Preston england after the great recession; tracking the political and cultural consequences of the crisis (2012)

Acknowledgements vii 1 England: Place, Trajectory 1 2 War and Memory: Shifting Recollection down the Generations 17 3 Changing Political Relationships: Europe and the USA in the Early 2

England after the Great

Recession Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis

P.W Preston

NATIONAL PASTS IN EUROPE AND EAST ASIA (Routledge, 2010)

ARGUMENTS AND ACTIONS IN SOCIAL THEORY (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)SINGAPORE IN THE GLOBAL SYSTEM: RELATIONSHIP, STRUCTURE AND CHANGE (Routledge, 2007)

RELOCATING ENGLAND: ENGLISHNESS IN THE NEW EUROPE (Manchester University Press, 2004)

UNDERSTANDING MODERN JAPAN: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MENT, CULTURE AND GLOBAL POWER (Sage, 2000)

DEVELOP-England after the Great Recession

Tracking the Political and Cultural Consequences of the Crisis

P W Preston

Professor of Political Sociology, University of Birmingham, UK

Palgrave

macmillan

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Acknowledgements vii

1 England: Place, Trajectory 1

2 War and Memory: Shifting Recollection down

the Generations 17

3 Changing Political Relationships: Europe and the

USA in the Early 21st Century 55

4 Freedom from ‘Britain’: A Comment on Recent

Elite-sponsored Political Cultural Identities 82

5 Cutting Scotland Loose: Soft Nationalism and

Independence-in-Europe 91

6 The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics

of the 2008 Financial Tsunami 106

7 Downstream from the 2008–10 Crisis: Tracking the

Economic and Political Effects 123

8 England: Available Images, Imagined Futures 156

Contents

Preface

The 2008–10 financial crisis has overthrown the settled conventional wisdom embraced over the last thirty years in Washington and London, the era of neo-liberalism The crisis has had significant consequences for economic and political thinking in practical politics, pragmatic policy and abstract scholarly reflection The model is now discredited

A period of confusion will follow: it will involve debates in respect of responsibility, debates in respect of policy lines and debates in respect of explanations A residual strand of neo-liberal thinking will be present, but other lines will emerge as debate is likely to broaden; not just ‘fixing the banks’ or ‘regulators’ or whatever, but a somewhat deeper discussion

of the design and consequences of debt-fuelled liberal market erism The initial crisis of neo-liberalism passed yet the downstream consequences continue to unfold And within Britain, where both New Labour and Conservative parties embraced these ideas, the model is similarly discredited It might be expected that the British polity will reconfigure, with economic, social and political reform, but quite how

consum-is anybody’s guess In thconsum-is text one aspect of these matters consum-is pursued; that is, the implications of the debacle for received political identities, our sense of ourselves as members of an ordered collectivity and the ways in which we might plot a route to the future Given the disorder, received thinking cannot other than be in question – so what changes might be envisaged?

Acknowledgements

Over the years I have had the marvellous opportunity of living and working in a number of countries in Europe and East Asia Most of this text was written whilst I was based in Hong Kong Living and working

in Hong Kong was a delight and I should like to offer my thanks for their congenial company to my colleagues and students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

As most of the pieces here were written whilst living and working overseas, they offer something of an outsider’s view of the politics of the United Kingdom; they were produced for various audiences, and save for three short pieces all have been revised for inclusion in this text

England: Place, Trajectory

The 2008–10 financial crisis marked the end of a thirty-year political/intellectual period; it had been the era of corporate/financial world ascendency informed and legitimated by the doctrines of neo- liberalism but as events unfolded both the politics and the arguments disinte-grated.1 The first phase of the crisis in 2008 engulfed the financial sec-tors of the United States and the United Kingdom These were the dual centres of the financial tsunami which ran around the global system in that year Following emergency state action it was thought that the crisis had been contained Nonetheless these events had multiple impacts:

first, they outraged populations (who are funding taxpayer-led bail-outs); second, they inclined incumbent political elites to at least consider taking

the opportunity afforded by crisis to re-balance the economic/political system in favour of the state (that is, in particular, to re-regulate the

financial world); and third, they severely damaged the intellectual

cred-ibility of the neo-liberal package (no longer could any theorist point to the ideal of the self-regulating market place as the vehicle for maximiz-ing human benefits) The second phase of the crisis came in 2010 The centre of gravity was mainland Europe where there was a tangled web

of interrelated problems: the private sector debts of banks, the costs to various states of supporting domestic banks, ongoing problems of over- large public expenditures (now compounded), and there were related problems with some eurozone economies where sovereign debt was called into question Thus a crisis of private debt modulated into a crisis

of public debt and debates in respect of unsustainable debt shifted their focus from the private to the public sphere All this underscored the epochal nature of the crisis and the need for fresh thinking

The first phase of the crisis, which culminated in the dramas of late

2008, has abated The finance industry came to the brink of collapse and

1

has been rescued by state intervention buttressed by taxpayer bail-outs

in turn secured by central bank sovereign debt issuance or ‘quantitative easing’ In other words, rescuing the banks was a government action and its success depends finally upon the political power/authority of the state The downstream consequences of these events continue to unfold: there have been further impacts within the financial sector (talk

of regulatory reforms, lobby-group politics and further problems ing in the guise of the European or phase two issues); there have been further impacts within the real economy (disturbed patterns of invest-ment in manufacturing and property, anxieties about employment and continuing concerns about implications of crisis for pre-existing global macro imbalances2); and there have been further impacts within the political realm (incumbent parties punished by electorates,3 deeper political failings uncovered, relating both to personnel and systems,4

emerg-and more generally the ways in which economic failure has impacted the legitimacy of political systems)

