The End of Nationalism - The final lesson of Empire?

In 1840, the British politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay asked his readers to imagine the fall of a great empire. Macaulay conjured a vision of the future, ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Pauls.’

It seems strange that Macaulay envisaged the fall of the British Empire, particularly at the height of its powers. Indeed, in a parliamentary speech, Macaulay described the British Empire as having surpassed the achievements of the Greeks or Romans. The British, Macaulay said, had gone beyond

"the most renowned of Western Conquerors… beyond the point where the phalanx of Alexander refused to proceed…a territory larger and more populous than France, Spain, Italy, and Germany put together…the world has seen nothing similar."

Yet the fall of empires and civilisations was at the forefront of British thinking throughout the nineteenth century. Aware that the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians, the Hindu culture in India, and its Taj Mahal-building Muslim successors, the Moguls, had all succumbed, was it not inevitable that the British empire would eventually go the same way? This concern was summed up by the Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, in his poem Ozymandius, describing the broken statue of Ramesses the Great, inscribed with the words, ‘look upon my works ye mighty, and despair!’ Yet Ramesses now lay on the desert floor, with nothing but miles of sand stretching into the distance.

Sketching the ruins of previous empires was an activity familiar to British travellers to India and Italy; one which spoke of power won and lost by civilisations, and its appropriation by their successors, able to travel to, write about, and sketch the symbols and architecture of lost authority. In Macaulay’s future, New Zealand are the new imperial power, colonised and ‘civilised’ by the British, whose place in the world the New Zealanders have now taken. Macaulay’s vision thus soothes concerns about the demise of the British Empire; even if Britain falls, it will have played its part in passing on the torch of civilisation, even to the far-flung reaches of the Southern Hemisphere. As the Romans had conquered and then educated and ‘civilised’ Britain, now the British were doing the same in their own colonies. Such narratives also justified imperial activity in the present; Empire was a positive force in the world.

In another parliamentary speech, Macaulay alluded to this same idea, insisting that some aspects of empire would always remain. ‘The sceptre may pass away from us’, Macaulay conceded, yet there would always be the British legacy of ‘the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws’.

It is interesting that the two nations who have perhaps had the greatest global reach and impact in the last three hundred years, Britain and America, are the same two who have recently reached back into the past to reconstruct themselves as ‘great again’. The US may not have physically occupied as many places as the British did, but their global economic and cultural reach is every bit as influential and impactful on the lives of people many thousands of miles distant from Washington. Like the British, America justifies its projection of power through its apparent civilising benefits, bathing the world in the light of economic and political freedom. Of course, like the impact of the British Empire, American foreign policy and its interference in the affairs of others has had mixed outcomes.

So why the recent resurgence of overt nationalism in both America and the UK? Perhaps both nations sense Macaulay’s vision of the end of empire, or at least the demise of their global primacy and, in their panic, are reaching for the security of the past.

The rise of China and India, for example, shortly to encompass a significant proportion of the world’s entire population and economic power, threatens even the might of the US. A smaller nation like Britain would seem to be powerless in the long term, to counter-act alone the re-establishment of the East as the dominant world-force. Of course, the advantage of West over East would appear to a traveller from another planet, as a very short blip in what has otherwise been the dominance of the East over human affairs for most of the past 5-6,000 years, since the rise of the first mud-brick cities of civilisation, along the rivers of the Tigress and Euphrates, the Nile, the Yangtse, and the Ganges.

The UK had its opportunity to join with several hundred million Europeans, in a cultural, political, and economic united front, but has chosen differently. Across the Channel, continental nations decided at the end of the Second World War, to put aside the type of overt nationalism which had caused conflict, war, and terror for so many hundreds of years. They were still proud citizens of nations, but chose to put common enterprise above the primacy of the nation-state.

Of course, in Britain, we were and are having none of that! We are, we tell ourselves, the nation that brought improvement to over half the globe, the progenitors of modern civilisation. Although we went our separate ways, Britain also represents the origins of the United States, to whom, as the Romans passed it to us, we passed the torch of the global civilising mission. Who are they, the EU, to dictate our future, when we fought and won so that they could even have a future at all? It’s a hard pill to swallow, no doubt.

The key weapon in the war to persuade the Brits to vote for Brexit, and the Americans to vote for Trump, was the promotion of nationalism, the re-establishment of British and American ‘traditional values’. Yet all identity is first and foremost predicted on difference. Proud nationalists will say that our identity is built around a set of common shared values. However, as Benedict Anderson put so well, the nation is really an ‘imagined community’; although we claim to share common values which makes us British, in fact the differences which divide a white middle-class Surrey stockbroker, a first-generation immigrant Muslim taxi-driver in Burnley, and an unemployed ex-welder on Tyneside are perhaps greater than the similarities that bind them. Equally a 20-year-old gay feminist student is unlikely to share a vision of Britain with a straight middle-aged male UKIP supporter. How can the US decide on a homogenous set of characteristics which constitutes America, when that nation was built almost entirely on the concept of diversity?

Instead, in both countries, it has been easier to decide what is definitely not British and American, and rally support around those differences. So, the mosque, the hijab and the burka, the asylum-seeker, the immigrant, the EU worker,

Mexican ‘murderers’, Chinese businesses which ‘rape’ Western economies, have all become the symbols of difference around which nationalism has coalesced. Indeed, even clearly indigenous white ‘Christian’ citizens who object to such images are singled out for exclusion, labelled as virtue-signalling ‘white liberal elites’.

And the impact? In both the UK and the United States, the attempt to re-define those nations in relation to some vague notion of historical ‘greatness’ has sown far more division that unity. Both countries are angrily divided down the middle. In Europe, it was said and hoped by many, that the UK referendum would trigger a ‘domino effect’, with many EU countries voting similarly for nationalist parties and to leave the EU. In fact, the reverse has occurred. Europe has searched its soul, and chosen, in Austrian, Dutch, and French elections, not to return to overt nationalism, but to support the European project. There is recognition of the need for change and reform (in what political system is this not a constant factor?), but they have chosen a road of co-operation rather than nation-state isolationism. Their challenge is to accept and co-exist with ‘difference’, rather than trying to homogenise the nation. It remains to be seen what the future holds for the UK going it alone, but it takes an average of ten years to negotiate an international trade deal, and usually only one at a time. Clearly it will be difficult.

To return to Macaulay and the ruins of London, his New Zealander may represent not the literal future for Britain, but the metaphorical decline of Britain as a global power; the ‘ruins’ of a once-dominant global financial centre now relocated beyond the shores of Britain. If the resurgence of nationalism does not bring success to America and Britain, we may have seen those nations offer their final ‘civilising’ lesson to the world, that co-operation rather than isolation is the key to the future.

Such a vision of decline may not be in our very near future but, as Macaulay said of his history-writing, ‘I have had the year 2000, and often the year 3000, often in my mind.’