1983, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen.4 Palestinians on the West Bank, suffering intensified Israeli occupation and settlement, but fired up by Islamist actions and led by those whom Yasser Arafat called ‘generals of the stones’, launched an Intifada or revolt in December 1987.5
A second dimension of the Islamist movement was triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. A holy fightback or jihad was mounted by Afghan guerrillas, the mujahideen, who were reinforced by volunteers drawn widely from the Islamic world, including Palestinian refugees, Egyptians, Algerians and Saudis.6 Like the International Brigades who went to fight fascism in Spain in 1936, they were inspired by a desire for justice and bound together as brothers in arms. One of the recruits was Osama bin Laden, the son of a Syrian mother and Saudi businessman who died in a plane crash when he was a child. He decided not to follow his brothers who went to study in Britain and the United States but graduated from university in Jeddah in 1979. In 1984 he went to Peshawar on the Pakistan–Afghan border, formerly a key garrison of the British Empire on the North-West Frontier, to recruit and train mujahideen for the war against the Soviets.7 The Soviets finally withdrew from Kabul on 15 February 1989, and Osama bin Laden and his comrades later claimed that their guerrilla action was responsible not only for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan but also for the subsequent implosion of the USSR (Figure 7.1). For them it was an anti-imperial victory on the scale of the defeat of the Sassanid Empire in 651 or the Byzantine Empire in 1453, and the next target would be what it saw as the American Empire and its allies.8
Figure 7.1 Global Islamism: mujahideen fighter with rocket-launcher advancing on Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 1989.
Getty Images / David Stewart-Smith / Hulton Archive / 76309285
The end of the Cold War was supposed to hand undisputed victory to the West, now supreme over its old enemy, the communist USSR. A forty-year struggle under the threat of nuclear destruction was over and the following decade was later dubbed ‘the holiday from history’.9 The way seemed open for the United States and its allies
to promote a new world order of liberal democracy, the rule of law, human rights, the free market and peace, without fear of opposition. If there were opposition, intervention to promote these goals would be justified on liberal or humanitarian grounds, especially if the United Nations offered it sanction, to safeguard or extend that new world order.10
In the event, things did not turn out so simply. The threat of communism was immediately replaced by the threat of global Islam. The British orientalist and Princeton academic Bernard Lewis wrote a piece on ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ for The Atlantic in September 1990. The cover picture was of a turbaned figure, staring out at the reader with anger.11 Harvard professor Samuel Huntington argued in 1993 and more fully in 1996 that after the Cold War the conflicts of the future would be clashes of civilisations, fired by opposing religious and cultural identities.12 The doctrine of liberal interventionism was all too soon displaced by a neo-imperialism which resurrected the methods and fantasies of former empires.
It was in the Persian Gulf that promises of the new liberal world order came up against neo-colonial realities. One of the vestiges of Britain’s colonial power was Kuwait, a hub of the oil trade on the Gulf, which it had ruled as a protectorate from 1899 and regarded as its sphere of influence even after it became independent in 1961. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Under the cover of UN economic sanctions against Iraq, the Americans and British exploited their new-found confidence and resolved to take firm action. ‘Out of these troubled times’, President George Bush told the US Congress on 11 September 1990, ‘a new world order can emerge’ in which ‘the rule of law supplants the law of the jungle’.13
For many Britons intervention was less about upholding the rule of law and more about reliving the heroics of the Second World War. Veterans of the Desert War against Rommel were asked to give advice to British troops dug in on the Saudi/Iraqi border, while Battle of Britain pilots sent goodwill messages to their heirs in the Gulf.14 The French were much less happy with a war that looked too much like a repeat of the Suez Crisis. French Defence Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who had witnessed the evils of the Algerian War as a young administrator, and opposed American imperialism, pressed for a negotiated solution. As late as 14 January François Mitterrand tried to convince the UN Security Council to hold an international conference that would broker an Iraqi withdrawl from Kuwait and attempt to solve the Israel–Palestine question.15 This was opposed by both Great Britain and the United States, who extracted Resolution 678 from the Security Council requiring Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait by 15 January 1991, or else face war. Saddam Hussein was a secular, not a Muslim leader, but three days before the UN deadline he played the Islamic card, having ‘Alallahu Akbar’, God is great, placed between the three stars on the Iraqi flag.16
Operation Desert Storm began on 16 January 1991, with bombs and cruise missiles raining down on Kuwait and Baghdad. To those on the ground it seemed less like liberal intervention than neo-colonial aggression. The Americans committed 540,000 troops, the British 35,000 and the French 10,000. Chevènement resigned on 29 January, criticising the ‘big stick applied on a scale not seen to date’ and the ‘Victorian hypocrisy of the world establishment’ which, he claimed, concealed the right of the strongest behind the rights of man.17 This had no effect on the ‘shock and awe’ tactics of the allied forces who drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait on 23 February. The Americans attacked retreating Iraqi forces along what became known as the ‘highway of death’ (Figure 7.2). General Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had ‘no idea’ how many Iraqis had been killed and, he continued, ‘I don’t really plan to undertake any real effort to find out’. Greenpeace estimated that between 70,000 and 115,000 Iraqi troops and between 72,000 and 93,000 civilians had been killed.18
Figure 7.2 The ‘clash of civilisations’: an American soldier inspects the carbonised bodies of Iraqi soldiers on the ‘highway of death’ from Kuwait to Baghdad, February 1991.
