by C. J. Sansom
In my alternative universe I see the SNP splitting, with right-wing elements supporting the Beaverbrook government in return for national symbols like the return of the Stone of Scone and vague promises of autonomy or independence. As Gunther says in the book, the co-option of local nationalists from Brittany to Croatia was an important element in Nazi policy throughout Europe.
During the 1980s, a new school of thought appeared, criticizing Churchill’s decision to fight the war at all costs. This time it came from the political right. In 1993 the academic John Charmley wrote a book, Churchill: the End of Glory,8 which stimulated Alan Clark, the ever-controversial Conservative MP, to write a Times article questioning whether Britain might have been better to make peace with Hitler in 1940. This exaggerated Charmley’s position, but nonetheless his book questions Churchill’s policy of fighting the war at all costs: ‘In international affairs it was the Soviets and the Americans who divided the world between them; in domestic politics it was the Socialists who reaped the benefits of the efforts of the Great (1940–5) Coalition.’9
To take the last point first, the Attlee government of 1945–51 was put in office not by Churchill, but the electorate. Whether the creation of the welfare state, full employment and the nationalization of part of the economy was a good or a bad thing is a matter of judgement. (I have portrayed in my book what I think conditions for ordinary people under a government that opposed these things would have looked like.) But peace with Hitler – which would certainly have involved Britain aligning itself with German foreign policy in Europe – was likely, I think, to lead to the end of democracy, let alone glory, in Britain. What, for example, would have happened (as in my book appears likely in a 1950 election) if a party or group opposed to the Treaty looked like being elected?
Charmley accepts that the Empire by 1939, particularly India, was going to be difficult to hold on to for long, and blames Churchill for his failure to see the facts. This is fair enough. However, a government which accepted the peace terms available in 1940 would inevitably have had to rely more, economically, on the Empire; unrest in India could only have got worse with Britain tied to the Nazis; the breakup of the ‘old’ Commonwealth would have been a distinct possibility. The New Zealanders, in particular, would have loathed links with the Nazis.
It is true (and the strongest argument used by those who disagree that the Second World War was ‘the good war’), that Stalin’s victory made the Soviet Union the second power in the world, and gave it control over Eastern Europe, which suffered murderous oppression and economic exploitation from his regime in the post-war years. Even so, had Hitler been allowed a free hand in Eastern Europe and Russia, the fate of those countries would have been even worse. It took the efforts of Britain, Russia and the USA to end the war in Europe in 1945. By then, the Holocaust had taken place and twenty million Soviet citizens, many of them civilians, as well as two million Poles and many other people from Eastern Europe, were dead. If the struggle in the East had continued with Russia fighting Hitler alone, the war would have gone on for years and the slaughter would have been infinitely greater yet. Hitler planned to kill the populations of Leningrad and Moscow, perhaps seven million people, and either enslave or murder all Russians and Poles who could not show Aryan ancestry.
The war in Russia was, I think, always militarily unwinnable; the country was just too vast, and the population totally hostile. This was not because the Russians loved Stalin but because Hitler planned to kill or enslave all of them, so they fought, quite simply, for their lives, as did the Poles, who fought back vigorously against attempts to settle part of their country with Germans. I think the result would have been as I have portrayed it in my book: Europe east of Germany as a vast slaughterhouse, conventional warfare combined with an endless guerilla conflict; Vietnam on an almost unimaginable scale. If people think that the preservation of some hypothetical British glory would have been worth that, it is not a notion I can share.
There is also the question of the effect of a British surrender on America. America would then have had no potential military toehold in Europe and might well have turned its back on the continent and done a deal with the Japanese. This in turn would have made the Japanese war against China, which reproduced many of the features of the German–Soviet war in its scale and murderousness, all the more protracted.
Therefore, despite the horrors of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe which followed Russian victory, I think a British surrender would have made world conditions even worse, to say nothing of the consequent continuation of Fascist rule in Western Europe.
