Why the polarisation - and what can be done about it?

 “Polarisation”, we are told, has become the predominant feature of contemporary societies. I want to explore why this issue has arisen in the past decade – and what we can do about it.

My first stab at an explanation put it down to a combination of the forces released by the ethic of greed which swept us up in the 1980s AND the technology of internet communication with which we were presented in the late 1990s. It’s so easy now to press a “like” button or tweet our feelings of identity with the particular tribe we belong to

The financial crash of 2008 gave us every reason to be angry – with Trump and Brexit being the initial beneficiaries. Now it’s Covid, global warming, supply chain collapse, war, inflation and energy shortages which are stoking our fears and divisions. We have become gibbering addicts to immediate gratification - such are the forces which Thatcher and Reagan released in 1979

But then I remembered that Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” which emphasised the contrast between “private affluence” and “public squalour” came out in 1958 – long before Thatcher has even been heard of. Clearly things are more complicated than I had originally thought. The rot had started earlier….but when...and how?

For the moment, I’ll leave these questions hanging because I’ve come across a clutch of books offering ways to deal with the issue of polarisation. Unlike global warming, this seems something on which we can and should be working with friends and neighbours. It also touches on the issue which I’ve become increasingly fascinated by – namely the mental maps, lens, frames and stories we use when trying to make sense of the world. Here are some of the books I encountered -

• “Living in Denial – climate change, emotions and everyday life” Kari Norgaard (2011) A researcher returns to her Norwegian roots to spend a year exploring what one town felt about climate change

• “Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy”; Joanne Macey and Chris Johnstone (2012) A philosopher and social psychologist team up to develop an important idea about hope (about which St Augustine did not say - "Hope has 2 beautiful daughters - anger about how things are and courage to ensure they do not remain so)

• How to have impossible conversations; Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (2019) a rather formula-ristic book 

• “Still Hopeful – lessons from a lifetime of activism”; Maude Barlow (2021) an admirable activist in issues such as water and globalisation offers some lessons from her work

• “Saving Us – a climate scientist’s case for hope and healing in a divided world”; Katharine Hayhoe (2021) which starts with a nice story about her being confronted with a large poster with the 4-way test of the Rotary Club, throwing away the speech she had prepared and using the 4 principles -

Start with something you have in common. Connect it to why climate change matters to us personally—not the human race in its entirety or the Earth itself, but rather us as individuals. Climate change affects nearly everything that we already care about. It will make us and our children less healthy, our communities less prosperous, and our world less stable. Often, in fact, it already has.

Then, describe what people can and are doing to fix it. There are all kinds of solutions, from cutting our own food waste to powering buses with garbage tor using solar energy to transform the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. There are solutions that clean up our air and our water, grow local economies, encourage nature to thrive, and leave us all better off, not worse. Who doesn’t want that?

This book is packed with stories, ideas, and information that will lead to positive conversations—conversations that bridge gaps rather than dig trenches, conversations that may surprise you with the discovery of common ground. By bonding over the values we truly share, and by connecting them to climate, we can inspire one another to act together to fix this problem. But it all begins with understanding who we already are, and what we already care about —because chances are, whatever that is, it’s already being affected by climate change, whether we know it or not.

Beyond Intractability is an important resource for the polaristion issue

 

Mapping the Common Ground

More in Common is an interesting Think Tank set up very recently with teams in France, Germany, the UK and the US. It's concerned to explore the 

“underlying drivers of fracturing and polarization - and to build more united, resilient and inclusive societies.  

 In its short life, it has commissioned a lot of survey work to try to understand what is going on in Europe and North America and issued a number of reports including, in April, this interim survey Hidden Tribes; Covid19, polarisation and the pandemic which, by September, produced these slides

This week, its British office produced a quite fascinating book-length report which I am still trying to read Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain based on research it commissioned from the prime Yougov survey team.

