Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  Labour’s oudook remains corporatist rather than individualist. Siedentop, to quote his Spectator article again, blames the absence of a powerful middle-class ethic. He writes: ‘Just as the French bourgeoisie acquiesced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the growth of centralised royal power, in order to destroy their local aristocratic oppressors, so the British working class has acquiesced in the centralisation of power during the twentieth century in order to destroy what it sees as social privilege – the middle class masquerading as an aristocracy’.

  One could stop to argue about the wisdom of a policy of class defence, in a period when working people are so intensely concerned with their individual rather than their collective destinies. But I am more interested in the consequences of Labour’s fatal fascination with the instruments of actually-existing Britain. The consequences can be implied by stating this proposition, which is fundamental: it is not possible to build democratic socialism by using the institutions of the Ancient British State. Under that I include the present doctrine of sovereignty, Parliament, the electoral system, the Civil Service – the whole gaudy old heritage. It is not possible, in the way that it is not possible to induce a vulture to give milk. The British regime is designed to preserve privilege, to prevent the effective distribution of power and to smother the individual who counterposes his own interests to the collective interest of the mythic nation. It is democratic in the sense that the Powder-hall Sprint is democratic; it is socialist in the sense that the National Coal Board is socialist.

  The Jacobins themselves knew that the Revolution required new institutions. Marxism’s warnings about the problems of a socialist movement confronted with the state apparatus of the previous regime have stood up well – tragically well – to experience. But Labour appear still to believe that the British Parliament under George III could have composed the American Constitution and applied it to the Thirteen Colonies.

  So it appears that in fact it is precisely Labour, out of all the British parties, which stands to gain most from constitutional change, but which is most stoutly opposed to is – dismissing it, indeed, as a middle-class irrelevance. Instead, Labourism makes an effort to claim the heritage for itself, and compete with the Tories as the party of ‘the nation’. This is not only absolutely unhistorical, in a multinational state like the United Kingdom. It is doomed to failure even as a tactic, for this is a game which the Tories and the regime itself will always win. Patrick Wright5 suggests that Labour’s failure to appropriate the ‘nation’ is inevitable ‘not least because the nation to which Thatcher appeals so successfully is articulated … against postwar statist reform. While actually increasing the powers of the centralised State, this Conservatism is also thriving on widespread disillusion with the bureaucratic corporatism of the welfare state’. The nation or national interest to which Labour appeals. Wright goes on, is perceived as grey, inhuman and undignified. ‘Starkly opposed to this, “the nation” to which Thatcher has learned to appeal is full of adventure, grandeur, ideas of freedom, ceremony and conscripted memories (of childhood or war, for example)… There are indeed “two nations” in the symbolism of Thatcher’s Britain, but these are not the two nations of habitual definition: the division is not so much between rich and poor or North and South, but rather between the grand … symbolism of Empire and War on one hand and the bureaucratic imagery of the welfare state on the other’.

  In whose name, then, should a mass party of the Left speak in Britain of the 1980s? Not in the name of the nation, but not in the name of one class either. How about in the name of the people? It is not a nation or a class which demands Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but the living – all the living – inhabitants of a definite country at a definite moment: now.

  It is for the Left, above all, to develop this notion of a ‘people’, free of British national mythology but also free of a false, defensive collectivism which threatens to become part of that mythology. Democratic socialism is about co-operation and community. But that can now only be reached by an indirect route. Labour cannot get there by syndical and class struggle alone; it must become the party of individual liberty as well, fighting for the rights of the citizen, for his power to challenge the bureaucracy, for institutions which enfranchise him -whether these are administrative courts or local pressure groups or community co-operatives. A war against the State is waiting to be fought by a mass ‘freedom party’ of the Left. Its battles should be for a written constitution, for the doctrine of popular sovereignty, for a just electoral law based on proportional representation, for a code of administrative law and a constitutional court, for a sweeping reform of Parliament and its proceedings, for the option of federal status for those parts of the United Kingdom that wish it, for an entrenched grant of far greater competences to local authorities including the power to levy variable rates of taxation, for the demolition of the English legal professions and their replacement by a judicial system in which justice is affordable and judges come from all classes and age groups … For the abolition of the monarchy? I hold this to be – in Reformation language – ‘a thing indifferent’. If the cult of the archaic nation is demolished, the monarchy – no longer called upon to sanctify it – will reduce to the scale of a harmless focus of affection and newspaper scuttlebutt. It is not the last king or queen who should be beheaded. It is the last Druid whose brains should be knocked out with the last volume of Walter Bagehot.