Hitler believed that his Reich would last a thousand years. This was never likely. He deliberately built up the regime as a series of conflicting factions with himself at its head. And physically he is unlikely to have lasted long – most historians agree that by the last year of his life he was showing symptoms of early, rapidly developing Parkinson’s disease. In my book, by 1952 the disease has taken its most rapid and serious path. If Hitler had died or become disabled there would have been a struggle for the succession between the regime’s competing factions, not least the army and the SS. In the real world sections of the army tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, by which time it was clear the war was lost. The 1944 Bomb Plot failed: had it succeeded a civil war between army and SS was a likely outcome.10 This would, I think, have been even more likely had Hitler died in 1952; I have postulated a larger group of opponents in the army that existed in 1944, based on their having fought an unwinnable war in Russia for a further eight years.
The Nazi regime was, contrary to myth, always unstable at its heart. So, too, was Stalin’s dictatorship; following his death the regime changed greatly and became far less murderous, though it remained, economically, monolithically Communist, and brutal to any people or satellite countries that stepped out of line.
And so, at the end, I think the Second World War was, still, the good war. Western Europe did indeed, for many years, enter the ‘broad sunlit uplands’ which Churchill foresaw. But nothing lasts for ever, and at the time of writing, August 2012, Europe faces both economic and political crisis. And across the continent, in response, forces of nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise again. European history in the first half of the twentieth century was, apart from Russia, a story of nationalism triumphant. The rivalries between big-nation nationalisms culminated in the war of 1914 and nationalist spirit kept that war going for four years despite its unprecedented slaughter. Courageous figures like Lord Lansdowne in Britain, who talked of a settlement, were thrust aside, or worse. After the Great War came the Treaty of Versailles, which glorified small-nation nationalism. New states sprang up from the wreckage of the old Empires, most of which promptly began discriminating against the new minorities within their borders, not least the Jews, and ended up as nationalist dictatorships. And in both large and small European countries nationalism gave birth to its monster children; fascism, based on the organized worship of the nation and Nazism, which worshipped not just nationality but race.
After the Second World War nationalism did not die. One only needs to look for example at de Gaulle’s France, or the anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe, but for the most part it was far less fierce, less xenophobic. But now it is back in its rawest form; all across Europe, in France, Hungary, Greece, Finland, even Holland, and most worryingly perhaps in Russia, fiercely nationalist, anti-immigrant, and sometimes openly Fascist nationalist parties are significant forces in politics again. And the terrible story of Yugoslavia in the 1990s reminds us just how murderous European nationalisms can still become.
I find it heartbreaking – literally heartbreaking – that my own country, Britain, which was less prone to domestic nationalist extremism between the wars than most, is increasingly falling victim to the ideologies of nationalist parties. The larger ones are not racialist, but they share the belief that national identity is the issue of fundamental, overriding importance in politics; it is the atavi
stic notion that nationhood can, somehow, allow people to bound free from oppression – nationalism always defines itself against some enemy ‘other’ – and solve all their problems. UKIP promises a future that will somehow be miraculously golden if Britain simply walks away from the European Union. (To what? To trade with whom?) At least they have the honesty to be clear that they envisage a particular type of political economy, based on that other modern dogma which has failed so often and disastrously, not least in Russia, that ‘pure’ free markets can end economic problems.
Far larger, and more dangerous, is the threat to all of Britain posed by the Scottish National Party, which now sits in power in the devolved government in Edinburgh. As they always have been, the SNP are a party without politics in the conventional sense, willing to tack to the political right (as the 1970s) or the left (as in the 1980s and 1990s) or the centre (as today) if they think it will help them win in dependence. They will promise anything to anyone in their pursuit of power. They are very shrewd political manipulators. In power, they present themselves as competent, progressive democrats (which many are) but behind that, as always, lies the appeal to the mystic glories of in dependence, which is what the party has always been for. Once ruling an independent state, they will not easily be dislodged. How people who regard themselves as progressive can support a party whose biggest backers include the right-wing Souter family who own Stagecoach, and Rupert Murdoch, escapes me completely. Like all who think they will be able to ride a nationalist tiger, they will find themselves sadly mistaken.
The SNP have no real position on the crucial questions of political economy that affect people’s lives, and never have; their whole basis has always been the old myth that released national consciousness, will somehow make all well. They promise a low-regulation, low-corporate-tax regime to please the right, and a strong welfare state to please the left. The wasting asset of oil will not resolve the problem that, as any calculation shows, an independent Scotland will start its life in deficit.
