in defence of Paul Mason: realism and managed decline in British foreign policy
Paul Mason has become a figure who tends to divide Corbyn supporters. I’m not saying I agree with him all of the time, but he understands more of the realities of international politics than he is often given credit for. His latest piece here describes a reality which has, arguably, already arrived: Europe as becoming the lightest of wrappers for a number of overlapping, interlocking and apparently conflicting economic and political interests. In this flickering and uncertain context, we have the UK, in a long-term pattern of relative decline, which now seems to be rapidly deepening. As political activists trying to develop a deep and enduring new social settlement, we need to revisit some basic truths, and especially Harold MacMillan’s assertion of the UK as being able to ‘play wise old Greece to America’s warlike Rome’.
The true situation of the UK, from the perspective of the continent, is certainly not Empire 2.0, striding the international stage with invention and ingenuity. At most, there is this cheap, cheerless and very short-term option as an offshore tax haven, a place where gambling is taxed a little less, where shoppers can go and buy cheap trainers. Links with the United States, in reality, seem no better or no worse before or after Brexit, but the psychological dependency will only be greater.
We need to take the lesson of Brexit. Britain’s European project from 1973 to 2016, where Britain avoided its post-imperial reckoning through membership and engagement with the European continent, has failed. We are going to have this reckoning. The UK has not just isolated itself from any potential ‘soft’ influence in troubled Eastern Europe, it has isolated itself from its historical allies: Portugal, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and of course, the ultimate in reluctant allies, France.
The fantasies of post-Falklands War Britain, where we had the illusion, enabled by North Sea Oil, and postwar investment in technology, of being a successful and strong nation state, are falling away, finally. The reality, even the best case reality, is that we are a post-imperial country. This is the path to implosion, with the depleted assets of an atrophying British state being continually plundered, potentially leading to a morass of conflict which will crowd out class consciousness, together with visible deterioration compared to close European neighbours. I’d suggest a different way: a reconstruction of a federal UK state as a realist, Byzantine entity.
In this murky period, I suggest we revisit MacMillan’s forlorn plea to be taken seriously as ‘wise old Greece.’ Let us take this, and rework it, so that we acknowledge that at best the UK can try to maintain itself in the same way that Byzantine and the city of Constantinople maintained itself after 400AD. We are going to be absolutely dependent upon a combination of the most modern technologies and adoption and adaptation of these, we are going to be dependent upon our multiculturalism and our ability to attract immigration, but most of all we are going to be totally dependent upon clever statecraft, of total multilateralism, which can extend to nuclear deterrents, research agreements, cyberwarfare treaties and a host of other objectives aimed specifically at making the world safer and more secure.
For Britain to meaningfully exist as any kind of independent entity, for of course, Brexit gravely endangers its de facto independence, it will have to define itself according to its ability to broker agreements with the rest of the world — not just defined by raw economic interest, but by the interest of global justice and fairness. And that is really the only path that we have, that does not lead to rupture, and the kind of breakdown in international order that leads ultimately to chaos and conflict, both at home, and abroad.
