European Document/A Reply to Patrick Cosgrave
Donnelly, Brendan
in traffic fatalities every year. But its meaning, really, is quite beside the point, for the point is Dr. Buscaglia himself: discursive, solipsistic, and in- defatigably cheerful. The...
...If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood...
...As West Germany, as Italy, as the rest of Western Europe, the United Kingdom is dependent on the generous protection of the United States...
...The General took in 1963 a pleasing revenge when he prevented the junior of the AngloSaxons from joining the club he had formed in the European Community: The British were, he claimed, too closely tied to the United States to regard themselves or be regarded by others as Europeans...
...I have not until now mentioned the European Community and Britain's role in it...
...Not even Churchill could have foreseen how rapid would be the political, military, and economic decline of the British Empire after its exertions in the Second World War...
...powerful nations should become more powerful in victory, not find themselves surpassed by the losers...
...by Brendan Donnelly satisfactory course of British development since 1945, lies in the events of the Second World War and, more especially, British perceptions of those events at the time and since...
...NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP FRANKY ~HNFF|R PHONE HA~LD FICK|TT Or call to place order: 1-800-872-4445 (Tennessee call 1-800-821-4370) VISA or MasterCard accepted THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...classes of the United Kingdom that the United States and Great Britain together do constitute "the AngloSaxon powers": The last three words continue in particular to exercise their baneful fascination...
...Not surprisingly, the prof's votaries take exception to this...
...The United States is a global superpower, geographically and militarily invulnerable to even its most powerful potential adversary...
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...The British victory in the Second World War was in most respects a Pyrrhic one...
...Buscaglia himself: discursive, solipsistic, and indefatigably cheerful...
...In the annals of American charlatanry this is nothing new...
...More ironically, Churchill could not have predicted the debilitating extent to which the events and circumstances of the Second World War have come to be regarded by the British themselves since 1945 as the high watermark of their history, providing a criterion and frame of reference against which all postwar policy needed to be judged...
...Much British policy since 1945 has been an attempt to re-create or even deny the disappearance of those Edenic days of childhood, at once so near and so remote...
...In the historical nostalgia of the British, the United States plays a central role...
...I hope to suggest in what follows that the use of that term in that sense implies and reflects a whole mistaken approach to Great Britain's role and interests in the world, an approach which has overshadowed and continues to overshadow our relations with our neighbors and peers in continental Europe...
...The appeals of European statesmen to the British for help (even directions) in forming the European Community went unheeded...
...But its meaning, really, is quite beside the point, for the point is Dr...
...not even the most ardent apologist of the British independent nuclear deterrent could face with equanimity the future were the United States to withdraw its nuclear protection from the United Kingdom...
...That 95 percent the prof has claimed for his own, outside the area of intellection, undistracted by the demands of truth or falsity, sense or nonsense, right or wrong...
...For illusion it is...
...Britain has now been a member of the European Community for more than ten years and the General has been dead for more than ten...
...Illustrated...
...The great majority of my fellow countrymen would not hesitate to qualify the consequences of the Second World War as "unfair": An Englishman's vocabulary has no more piercing cry of pain at the remorseless workings of the infernal machine...
...this decline made all the more probable Churchill's implicit prophecy that the achievements of 1940 could never be repeated...
...But ten years after the war, many Britons would have regarded the idea of themselves as Europeans as a renunciation of their country's greatest historical success...
...But anyone accustomed to describe the two countries as "the Anglo-Saxon powers" must soon fall prey to the illusion that there is a substantial equivalence or even identity of interests and aspirations between the United States and the United Kingdom...
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...A poignant example of this phenomenon is Churchill's prophecy that 1940 would be regarded as the "finest hour" of the British Empire...
...It is a lush eternal Springtime where the doctor disports, and as he pipes his merry tune his minions follow happily--to a meadow where the mist is always rising, where for the moment (until the lecture is over, until the book is set down) they can be removed from the workaday...
...In later years British politicians would wish that they and their predecessors had been more prescient...
...To them the General's obsessive suspicion of "the Anglo-Saxon powers" appears not merely appropriate, but even flattering...
