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Europe must act as a much-needed adrenalin shot to a weary Uncle Sam
While we all luxuriate in the afterglow of a fabulous summer and await the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum – as well ponder the rise of Ukip and how it will all pan out at the coming General Election – a much more terrible set of conundrums lap at Europe’s borders. Far to its east, the post-war settlement is under threat.
Already an annexation has taken place. On Europe’s southern flank a militia banditry reigns in the land we helped free from Gadhafi. Across the desert sands of the Sahara the black flag of Muslim extremism makes many of the states there close to ungovernable. Sweep east and the heroes of Tahir Square have seen a military dictatorship annul all their efforts and seize power in Egypt to stop that pivotal Arab state falling to the excesses of the Muslim Brotherhood. Go south into the land of the former Queen of Sheba (Yemen) and more turmoil reigns. Across the narrow straits from our former colony of Aden and into Somalia more of the same flourishes, not just on land but at sea, where a scourge which our navy had long ago cleansed the world of has broken out again: piracy. Travel north into the desert fastnesses which Lawrence once traversed and you are upon Gaza and Syria. Again, more chaos. Go east and you have reached Iraq where the most bestial activities of all are currently taking place. Further east and you are upon the hapless land of Afghanistan where we await the outcome of our ten-year effort when we leave next year. The signs are not good. If a new Iraq breaks out there it may very well take down a nuclear armed Pakistan with it.
While all this is going on, we in the West fret about our petty goings on – though certain goings on, such as splitting our country apart and leaving the EU are not, admittedly, petty – and we worry about what our responses should be to these ugly canvasses which are unfolding all around us. It is my concerned belief that we are about to see years, if not decades, of strife before an exhausted Islam settles down to enjoy the sort of order which descended over Europe with the 17th century ‘Peace of Westphalia’ following the terrible bloodletting of the Thirty Years War. That, too, was about religion – the Protestant/Catholic schism which has echoes of the present Sunni/Shia split.
But things could have been different if the US had had a partner as militarily powerful as itself with whom it could have shared the burden. It would have made it possible for us to save our Muslim brothers from themselves and spare them the miseries we endured in that long-ago conflict. That partner should have been us, the Europeans. We have no longer any interest in colonising anybody, but we do have an interest in maintaining stability, especially when it is on our doorstep.
Just as the victorious Western Allies were able to work the miracle of creating and sustaining a democratic and peaceable West Germany after the horrors of Nazism, so we could have rendered the same service to the fractious Muslim world if we in Europe had pulled our weight in world affairs and not left it all to an ever more fed up and weary Uncle Sam.
But even now it is not perhaps too late. First of all we must stop distracting ourselves by fragmentation – starting with ourselves. If Scotland separates, it will send Spain into paroxysms of worry as its most prosperous region, Catalonia, ups the ante for independence. Then the Basques, another – prosperous area – will do the same. Belgium, itself – the heart of the European Union – may very well split in two, with the French-speaking south and Dutch-speaking north going their own ways. There is plenty more potential for further fragmentation in the always volatile Balkans. And who’s to say that Wales and Northern Ireland might not catch the contagion.
Cameron’s job – in which, as far as I can see, he has done mighty little that is visible and hence Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip – is to get busy on those re-negotiations with Europe and make them meaningful. Europe needs reform, and most of its members know it. If he can get it into their thick heads that they really are in danger of losing one of their biggest players then I think there is a chance that he may come home with a package that most of us can accept. Meantime, he should go public and tell them (and the country) that unless this is so he will have to recommend our departure.
If Europe can weather this British-made storm which lies ahead and stop attempting to reduce its nation states to regional entities, then it can forge ahead and exert the kind of muscle on the world stage – both diplomatically and militarily – as will act as an adrenalin shot to Uncle Sam. No longer will he feel alone. He and his new partner will dispose of such power as will make all others think twice, including Putin with his old-world adventures in the east. Europe will have come into its own and will have demonstrated to the world that its interests lie not only in enriching itself but in helping an increasingly impotent United Nations maintain a stable and just world.
What if WWI never happened?