The report suggests that Britain is not quite as polarised as we might think and can be divided into seven distinct groups - 

– Progressive Activists: A powerful and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity, and who seek to correct the historic marginalisation of groups based on their race, gender, sexuality, wealth and other forms of privilege. They are politicallyengaged, critical, opinionated, frustrated, cosmopolitan and environmentally conscious (13%).

 – Civic Pragmatists: A group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics. They are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal (13% of the total).

 – Disengaged Battlers: A group that feels that they are just keeping their heads above water, and who blame the system for its unfairness. They are tolerant, insecure, disillusioned, disconnected, overlooked, and socially liberal (12% of the total).

 – Established Liberals: A group that has done well and means well towards others, but also sees a lot of good in the status quo. They are comfortable, privileged, cosmopolitan, trusting, confident, and pro-market (12%).

 – Loyal Nationals: A group that is anxious about the threats facing Britain and facing themselves. They are proud, patriotic, tribal, protective, threatened, aggrieved, and frustrated about the gap between the haves and the have-nots (17% of the total).

– Disengaged Traditionalists: A group that values a well-ordered society and prides in hard work, and wants strong leadership that keeps people in line. They are self-reliant, ordered, patriotic, toughminded, suspicious, and disconnected (18%).

– Backbone Conservatives: A group who are proud of their country, optimistic about Britain’s future outside of Europe, and who keenly follow the news, mostly via traditional media sources. They are nostalgic, patriotic, stalwart, proud, secure, confident, and relatively engaged with politics (15%).

 The Britain we find in this study is not divided into two opposing camps. Britons come together in different formations depending on the issue at hand – 

much like the pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope which cluster in different patterns as the instrument rotates.

This is a strength that may inoculate the UK against one of the most dangerous dimensions of polarisation, which experts describe as ‘conflict extension’ – when members of a group converge across a range of issues. Because the segments come together in different formations depending on the issue at hand, Britain is less likely to become divided as a society into two opposing camps.

– On issues of immigration and race, “Loyal Nationals”, “Disengaged Traditionalists”, and “Backbone Conservatives” come together, while “Progressive Activists”, “Civic Pragmatists”, “Disengaged Battlers”, and “Established Liberals” form another coalition.

 – On issues that involve social trust and institutions, we may see “Established Liberals”, “Civic Pragmatists” and “Backbone Conservatives” coming together on the one hand, while on the other hand “Disengaged Battlers”, “Disengaged Traditionalists” and “Progressive Activists” often align similarly because of their distrust of institutions.

– On issues of inequality and economic policy, Progressive Activists, Loyal Nationals, Civic Pragmatists, Disengaged Battlers, and to a lesser extent, Disengaged Traditionalists, are united.

 – There is widespread agreement on climate issues, led by a strong coalition of Progressive Activists, Civic Pragmatists, and Loyal Nationals.

I said, in the last post, that I was proud to be called a sceptic – but that is not the same as a “contrarian” of whom the sadly-missed Chris Hitchins was the most celebrated exemplar. I have, several times in this blog, bemoaned the failure of progressives to make common cause – or seek “common ground”. It remains an important concept for me

I need a separate post to explain the difference between these distinct aspects of strategic thinking….In the meantime, let me refer to another section of the report which pursues this theme …..

      We find common ground in Britain on many issues, with large majorities which:

– share a sense of national pride in many similar things – such as the NHS, our countryside, and our volunteer tradition

 – feel proud of Britain’s progress on gender equality and becoming a more tolerant and diverse nation – are committed to gender equality and racial equity

– believe that as a society we need to focus on responsibilities as much as rights

 – believe in closing the unfair gap between the haves and have-nots, and making sure that the hard work of key workers and others is better rewarded – want Britain to protect our countryside and lead on climate change

– believe we should strike a balance on difficult issues such as immigration

– feel decision making is too centralised in London

– want political leaders to compromise rather than just sticking to their positions and fighting. 

How America Lost its Mind

Polarisation has got so bad in the US that some people are now calculating, in all seriousness, the prospects of civil war breaking out in the country.