...the defense of the United Kingdom alone, isolated in a hypothetically neutral or subjugated Europe, could never form a sensible basis for American global policy...
...Querulous academics may protest, but the Great British public knows that the Second World War was won by the heroic struggles of the English-speaking democracies, whose respective contributions to final victory were at least comparable and probably similar...
...In strict objectivity, nobody can deny that the United States and the United Kingdom are both "powers" and by a heroic synecdoche they might just be regarded as Anglo-Saxon...
...Most British electors, encouraged by ignorant and sycophantic political leaders, think of themselves as having The WoodCraft Swing Everything a quahty wooden swing set should be: fun, safe, durable, and beautiful...
...Persevering readers will, however, have discerned the drift of my argument...
...The NATO alliance is not, and never can be, a mere continuation of the wartime AngloAmerican coalition from which the Danes, the Belgians, and the other continental Europeans happen to benefit at the moment...
...James Russell Lowell, in dismissing the notion that Emerson's audiences gained intellectual sustenance from the old windbag's lectures, wrote that "there is keen excitement, though there be no ponderable acquisition...
...There is of course little in this analysis that is factually incorrect...
...Rhetoric invoking the spirit of Dunkirk is still heard on this side of the Atlantic, and the most unlikely among his successors have sought to mimic Churchillian attitudes and phrases...
...The message is the man...
...Since 1945 we, like our neighbors the French, the Italians, and the Germans, have been essentially a middleranking industrialized nation of Western Europe, whose economic, political, and military interests differ little if at all from those of our continental neighbors...
...The resources of the British Empire were gloriously and fatally overextended...
...Many in Britain who are still today hostile to British membership in the Community affect a retrospective admiration for General de Gaulle, who supposedly understood us better than we understood ourselves...
...A major reason for the errors of that time was the understandable inability of British politicians and opinion-formers to shake themselves free of the seductive images of the Second World War...
...The Anglo-American alliance had proved itself uniquely capable of resolving, in the interests of democracy and freedom alike, the problems of the European mainland...
...Britain finished the war uninvaded and on the winning side...
...Instead, Dr...
...You are a now" is a proposition that may be characterized in a number of ways, but not as common sense...
...Those who prophesy sometimes have their prophecies fulfilled in ways they could not have foreseen...
...It was psychologically extremely difficult for those whose formative personal and political experiences occurred between 1939 and 1945 to accept that their country's future destiny and real interests lay with their neighbors in Western Europe...
...The defense of democracy is a noble and crucial component in the United States' struggle against Soviet hegemonism...
...The gross domestic product of the United States is some six times greater than that of the United Kingdom and its population four times as great...
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...He is a teacher, not an adding machine...
...Spectacle," by Patrick Cosgrave, TAS, September 1984...
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...As he wanders in those other Elysian Fields, he no doubt regards history as having proved him right...
...Although the French have not become noticeably less French or the Germans less German since they joined the Community, lachrymose or strident promises to defend the British identity against the encroachments of the European Community are still sure of applause at British political gatherings...
...Great Britain, on the other hand, is crucially dependent on its trade with the rest of the world and its domestic market is too small to permit those economies of scale essential for the indigenous development of, for instance, the all-important "new technologies...
...Like the best heresies it is merely an overemphasis of a part of the truth...
...Nothing since has been remotely as reassuring...
...The United Kingdom is a middle-ranking power confronted on its doorstep with a hostile and ruthless superpower which in recent years has shown an ever increasing taste for military adventurism and today possesses as never before the means to gratify that appetite...
...The United Kingdom has paid dearly for this overemphasis...
...the idea of the things that people already know," says Buscaglia's administrative assistant, Steve Short...
...Words are often as much the masters as servants of thought...
...American goodwill towards the United Kingdom has not spilt over in a fit of absentminded generosity to the less favored members of the school in which the United Kingdom is senior prefect, victor ludorum, and scholarship pupil all in one...
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...all too often the United Kingdom has found itself isolated and rebuffed within the European Community...