It does not take more than a casual glance at its history to show that the SNP have never had any interest in the practical consequences of in dependence. They care about the ideal of a nation, not the people who live in it. They ignore or fudge vital questions about the economy and EU membership. In recent times, before the Euro crisis, they cheerfully talked of an independent Scotland joining the euro (they evade the huge issue of whether an independent Scotland, as well possibly as the remainder of the UK, would have to reapply for EU membership, a legal minefield). Before 2008 they spoke of the banking sector, of all things, as the core of an independent Scottish economy, forecasting a Scottish future comparable to that of Ireland and Iceland, shortly before both countries went so catastrophically bust. Now they talk of keeping the pound but following an independent economic policy. (How would that work? Why should the rest of the UK agree effectively to write a blank cheque? How would that be independence exactly?) But the practical problems of the real world have never been of interest to parties based on nationalism; on the contrary populist politicians like Alex Salmond ask people to turn their backs on real social and economic questions and seek comfort in a romanticized past and shared – often imagined – grievances. National problems are always someone else’s fault. The unscrambling of the British economy and British debt after three hundred years of intimate unity is impossible to calculate using any accounting formula. Arguments are already leading to bitterness and growing national hostility on both sides of the border. That is what nationalism does, and what it feeds off. And all the arguments, all the ill feeling, are tragically unnecessary.
Meanwhile the SNP are trying to manipulate the independence referendum to secure a maximum vote for themselves, by holding it in the anniversary year of the Battle of Bannockburn and lowering the voting age to include sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, because polls have shown that age group is most likely to vote for them. This smacks dangerously of electoral manipulation by a ruling party to stay in power and increase its power. God knows we have seen enough of that in modern European history. John Gray has recently written that while the dictatorships of the 1930s are unlikely to return, ‘toxic democracies based on nationalism and xenophobia’ could emerge in a number of countries and be in power for long periods.11 Scots are proud, rightly of seeing their country in a European context. This, today, is the context.
Scotland and England have been politically and economically united for over three centuries. They have not been at war as states since the sixteenth century. The civil wars of the seventeenth and the Jacobite wars of the eighteenth centuries, though they had strong nationalist elements too, were both essentially about the nature of kingship and its relation to Parliament, society and religion within all the nations of the British Isles. This is not a historical narrative the SNP would approve, of course. They want a people drugged on historical legend, replete with holy national sites (such as Bannockburn) and myths. These things are the dead, empty heart of nationalism, always said to be unique in every country, always drearily similar. The British people have intimately shared everything, good and bad, involved in the experiences of the first Industrial Revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars. Economic division in Britain has been, since the 1930s, not between Scotland and England but between south-east England and the rest. There are probably millions like me who are British Anglo-Scots and wish to be allowed to remain so.
Prejudices between the Scots and English have on the whole been mild in recent history. In my view, at least, the Scots and English are very good at knocking the rough corners off each other’s national cultures. But, beneath the empty populist bonhomie of Alex Salmond, the prospective breakup of Britain is already creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border. I hope with all my heart that Scotland votes to remain in Britain, because then at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime will vanish from Europe. If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote ‘no’ in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile. The recent record of other parties in Scotland has not been good; that is never a reason to vote for something worse, and to do so irrevocably; and a party which is often referred to by its members, as the SNP is, as the ‘National Movement’12 should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers what those words have so often meant in Europe.
Endnotes
1. Jenkins, R. Churchill (London 2001), 197–200
2. Mukerjee, M. Churchill’s Secret War (2010), 276
3. Roberts, A. The Holy Fox (1991), 67
4. Griffiths, R. Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), 223–4
5. Roberts, op. cit., chapter 21, is the best account.
6. Pearce, R. Attlee (1997), 97
7. Butler, R. The Art of the Possible,143, quoted in Sandbrook, D, Never Had It so Good (2005), 85–6
8. Charmley, J. Churchill: the End of Glory. A Political Biography (1993)
9. Ibid., Preface, xvii
10. Evans, R. The Third Reich at War (2008), 645
11. Gray, J. A Point of View: The Trouble with Freedom: BBC News Magazine. (24 Aug 2012).
12. Torrance, D. Salmond: Against the Odds (2011), xi
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