  We are living in an increasingly airless room. Hope has been pumped out of it, and replaced by a scent of decay, by Karl Miller’s ‘anxiety and ill-feeling and … sense of a dishonoured public life’. If unreformed State power goes on expanding, and popular misery deepens, convulsions and unconsciousness will ensue. We must escape, or at least kick open the windows. We must transfer power to the people, but that will remain a dead political cliché until Labour, especially, understand that this transfer cannot now be achieved by the old, direct methods of syndical and class struggle, still less by a Labour government acting through the British State. This society requires drastic and immediate constitutional change. And the simplest way of justifying that change is to say that it would allow people, at last, to fight for themselves. [1986

  The John P. Mackintosh Memorial Lecture, University of Edinburgh 1986.

  III

  Europe

  A Barbaric Continent

  Tiring the Romans

  ‘Europe is dead!’ This, one hears, was the opinion expressed by a flight of Reaganite hawks who visited London the other day.

  One’s first retort, from beyond the tomb, is that if there is no life in Europe, President Reagan’s men should have been more discriminating about death when they prepared his visit this week to our silent continent. It seems that there are good bones and bad bones. We lie dead at Bitburg, and dead at Bergen-Belsen, but some Europeans are evidently more dead than others. The President’s first itinerary assumed that the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS would be more responsive to him than the victims of the concentration camps.

  This distinction has been hastily abolished. But there are still many armies of bones who are not reckoned worth talking to at all. When Chancellor Kohl went to Belsen last week, there was a separate ceremony – which he did not attend – for the 50,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war who perished there in numbers equal to those of the Jewish dead. President Reagan might reserve a word of respect for them without buckling the supports of the Western Alliance. But he probably won’t.

  Still, this is not the sort of deadness the President’s disciples in London were complaining about. They find the leaders of Western Europe suffering from a lack of ardour which could be fatal if left untreated. When offered new missile systems, or visions of defence by an array of fireworks in space, they merely whine. When warned that the Soviet Union is hunched over a giant console controlling urban terrorists, coal miners and peace marchers in a minutely planned campaign for their undoing, they titter. They are flaccid, they are effete. European civilisation lives, wi
th all its museums and palaces, its restaurants and pessimistic movies, but this is just the luminescence on the belly of an old mackerel if the raw instinct for self-preservation is extinct.

  This is a grand old point of view. As clichés go, it has enjoyed a long life. It therefore deserves to be promptly stood on its head.

  The ‘over-civilised’ point, first. On 3 September 1939 delirious crowds stood outside the British and French embassies in Warsaw to celebrate their declaration of war on behalf of Poland. Most people shouted ‘Long Live France,’ or ‘Long Live England’ (the Polish for Great Britain being too much to expect on a hot autumn day). This was pathetic enough, as neither Britain nor France fired a shot to save Poland from destruction. But one anonymous man, clambering on the shoulders of his friends, went further. He cried: ‘Long Live European Civilisation-

  It has always seemed to me that the events which followed his cry demolished the term ‘European civilisation’ for ever. Certainly, many of the palaces and paintings survived (though not in Poland), and Europeans today read and write more than ever. But the idea that there was some necessary connection between Beethoven and benevolence, between Mantegna and mercy, collapsed as totally as the Frauenkirche in Dresden. As late as 1939, Europeans who were already living in the period of total politics and mass populism still accepted the propaganda of the previous epoch, when kings and dukes – however cruel and stupid in their persons – were also the patrons of high culture. It was supposed that something rubbed off. Auschwitz corrected that.

  For Europe is not a civilised place, a region which is polished but rather lifeless. It is a barbaric continent, heaving with a crude vigour which is now beginning to crack apart the marble slabs of imperial order laid across it by the post-war settlement 40 years ago. There is a lot wrong with that order, but it has at least restrained the Europeans from slaughtering one another for an unprecedented span of time.

  Squashed under the enormous weight of Soviet domination, the Eastern nations of Europe have had no opportunity to display savagery. But in the West, conflicts waged outside Europe have shown what ferocity lies only lightly buried. France fought devastating wars in Indochina and Algeria, and came close to civil war in the Algerian aftermath. Portugal soaked Africa in blood. Britain remains one of the most pugnacious and military nations in the world, whose forces have been almost constantly in action somewhere in the world since 1945.

  But barbarism is not just a readiness to fight. More often, the barbarian expresses his vigour through duplicity. France under the Fourth Republic and then de Gaulle was as maddening a partner for the Americans as President Ceausescu of Romania has been for the Soviet Union. Mr Mikhail Gorbachov now studies with distaste a row of Communist regimes which require Soviet support and Soviet fuel to stay in power, but which will always wriggle away from the path of virtue if they can. The European NATO allies have shown truly barbarous inconsistency by alternately squealing for more solid tokens of American military support and then grousing about the tokens when they arrive in the shape of cruise and Pershing missiles. Star Wars will be the same story. As the Romans knew, the real trouble with barbarian allies is not so much that they rebel as that they are inconsequent.

  As the Romans knew … could it be that there is a ‘civilised’ Roman quality which the United States and even the Soviet Union possess and Europe does not? Perhaps a muscle-bound innocence, an enduring surprise that others may not recognise their good intentions. Perhaps it is just patience, the ability to stay put in distant places. A Roman legion might spend generations on Hadrian’s Wall. There are US barracks in Bavaria and Soviet barracks in Mecklenburg where young American and Russian soldiers drill on the same squares where their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, drilled before them.