How might the world have looked but for that cataclysmic conflict which began almost a hundred years ago? Mighty different, I can tell you. It is highly unlikely we would have a United Nations since only a catastrophe on a planet-wide scale could have caused countries to submit themselves in the future to a supra-national authority.
How might the world look today but for that cataclysmic conflict which began almost a hundred years ago?
There would be no Arab-Israeli conflict and, as a result of that, no 9/11. We would be boarding aircraft in pretty much the relaxed way we used to, with none of the demeaning scrutiny and security measures we have now. There would have been no Cold War and as a consequence of that no mad rush to be the first to land a man on the moon. Because the Second World War was the unfinished business of the first, rocketry was given priority by the Germans as a possible war-winning technology and without that impetus space technology would be way, way behind where it is today. We might not even have those satellites circling the earth which give us GPS, satellite television and so much else. Computer technology – also hastened by war – would still be in its infancy and the World Wide Web would be non-existent. The whole business of electrical miniaturization on which just about everything today depends received a major shot in the arm by the space effort. Of course we would have got there in the end but it would have been at a much more leisurely pace.
In geopolitical terms, the landscape would be just as dramatically different. There would be no European Union since it was only the trauma of the two World Wars which caused Europeans to think there had to be a better way. We would probably still rule India and most of the other European empires would be staggering on, though under rising pressure for emancipation along with us. Russia would have evolved from a tsarist autocracy into a fully fledged democratic state. All the fallen monarchies of Europe – the Hapsburgs of Austria/Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, he Tsar of Russia and even the Sultan of Turkey would still be in place along with a clutch of Balkan princlings. It is likely, though, that most of them would have had their wings clipped democratically.
But the Emperor of China would still be gone. He went three years before the Great War started, discredited by his inability to prevent China’s humiliations by the European colonial powers. But the new China would have had a Japanese experience; it would have taken the Japanese approach of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and industrialised like mad. Today, most probably, it would be the top economic as well as military power in the world with Uncle Sam as No. 2. It would have avoided the trauma of the Mao experience and be like Japan, a democratic state. Britain’s colossal overseas investments – all lost to war – along with her staggering land holdings around the world would have been deployed to who knows what ends. They might even have allowed her to stay top dog.
All in all it would have been an utterly different landscape from the one we see around us today. It would not necessarily have been a better world since many of the less salubrious features of the old world would not have been swept away and there would have been umpteen disputes leading to what may be described as bush-fire wars.
As for no conflict with the Muslim world, that is because there would be no state of Israel. If there was any conflict it would be with their Ottoman overlords – it would be them, not us, taking the flak. It was Britain’s seizure of Palestine and the destruction of the Ottoman Empire along with its foreign secretary’s promise to allow a home for Jews in the Holy Land which made the creation of Israel possible. He had no idea it would lead to the dispossession of millions of Arabs from their ancestral lands. This, above all else, is what drives the Jihadists today along with Western military intervention in Muslim affairs. They take the view that it was not a kind-hearted act on the part of Britain regarding Jews – which in fact it was – but a calculated move to plant a Trojan Horse in their midst which would do the West’s bidding and help it keep control of them.
One of the consequences of the two World Wars was to so weaken and discredit the European powers that it hastened the end of their empires. Had the people of the various empires gained their freedom at a more leisurely pace – perhaps as much as a century later – there would have been more time to prepare cadres of their people and put institutions in place which could have avoided the shambles we saw following the rush to independence after the war. Africa, today, with its boundless resources, might perhaps be a well-governed and prosperous continent
But war did hasten the end of deference – à la Downton Abbey – and dispose, in the process, of autocratic monarchies. Only in the victor or neutral states did they survive. Interestingly, not a single state which abolished its monarchy has had a change of heart and reinstated it. I suppose that is our fate when something cataclysmic comes along one day to discredit our own monarchy.
Apart from the most obvious ones – the advancement of science, the UN and the EU – the other major beneficiary of war has been the emancipation of women. Oddly, it was not the dictatorships with their powers of compulsion (the USSR was an exception) which were the earliest and most successful in harnessing the abilities of the fair sex, but the elective dictatorships of the West. Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, was always bemoaning the Reich’s slowness in this crucial field to his boss.
The Last Foundling 