A common language is sometimes a “false friend” – concealing mutual misconceptions – and although I was pleasantly surprised (if not impressed) when I eventually got to the USA in the late 1980s, I am aware that this is not a very easy country to understand. Not for nothing did Martin Amis use the title “The Moronic Inferno” in 1987 for his analysis of its cultural aspects*.

When, five years ago, I first read “The Puritan Gift”, I was struck with how US Business Schools seemed in the 1970s to have destroyed the original puritan spirit - but a long article I came across at the weekend - “How American Lost its Mind” by Kurt Andersen (based on his 450 page book “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History” 2017) – made me realise that things are a lot more complicated.  The article focuses on the last 60 years and shows how both left and right have contributed to the present madness. 

Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.

We Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and the miraculous

 Andersen suggests that two factors proved to be the final catalyst for the current madness

- the relativism that came into vogue in the 1960s.

- the digital technology revolution of the 90s

Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today - with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

What I particularly appreciated about the argument was first its balance – it’s not seeking to allocate blame but rather to seek to understand the various factors which seem to have reached a point of no return (it’s noticeable that Andersen has no solutions to offer - apart from courage and the voice of reason)

I also liked his use of key books to mark the trail of the past half century or so – although, generally, these track the leftist path. The Right’s path tends to be identified more by religious, listening and viewing habits…..Not, however, that the Centre should be forgotten – with The Social Construction of Reality appearing in 1966

….one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

When I first read that, at age 18, I loved the quotation marks. If reality is simply the result of rules written by the powers that be, then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become ‘a foundational text in academia and beyond.

I’m reminded of the great Russian saying –

“Don’t fear your friends - because they can only betray you. 

Don’t fear your enemies – because they can only destroy you

But fear the indifferent – because it’s they who allow your friends to betray you and your enemies to destroy you”

I’m a great fan of intellectual histories – and, although this is clearly a popularised version, it seems to offer a rare insight into how the development of mainstream American thinking over several centuries has brought us to this point of open conflict. 

A few weeks ago, Andersen published a sequel to the 2017 book which explains how conservative forces, horrified by what the 1960s had released, get their act together to forge an agenda and bankroll a reaction which brought us neoliberalism “Evil Geniuses - the unmaking of America, a recent history” (2020). I’ve seen the story told many times of the role of the Mont Pelerin Society and the neoliberal ThinkTanks it spawned – but this is the first time I’ve seen such a clear explanation of the connection with the polarisation of American society…..  …..And it’s a nuanced story too – giving due recognition to the ant-government streak I so well remember in the 1960s and early 1970s - which attracted even a "young leftist" like me to writers such as Saul Alinsky and Ivan Illich.    

More to the point it drove the US Young Democrats of the late 1970s and 1980s (like Clinton and Hart) to break with the “oldies” who had been carrying the torch for the New Deal and to side with the new economic right….,   It was, after all, a Democratic House which gave Reagan the licence to drive forward deregulation

A Bad Start for a new King

Charles III has been in authority over us for some 24 hours and has already succeeded in making me very angry – on 3 counts.

• By crafting an oath that treats us all as feudal “lieges” ie slaves

• by agreeing that Liz Truss, the new PM, should be in tow as he makes ceremonial visits to the 3 other nations which form his kingdom – thereby breaching the principle of royal neutrality which his mother observed so faithfully for 70 years

• by avoiding the 40% succession tax which is normally applied when an heir dies – and by the ease with which the Duchy of Cornwall (worth more than a billion pounds) passed to his elder son.

I have no great feelings one way or another about the British monarchy - although I will confess that when, in my youth, the National Anthem was still played an the end of a cinema session, I would never stand. But there were (and remain) more important things to bother about - one of so many reasons why I can never take Liz Truss seriously for having proposed - some 25 years ago - at a Liberal Democrat Conference the ending of the British monarchy.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the post I received today from Ian Leslie which suggested there were perhaps psychological reasons why such countries as Scandinavian, Netherlands  and UK had managed to remain open, democratic and civilised

One of the country’s best bloggers did a great twitter thread today which indicated the immensity of what is at stake. It starts with questioning the suspension of parliamentary business for an unspecified period

• the continuity of the monarchy requires the business of government to continue - after the appropriate pause for reflection that was provided on Friday and Saturday - starting on Monday morning.

