By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, September 12, 2019
British prime minister Boris Johnson is desperate to
translate the British public’s June 2016 vote to leave the European Union into
a concrete Brexit.
But the real issue is far older and more important than
whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the
increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically, and
linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European
culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with
France, Germany, or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant
spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler
could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured
his superiors in 1801 amid rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do
not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come
by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary
government, and majority-Protestant religion set it apart from its European
neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th-century British and Scottish Enlightenment of
Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke, and Adam Smith emphasized individualism,
freedom, and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result
that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the
idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s
violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of
their rights and even their lives.
France produced Napoleon, Italy had Mussolini, and
Germany gave the world Hitler. It is difficult to find in British history a
comparable dictatorial figure who sought Continental domination. The British,
of course, were often no saints. They controlled their global empire by both
persuasion and brutal force.
But even British imperialism was of a different sort than
Belgian, French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish colonialism. Former British
colonies America, Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand have long been
democratic, while much of Latin America, to take one example, has not until
recently.
In World War I, the British lost nearly a million
soldiers trying to save France and Belgium. In World War II, England was the
only nation to fight the Axis for the entirety of the war (from September 1939
to September 1945), the only Allied power to fight the Axis completely alone
(for about a year from mid-1940 to mid-1941), and the only major Allied power
to have gone to war without having been directly attacked. (It came to the aid
of its ally Poland.)
Historically, Britain has looked more upon the seas and
the New World than eastward to Europe. In that transatlantic sense, a Canadian
or American typically had more in common with an Englander than did a German or
Greek.
Over the last 30 years, the British nearly forgot that
fact as they merged into the European Union and pledged to adopt European
values in a shared trajectory to supposed utopia.
To the degree that England remained somewhat suspicious
of EU continentalism by rejecting the euro and not embracing European
socialism, the country thrived. But when Britain followed the German example of
open borders, reversed the market reforms of Margaret Thatcher, and adopted the
pacifism and energy fantasies of the EU, it stagnated.
Johnson’s efforts as the new prime minister ostensibly
are to carry out the will of the British people as voiced in 2016, against the
wishes of the European Union apparat and most of the British establishment. But
after hundreds of years of rugged independence, will Britain finally merge into
Europe, or will it retain its singular culture and grow closer to the
English-speaking countries it once founded — which are doing better than most
of the members of the increasingly regulated and anti-democratic European
Union.
Europe is alarmingly unarmed. Most NATO members refuse to
make their promised investments in defense. Negative interest rates are
becoming normal in Europe. Unemployment remains high in tightly regulated labor
markets.
Southern European countries can never fully repay their loans
from German banks. The dissident Visegrád Group, composed of the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, seeks to create a mini alliance inside
the EU that promotes secure borders, legal immigration only, nuclear power, and
traditional values and Christianity.
Britain has a last chance to re-embrace the free-market
democratic world that it once helped to create — and distance itself from the
creeping statism it once opposed.
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