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Underlying the many stated and unstated reasons for British involvement in the current Iraqi misadventure is the widespread assumption that there are strong links between the UK and the US. These include not only a common language and a closely linked heritage but shared cultural values, including a belief in the importance of human rights and Western-style democracy as the fairest possible form of human government. That assumption becomes explicit each time a British Prime Minister or his minions or the British media refer to the so-called “Special Relationship” between the two countries. The implication is that we have more in common with, and therefore should offer greater allegiance to, the nearly 300 million people who live 3,000 miles away from us, than the 300 million inhabitants of the European Union who live only 22 miles away. After all, the Europeans do not speak English and we have fought many wars against them over the last 1,000 years, while. apart from a couple of times in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we have been at peace with the United States since the arrival of the first colonists. The term is rare enough in this country, but I suspect that only USAmericans interested in British politics or assigned as diplomats to the Court of St James are aware of the “Special Relationship” or its supposed components: a) the United States’ willingness to assist the UK in times of national emergency; b) the UK’s ability to influence US international policy; and c) the UK’s willingness to offer assistance to the US in its ventures abroad. The phrase briefly had meaning in the first two years of the Second World War, when the United States was officially neutral but President Franklin Roosevelt supported the British war effort to the extent that his office allowed him. But since then, it has been no more than a figment in the imagination of the British Prime Minister of the day. That is because while the US is very happy to call on c), the experience of the last fifty years has shown that it has always ignored a) and b). In 1956, the United States refused to come to British and French assistance when the two European countries sought to assert control over the Suez Canal. And in 1983, the US government did not even inform the UK that it was about to invade Grenada which, although no longer a British colony, was a member of the Commonwealth and had the Queen as its head of state. Meanwhile the UK's has frequently failed to influence US action in most fields of international policy, from its one-sided stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its refusal to sign a number of key international treaties, including the Kyoto agreement on climate change and membership of the International Criminal Court. Indeed, the only example that I can think of in the last fifty years where the US took a pro-British position that was arguably contrary to its broader international goals, was its support for the UK’s retaking of the Falkland Isles after the Argentinian invasion of 1982. Even then it is obvious that if Argentina had been a stronger economic and strategic partner of the US than was the UK, the logistical support offered to the Brits would have been gone to the Argentinians instead. What brings the Special Relationship back to life in the term of each new prime minister? I suspect it is nothing more than his or her first post-election flight to Washington to meet whichever wealthy USAmerican has most recently bought his way into the presidency. Power breeds corruption in those who have it (if those in power do not break the letter of the law, they always wound or kill its spirit) and blindness and self-deception in those who approach it. The power of the US president is often limited, particularly if Congress is hostile or divided, but his role as head of state as well as head of government of the world's richest and most powerful nation is significantly greater than that of a British prime minister. No wonder such disparate characters as Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have been so easily seduced. This, their subconscious must tell them, is what I might have been if not for an accident of birth. And while they walk starry-eyed through the White House or whichever presidential holiday home they have been invited to, we can be certain that the man walking by their side, whatever his politics or background does not give a damn about the Special Relationship except as a tool with which to lever more commitments of support from whichever patsy* he is playing host to that day. So let us be honest and admit that the Special Relationship does not exist. Nor could it exist, because despite appearances, neither the leaders nor the peoples of the two countries share common values and goals. The 1776 Declaration of Independence and subsequent war, leading to British recognition of the new republic was only the most prominent event in a process of separation that had begun over a century before with the arrival of the Puritans on the Mayflower and other ships. That process continued as millions of migrants from across the world - not merely the cluster of islands floating off North-West Europe - continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continues today. At first sight, people migrate for many varied and complex reasons, but in reality each migrant leaves his/her birthplace for one single motive - discomfort. That discomfort can be physical – lack of food and poverty – or psychological – persecution because of race, status or religious belief. The two are often connected: those who do not conform to society’s norms are likely to suffer discrimination which, can lead to reduced access to food and shelter and at its worst to pogroms and concentration camps. Yet while poverty and hunger are often beyond the individual’s or community’s control, other sources of discomfort, such as practice of a minority religion, are not. Official religious doctrine changed several times in the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to and from the Catholicism of Mary I and James VII and II** and the Puritanism of the Lord Protectorate. Most Brits (as they were not yet known) took the pragmatic viewpoint of performing or attending the rites authorised by the