Getty Images / Peter Turnley / Corbis Historical / VCG / 640507099
That said, the Gulf War never really ended as the United States and United Kingdom tightened the blockade on Iraq, encouraged hopeless revolts by Shiites and Kurds, imposed ‘no-fly zones’, and bombed Baghdad in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. One calculation is that between 1991 and 1998 half a million Iraqi civilians died.19
After defeating the forces of the Soviet Union and fired anew by the brutality of the United States and its allies in the Gulf War, the Muslim ‘International Brigades’ that had gone to fight in Afghanistan fanned out to engage in other actions. These included the war in Bosnia against the Serbs in 1992–5 following the breakup of Yugoslavia, the 1994–6 war in Chechnya against the Russian Federation and the civil war in Algeria following the coup of 1992. One individual who went to fight in Afghanistan and then fought for the Bosnian Muslims was Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, the son of an Egyptian army officer, and who studied civil engineering at Brighton Polytechnic College. He later became more commonly known as Abu Hamza.
In Algeria, the government of Colonel Chadli, a veteran of the FLN, began a programme of economic liberalisation in 1986 and political liberalisation from 1989. But free elections benefited the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) which aimed at founding an Islamic state. The FIS won over 80 per cent of the seats contested in December 1991 and looked set to win most of the rest of them in January 1992. Encouraged by France and the United States, the Chadli government mounted a coup on 11 January 1992, dissolving parliament, cancelling the elections, declaring a state of emergency, banning the FIS and arresting its leaders.20 Secretary of State James Baker later explained that upholding the rule of law and democracy was tempered by the challenge of dealing with global Islamism:
Generally speaking, when you support democracy, you take what democracy gives you. If it gives you a radical Islamic fundamentalist, you’re supposed to live with it. We didn’t live with it in Algeria because we felt that the radical fundamentalists’ views were so adverse to what we believe in and what we support and to what we understand the national interests of the United States to be.21
The military coup against democracy gave Islamists no alternative but to turn to armed struggle. An Islamic Armed Movement (MIA) was set up by Saïd Mekhlofi, a veteran of the Afghan War and the FIS’s former head of security, and its members wore stolen army uniforms. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) formed in the summer of 1992 also involved Afghan veterans and adopted Afghan-style beards, shaved heads and loose-fitting clothes. Algeria now descended into civil war as these armed groups attacked local authorities and police, seized control of tax revenues and massacred their opponents in the name of jihad.22 These opponents included the French, who were seen to be backing the Algerian dictatorship. The GIA killed five French people in Algiers on 3 August 1994 and on Christmas Eve 1994 hijacked an Air France airbus at Algiers airport, demanding the release of imprisoned comrades. The plane was stormed two days later by French forces after it arrived in Marseille and the hijackers were killed.
The Satanic Verses and the Crisis of British Identity
The rise of global Islamism and the return of neo-colonial conflict had a profound impact on immigrant communities in France and Britain. To date, even if they had a Muslim background, these had identified as North African or Arab, as Indian, Pakistani or East African Asian. Increasingly, these minority communities now identified themselves as Muslim and were identified as such by members of the host communities who embraced Islamophobia.
The underlying issue in both countries was the extent to which immigrant populations could be integrated into metropolitan society. How much would they have to transform their values, leaving behind beliefs brought from their country of origin, and how far could they retain these while living in the host society? Equally, how far were metropolitan societies prepared to accommodate difference and diversity by reinventing themselves as multi-ethnic, multicultural spaces, and how far would they retreat int
o a defensive, monocultural and indeed colonialist nationalism which stigmatised and excluded immigrant populations?
In Britain, these questions were played out in a famous 1989 cause célèbre. Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but the Muslim community felt deeply that it insulted the Prophet. Matters came to a head in the Yorkshire city of Bradford. Many of the immigrant population had come from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir to work in the woollen industry. When factory jobs disappeared they set up businesses instead and those who made money built places of worship; the Bradford Council of Mosques was founded in 1981. Industrial decline, however, also sharpened the hostility of the white community and conflict flared up locally and nationally with the Honeyford case of 1984–5.23
Empires of the Mind Page 20