  Books pile up, devoted to what the superpowers have done to Europe. There are volumes on the Sovietisation of the East, on the Americanisation of the West. But nobody, I notice, has asked what Europe has done to the superpowers.

  Let’s remember, first of all, that it was the Europeans who brought them into Europe and pitched them into confrontation. Adolf Hitler’s lost gamble in 1941 brought Soviet power up to the Elbe. Ernie Bevin, as much as anyone else, persuaded President Truman to leave American forces on the Continent.

  Bogged down in the European swamp, the Romans have spent unthinkable totals of money and manpower. The Americans financed the post-war economic recovery of the West. The Soviet Union runs its own side of Europe at a net loss.

  And neither has bought peace of mind. Across his western fence, Mr Gorbachov sees the gibbering mess of Poland, all crucifixes, generals and nationalism. The Americans have had to watch Western Europe acquire their technology and then impudently sell its fruits to the Soviet bloc. The swamp is alive, but mostly with leeches.

  What have we done to them? After 40 years in Europe, the New Soviet Man has lost his clean jaw-line and become squat, liverish. That American boy who, so long ago, rode the jeep with the white star of liberation has grown grey and paranoid, and moodily kicks the Nicaraguan cat.

  It is the Romans who have aged so terribly, and Europe which has grown barbarously young again. E. P. Thompson says that ‘Europe is meditating now a declaration of independence.’ But who is really dependent on whom, 40 years on? My friend Francis Hope used to say: ‘When the child is grown-up, it’s time the parents learned to stand on their own feet.’

  [1985

  Axel’s Castles

  Axel Caesar Springer, the West German newspaper tycoon, died a week ago. When I heard the news, I saw again the streets of Berlin brimming with red flags and heard – from nearly 20 years ago – the voices of tens of thousands of marchers roaring his name. ‘Dispossess Springer!’ they shouted, and ‘Springer, we are coming for you!’ But the second thought which came to me was a question. Why, after all, was he so frantically hated by so many?

  He was a tremendous Anglophile. British officers licensed and encouraged him to start his first newspapers, back in ruined Hamburg in 1948, and Springer always fancied a decor of leather armchairs and brown panelling which he thought ‘typically English.’ And his life’s achievement – the establishment of an empire of raucous, nation-wide popular papers which relied for their appeal on sex, schmaltz and the bullying of left-wing scapegoats – was the introduction to West Germany of a very British institution.

  Any Springer editor had to subscribe to four principles, which do not sound shocking when written down. These were the peaceful reunification of Germany ‘in liberty,’ reconciliation between Germans and Jews and firm support for the state of Israel, rejection of all forms of totalitarianism, and defence of the ‘social market economy.’

  Some called Springer ‘fascistoid.’ That was idiotic. The British military authorities gave him a licence to open newspapers because they thought that his brand of anti-communist, liberal entrepreneurship was what the Germans needed. He started the radio programme magazine Höt Zu and then the Hamburger Abendblatt, his first daily evening paper. Its slogan was ‘Be Nice to Each Other.’ He wrote before he launched it that he wanted ‘to make a paper whose motor is today’s heartbeat, which obeys only its own laws.’ This was a recipe for a populist press which would break with the stale old German tradition of papers tied to political parties.

  The empire grew. He started the serious conservative daily Die Welt, the cheap and rabid Bild-Zeitung which now has a circulation of over five million, and two popular Sunday papers. He acquired the remains of the pre-war Ullstein publishing giant in Berlin, and owned a virtual Press monopoly in Hamburg and West Berlin. When people complained that he had no mandate to force his own politics on the nation, he would refer to ‘the daily, overwhelming vote of the readers for my papers.’

  One of the anti-Springer buttons of 1968 warned: ‘It will end badly for Springer.’ As the years passed, he became a sad man, preoccupied by a mystical version of Protestant faith. His son killed himself in 1980, leaving the empire without an heir. Most of his causes became
irrelevant or unpopular, and his political campaigns became rarer. At the end, his chief mourners were the leaders of Israel, whose nation he had supported with faithful and spectacular generosity from his own fortune.

  Why, then, did so many Germans – not just the young Marxist Left of the 1960s but Social Democrats and liberals too – come to see Axel Springer as their arch-enemy? This hatred reached its peak in the late 1960s, the time of the student revolt, of the first entry of the Social Democrats into government, of the Ostpolitik which began to dismande West Germany’s threat to redraw the frontiers established in 1945. There was the ‘Dispossess Springer’ campaign, the call for a ‘Lex Springer’ against newspaper concentration, the fiery 1968 riots which tried to stop the distribution of his papers, the decision by German writers to refuse contributions to the Springer press.