by Ian Buruma
That Britain was ahead of the world in its doctrine of individual rights, Mazzini was the first to acknowledge. But much as he admired freedom of conscience, press, and trade, these were not enough. Democracy to him was but a means to higher aims. His life—and his ideal state—was a mission to establish universal progress and the brotherhood of man. Without such a higher mission, he believed, individual rights degenerate into selfishness, government to a necessary convenience, and there “is, properly speaking, no society.” Mazzini had anticipated the bitter tension between what came to be known as “Thatcherism” and “Europe.”
Mazzini’s views on Europe were remarkably prophetic. In the late 1840s, when he started a People’s International League in London, to educate the British public in international affairs, he argued for an association of equal, democratic European states, which would trade in one vast free market. The Times called it “tiresome quackery,” as one might, but Mazzini’s eccentric vision came true more than a century later. His aspirations were aimed higher than that. Although a passionate nation builder in his own time, Mazzini believed in a future United States of Europe. With a common constitution, the artificial rivalries of dynastic courts would disappear, and a European Court of Arbitration would solve cases of injustice. This is an ideal yet to be realized, and Britain is unlikely ever to be its champion.
Mazzini had many British supporters. Swinburne felt so inspired that he wrote an ode to Mazzini, and when they met, he kissed the sage’s hands. Arnold Toynbee said Mazzini was the “true teacher of our age,” greater than Carlyle or Adam Smith. A shipowner in Liverpool named his son Mazzini in the Italian’s honor. Mazzini’s portrait was on many people’s walls. But the British government, despite Palmerstonian rhetoric about spreading freedom and promoting constitutional government, never took up Mazzini’s mission. Queen Victoria was not amused by him. Disraeli distrusted his zealotry. (Gladstone, however, supported him.) And British foreign policy was not conducted to spread a moral mission of universal progress, but to look after what were seen as national interests. This meant, as far as Europe was concerned, a combination of balancing powers and splendid isolation. Not that Britain was against the national aspirations of Young Italy, and other democratic nationalists, in principle. But supporting precarious, sometimes violent revolutionary movements against powerful despots was not seen as necessarily in the national interest.
Mazzini found this as hard to bear as the British neglect of Byron. To him, politics was about principles or nothing at all. Europe was engaged in a war of principles, between progress and reaction, the despotism of court and church against democratic nationalism. Passivity, or neutrality, was not an option: “Neutrality in a war of principles is mere passive existence, forgetfulness of all that makes a people sacred, the negation of the common law of nations, political atheism.” Can it be, he wrote, “that England, the England of the Reformation, the England of Elizabeth and of Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, gives up Europe to the dictatorship of force?”
These criticisms of British foreign policies are very like those made against another nation that boasts of being the land of the free but often puts national self-interest before its professed ideals: the United States of America. Ledru-Rollin’s criticism of Britain, that it lacked a grand vision, an overriding national idea able to transform the world, cannot be applied to America, to be sure. Liberalism is not only an American civic religion, but has been actively promoted abroad as a universal ideal. Hence the tension in American foreign policy between idealism and realpolitik. The question is whether classical liberalism, based as it is on legal and political institutions, and not on a perfectionist philosophy, can be turned into the kind of mission Mazzini, or indeed Ledru-Rollin, had in mind. I think Mazzini was disappointed by the “selfish” and aloof nature of British policy, not because British government was aristocratic or monarchical, but because its bourgeois liberalism is inimical to sacred missions. At best it is a system based on enlightened self-interest. Morality, or principle, plays a part in this. But it is never the only issue at stake.
The differences, then, between Ledru-Rollin, Mazzini, and Marx were great. Mazzini thought Marx had the makings of a dictator, and Marx hated Mazzini’s verbose mysticism and “puffy grandeur.” Mazzini did not believe socialism could be imposed on people, and Marx thought Mazzini’s democratic ideals were flabby. Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin were closer in their views. Their main difference was that the Italian thought human progress would come from Rome, while the Frenchman could think of only Paris as the source of universal liberation. But all three were suspicious of liberalism, which institutionalized adversarial politics. Marx saw party politics as a smoke screen for class interests. Mazzini was wary of party politics because his aim was the elimination of conflict. He was convinced that through common education, the whole of mankind, or at least European mankind, would be united in interests, purpose, and ideals. In this kind of “Europe,” there would be no place for “selfish” English liberals.
It is not the kind of “Europe” I would like to see. And yet Mazzini’s criticism of British foreign policy is still persuasive, even moving. His Anglophilia adds to his passion, and his passion may have been politically naive, but it was noble, and in his passion, he saw the limitations of British pragmatism. He wrote an article for The Westminster Review in 1852 that is still worth reading. It came at a peculiar time, when official British aloofness was slowly being disturbed by one of those periodic moods of belligerence, which would erupt a year later in the Crimean War. This was not the intervention from Britain that Mazzini had hoped for. Marx, naturally, applauded it; any war against Russia was a good war.