...Curiously, few thoughtful Britons are at their ease even today with the self-evident proposition that Britain's postwar decline was a necessary and irreversible consequence of her wartime THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 exertions...
...But we British deceive ourselves if we imagine that our American friends could ever rationally maintain their current level of political and military commitment in Western Europe solely in order to protect the United Kingdom against the Soviet Union...
...A REPLY TO PATRICK COSGRAVE* During the Second World War General de Gaulle suffered at the hands of the "Anglo-Saxons" many slights, real and imagined...
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...After all, it was precisely those neighbors who had been defeated or humiliated in the war which the British had won with their American, their "Anglo-Saxon," allies...
...All of us depend upon the protection of the United States and it is historically anachronistic, an example of the arrested national emotional development of which I have already spoken, to believe that the events of forty years ago somehow set the United Kingdom apart from those other nations of Western Europe which individually are incapable of defending themselves from Soviet imperialism...
...The U.S...
...He's just reminding them of universal truths they might have forgotten...
...There is a powerful, if often unstated, sentiment in British popular opinion which sees Britain's decline since the war as a reversal of the natural order of events...
...Among the most amiable characteristics of the American people are their generosity and loyalty to their friends...
...The United States is substantially self-sufficient, constituting on its own a continental economy and exporting less than ten percent of its GDP...
...That stretches it considerably...
...There is perhaps no political alliance in the world more firmly buttressed by ties of personal friendship and affection than that between the United States and the United Kingdom...
...The answer to that question, as to many others concerning the unsays, adding portentously: "What of the other 95 percent...
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...There is still a surprisingly tenacious belief among the opinion-forming *"The E.E.C...
...How can an intelligent man believe that they do...
...This goes a long way toward explaining the prof's longevity, why he has survived and prospered while the other detritus of the sixties has withered and faded away...
...But the differences between the American situation and the British are unembarrassingly obvious...
...The British and American governments do not have even remotely similar starting points for the establishment of policy...
...Margaret Mead has hypothesized that 4 percent of our human potential is discovered," he DOCUMENT Soviet Union's invading North America in 1985 is only a little less absurd than the idea of North Vietnam's doing so in 1968...
...The Allies were strong, righteous, and ultimately successful...
...00100-DF-XXXY3420 In these early years of the 1990's the data presently available confirm that we indeed live in apocalyptic times...
...a retrospective glow surrounds all Britain's wartime policies and alliances...
...I believe the United Kingdom badly missed the European bus at the time of the Community's formation in 1957...
...He is, at bottom, a wonderfully effective entertainer...
...Leo is popular because he talks about common sense EUROPEAN...
...are, happily for both parties, close allies and share a common democratic form of government...
...Even today British commentators and politicians are reluctant to regard themselves as Europeans...
...power and morality converged in a peculiarly satisfying way and the British Empire was at the very point of this convergence...
...many of Britain's present difficulties within the Community stem from the fact that we were not "present at the creation...
...From 1939 to 1945 the world was a dangerous and demanding place, but in the last resort comprehensible to the man on the Clapham omnibus...
...Those who, on a cooler view of Britain's position, pointed out that the United Kingdom was geographically, culturally, and politically a part of Western Europe were seen as belittling the country's world role, as anti-American and desirous of submerging "the British identity" in Europe...
...Brendan Donnelly works for the British Conservative party in the European Parliament...
...and the U.K...
...The United Kingdom and the United States had, together and in broadly equal partnership, defeated or rescued the countries of Western Europe...
...To accept that seems to many to diminish the glory of victory in 1945...
...These happy circumstances masked from us (and even now make it difficult for us to accept) that in 1945 our position was objectively much more nearly akin to that of humiliated France and even of defeated Germany than to that of triumphant and exalted America...
...The United States was perhaps the dominant partner by 1945, but its late entry into the war meant that it had a lot of ground to catch up...
...Revisionist interpretations have made little difference to popular perceptions...
...both countries play central roles in the NATO alliance and are linked by important cultural, historical, and economic ties...
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...Buscaglia, with his verbal voodoo, conjures up an atmosphere redolent of profound meaning--not sense, but the suggestion of sense...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