• Other business is continuing next week. Debts will also be chased. Schools and other public services will all operate. But the process of accountable government will be suspended. That is a powerful and worrying symbol suggesting there is no accountability in the UK, after all.

• There have been ample such other symbols, all of which have been troubling. I was astonished that the Accession Council was not asked its opinion on the ascent of Charles III to the throne: not once were the 200 or so Privy Councillors assembled asked their opinion.

• If the so-called ‘great and good’ were present to offer counsel - as is their task - why was their opinion not sought on the matter laid before them? And yet it was not. A simple call for ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes’ would have sufficed. But it did not happen. So, nor did democracy.

• Instead Charles III ascended as of right. Eugenics trumped democracy here - and our leaders didn’t even pretend otherwise.

• Worse, the accession proclamation said that Prince Charles has ‘become our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord Charles the Third’. A liege is the vassal of a feudal superior, where vassal means a person holding rights on conditions of homage and allegiance.

• I have to say that I object to the idea that I hold anything as a favour from a monarch who did no more to acquire that right than to be born. Every political sensibility that I have is offended by that idea.

• This notion also affronts my senses as a believer in the equality of all. It offends me as a democrat.

• Let’s also be blunt: there is nothing about this that can be reconciled with any declaration of human rights. So the question has to be, why was this wording used?

• unless its use was deliberate and a reflection of what is really happening on this accession. Might it be, in other words, that the language was deliberate, just as the rush to get Charles on the throne whilst the country is still in shock also very deliberate?

• In other words, the whole point of this rushed exercise that emphasises status, inherited power, the perpetuation of wealth and control of the populace, coupled with a wholly unnecessary suspension of parliamentary scrutiny, is to highlight the real power in this country?

• I wondered until it was announced that the new King would do a tour of the capitals of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I cannot object to that. I can when he is to be accompanied by Liz Truss as new prime minister.

• t could, of course, be argued that the King must act in consultation with ministers. But the message is deeply dangerous. First, it seeks to tie the Crown to the Tory party, which is threatening to the monarchy. Second, it makes the Crown political, and it should not be.

• At a time of national crisis all this worries me, greatly. Truss has already made clear that she will allow energy poverty to continue. This was implicit in the statement she made last week. She has also refused to tax the war profits of energy companies.

• Truss could not than have made it clearer, already, that she favours an unfair and divided society. Charles has ascended to the throne on the basis of feudal promises, and deeply divisive oaths pertaining to religion. Associating these things is deeply unwise, but is happening.

• The point I am making is that democracy, equality, and the right of the citizen to be who they wish is under varying challenges in these arrangements, promoted when parliament, and so democratic accountability, is suspended.

• This is not the working of a functioning state. Nor is it the work of what I think a parliamentary democracy should be. There is instead in all this an ancient regime seeking to remind the country where power lies, backed by a prime minister all too willing to reinforce division

John Harris is one of the rare journalists who gets out of the metropolis and makes a point of finding people whose opinions generally give a better sense of how social values are changing. He’s been out and about these past few days and has an interesting take.

At the time of her coronation, the idea of a tightly bound national community with the monarch at its apex made an appealing kind of sense. The left’s social democracy had fused with the right’s patrician instincts to produce the postwar consensus. In 1953, a Conservative government built nearly 250,000 council houses, the largest number ever constructed in a single year. By modern standards, most employment was relatively secure. Even if lots of people were excluded from this dream, and many lives would subsequently take a turn into insecurity and uncertainty, the postwar era inculcated enough faith in the UK’s institutions to keep the monarchy safely beyond criticism.