“The menace,” wrote Mazzini, “of the foreigner weighs upon the smaller states,” by which he meant the autocratic rule in Italy of the Austrian Empire and the sinister designs of the French. The last sparks of European liberty, he went on, “are extinguished under the dictatorial veto of the retrograde powers. England—the country of Elizabeth and Cromwell—has not a word to say in favour of the principle to which she owes her existence. If England persists in maintaining this neutral, passive, selfish part, she must expiate it. European transformation is inevitable; when it shall take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty paces at once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided, the people will remember that England has stood by as an inert, immovable, sceptical witness of their sufferings and efforts. Ancient alliances being broken, the old States having disappeared, where will be the new ones for England? New Europe will say to her, live thy own life. This life will be more and more restricted by the gradual inevitable emancipation of her colonies. England will find herself some day a third-rate power, and to this she is being brought by a want of foresight in her statesmen.”
What would Mazzini make of the world today? He would see a Britain divested of its colonies, a modest power on the margins of a European continent whose embrace it has accepted with the greatest reluctance. He would see a gap between British skepticism and a grand European project. He would see a continuing clash between French dirigisme and British liberalism, with a big, lumbering Germany moving uneasily in between. And he would see a United States caught in the same foreign policy dilemmas as Britain was before: a beacon of freedom and a refuge from tyranny trying to balance principle with self-interest, realpolitik with the promotion of liberty, and the desire to do good with the wish to retreat from the world and its messy conflicts.
Mazzini returned to his native country in 1870, where he spent the last two years of his life dodging his enemies, writing an essay on Byron, and adopting various disguises. One of them was that of an Englishman named George Brown. He now lies buried in the very un-English cemetery of Genoa. The cemetery is almost a village of grandiose tombs and statues of rapturous Madonnas, dead grandees striking heroic poses, and orgasmic angels hugging stone corpses on their way to heaven. Mazzini’s tomb is in the shape of a small Greek temple, to express, I assume, his r
esistance to the obscurantism of the Church. On it are engraved the following words: “His body belongs to Genoa. His name belongs to the ages. And his soul belongs to humanity.” Not a bad epitaph for a man who would change the world.
VOLTAIRE BLESSED BENJAMIN Franklin’s son. Goethe said he would sail to the United States if only he were forty years younger. Mazzini, Herzen, Liebknecht, and many other European radicals shared these sentiments. When Anglophiles tire of Britain, they turn to America as the promised land of liberty—but without the burdens of English class, English history, English privileges, and English prejudices. Mazzini thought the United States came “higher and nearer to the Ideal than any nation actually existing.” He meant the revolutionary ideal of universal progress and human perfectibility. America, after all, had a dream.
Herzen’s approval of America bore a very different and rather world-weary stamp. He had come to appreciate Britain for its lack of Utopian zeal, its boringness, philistinism even, and its bourgeois civility. His idea of the United States was Britain without aristocrats, without history, but, above all, without idealism: America without a dream. “This young and enterprising people,” he wrote, “more active than intelligent, is so much occupied with the material ordering of its life that it knows nothing of our torturing pains … Their contentment will be poorer, more commonplace, more sapless than that which was dreamed of in the ideals of romantic Europe; but it will bring with it no Tsars, no centralisation, perhaps no hunger.”
His, then, is the old, rather patronizing European notion that America is not a grown-up country. Britain was too grown-up to display dangerous enthusiasms; America was too young, and too banal. Herzen, that consummate Old Worlder, did not really understand the New World. He failed to foresee that liberalism, both word and concept, would take on a different meaning in the United States. It became something far more active, more enthusiastic, more “progressive.” From a conservative guarantee of individual rights it became an instrument to improve society. In that sense, even if the semantic change would happen much later, the radicals of the Old World really were more at home at the American consul’s table than at the stately home of an English grandee.
There is another variation of Anglo-Americanophilia, however, which is to see Britain and North America as inseparable parts of one Anglo-Saxon world. The Special Relationship is an old dream, fading in Britain and almost vanished in America. It is now seen as a form of British nostalgia. But in fact, it is rooted in European Anglophilia. Wilhelm Liebknecht was a typical example. Marx had always suspected him of being unsound, and Marx was right. Liebknecht adored Marx. He thought that as a scientist Marx was at least on a par with Darwin. But Liebknecht was not a dogmatic man. He had come to England to “learn from Marx and Engels, and from John Bull, the great old stager, who accomplished the unique feat of sweeping the cobwebs of philosophy and ideology from our German brains …”
Together with Marx, Liebknecht visited the Great Exhibition in 1851. Marx saw nothing but symbols of class conflict. But Liebknecht saw the exhibition as a triumph of free trade and industrial progress. He noted how it made the British workers feel as proud and patriotic as their bosses. He believed that the trade unions had made citizens of the workers. Fortified, oddly enough, by Disraeli’s novels, as well as his own observations, he wanted to set up German trade unions based on the British model. This didn’t go down well with fellow socialists such as Engels, Kautsky, and Bebel, who called him a sentimental old fool. In fact, Liebknecht was a German social democrat, a typical example of a liberal-minded German tradition, which is too often overlooked, since it existed in the shadow of more sinister creeds.
