The Long View: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900
Now that #Brexit might finally be upon us, here is a prescient book review from 2007 about the peculiar philosophy that made it possible more than a decade later.
I am afraid this book is an example of a peculiar deleterious effect that the European Union has had on conservatism in Britain, and to a lesser extent in America. Appalled by the totalitarian liberalism of EU bureaucracy and disgusted with the waste and general crookedness that attends its operation, too many conservatives are now willing to abandon the concept of Western Civilization. In order to be free of the implacable inanity of Brussels, they are willing to abandon Continental Europe to its sordid fate. American conservatives increasingly suggest that isolationism is an underrated idea, while their counterparts elsewhere try to patch together a substitute civilization from bits and pieces of the wider world. This strategy is neither conservative nor prudent, and it’s not going to work.
Do not throw away Europe. You are going to need it later.
A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples
since 1900
By Andrew Roberts
HarperCollins, 2006
736 Pages, US$35.00
ISBN: 978-0-06-087598-5
Among the innumerable triumphs of the English-speaking peoples in the field of popular culture in the 20th century were the satirical routines of the Monty Python Flying Circus comedy troupe, and among the most ingenious routines of Monty Python was The News for Voles. The News for Voles was just like the newscast for everybody else, except that the newsreader mentioned that no voles were involved in such-and-such a traffic accident, and that no voles took part in a recent international summit. Perhaps you had to be a regular watcher of British television at the time to understand exactly what Monty Python was making fun of (The News for Wales, perhaps?), but you get the idea. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 is based on pretty much the same idea: it’s essentially a history of the 20th century, but told from the joint perspective of the major English-speaking countries, or at least the joint perspective they might have if they had one.
The author, Andrew Roberts, writes for The Sunday Telegraph and is also the author of, among other books, Eminent Churchillians. (He lives in London, so no doubt he is from one of the English-speaking countries.) At least nominally, he was attempting to continue Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, though he acknowledges that a comprehensive history of that subject would be impossible. This work, reasonably enough, is episodic, impressionistic, and emphasizes the author’s likes and dislikes, though it is still more or less a narrative history. If you liked the moralizing survey-histories of Paul Johnson, you are probably going to like A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Unlike Johnson’s histories, however, I think that Roberts’ work refutes its own premise.
Non-English-speaking peoples are, of course, of some historical interest to the author, but the important point is always what the English-speaking peoples did with the primitive foreign notions they inherited:
The English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that nonetheless made them great: the Romans invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism, the Germans Protestantism, and the French can lay some claim to the Enlightenment (albeit alongside the Scots). Added to those invaluable ideas, however, the English-speaking peoples have produced the final practical theories behind constitutional monarchy, the Church-State divide, free speech and the separation of powers. They have managed to harness foreign modes of thought for the enormous benefit of their societies, whilst keeping their native genius for scientific, technological, labour-saving and especially military inventions.
All of these splendid characteristics enabled the English-speaking peoples to see off the Three Assaults against world order in the 20th century (Prussianism, Nazism, Communism). They give the English-speaking peoples at least a fighting chance to defeat the Fourth Assault (radical Islam) that began in the 1990s and exploded in the early 21st century. The Assaults and the responses to them are the essential structure of this history.
It is quite possible to write a history of the World Wars and Cold War from the perspective of Anglo-American cooperation, which we get in this book. It is not hard to fit the major Dominions into such a tale. The chief interest of the story, though, lies in its attention to lesser-known issues and the author’s personal enthusiasms. Thus, for instance, he has a special antipathy for Australian historian Charles Manning Hope Clark, evidently a Lefty fellow-traveling sort who disparaged the Britannic heritage. (And speaking of Australia, were Japanese commercial vessels really surveying the coast as early as 1925 for possible landing sites?) We get a defense of the Boer War that does mention Cecil Rhodes, though a bit elliptically, and without addressing the possibility that he might have had ambitions beyond extending the franchise in the Boer republics. As a matter of transatlantic reciprocity, the author endorses the Spanish-American war with enthusiasm, though not enough for him to query his editors whether “che sera sera” was quite the phrase that Spanish colonial authorities, however negligent, would use about public health in the Philippines. Moving right along, we learn that the Amritsar Massacre was a necessary and successful measure to protect public order. Curiously, there is no defense of the use of troops in the Tonypandy Riot in Britain in 1910, an event for which then Home Secretary Winston Churchill was widely blamed, though probably unfairly. In any case, Churchill comes off as a titanic but flawed figure. This attitude gives the author the opportunity to highlight the statesmanship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, particularly as that statesmanship was so superbly chronicled in Conrad Black’s definitive biography of the man.
As for more recent events, the author deplores the scuttling by the Eisenhower Administration of the Anglo-French attempt to retake the Suez Canal, an interference against the true interests of the English-speaking peoples that, we are told, still rankles in the better clubs in London. The Carter Administration in America and the Heath Government in Britain are represented as the nadirs of politics in each country. Regarding the conservative renaissances that followed, the author is condescendingly complimentary of Ronald Reagan, but unrestrainedly effusive in praise of Margaret Thatcher and, significantly, Tony Blair. The author makes a case that both prime ministers demonstrated the Special Relationship between the US and the UK at its best, that is, where most of the ideas and public formulations come from London and Washington provides most of the resources.
It is necessary to maintain and strengthen the ties that bind the English-speaking peoples, and especially the Anglo-American Special Relationship, because that is the alternative to the European Union. The author finds it inexplicable that the United States has since 1945 been promoting closer European integration, with Europe defined to include Britain. Europe, frankly, is just too unstable to guarantee the rule of law:
Although [Continental European countries] are ancient states, many of the constitutions of European countries are very young indeed, far younger than those of Britain’s constitutional monarchy (1688-9), America’s democracy (1776), Canada’s responsible government (1848) or even Australia’s Federation (1900). By stark contrast, the French Constitution establishing the Fifth Republic was only promulgated in 1958, Germany’s Basic Law in 1949 (and amended thirteen times since) and Portugal’s became law in 1976 (to be revised in 1997)...It is small wonder therefore, with these Constitutions being so young, that they do not have the same purchase on the imaginations of their populations as do the English-speaking peoples’ constitutions, which – with the obvious exception of Eire’s Buneacht na hÉireann of 1937 – reach long beyond the memory of anyone alive.
In reality, of course, the current Canadian constitution dates from 1982. Furthermore, although the basic provisions of the United States Constitution remain in force after over 200 years, the document has about doubled in length with amendments over that period. We could dwell at length on “the obvious exception of Eire,” since the Republic of Ireland serves the author as an Awful Example, a predominantly English-speaking country that has historically been pro-German, anti-British, and non-Protestant. There is, frankly, something to be said for the proposition that Irish nationalism has always been slightly unhinged, but a culturally acute historian might note that this unhingement has always been disproportionately of a Protestant variety. From Wolfe Tone to Parnell (don’t get me started on Yeats), Irish nationalism was a project of the Protestant Ascendancy that was disgruntled by London’s refusal to allow it to misgovern Ireland without oversight. Only slowly (and at first against the opposition of the Catholic Church) did the Ascendancy bring Catholic Ireland to its point of view. In all the world, in fact, there are only two political styles that resemble this Celtic anarchy: American Jacksonianism and Ulster Unionism.
As to religion generally, it is perhaps understandable that a history of the 20th century would tend to dismiss it, since that was a uniquely secularist century, at least among elites. Nonetheless, the author’s attempt to characterize the English-speaking peoples as secular is merely peculiar. It is true that English-speaking countries tend to be leery of theocracy in the sense of merging ecclesial with state functions, but that is quite different from saying that those peoples are disinclined to consult religious principles with regard to public policy. Actually, one could write a history about the decline of the British Empire that described the process as evolving in parallel with the decline of Victorian piety. That would not be the whole story either, but it would be less misleading than one that gave the impression the collapsed state of English Protestantism is either historically normal or healthy.
The lack of a whole story is what’s wrong with this book. Among the illustrations, we find these two on a single page: Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who was one of the first two persons (along with non-kiwi but presumably English-speaking Tenzing Norgay) to reach the summit of Mount Everest, smiling into a camera while wearing his oxygen pack; and Buzz Aldrin, also wearing an oxygen pack, on the surface of the Moon. Oxygen packs or no, these images are not self-evidently part of the same story. If they are, then the story might also reasonably include pictures of Yuri Gargarin and Jacques Cousteau.
There is obviously a sense in which the major (and most minor) English-speaking countries form a class. They have similar and historically related institutions; they trade stuff, people, and ideas; they are usually allies. What they aren’t is a separate civilization, which Toynbee defined at the beginning of A Study of History as the smallest social unit with the context needed to make history intelligible.
Even the term “English-speaking peoples” is clunky. The sleeker term “Anglosphere” occurs only with reference to James C. Bennett’s book, The Anglosphere Challenge. Churchill chose the name “English-speaking peoples,” of course, so Roberts was saddled with it, but you have to wonder how much common identity can be built by using a self-designation that is so painful to say.
On the level of action, the English-speaking peoples are one thing chiefly by virtue of the fact they have all been victims of the same “assaults.” Well, yes, when a group of peoples fight off an attack, they often find that they have become a nation. The problem is that each of the English-speaking peoples experienced the assaults in different ways and helped to fight them off as part of a common effort that extended substantially further than the English-speaking world. And as for the assaults themselves, they were not like random natural disasters. The ones involving the Germans were episodes in ethnic and philosophical systems of which the English-speaking peoples were also a part. The threat of Communism was everywhere a feature of domestic politics. The Islamist Assault is more alien, but it is emphatically the case that the English-speaking peoples are not the only victims, and the English-speaking peoples cannot fight it on their own. The concept of “the English-speaking peoples” that we see in this book is a kind of censoring device that makes the present world and its prologue substantially less comprehensible than they really are.
I am afraid this book is an example of a peculiar deleterious effect that the European Union has had on conservatism in Britain, and to a lesser extent in America. Appalled by the totalitarian liberalism of EU bureaucracy and disgusted with the waste and general crookedness that attends its operation, too many conservatives are now willing to abandon the concept of Western Civilization. In order to be free of the implacable inanity of Brussels, they are willing to abandon Continental Europe to its sordid fate. American conservatives increasingly suggest that isolationism is an underrated idea, while their counterparts elsewhere try to patch together a substitute civilization from bits and pieces of the wider world. This strategy is neither conservative nor prudent, and it’s not going to work.
Do not throw away Europe. You are going to need it later.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
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