And now? The social attitudes that defined that period, and lingered into the 1990s – a strange mixture of solidarity and deference, and a widely shared optimism about the future – seem very quaint. If you are in your late teens, just about all of your memories will be of the endless turbulence that followed the financial crash of 2008. Your most visceral experience of politics will have been the opposite of consensus and harmony: the seething polarisation triggered by Brexit.

For many of those aged under 40, home-ownership is a distant dream, and hopes of job security seem slim. Meanwhile, perhaps because society and the economy have been in such a state of flux, space has at last been opened to talk about things that 20th-century Britain stubbornly kept under wraps: empire, systemic racism, the plain fact that so many of the institutions we are still encouraged to revere are rooted in some of the most appalling aspects of this country’s history.

The result of that change is a kingdom with two distinct sets of voices: one that reflects Britain’s tendency to conservatism and tradition, and another that sounds altogether more irreverent and questioning. In all the coverage of the Queen’s passing, the first has been dominant: how could it be otherwise? But as the period of mourning recedes, and a new monarch tries to adapt fantastically challenging realities, that may not hold for long. The post-Elizabethan age, in other words, is going to be very interesting indeed.

Ango-american liberalism runs out of puff

A September post was devoted to a book called Fantasy Land - how America lost its Mind (2017) which was a highly readable intellectual history of that country – emphasising its Puritanical beginnings and the role this has played in American exceptionalism.

A few weeks ago, the author, Kurt Andersen, published a sequel to the 2017 book - “Evil Geniuses - the unmaking of America, a recent history” (2020) - which explains how conservative forces, horrified by what the 1960s had released, got their act together to forge an agenda and bankroll a reaction which brought us neoliberalism.

I’ve seen this story told many times - of how the Mont Pelerin Society spawned a multiplicity of neoliberal ThinkTanks but this is the first time I’ve seen such a clear explanation of the connection with the polarisation of American society…..

And it’s a nuanced story too – giving due recognition to the (generally ignored) anti-government streak I so well remember in the 1960s and early 1970s – which attracted even a “young leftist” like me to writers such as Saul Alinsky and Ivan Illich. 

More to the point it was the sentiment that drove the US Young Democrats of the late 1970s and 1980s (like Clinton and Hart) to break with the “oldies” who had been carrying the torch for the New Deal and to side with the new economic right….  

It was, after all, a Democratic House which gave Reagan the licence to drive forward deregulation. The full story of the implications of the Democrats’ disowning of the leftist/populist tradition is told in Goliath – the hundred year old war between monopoly and democracy; Matt Stoller (2019) 

There were two things I particularly appreciated about Andersen's book –

- First the element of mea culpa. Andersen is writing the book as an economic liberal who has been slow to understand how a non-stop process of marginal and largely unnoticed adjustments has amounted over 4-5 decades to a dramatic socio-economic shift. At several points in the narrative, he pauses to make a very useful summary of these changes.

 - his skill in summarising key books to give us a superb intellectual history 

I had promised this would be the follow-up to my last post about the direction the United States has taken in the last fifty years – but a short article by Pankaj Mishra has persuaded me to widen the thrust of the post beyond America’s shores to the bastions of liberalism everywhere.

Strongly critical, as always, of Western ethnocentricity, Mishra starts in typical vein 

The late Tony Judt, born in 1948, once spoke of the “pretty crappy” generation he belonged to, which

 

“grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political.”

 

In Judt’s view, too many of his intellectual peers moved from radical postures into the “all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security” in the 1970s and 1980s as the postwar consensus in favor of the welfare state gave way to neoliberalism; they were especially quick to internalize the popular belief when the Berlin Wall fell that liberal democracy and capitalism had “won.”