government of the day, whatever their private feelings. In other words, they compromised. Some Catholics refused to do so and the most prominent of these, when apprehended, were executed. And some Protestants, who considered that James VI and I and his son, Charles I and grandson Charles II, were too lax in their interpretation of scriptures, decided to move to the New World and set up communities where they could practise religion in their own way. In other words, they refused to compromise. Much, if not most migrants to the US were people who would not compromise; they refused to starve or to deny their faith. That mass migration ensured that the fundamental ethos of the United States is an individualism, a selfishness and a refusal to compromise. (Mass migration to other countries, such as Brazil or Australia, was from different motives which are not discussed here.) The result is a fundamental belief in the United States that in any clash between the individual and the community, it is the community that has to give way. And it is that insistence on the individual's priority over the community that has led to such diverse phenomena in as hostility towards gun control, a tendency to litigation ($2 million compensation for being given hot coffee - puh-lease) and a refusal to constrain US industry to conform to standards that will prevent global warming. In contrast, we Brits compromise and have compromised for centuries. We are more interested in a quiet life than in generating discord. We do not feel that we are so important that the community has to respect our every wish; indeed, many of us understand the importance of community. And while we may ignore our fellow citizens, we respect their right to a life similar to our own. And so we support a national health service, we agree with a ban on guns, we understand that we have to make sacrifices to our way of life if we are all to thrive on this planet. Paradoxically, after hundreds of years of putting community before individual, compromise before principle, we Brits have actually created a society where the individual flourishes. This can be seen in many different ways. For example, we are less likely to feel threatened by strangers, unlike Middle America, where few people are comfortable with individuals who do not closely resemble themselves. This is most obvious in racism, which of course exists in the United Kingdom, but which is much less pernicious than in the US, as can be seen from the simple test of comparing the number of mixed-race couples in London and New York, Birmingham and Birmingham. Many other indicators that confirm that the individual thrives more in the UK than in the US. Not is the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay be intolerable in British eyes, but post September 11th anti-terrorist legislation in the US destroys the very civil liberties that the country claims to defend. At least theoretically, access to good health care is universal in this country, while it is deprived to the poor in the United States. And although not as rational as our northern European neighbours, our approach to sexuality, reproductive health and recreational drugs is a model of reasonableness compared to the anguished fear of sexual intercourse and drugs that permeates so much of US life. Of course we Brits have our faults. We are rude, dirty, incompetent and patronising. And in some ways we are becoming increasingly USAmerican. By that I do not simply mean our increasing tendency to sue someone else for accidents or our own mistakes, but, following the same pattern as in the US, the arrival of immigrants who are not interested in integrating into British culture but who are bringing in prejudices, particularly towards gender, sexuality and religion that we had mostly abandoned by the 1970s and 1980s. And of course the US has its strengths. With some exceptions, it has made and continues to make far greater scientific and artistic progress than the British have done for at least two generations. Its armed forces have been instrumental in real acts of liberation as well as unwarranted occupation. Individual USAmericans can be fascinating, challenging and charming, and I would hate to be deprived of the opportunity to visit and live there again. And of course, if wealth is your goal, then the United States is the place to be… But by being so closely associated with US values, the UK has much to lose and little to gain. From the limited perspective of self-preservation we invite both political and terrorist attack by being increasingly identified as imperialist, unreasonable, an enemy of Muslims. And from the broader perspective of working towards an increasingly small world that is run for the benefit of all its inhabitants, we are increasingly identified as imperialist, unreasonable, an enemy of Muslims… and the poor and those at risk of ecological disaster etc etc. We have to make it clear, both as individuals and as a nation, that we are Europeans, not Americans in either sense of that word (referring to the US or to the Americas***). If we are not particularly close to the French or Italians, we are much closer to the Dutch and the Scandinavians and those bastions of democracy, Canada and New Zealand than we are to the United States. (The Australians lose points for their continuing inability to integrate its native people into its community, unlike their neighbours across the Tasman Sea.) The day we, and whichever government is in power, recognise that fact is the day that Britain will regain its independence, self-respect and the respect of the rest of world. Let us hope that that day comes soon. * US slang: a person who is gullible and easy to take advantage of. ** James VII of Scotland, who was also II of England. *** "USAmericans" allows the word "American" to be reclaimed to refer to people across the American continent from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego.  "You have at least one reader who feels substantially richer from the experience. You have a truly exciting ability to enter your characters. There is an old Indian saying in these parts: 'To walk in another's moccasins' and this you do superlatively. Thank you for sharing your indubitable talents with me." Thank you, David. Visit his website |
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