In 1886 Liebknecht visited America and got a little carried away by the experience. The United States was “the greatest, most perfect state ever produced by man.” It had been “destined by Providence to be the land of the future.” Yet his Anglophilia remained staunch. London remained the center of a “Great England, which includes, in my opinion, not only the Greater Britain of colonial enthusiasts, but also, indeed particularly, the United States of America and Canada.”
Marx could not possibly share this view. Not only did he have to admit, at the end of his life, that the prospects of a revolution in Britain were hopeless, but he was ignored in London, even as his fame grew in Europe. Britain was, as Liebknecht said, “always a secure refuge for European freedom fighters,” but it was also a graveyard for Utopian ideals. Even the British socialists showed little interest in Marx, or his writings. At the meeting of the International in 1872, British delegates insisted on the right to form their own, local organization, instead of being represented by the General Council. They distrusted foreigners, and the idea of London being the source of universal liberation was far from their minds. When Das Kapital appeared, it was barely noted in Britain. And Marx’s death in London in 1883 was recorded briefly in The Times in a dispatch from the Paris correspondent, who read about it in the French papers.
Yet there he lies, in Highgate Cemetery. It is a very English cemetery, with graveled paths, meandering, like English country lanes, past modest tombstones, worn and bent with age, many of them overgrown with weeds. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, rich and poor, famous and obscure, British and foreign, lie together like citizens in a metropolis. It is a civilized place, where nature is lightly but artfully ordered as in a country garden. The massive, rather brutal tomb containing the bones of Karl Marx looks out of place there. It is perhaps more suited to the cemetery of Genoa. The great revolutionary head gazes stonily at this most democratic and bourgeois of cemeteries. The inscription reads: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.” Opposite the tomb lie the more modest graves of communist leaders from South Africa and Iraq. Next to them are one or two Arabs, described as “humourists.” I noted, as a final affront to the self-image of the father of revolutions, several neat little piles of stones placed on his tomb, the traditional Jewish token of remembrance—for a great Jew who disliked Jews and disapproved of England.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
SCHOOLDAYS
I HAD A CHILDHOOD FRIEND CALLED VICTOR. HE WAS A pretty little boy, with honey-blond hair, cherry red lips, and brown eyes, a little like the angelic child in the old Pears soap advertisement, sweetly pushing out his cricket bat. As time went on, Victor grew prettier and prettier, but he was not academically gifted, and he misbehaved in class. He fell behind so badly in his schoolwork that his wealthy parents decided there was but one thing to do: send him to an English boarding school, where there would be fewer demands on his intellect and he might learn some manners. So Victor left The Hague and became a pupil of a minor public school in Berkshire. The idea filled me with deep envy.
This was a little odd, to be sure, even then, even in The Hague. None of my schoolmates had any desire to be sent to a boarding school. Boarding schools in Holland were for juvenile delinquents, or “difficult” children. They were institutions that smacked of prison or the army. We enjoyed the freedom of a coeducational, secular school system. Perhaps “enjoyed” isn’t the right word. We took it for granted, just as most parents took it for granted—thanks largely to Napoleon’s educational reforms—that you didn’t have to pay for a decent education.
And yet no institution has held such fascination for Anglophiles as the English public school. More than Parliament, or the common law, or the Stock Exchange, the English public school represents the Anglophile’s idea of England. For it is there, in those neo-Gothic cloisters, that the English gentleman is created, as a new breed of aristocrat in a bourgeois age. In 1974, two years before his death, André Malraux, so ill he could hardly hold his head up, told the writer Bruce Chatwin that Western civilization was faced with the most serious crisis since the fall of Rome. His facial tics, disconcerting at the best of times, grew more violent as his excitement mounted. What was needed, he said, was nothing less than the reformation of man. The Romans had created superi
or men who managed a great empire for centuries. The Soviets tried the same, but with much less success. The only nation to have produced a national elite as powerful as the Romans was England. It was not the aristocracy Malraux was thinking of, or medieval knights. No, England had created the gentleman. The English gentleman was one of the greatest creations of Western civilization, “la grande création de l’homme.” The question was whether England could ever produce such a specimen again.
In fact, Malraux was being a little too grandiose. When Wellington said that Napoleon was defeated on Eton’s playing fields, he was saying something more profound than the glib phrase suggests. Napoleon—like Malraux—stood for grandeur and revolutionary progress. The public school man is conservative, the guardian of an anti-revolutionary society, where progress does occur but is always viewed with the deepest skepticism. The public school man didn’t invent or create an empire, he administered it. He is the English version of the Confucian “man of culture,” for whom moderation is the highest goal. But Malraux was right: as with the Chinese Confucian, the greatest attraction of the English gentleman is the fact that he is made, not born.
All I knew about English public school life as a child was based on hearsay and fiction. I had never been inside such a school. I had heard family stories: my grandfather and two uncles had been to a boarding school with a particularly rugged reputation. My grandfather and one of my uncles claimed to have enjoyed the experience. For my other uncle, who lacked their heartiness and taste for sports, it had been a torment.