A similar worldview prevails among a still younger generation than Judt’s. Its members, beneficiaries of an even more complacent era, the end of the cold war, are entrenched in senior positions in the periodicals, television channels, think tanks, and university departments of Anglo-America. Growing up during the triumphalist 1990s, they assumed that American-style democracy and capitalism had proven their superiority;

 

……A newspaper columnist from India, China, Ghana, or Egypt is unlikely to be recognized as an authority on global affairs unless she can demonstrate some basic knowledge of Euro-American political and intellectual traditions. But most Western scholars, let alone newspaper reporters, do not have even a passing acquaintance with (the richness of) Indian, Chinese, African, and Arab history and thought.

I don’t pretend to know (or care) much about political philosophy but I am aware that, in 1971, the American liberal analytical philosopher John Rawls published “A Theory of Justice” in which he laid out the apparatus of justice theory that became the dominant conceptual framework for subsequent theorizing about politics among philosophers and many political theorists in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. 

The impact of Rawls’s theory on the landscape and language of political philosophy was immense. Only a decade after the publication of “A Theory of Justice”, one bibliography listed 2,512 books and articles engaging with Rawls’s thought. For his followers, Rawls became a patron saint, the visionary behind an egalitarian dream of distributive justice. Among his critics, he was known as a neo- Kantian individualist who adapted the toolkit of rational choice and decision theory and viewed individuals as at once self- interested economic agents and autonomous moral persons.

They saw him as providing a philosophical rationalization of a liberal welfare state or, worse, a defence of the conservative status quo that implicitly framed America as a land of liberty and civic freedom.

 

In his wake, political philosophy was remade. Philosophical liberalism became synonymous with Rawls, and political philosophy synonymous with a kind of liberalism born of postwar America. Even many who opposed it were shaped by it. By the late twentieth century, Anglophone political theorists operated in the shadow of justice theory

I’m quoting from a new book “In the Shadow of Justice – postwar liberalism and the remaking of political philosophy” which looks an important and highly accessible critique for these times when anglo-americans at least are questioning the future of the liberal part of our tradition. The LSE review blog which I value gave it a useful review - 

Using the core liberal question – whether a society can be justified to all its members in light of inequalities – as a point of departure, she traces the emergence of two liberal principles: firstly, the principle of civil liberties and personal rights; and secondly, the principle of equality. The key assumption underpinning the latter principle is that economic inequalities should be tolerated if they improve the situations of the least advantaged in a society.

The particular focus of the book is on the revival of political thought brought about by Rawls’s justice theory following a period of economic depression and World War II that had left philosophers unable to think about justice.

The bulk of the book is made up of critical commentaries on political events and intellectual debates that shaped political liberalism in the US and Britain in the post-war era.

 

There are several powerful arguments animating the eight chapters of Forrester’s book.

In Chapter Four the author grapples with some of the attempts to reconstruct and rethink Rawls’s framework, before turning to the problem of the future (6) and the New Right and New Left (7), Forrester brings into the conversation concepts of markets, choice and responsibility. In Chapter Eight, she conclusively shifts attention to the limitations of political philosophy and makes a strong point for questioning the currency of liberal thought to understand the times in which we live.

Forrester illuminates how Rawls’s justice theory survived the radical protests and the rise of the New Left of the 1960s, the hollowing out of the welfare state in the 1970s and the New Right’s assumptions about the nature of politics, institutions, personhood and the individual in the 1980s.

Notably, what appears as a conflict at first glance – the idea of distributive justice pitted against neoliberal pledges for privatisation, financialisation and institutional interdependence – is revealed by Forrester to have become a story of profound philosophical success. As many political theorists deployed ideas surrounding markets, choice and responsibility within a Rawlsian framework, liberal egalitarianism subsequently became the dominant mode of theorising by the 1980s.

Engaging with a number of influential critics, such as Bernard Williams, Judith Shklar, Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, Forrester shows how liberal thought increasingly came to be detached from concrete political experiences

The origins of the First World War - the how rather than why

Coincidentally, the historian who has written the new, detailed study of the origins of the First World War which I mentioned yesterday (Christopher Clark) has just reviewed a couple of other books on the same subject. It starts the same way as the book itself (which kept me captivated for five full days).  Its appeal lies, for me, in showing how a few players seem to have tipped the balance in the declaration of war - particularly Poincare. In the opening pages we learn of the scale and significance of French loans to Serbia in the period preceding and during the 2 Balkan wars; and, later, how Poincare buttered up the Russians and helped push them to full and final mobilisation. 

