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Monthly Archives: June 2016

Britain: An Unhappy Country Seeking Catharsis

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by Christian Davies in Politics

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United Kingdom

Blair confronts us with a version of ourselves of which we are terrified: not just weak, but unprincipled; not just demoralised, but undignified; no longer the world’s aristocrats, but butlers for the new super-rich.

Gazeta_Wyborczah.png

This is the original, English-language version of an article published in Polish this weekend in Gazeta Wyborcza.  The Polish translation can be found here.

As outsiders and Britons alike try to understand the result of Britain’s EU referendum, it is tempting simply to refer to Acheson’s dictum that ‘Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role’ and assume that all can be explained by a surge of imperial nostalgia, reflecting Britain’s mental semi-detachment from the continent and the natural insularity of those who dwell on an island.

But although those things are still relevant, they do not go nearly enough in explaining the state of British politics and society today.  Acheson was right, but a lot has changed since 1962.  After decades of agonising, Britain did find a role with which it appeared to be comfortable, as a medium-sized power with special privileges, one of the United States’ major allies and its European lieutenant within NATO, and one of the three major powers within the European Union.

It is a much more recent loss of faith in this post-imperial role that helps to explain why Britons opted for what Prime Minister David Cameron – who has announced his intention to resign – described during the campaign as “the self-destruct option” of departure from the European Union.

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Is There a European Political Culture?

02 Thursday Jun 2016

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Europe

We like to tell ourselves that ‘Europe’ is defined by its achievements, when in truth our story is just as much one of barbarism, ignorance, and violence as it is about civilisation, enlightenment and high culture

This morning I participated in a panel discussion at the Wroclaw Global Forum, a security conference hosted by the Atlantic Council in the Polish city that in a former life was the German city of Breslau.

The conference is held in a facility next to Wroclaw’s Centennial Hall, built in 1913 when the city was still part of the German Empire, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Nations, when a coalition of armies from Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden defeated Napoleon outside Leipzig.  A concrete counterpart to Leipzig’s magnificent Völkerschlachtdenkmal, its design, original purpose and former Polish name (Hala Ludowa, Hall of the People), serve to illustrate how a monument can stand still whilst names, systems, borders and local inhabitants change around it.

As if to press home the historical precariousness of Central European existence, conference guests stay at the Hotel Monopol, which has the dubious honour of having hosted Adolf Hitler in 1938 when he travelled to Breslau so as to address a gathering of Sudeten-Deutsche who had made the journey from nearby Czechoslovakia.  The setting helps gives even the most platitudinous Atlanticist clichés about the value of freedom a resonance they lack when regurgitated in their native Washington.

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Recent Posts

  • Polish PM Angers Human Rights Campaigners with Plans to Shake Up NGOs
  • New Polish Military Force Worries Political Opposition
  • Poland Exhumes President Lech Kaczyński’s Remains
  • Polish Women Vow to Step Up Pressure Over Abortion Restrictions
  • Poland’s Abortion Ban Proposal Near Collapse After Mass Protests

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Kenton on The Ghosts of Smolensk

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