Onward, Onward Rode the Rogues: a mother lode of patriotic taurine excreta.

Ian Williams

Tribune Written By: Ian Williams

Published: March 7, 2014 Last modified: March 5, 2014

Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea are perilously close to tearing up rules that have kept us “the peoples of the world from the scourge of war.”
Both sides in the conflict will be invoking the United Nations Charter, which enshrines the inviolability of sovereign states and their borders – unlike the League of Nations, which was surprisingly active at redrawing borders after Versailles. The root of the problem is the weird West European notion of the nation state – a Procrustean construct in which populations had to be cut or stretched to fit homogeneously into a frame predetermined by nationalist ideologues. The French probably invented it – at a time when more than half their population did not speak French.
Looking at the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs almost leads to nostalgia, albeit with many qualifications. In their different ways, they at least provided for linguistic and ethnic diversity within one polity, which the European Union (despite its failings) also offers.
Boris Yeltsin’s power grab in Moscow led to the chaotic dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving far too many questions unanswered, not least of which were the rights of minorities. A shared EU style citizenship, dual nationalities, linguistic rights should all have been negotiated – not to mention open borders.
Decolonisation in both Africa and the former Soviet Union led to many absurdities based on respect for existing boundaries whether drawn up by tipsy District Commissioners in Africa or playful commissars in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s. One of Stalin’s little jokes, Nagorno Karabagh, stranding an enclave of Armenians in Azerbaijan, is a classic unresolved issue that cannot be solved without adjusting borders.
So what of Ukraine? During the Balkan Wars, Bogdan Denitch, who represented the Democratic Socialists of America at the Socialist International, often quoted the Balkan formula: “Why should I be a minority in your country, when you could be a minority in mine?” It seems to be doing sterling service in the Ukraine now.
If only Putin were as sedulous about the rights of, say, Chechens, as he is about Russian speakers in the Crimea. Or if Moscow had shown any respect for the rights of the Crimean Tartars. But then the respect for Iraqi sovereignty shown by George W Bush and Tony Blair is hardly a good example. Experience suggests that people believe in their own right to self-determination but are less convinced about the rights of others. Ask a typical Indian about Kashmiri rights, an Argentinean about Falkland Islanders, or a Moroccan about Western Sahara, and the chances are you will hit a mother lode of patriotic taurine excreta.
While many at the time would agree that the Sudeten Germans had been deprived of their right to self-determination, there is a consensus that Hitler’s “liberation” of them broke all the rules. It was the Nazis flouting of the rules against aggression and conquest that led to the UN Charter’s emphasis on sovereignty – which has been reasonably successful so far in averting a third world.
There are more questions than answers in the Ukraine. Its capital, Kiev, was the core of what became the Russian state. There were Polish, Lithuanian and Russian states on what is now Ukrainian territory but until 1917 there had been no independent Ukrainian polity. Ironically, Ukraine owes its present territory to Stalin and his joint invasion with Hitler in of Poland in 1939.
But the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, with their anti-Russian language moves, are not exactly paragons of toleration. If Ukraine has a right to national self-determination, then why don’t the constituent parts also have the same right? There is nothing in the UN Charter to stop boundaries being changed – but not by force. There are other ways. One is negotiation, from first principles with consultation and protection for all the parties on the ground. The other is the EU approach, which has been remarkably successful in making the borders meaningless for all but administrative purposes. If Britain and the new Europe can remain economically part of the EU while grovelling politically to Washington, Ukraine can join the EU without joining Nato and while maintaining the close political relations it needs with Russia. After all, those Ukrainian nationalists still want Russian gas to keep them warm.

How Fiery is the St George's Cross

How fiery is St George's cross?

The attempts to make St George's day a parade of Englishness betray a lack of self-confidence that is, well, un-English and un-British.
Ian Williams

Some of us are born into identities, some grow into them, and others have them thrust upon us. I will happily raise a tot today in memory of Shakespeare the poet, but will pass on St George's Day. The attempts to make St George's day a parade of Englishness betray a lack of self-confidence that is, well, un-English and un-British.

St David's, St Andrew's and St Patrick's days can be seen as attempts to reassert local identities against a dominant threat - the English. And of course, it is true that constant reminders are necessary to counter the assumption that England continues from Hadrian's Wall to John O' Groats. But whatever allegedly threatens any English identity, it is not from the Celtic Fringe that surrounds and permeates the bits south of Hadrian's Wall and East of Offa's Dyke. One cannot help but detect a subtext in this St George's Day stuff that there is a threat to "Englishness" from British citizens whose origins lie farther afield who may not necessarily see Morris Dancing and the maypole as big things in their cultural life. But how many little Englanders ever clomped their clogs around a maypole anyway?

The dangerous thing about identity is how it can be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians, whether Boris Yeltsin, who split the Soviet Union so he could be number one in its Russian core, or Václav Havel, who supervised the referendum-free velvet divorce between Czechs and Slovaks, even though neither of them especially wanted it. In the conservative press, you can read pundits who want the Scots to secede: this is not because they especially wish their northern neighbours well. On the contrary, they wish them gone in the hope that they will take their collectivist social democratic votes with them - away from Westminster. Actual feelings are more complex than this.

I remember during a union conference in Scotland standing at a bar the night before the England/Scotland match when a hairy Glaswegian giant who looked like an escaped extra from Braveheart heard me order and loomed belligerently into my face. "See you... ye're Inglish!" I demurred and told him I was from Liverpool. "Give the mon a drink, he's no Inglish!" he told the barman - and indeed the bar. And he was right.

I always considered myself British. A majority of my ancestors were Welsh in origin, with some Scots and Swedish, and we have been for three or four generations living in Liverpool, which is geographically in England, but functioned as the capital of North Wales, while being under heavy cultural influences (hence the dialect) from both parts and traditions of Ireland. For the cognoscenti, I've always thought that the Manx connection has been understated as well, although the nearby island of notorious smugglers clearly had some strong influences on the city. Over the years, I've added extra identities. When I came to the US, it made me feel European, and I acquired US citizenship as well. None of these are mutually exclusive.

Last week I almost had tears in my eyes at the New York launch of Liverpool as the European City of Culture for next year. Irish bartenders from the West of Ireland regard Scousers as every bit as Irish as Dubliners. In New York I have washed down haggis with a single malt at Burn's Day suppers, the best arranged by the St Andrews Society. I have toasted Trafalgar Day - in rum of course, at the St George's Society, and eaten strange ancestral Welsh dishes with the St David's society.

There is an interesting division of responsibilities in these New York charitable societies. They were founded some two hundred and fifty years ago to tend for Scots and Welsh down on their luck in New York. The St George's Society tends to any citizens of the commonwealth down on their luck - which is the kind of non-assertive subsumation of cultural identities I can live with. Which brings us to what unites most former citizens of the British Empire: a mild to middling resentment of the Home Counties public school types who presume to speak on our behalf and - I cannot tell a lie - a somewhat condescending attitude to natives of the colonies that broke away in 1776 - in the name of ancient English liberties by the way.

Those who only know of England in the home counties and the St George's cross should remember as they try to nudge out the Scots and Welsh that many parts of Northern England feel closer politically and socially to their Celtic neighbours than they do to either New Labour or even Cameron's new Conservatives. I could quite understand the Scots being miffed at London. But for the sake of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester, I hope they stick around and think of the Red Cross as something you put on ambulances, not bumper stickers.

Special Relationship - Dead as a Parrot.

A special relationship?

Not exactly. Britain has always been the battered mistress: badly treated but clinging to the US for protection.
Ian Williams

Latest on Guardian "Comment is Free"
A Special Relationship
February 11, 2007 3:00 PM |

My father's old chums always used to reminisce about trigger-happy Yankee pilots during the second world war. But the Pentagon's denial that it had tapes of the killing of British Corporal Matty Hull by American pilots in Iraq highlights the change in the alleged "special relationship", over the last seven decades.

The special relationship was indeed special and one-sided from the beginning, putting Britain in the role of the battered mistress: frequently screwed and badly treated, but clinging to the protection of the stronger USA. But no matter how humiliating, it could be argued that Britain used to benefit from it. No longer.

There was a rare moment of candour last year by a US State Department official, Kendall Myers. "There never really has been a special relationship or at least not one we've noticed," he said and added: "We typically ignore them and take no notice. We say, 'There are the Brits coming to tell us how to run our empire. Let's park them'. It is a sad business and I don't think it does them justice."

He concluded "I can't think of anything [Blair] got on the asset side of the ledger," out of the Iraq War.

In the second world war even my old man's aggrieved veteran friends were glad the Americans were there, "blue on blue" notwithstanding. It was a war that Britain had worked very hard to drag the US into - and not just for selfish reasons. Knowing that Britain only had the resources to fight the war on its own until 1943, the cabinet in 1940 decided not to cut to a deal with Hitler, which could have left the economy and empire intact, and instead fought on, even though it meant effectively selling the country to the USA. Washington took full advantage of the fire sale.

Even at the height of the struggle against Hitler, once Canadian and American troops began to arrive in Britain, the US Treasury unilaterally cut off lend-lease whenever their spending brought Britain's dollar reserves above $300m.

Britain handed over to the US all its technology, from penicillin and radar to its nuclear bomb research. Washington rewarded it in 1946 with the McMahon Act, which stopped British access to the joint research product of the Manhattan project, and a sudden stop on lend-lease terms as soon as the war was over.

But Britain was in no position to argue. After the war, the Labour government, stiffed several times by the US Treasury, was under no illusions - but now faced the prospect of the Red Army taking over Europe. There was no way a bankrupt Britain could head off the threat on its own.

The Labour foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, invented NATO to "keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in". But he was under no illusions about American altruism, which is why the British Labour government decided to build its own nuclear bomb. As Bevin put it: "We've got to have it and it's got to have a bloody Union Jack on it."

During the Berlin airlift, Britain accepted US bases, with nuclear weapons. Churchill condemned the Labour party for selling out British sovereignty, but did nothing to expel them when he resumed office in 1951.

The later Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan accepted an even more explicitly subsidiary role, in an avuncular sort of way, with Jack Kennedy. In an inadvertently appropriate analogy, he saw Britain as Athens to America's Rome, providing wisdom and culture to the stronger military power. Of course, in the real world, Rome conquered Athens and those wise Athenian cultural teachers in Rome were often slaves.

Successive British governments managed to maintain some minimal dignity under the circumstances. For example, despite Lyndon Johnson's arm-twisting, Labour prime minister Harold Wilson managed to ensure that there was no British involvement whatsoever in Vietnam. Even Margaret Thatcher managed to oppose the US's uncritical support of Israel - whether to maintain profitable arms trade with Saudi Arabia or out of concern for the Palestinians.

Until recently, Britain's diplomatic specialty was to bridge the gap between a unilateralist USA and the rest of the world. It also has to be said they did a pretty good job of it, no matter how distasteful most of the time. Like cleaning sewers, someone has to do it.

Being a loyal ally did indeed give them an occasional hand on the steering wheel, as Tony Blair said. But what Blair thought was the steering wheel in a car was usually just the whistle on a runaway locomotive. All he could do was warn that the train was rattling down the tracks and would not stop until it hit Iraq. Subservience without self-interest is now the rule. For example, Britain now regularly abstains at the UN rather than defy Washington on Middle Eastern issues. London will extradite British citizens to the US without a hearing in their own country - but not vice versa.

The gains to the US are clear. It gets a difficult-to-sink aircraft carrier moored off Europe, and a significant diplomatic and military ally to save it from the total isolation that its policies would so often have otherwise condemned it to. And it comes without sending aid or covering for maverick military adventures, as it does with Israel.

A former British foreign secretary once explained to journalists that British policy was the same as it was in the time of Pitt the younger: "To ensure that no combination of powers arises in Europe that can threaten Britain."

That policy has sunk with the wooden battleships of the era. Britain should stop acting as Washington's Trojan Horse in Europe, and join in building a multilateral Europe rather than providing latter-day sepoys for the American empire.