The book suggests (rightly or not I can't say) that the Balkans itself has tended to be relegated in most serious accounts of the causes of the war and his book certainly puts it back in central place. It also has an interesting section emphasising that his account is more concerned with the "how" of events, rather than the "why"......      

The debate over the origins of the First World War is older than the war itself. Even before the first shots were fired, Europe’s statesmen constructed narratives depicting themselves as innocents and their opponents as predators and breachers of the peace. Since then, the debate has spawned a historical literature of unrivalled size, sophistication and moral intensity. In 1991, a survey by the American historian John Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone.
The debate is still going strong today, for several reasons. First, the war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed four multiethnic empires (the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). It killed at least ten million young men and wounded at least twenty million more. It disorganised the international system in immensely destructive ways. Without this conflict it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917, the rise of Stalinism, the ascendancy of Italian Fascism, the Nazi seizure of power or the Holocaust. It was, as the historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. It is hard to imagine a worse initial condition for the modern era of which we are the inheritors.
A second reason is the exceptionally intricate character of the crisis that brought war to Europe in 1914. The Cuban Missile Crisis was complex enough, yet it involved just two principal protagonists plus a range of proxies and subordinate players. By contrast, the story of how the First World War came about must make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance – Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia and Britain – or six if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war.
To make matters worse, the executives of these states were anything but unified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the respective governments. The chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the years leading up to the war. It also helps explain why the July Crisis of 1914 became the most opaque political crisis of modern times. There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that can’t be supported by selecting among the available sources. Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in ‘the system’. There has always been enough complexity to keep the argument going.
The debate is old, but the issues it raises are still fresh. One might even say that the political crisis of July 1914 seems less remote – less illegible – now than it did thirty or forty years ago……………. What must strike any 21st-century reader who follows the course of the crisis is its raw modernity. It began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers: the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on 28 June 1914 had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge: extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders, its links to any sovereign government were oblique.
Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has given way to a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.
It is less clear now that we should dismiss the assassination at Sarajevo as a mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 is an example of the way in which a single symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potentially lethal nature of Balkan nationalism. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914. This doesn’t mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present. Rather, it means acknowledging those features of the past where our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view.
The impact of these changes can be discerned in recent writing on the origins of the war. There has been a globalisation of the field of vision. The prewar polarisation of Europe into opposed alliance blocs now looks less like a purely continental European story and more like the European consequence of world-historical realignments driven by conflicts along a range of imperial peripheries in China, Africa and Central Asia. Rather than searching for the antecedents of the actual war that broke out in 1914, recent studies have tended to stress the open-endedness of international relations in a world in which nearly all the key players had more than one potential enemy. The European alliances, it has been argued, didn’t necessarily make war more likely: they could have the opposite effect if one ally refused to back the adventurism of another, as happened on several occasions in the decade before the war. Anglo-German naval rivalry may not have predestined an armed conflict between Britain and Germany: a number of recent monographs have shown how decisively Britain saw off the German naval challenge and have questioned how much impact the matter had on British geopolitical thinking. Periods of détente before 1914 were not deceptive moments of respite from mutual hostility but represented a genuine potentiality of the international system. On the eve of the July Crisis, as a recent article by T.G. Otte has shown, the British Foreign Office was on the verge of dropping the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and seeking a rapprochement with Germany. Far from being inevitable, in other words, this war may actually have been improbable. On this reading, it was not the consequence of long-run historical ‘forces’, but of short-term realignments and shocks to the international system.

The Financial Times has another excellent review of some books on the causes of the First World War - as does the excellent Dublin Review of Books

The painting is a Popescu - but a Constantin Isache (1888-1967) not Stefan (1872-1948)

Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical