Days of yore

In 1914, when my ma­ter­nal grand­mother was a teenager, Britain ruled over 412 mil­lion peo­ple, who lived on al­most one quar­ter of the world’s sur­face. In 1969, when I was twelve and she was in her six­ties, I was as­ton­ished to find she still be­lieved that the British Em­pire would never come to an end, even though, to all in­tents and pur­poses, it al­ready had. (Today Britain has sov­er­eignty over just 14 tiny ter­ri­to­ries, three of which are un­in­hab­ited). It was pre­cisely be­cause the British Em­pire was in tat­ters by the time the ’Six­ties swung around that the then Prime Min­is­ter Harold Macmil­lan ap­plied to join the fledgeling Eu­ro­pean Eco­nomic Com­mu­nity. Its found­ing coun­tries had de­cided to build closer eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal ties with each other, with the ex­press in­ten­tion of pre­vent­ing any fur­ther Eu­ro­pean con­flict, but when Britain fi­nally joined in 1973, it did so for very dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Ac­cord­ing to his­to­rian Je­remy Black, Britain needed the EEC as a spring­board to re­cu­per­ate ’its sta­tus as a world power’. In other words, al­though the UK’s three hun­dred year-long im­pe­r­ial party had come to an end, it had left one mother of a hang­over, which would ex­plain why, when cosy­ing up to the con­ti­nen­tals, Britain en­dowed it­self with what Black calls a ‘semi-de­tached sta­tus’ within Eu­rope, by re­fus­ing to join the eu­ro­zone and stay­ing out of Schen­gen (but en­joy­ing free trade, free move­ment of cit­i­zens, the Eras­mus pro­gramme, Eu­ro­pean sub­si­dies and so forth). Per­haps it was only a mat­ter of time be­fore mil­lions of Britons – well, the Eng­lish – blamed the hang­over hurt in their heads (the im­pos­si­bil­ity of seiz­ing back Britain’s nos­tal­gi­cally longed-for ’great­ness’) on the ’bu­reau­crats in Brus­sels’, and stum­bled over the Brexit precipice.

Em­pires leave their mark on a coun­try long after the em­pire builders them­selves have slunk into the re­cy­cling bin of his­tory. Spain’s em­pire ex­panded like an oil slick over four cen­turies until it had oc­cu­pied al­most 11% of the world’s sur­face area, but then col­lapsed like a house of cards in the 1800s, when it lost most of South and Cen­tral Amer­ica, plus ter­ri­to­ries in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Far East; after which its do­mes­tic pop­u­la­tion was sub­jected to a se­ries of im­pe­r­ial wannabes: an au­thor­i­tar­ian monarch (Al­fonso XIII), a vi­cious dic­ta­tor (Miguel Primo de Rivera), the gen­er­als who ini­ti­ated a hor­ri­fy­ing Civil War (José San­jurjo et al), and after that, yet an­other vi­cious dic­ta­tor (whose name we all know).

Per­haps Spain’s right wing and its many friends in the ju­di­ciary are suf­fer­ing a post-im­pe­r­ial hang­over sim­i­lar to Britain’s, which – as the pres­ti­gious His­pano-Scot­tish jour­nal­ist John Car­lin has in­sin­u­ated - would ac­count for their strat­egy-free and in­ter­na­tion­ally con­demned jail­ing and on­go­ing per­se­cu­tion of pro-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lans and their lead­ers. Mean­while, back in Eng­land, Mr John­son and his Brex­i­teers are re­fus­ing to even con­tem­plate Scot­land’s de­mands for a new ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence. The at­ti­tudes of the right (and some on the left) in both coun­tries boil down to the same thing, namely that they per­ceive a po­ten­tial loss of con­trol over parts of their re­spec­tive states to be a gross in­sult added to the in­jury caused by the dis­si­pa­tion of the na­tional glory once sym­bol­ised by their long-lost em­pires. Such hark­ing back ren­ders them in­ca­pable of recog­nis­ing that the pre­sent-day po­lit­i­cal con­flicts with Scot­land and Cat­alo­nia need to be dealt with by po­lit­i­cal means, not least be­cause for many Scots and Cata­lans, the fu­ture is a lot more im­por­tant than some­body else’s past.