The second phase of the crisis, however, which unfolded in early 2010, continues to roll around the member states of the European Union There are numerous interlinked issues In regard to urgent problems, commen-tators5 have noted, first, sovereign debt, in particular in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and other Mediterranean countries (the so-called ‘PIIGS’), and then, second, national and trans-European banks carrying state and pri-vate-sector debts, some related to member states’ sovereign debts, some

to involvement in the Anglo-American-style casino banking games and others incurred through funding participation in wild property bubbles

In regard to putative solutions, commentators have noted member state confusion as to the ways in which states and Brussels should respond; raised doubts about key political leaders6 marked the contested drift towards fiscal conservatism; reported continuing debates about the extent of regulatory reform and administrative oversight; and in the later part of 2010 reported early data on the uneven economic and social impacts of fiscal retrenchment

The central concerns of the text

The downstream consequences of the 2008–10 debacle are running through the economy, society and politics of the United Kingdom This is entirely unsurprising, and specialists are attending to vari-ous issues arising.7 This text, however, is concerned with the broad political implications of the crisis It marked the end of a political- intellectual period and so three broad areas of concern (or central

questions) are flagged: political – how will the core executive respond

in order to position the state within the global system (more status quo or a more pragmatic focus on national interests or more European

Union?); intellectual – what might a domestic intellectual successor to

neo- liberalism look like (Thatcherism Mark IV or a Keynesian-inflected pragmatism or a variant European social/Christian democracy?); and

cultural – how will the crisis impact the self-understandings of members

of the polity (a defensive nationalism, perhaps in the form of ‘little Englanderism’, or an assertive pragmatism, or a cosmopolitan engage-ment oriented towards the outside world)

A number of lines of enquiry are open which might throw some light

on these questions: available lessons – the resources stored up in the

his-torical experience of the polity, the diverse strands of tradition/culture which constitute the polity’s collective memory, the sum total of the myths, prejudices, official truths, taken-for-granted ideas, popular opin-ions, conserved artefacts and critical scholarship8; current system logics –

the constraints/opportunities afforded to elite actors by the structures

of power9 which constitute current regional and global systems; and

available agent resources – the various streams of self- conscious reflection

available to inform practice, both technical, the work of experts of one sort or another, and interpretive-critical, the work of the denizens of the public sphere

Looking to the future it is possible to speculatively characterize a

number of possible political/intellectual projects (‘scenarios’) First, the

status quo affirmed, ‘the poodle option’,10 which would involve minimal changes in the elite’s economic and political orientations, and is thus

a variant ‘dual parasitism’11 on the European Union cast as a free trade area and on the USA as continuing post-bloc leader, where the key agents/institutional bases for this orientation are the City, the defence/security sector and the related core elements of the state, with some

supplementary ideological nostalgia Second, a status quo evolution, ‘the

change-needed option’, which would be a species of muddling through albeit involving changes in the elite’s economic and political orienta-tions; centrally there would be a continuing focus on the European Union as a free trade area but with less stress on American leadership, although with no clear goal or model in view (overall, the stance would

be the consequence of the lessons of Prime Minister Blair’s wars in respect of the incompetence of Whitehall/Westminster coupled with

a belated realization that the widespread international and domestic recognition of the elite’s dependency upon the USA was not beneficial

to the general interests of the polity) The key agents/institutions for

this orientation are a weakened City, a weakened defence/security sector and the related core elements of the state plus a softening ideological

supplement) And, third, domestic reform and international rebalancing, ‘the

quiet European option’, where this would involve significant changes in the elite’s economic and political orientations, in particular a pragmatic turn towards national development, where this would entail acknowl-edging that domestic politics and policy can only be framed within the context of Europe The agents/institutional bases are the state plus allies

in Europe (unacknowledged) with, thereafter, the nostalgia reduced,12

the City and defence/security weakened and the stress on the ship role of the USA ended (unacknowledged) The future becomes both more European and, when cast in the terms of domestic political debate, more open

leader-In respect of the United Kingdom, the conclusions offered will be

downbeat: first, Britain is best described as oligarchic in political form,

that is, the polity is ordered by networks of elite power remote from the

general population, and this is unlikely to change; second, the polity is

formally governed around a core executive, and this too is remote from the general population (it fails the simple test of Karl Popper13), and it

too is unlikely to change; and third, the project which these interlinked

elites pursue, and the manner in which it is theorized/legitimated, will change (it is doing so, it has to – that is what ‘crisis’ means), and here the scenarios sketched will identify a range of future possibilities, but from these one alternative will be underscored and here the argument will point to an increase in the salience of Europe In summary, the European Union is likely to become the ever more obvious framework

of domestic politics – a variant of scenario number three – but the pace

of change is likely to be snail-like, and the domestic elite/core tive will give ground both to Brussels and its own population only very slowly

execu-Neo-liberalism: the thirty-year hegemony

The financial crisis of 2008–10 marked the end of a thirty-year period within the Anglo-Saxon politico-cultural realm of political, policy and intellectual confidence in respect of the fundamental logics of the glo-bal (non) system.14 The clarity revolved around the political tenets of neo-liberalism, themselves an emphatic variant restatement of the fun-damental claims of the long-established tradition of liberal economic and political thinking Liberal notions of political freedom were run together with claims in respect of the benefits of liberal market systems

such that in recent years the tag ‘market democracies’ appeared In some contexts the package was presented in political terms, thus the familiar claims about ‘universal human rights’ (often directed at those with whom the USA, or to a lesser extent the European Union member states, disagreed), but, more pragmatically, the key to the package lay

in its economic practice, the expansion of Anglo-American-style petitive market capitalism, where such practice was in part informed

com-by, and in part legitimated com-by, the theoretical claims of mainstream neo-liberal economics.15

Four key claims for the benefits of a competitive market system were made by mainstream neo-liberal market theorists:16 first, to the maximization of material wealth; second, to the maximization of moral value; third, to the maximization of political freedom; and fourth, to the

maximization of knowledge Thereafter these ideas were the basis for

an aggressive Western stance towards the rest of the world – in part, in the long post-war period they served as a counterpart to more security-oriented cold war bloc-think and thereafter, following the events of 1989–91, they were an aspect of the triumphalism of the interregnum during which the end of history was taken to have involved the achieve-ment of the definitive priority of ‘market democracies’ Such hubristic thinking dominated the last years of the twentieth century and ran

on into the early decade of the twenty-first; the USA and its allies and partners affirmed the policy nostrums of deregulation, privatization and the benefits of self-regulated liberal marketplace activity; they also celebrated the model of liberal democracy (although in the event, the former concerns have proved to be the greater preoccupation, the latter somewhat optional17)

The initial extension of these ideas was accomplished through the Bretton Woods system: the agreement established the governing insti-tutions of the post-Second World War liberal market sphere; it was dominated by the USA, acquiesced in by Europeans in the west of the continent (in the ruins of the end of the war years they had little choice,

as was made clear by the USA) and constructed so as to block the pation of the state socialist countries (that is, the USSR and its allies,18

partici-which pursued their own semi-autarchic strategies) Other countries within the newly established ‘third world’ could declare for a non-aligned strategy but in practice they came to lean one way or another The system affirmed a set of rules governing economic activity, both domestic, where the preference was for the corporate world, or support

to encourage the emergence of such a sphere, and international, where preferences pointed towards free trade-style relations rather than closely

regulated activity There were many exceptions to these general rules (so, for example, allies in Europe and East Asia were given extensive help in reconstruction or development, with Keynesian-style planning stressed); however, within the broader American-dominated sphere the preference was for policy choices which favoured marketplaces and avoided state direction (thus, for example, Latin America nationalist developmentalism was liable to be mis-characterized as socialist, and resisted and routinely subverted)

Nonetheless, during the 1970s this particular settlement came under pressure: the USA suffered from the costs of the Vietnam War; the oil shocks introduced inflationary pressures; and what had been a success-ful pattern of development – in the West and elsewhere – came to be dogged by low growth and high inflation Celebrants of market liber-alism argued successfully for a change in direction, and in the Anglo-Saxon sphere in particular governments made space for the corporate world to assume a greater role in determining the direction of devel-opment of society The neo-liberal project was thereby inaugurated Later, these ideological and policy dispositions were reinforced by the 1989–91 collapse of European state socialist systems and a period of lib-eral triumphalism ensued – claims to the dominance of the Washington Consensus, claims to the ethico-political end of history and a drumbeat

of celebration of the inevitable and desirable process/goal of liberal globalization.19 The project and package of ideas ran effectively for

some thirty years: political elites were committed – Washington, London

and elsewhere within the broad spread of allies, sometimes tagged the

Anglo-Saxon economies, sometimes the West; institutional mechanisms

were effective – in America, the Wall Street–Treasury–World Bank/IMF

nexus and as a secondary centre, in London, the City plus Westminster/Whitehall; and thereafter, the influence of this grouping within inter-

national organizations – the IMF, World Bank, WTO and so on; and on

the face of it the results were good – a long run of economic growth (in the

metropolitan heartlands and in the policy-privileged area of East Asia), further spurred by de-mobilizing labour representatives, that is, shifting the political balance away from labour and towards industry and the state;20 then, in later years, successful growth became a debt-fuelled bubble economy with the paradoxical overall results of economic growth, social inequality and broad popular acquiescence

However, returning to the central claims, it is the case that the tual core of the neo-liberal project has been widely criticized.21 First, the

intellec-claims in respect of material production were essentially technical, that

is, liberal marketplace competition would determine prices and these

signals would distribute knowledge and thus resources appropriately (recently celebrated in the financial markets in the guise of the ‘efficient markets hypothesis22), but economic activity is always and everywhere lodged within social systems and these carry elaborate schedules of rules

of behaviour and any attempt to reduce these multiple social logics

to the model of instrumental rational calculation identified by liberal market theorists as the key to market functioning is an error (an a priori ideological commitment being preferred to the results of social scien-

tific enquiry) The claim to maximize material wealth fails Second, the

claims in respect of moral value were ethical/ideological Liberals take action and responsibility for action to reside with the individual person, thus as the liberal market prioritizes individual action, so it fosters the maximization of moral worth But the autonomous individual of the liberal imagination is a fiction because human beings are always and everywhere embedded in dense networks of social relationships, and these in turn carry elaborate schemes of right behaviour, where, in con-trast, liberalism offers an incoherent package of subjective calculation plus claims to rights within bureaucratically (managerially) ordered soci-eties.23 The claim to maximize moral value fails Third, a related claim

points to the liberal market system requiring only a minimum state, an institution/organization able to enforce contracts, thereby minimizing restrictions upon autonomous individuals The system maximizes polit-ical freedom, but as persons are lodged not merely in society but also within polities the claim to negative liberty entails affirming an asocial model of humankind, that is, an ideal of isolation/autonomy in place

of acknowledging the thoroughgoing social nature of human life and casting political life in terms of participation/membership The claim

to maximize freedom fails And fourth, the package is buttressed by

the claim to the status of a positive science, thus economic knowledge

is maximized Here, first, the claim is a restricted one – knowledge of economic life is maximized but not so much as to allow collective plan-ning of economic activity Knowledge of liberal markets is maximized, not knowledge of the business of the social production of livelihood (which would open up economic anthropology and sociology where neither discipline is disposed to celebrate liberal markets as universal models) Then here, second, the positivistic model of science invoked is open to question, or more strongly, would be widely rejected amongst philosophers of social science,24 matters noted in connection with the

2008 financial tsunami The claim to maximize knowledge fails

The core intellectual claims of the neo-liberal position fail; they are unsustainable These issues have long been debated amongst specialists

but over the period 2008–10 the project experienced a very public double failure In the 2008 phase of crisis the project experienced acute problems within certain parts of the financial system which spilled out through the whole banking system into the productive economy and thereafter, as a result of inevitable economic contraction, out into the wider social world The crisis was such as to require both national state responses and coordinated action between the states with most at risk in damaged financial sectors States printed money (quantitative easing), flooded the financial system with liquidity and collapse was averted The downstream consequences of the crisis – financial, eco-nomic, social and political – continue to unfold In 2010 a second phase

of the crisis erupted in Europe: sovereign debt problems, over-exposed banks and a political system seemingly unable to respond quickly to pressures generated within the financial system.25

In regard to 2008 a number of key points can be made: first, the

failure was intellectual – the intellectual machineries of neo-liberalism failed as they could neither explain the collapse nor provide policy advice about repairs (but banks and their supporters did seek to defend

their position against calls for systemic reform); second, the failure was

political – thirty years of celebration of markets plus individualism plus consumption led to bubble economies in America and Britain (and the outrider neo-liberal spheres such as Ireland and Iceland) and then

collapse, so greed was not good, rather it was foolish; third, the failure

was institutional – the apparatus of financial neo-liberalism (the banks and regulators in Wall Street and the City of London, plus their off-shore bases and links to other institutional/regulatory environments in Europe and East Asia) failed as there were simultaneous crises of liquid-ity and solvency in core banking organizations and the system came close to collapse before being rescued by state action in America, Britain and elsewhere (depending on the extent of buy-in to neo-liberal prac-

tice/ideology); fourth, a related failure was in legitimation – neo- liberal

theories had a role in legitimizing the liberal market-centred system and as the apparatus failed, neo-liberalism could offer no statements in support of the system (but some tried, arguing that the market would have solved the problem if the state had not interfered or arguing that market had not failed, rather the state had with insufficient regulation;

however, such arguments were widely derided); and fifth, the failure

was social – thirty years of buying into the celebration of the market left American and British citizens in particular exposed when the crash came with debt and unemployment; the absence of alternate models was revealed – if not consumer individualism, then what?

In regard to 2010 a number of points can be made First, the

prob-lems have been two-fold; both economic, that is, probprob-lems in regard

to finance within both the private spheres and public sectors of ber countries, and political, that is, the lack of agreement, or speed in

mem-action, of member state governments Second, the financial crisis (both

private and sovereign debt issues) has spilled over into the more general politics of the European Union In general, mainland elites are commit-ted to the project of ‘ever closer union’ (whilst populations are more wary), but this is not the case with the British elite So there is a disjunc-tion between the views of insiders who read the euro as a core element

of the European project, and outsiders, in particular market players in Wall Street and the City of London, who read the current problems in terms of available economic theory (which seems to run in line with their inclination to speculative profit-making and a strand of hostility towards the European project)

In sum, the upshot of the 2008–10 debacle of neo-liberalism opens up

two general lines of reflection: first, how to conceptualize and organize

the business of livelihood – the decisive practical rejection of the claims

of neo-liberalism allows/invites a turn to other traditions of intellectual reflection upon matters ‘economic’, thus, political economy, institu-tional economics, economic anthropology and economic sociology, where the last pair in particular point to a core notion around which strands of debate can revolve, that is, ‘the pursuit of livelihood’;26 and

second, how to conceptualize and organize the business of political

membership of ordered communities27 – the rejection of neo-liberalism (with its atomistic individuals in pursuit of autonomously arising wants which can be satisfied in a contractually ordered competitive consumer marketplace) allows/invites a turn to other philosophical traditions – ideas of authenticity28 – ideas of community29 – ideas of democracy.30

The United Kingdom – reading changing trajectories

The 2008 crisis had a double centre in Wall Street and the City of London, the latter having in significant measure during the era of neo-liberalism become an offshore base for the former, such that one available joke tagged the City as Wall Street’s ‘Guantanamo Bay’, a place where activities contrary to the demands of the US regulatory regime (or illegal31) could be undertaken with impunity The crisis undermined the pro-market policy stance of the British state as decades of celebration of the marketplace in general and recently, more particularly, the financial marketplace, came to an abrupt halt New Labour were ejected from

power.32 They were replaced by a Liberal-Conservative coalition and although their programme is still in process of formulation, two lines of political/legislative reform can be seen: first, a measure of re-regulation

of the finance industry; and second, a measure of reduction in the cal role of the state within the economy/polity And whilst the change

fis-in party rule fis-in Westmfis-inster is of little fis-interest fis-in itself, what is more interesting – and cloudy – are the deeper responses of power holders

to the crisis, that is, new patterns of understanding and new lines of policy-making

This crisis implies a number of lines of reflection specific to the

situation of the United Kingdom: first, the British elite have embraced

neo-liberalism over the last thirty years – James Callaghan33 made the first moves and thereafter they were pursued by Margaret Thatcher and Blair/Brown34 down to 2008.35 It has failed and enquiry must turn to consider a prospective domestic successor to neo-liberalism (political stances, policy orientations, institutional mechanisms and the public

explanation/legitimation of these practices); second, the British elite

found consolation for loss of empire in the claim to the status of number one ally to the USA – this was how they positioned Britain within global system – but as the global system reconfigures, any simple continuation of that role seems unlikely – a trend underscored by the crisis – and enquiry must turn to consider a prospective replacement

of this role; third, the general population has enjoyed both the benefits

of the welfare state and the particular satisfactions of consumerism but

as the downstream consequences of the crisis unfold and fiscal servatism takes hold – and as familiar post-Second World War patterns

con-of collective self-understanding are challenged – enquiry must turn to consider likely future developments

The issue of political cultural identity, the ways in which people locate themselves within an ordered community, has been the subject

of a series of earlier texts The focus of these texts has shifted: first, the notion of Britain was considered;36 then, moving back, the business of identity in general was debated;37 and thereafter, moving forwards, fur-ther work considered the implications of the growing importance of the European Union for ideas of Englishness.38 But overall, these texts com-prise an unfolding examination of the political culture of the denizens

of the United Kingdom – the core of the diagnosis is of an asymmetrical distribution of power that makes the structure of the polity oligarchic; the machineries of government are centralized (and the core executive

is not subject to any routine informed control) and the role of ment is essentially decorative (and the electoral system – one aspect of

parlia-any claim to ‘democracy’ – is systemically corrupt), with the general population demobilized with their patterns of life under-girded by the welfare state and their attention directed to the spheres of mass popular culture and the realms of consumption And now, this text returns to these concerns and looks at the implications of the 2008–10 debacle

of the neo-liberal project of market democracy, arguing, in respect of the United Kingdom, the crisis has been such that it cannot but have implications for the ways in which elite and mass conceive their polity and its possible futures

The materials gathered in this text address this agenda under three broad headings:

available lessons – legacies – resources stored up within the trajectory

taken by Britain – (if men make their own history but not as they choose, then what is the scope for choosing?);

current system logics – the implications for the British core executive

of the changing location of the polity within trans-state flows of power – that is, the processes of global re-balancing, including the rise of the BRICs, the deepening importance of the European Union and the slow relative decline of the USA; and

available agent group resources – the ideas available for the

reconstruc-tion of England – institureconstruc-tional machineries and ideas and agents

The text is constructed as a number of interlinked discussions First – any

re-imagining of the polity will need to draw on established ideas/ practices These point to the realm of collective memory and the idea

of the national past – the ways in which memories are carried down the generations and the more particular issue of the national past, those elite-dominated ideas which offer the polity a tale of where it came from, how it is configured and where, by implication, it is going These matters

are pursued in Chapter 2 Second – any re- imagining of the polity will

have to locate it within wider international patterns Here elite concerns for the United States and for the European Union are considered; residual concerns for empire in the guise of the Commonwealth are not impor-tant except insofar as they evidence a deep-seated strand of nostalgia within the polity Links with the United States have undergone a series

of shifts in recent years as the 1989–91 to 2008–10 period has unfolded – hubris has led to an inevitable fall The American debacle (economic and military) has had consequences for the situation and self-understandings

of an elite who have understood themselves to be the number one ally

in Europe The second major link is with the European Union – an elite

•

•

•

response to the debacle of civil war – cast in economic terms but always serving a political goal The record of the continent and the European Union is remarkable, but the British contribution is minimal – seemingly

a search for a loose free trade area, all the while accompanied by carried denigration For the British elite the 2008–10 crises may have made Europe both more important and more unstable/uncertain These matters are pursued in Chapter 3 In a related fashion, any re- imagining

media-of the polity will in part be informed by elite ideas (as the political structure of the polity is a species of soft oligarchy) – some debates are under way, and sections of the elite have offered an unsophisticated celebration of Britain and Britishness, while others have reacted nega-tively to the rise of nationalism within Scotland These are discussed in

Chapters 4 and 5 Third the 2008–10 financial crisis has undermined the

persuasiveness (such as it was) of these responses – political economists argue that economics and politics are two sides of the same coin, that being the case, the crisis can be expected to have a spread of political consequences – it can be argued that the line of travel of response can only be for domestic reform and a greater role for Europe These matters are pursued in Chapters 6 and 7 And then, continuing, any re-imagin-ing of the polity will be informed by (in addition to elite ideas) those resources carried within received culture (both ideas and ideas embedded

in practice) – ideas of England and Englishness are available, and these matters are pursued in Chapter 8

The conclusions are downbeat The British polity is a soft oligarchy The crucial interlinked power holders inhabit a nexus which binds Whitehall, the corporate world and the armed forces/ monarchy Internationally, these same power holders are firmly linked to Washington via finance, security and ideology The 2008–10 financial debacle has disturbed these networks of power Looking to the future, three scenarios can be

described: first, an affirmation of the status quo ante – the British elite

opt for what they know and what they know is subordination to the

model of the USA and the demands of its state machinery; second, an

acknowledgment of the need for a change in direction, with none

speci-fied, a species of muddling through; and third, a more self-conscious but

veiled choice for Europe, granting that the Union is the immediate given frame for domestic politics and the model for internal reforms However, any change is likely to be carefully managed by the elite and as a conse-quence is likely to be the minimum necessary to maintain those patterns

of power which sustain the polity as a whole The system is well insulated from popular pressures but the scale of the debacle – in particular in rela-tion to the important financial sector – is such that some rebalancing of

forces within the elite is likely Further, wider changes are not ruled out but are unlikely to significantly disturb – at least in the short term – the current status quo.

Notes

1 A general economic history of the post-Second World War period in the West would draw a distinction between the early 1950–1960s Bretton Woods era and the later 1980s-onwards neo-liberal era In this vein the later period can be tagged the era of neo-liberalism; it was a political project – a mix of ideas (about ‘markets’), institutions (‘minimum/regulatory state’), players (the corporate world in general and the financial world more particularly) and practice (the Reagan/Thatcher years) In the case of the UK the inau-guration of the neo-liberal era can be dated to the late 1970s, with Denis Healey turning back from the airport to deal with an economic crisis or Jim Callaghan telling his supporters that the days of easy Keynesian stimulus spending were over And the demise of the system can be dated to the period 2008–10: crucial institutions are discredited (the finance sector and the regulatory state), key players revealed as foolish or venal or both (in markets and the state) and the ideas undermined (core claims of market liberalism are discredited – and commentators make jokes about ‘physics envy’) – but this does not mean that the power of the celebrants of market liberalism is instantly voided It is not, hence the downstream processes of reconstruction will be drawn out – in historical context, it took thirty-odd years to build the neo-liberal edifice It will take similar periods of time to replace it

2 Now a long-running area of anxiety – see Martin Wolf, ‘Faltering in a Sea of

Debt’, Financial Times, 19 April 2011.

3 Obviously enough – the Anglo-Saxon world saw governing parties on both sides of the Atlantic thrown out of office – G W Bush in the midst of the autumn crisis of 2008, Gordon Brown slightly later

4 For example, for discussions about the alleged incompetence of key policy players see, for example, Anatole Kaletsky (2010) who excoriates the per-formance of Henry Paulson (pp 128 et seq) and notes the, in retrospect, bizarre belief sets of Alan Greenspan (p 7), or the weak efforts of regulatory bodies on both sides of the Atlantic or, in regard to the United Kingdom, the

extraordinary revelations about the behaviour of parliamentarians (see Daily

Telegraph, autumn months 2009).

5 Here – and throughout the text – ‘commentators’ signals those specialist nalists (and sometimes academics and officials) writing in the mainstream European press whose contacts with government and corporate circles make

jour-their work well-informed – Financial Times, The Economist, Der Spiegel, Le

Monde, The Guardian, The Independent, and other sources mentioned directly

Interesting material also turns up in non-newspaper sources such as the

London Review of Books, New York Review of Books and New Left Review.

6 For example, Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial Times has been a vocal

critic of the German and French leaders

7 In the early autumn run-up to the Chancellor’s ‘autumn spending review’ the mainstream United Kingdom newspapers were full of experts of one sort

or another predicting problems in regard to spending cuts, politicians of one sort or another predicting various sorts of trouble and unionists of one sort or another predicting waves of strikes and public protests; but these are not the concern of this text, rather the focus is on the ways in which the elite situate themselves, intellectually and politically – or, in brief, how they formulate a novel project for the polity.

8 This points to the territory of the arts and humanities – history, phy and most directly, cultural studies, those disciplines concerned with the ways practical experience is sedimented in culture and passed on to

philoso-be worked and reworked by successor generations See, for example, Inglis (1993)

9 An idea taken from Strange (1988)

10 The characterization of the United Kingdom state/government as an American ‘poodle’ is well-established – and recognized by the elite – see House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2010), paragraphs 184–96, especially para 192 – but more interestingly, Perry Anderson extends the criticism (but not this particular terminology) to the generality of the mem-ber states of the European Union – see Anderson (2009), pp 67–77

11 See Preston (1994b); the tag pointed to the ways in which the British elite positioned themselves However, it might be that the links to the USA are the key – hence New Labour’s neo-liberalism and Atlanticism (see Lee [2009]; Harvie [2010]) What is noticeable in commentary in 2010 is that the Blair era is now written out of the story – the early promises of New Labour included ‘putting Britain at the heart of Europe’ (it never happened – instead there were varieties of pro-Americanism from Brown and late Blair)

12 One might run this the other way – more nostalgia as cover for a turn towards Europe plus the passage of time and generations makes the Second World War (a key element in the UK’s national past) increasingly a mat-ter of history and theme parks and reconstructions and the like – that is,

it becomes nostalgia at secondhand, figuring less in both personal and

political identities Recall A P Cohen in Self-Consciousness: An Alternative

Anthropology of Identity (1994) – rituals are not descriptions of reality; rather

they are social conventions with reference to which social interactions are ordered (see, for example, p 92)

13 Popper distinguished ‘democratic’ and ‘totalitarian’ polities in terms of whether or not their governments could be changed without bloodshed – the role of competitive elections – but in contemporary Britain, whilst it is possible for the population to change its politicians, the core executive and deeper networks of power are beyond its reach

14 International relations theorists, mainstream economists and others pily speak of ‘the global system’ – this is an error; the concept of ‘system’ implies an integrated collection of parts – but this does not describe the pattern of economy, society and polity Rather the contemporary pattern is the contingent out-turn of a multiplicity of particular, historically embedded processes – the pattern is contingent – hence the formulation ‘global (non) system’ However as the neologism is unattractive the phrase ‘global system’ will continue to appear

hap-15 There is a slippery issue here – neo-liberal economics describes an ideal model – but it is used to inform policy (for example, ‘efficient markets’ and the

‘rational actor’ – see George Soros and other commentators on the financial crisis) It is also claimed to be scientific, that is, reliable Unfortunately it has turned out to be nonsense The system itself, that is industrial capitalism, may

be experiencing problems but it endures – many would say its practical logic

is better grasped by using the tools of political economy, a very different lectual/moral strategy for making sense of the business of human livelihood

of China (ROC, that is, Taiwan) complicated matters

19 It should be noted that there were many critics – in political economy, development theory or those associated with ideas of the developmental state – but the orthodox consensus was powerful (on American nationalism, see Lieven [2004])

20 The strong state and free economy line (Andrew Gamble) – or authoritarian populism (the Stuart Hall line)

21 On this see Preston (1994a), Chapter 5

22 See Cooper (2008)

23 MacIntyre (1985)

24 On this see Preston (2009), which argues for an interpretive critical standing of the nature and possibilities of social science

under-25 For a gloomy running commentary see Wolfgang Munchau in the Financial

Times; and – pointing up the political aspects of these problems – for a

cheer-ful running commentary see contributors to the Daily Telegraph.

26 A sketch of such a discussion is drawn in Preston (1994a), Chapter 5

27 This points to the domaine assumptions of politics/policy – how polities are conceived – a vast area, and the territory of political philosophers/theorists

28 For example, notions associated with existentialism and the stress on sonal moral choices – not simply utilitarian calculation

per-29 For example, Alasdair MacIntyre (1985) rejects liberalism’s autonomous vidual and points to the business of living well within a community

indi-30 For example, C B Macpherson has rejected the claims to maximize ian power lodged by liberalism and has argued instead for a return to a richer notion of human power, available within traditions of democracy

utilitar-31 More is needed on this – an intellectual route in is provided by Christopher Harvie (2010, pp 24–7) via the notion of ‘illegalism’ – the intersection of criminal activity with sharp business practice – sourced to Mack and Kerner (1975) In regard to the crisis, recall Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi fraud or,

as reported in the Financial Times (16 July 2010), Goldman Sachs being fined

half a billion dollars over the Abacus affair by the Securities and Exchange Commission, with opinion reported as thinking they had got off lightly The

Daily Telegraph of the same date ran a sub-heading ‘Goldman’s Reputation Is

Dirt but Brand Is Still Strong’

32 It is likely that responsibility for the debacle will be debated over the next few years – early responses by commentators and scholars place Gordon

Brown and his ally Ed Balls at the centre of the problems – they bought into both neo-liberal economics and Atlanticism, and they blocked involvement with the European Union, in particular participation in the launch of the euro currency (Harvie 2010; Lee 2009; Peston 2008).

enthusi-36 Preston (1994b)

37 Preston (1997)

38 Preston (2004)

2

War and Memory: Shifting

Recollection down the

Generations 1

Three ideas can frame discussions of memory First, the idea of collective memory, which points to the various ways in which events in the past are selected, lodged in the present and made available for reworking in the future Collective memory is not unitary, rather it presents itself in diverse strands, each the product of a discrete social location, family or community or organi- zation or state or whatever Second, the idea of the national past, which points

to the arena of common political identity and tells a community where it came from, who it is and where ideally it might hope to be in the future It

is another subtle construct, a contested compromise between the demands of the elites and the various recollections of the masses And the third idea, the most fundamental, and now familiar, is that the past is no simple record of events, rather it is a social construction, the outturn of subtle social processes whereby materials are taken from the flow of events and refashioned as state- ments about history One strand of work is carried in memoirs Such work offers a quite particular view of the past; informal, idiosyncratic and personal;

it offers later generations a distinctive route into that past, a species of direct access, a prompt perhaps for other more systematic work And at the present time, as the circumstances in which Europeans find themselves change (thus, most generally, macro-changes in global political economic relations with the relative decline of the USA and the concomitant rise of East Asia), there are pressures to revisit and re- imagine received understandings, and in this task memoirs allow present generations to access the often engaging non-official past, providing thereby a useful resource in thinking about possible futures.

In recent years in Britain there has been some general public sion of the nature of war: debate has focused on interventions in the Middle East; in all this one position has been clearly articulated by

discus-17

liberal interventionists, favouring war, whilst against the recently ecuted wars of the USA and its allies there have been various coalitions

pros-of opponents The debate has pros-often been bitter and it has also been inconclusive.2 It has also been shorn of any wider historical contextu-alization This last is surprising The general crisis3 of the twentieth cen-tury found expression in numerous interlinked wars These have been subject to extensive scholarly examination It might be thought that the catastrophic costs of warfare are well known but some recent elite behaviour suggests otherwise, hence the need to restate lessons which

it might have been thought had already been well enough learned One such set of lessons relates to the decisions to undertake such actions, their costs and the ways in which events are subsequently read into the collective record

The collective apprehension of war finds various expressions, from the celebratory characterization of heroism and sacrifice through to the condemnatory identification of crime and waste.4 Such expressions vary both within particular communities, with age, class or ethnicity, and between communities, where certain generic aspects of understand-ings can be identified as consequences of discrete historical trajectories

A sceptical or scholarly report could begin by noting that the record

of the general crisis of the twentieth century in Europe and East Asia

reveals the scope or cultural reach of the associated wars: in duration, running over some sixty-odd years; in form, assuming multiple varie-

ties, as in inter-empire wars, inter-state wars, civil wars, wars of colonial

withdrawal plus cold war proxy conflicts; in scale, killing, displacing and traumatizing millions; and in current presence, as multiple wars, with

diverse participants, find expression in multiple memories Elites are disposed to find positive meaning in these conflicts, to record, one way

or another, that the good guys won, that things were better afterwards than before; but this is a conceit/deceit, for the record of the general crisis reveals the utter contingency of war It has a pattern only in retro-spect It has putative meaning bestowed only in hindsight The record reveals the diversity and subtlety of personal and popular memory; personal recall is often surprisingly accurate albeit inevitably local to place and time;5 but it is also true that elisions amongst the memories

of groups are routine; sometimes these are shocking,6 but most tions might be expected to encompass an element of authenticity, that

recollec-is, ordinary people do not ordinarily lie.7 But against this, the record also displays the extraordinary flexibility of official memory: denial, evasion, dismissal and, perhaps more subtly, ritualization via memo-rialization Elites are concerned with immediate practice and reason

of state flags an unconcern for truth – it is a matter for others But, as noted, such truth has been pursued and scholarship has accumulated a wealth of material, including empirical details, lines of argument and ethical judgments A simple record can be a useful starting point.

Grasping the scale of the general crisis

Historical analysis involves an exchange between context, theorist and audience In 1945, in the wake of the chaos of the Second World War, the ‘allied scheme of history’8 pointed to German guilt, allied heroism and widespread popular resistance amongst occupied populations It was not very good history It failed to render the scale or character of the catastrophe that befell Europeans (the numbers of dead and injured, the dispossessed, the refugees, the material damage, the scientific and cultural losses), awkward details were air-brushed (thus the bureaucratic mass production of civilian death by use of aerial bombing campaigns), some issues were avoided (the suffering of the people of Germany), key questions not asked (how could European political elites be so incompe-tent) and major consequences not pursued (the division and occupation

of Europe) In 1989–91, as the obfuscations of bloc-time fell away, a new global pattern was evident with three (or more) major regions; one of which comprised the project of the European Union It was noted that the project’s apparatus was institutionally dense, embedded in law and deeply intertwined with the domestic machineries of the member states, or in other words, much had been done

A broad agenda of further work was readily sketched – economic, social and political One element was political-cultural identity: what sense could be attached to the notions of ‘Europe’ or ‘European’? It was likely that answers would be found only in unfolding practice but one aspect could be considered prospectively; that is, the construction of a

‘European history of Europe’ It would most probably be a contested, unsettling9 process for where the allied scheme of history is agreed, mix-ing remembering and forgetting,10 received truths would be challenged

as historians addressed what was remembered and what had been ten A European history of Europe would entail the perhaps wholesale re-imagining of established national pasts Such a process would be a broad social task, not a matter for authoritative elite discussion/ decision; multiple lines of work could be anticipated and like the European Union itself these would be likely to be jumbled and contested rather than neat and tidy It was difficult to imagine any European-level equivalent or analogue of the sort of authoritatively secured political-cultural closure

forgot-that had been needed to establish a single national past More cally, it was also difficult to see how Europeans could escape the intel-lectual/moral imperative to write the history openly, that is, to debate matters freely, without restrictions

optimisti-* optimisti-* optimisti-*

The modern world began in Europe: ideas (religion, philosophy and the rise of science), episodes (the rise of towns), activities (the growth of commerce), exchanges (the start of voyages of discovery), plunder (bullion from Spanish Latin America) and accidents (the invention of capital-

ism, states and nations) Europeans produced a dynamic form-of-life:11

domestically with intensification and internationally with expansion The form of life was successful, in its own terms and ours; celebrated

in the idea of progress;12 patterns of understanding were elaborated in great traditions (the arts, literature, religion, politics and the like) and little traditions (ordinary life, popular culture and media) One aspect

of these self-understandings affirmed the notion of civilization, the achievements of the Europeans in contrast to all others, regarded as variously deficient However, the onset of the Great War signalled the start of a general crisis – a process of systemic collapse in both core and peripheral territories – and the upshot of the crisis was the eclipse of the European system of state-empires In its place was a confused pattern The European continent was divided and occupied and the key centres

of power lay in Washington and Moscow Local elites in formerly eral territories were carving out new states The global pattern came to be read in terms of the notion of ‘three worlds’; the rich capitalist West, the state-socialist East and the third world of the newly independent poor.For Europeans the crisis involved in a series of wars; different wars, involving different people, lasting different lengths of time and thereafter remembered differently The early part of the century saw intermittent war in Europe; an interlinked series of conflicts together constituting

periph-a thirty-one-yeperiph-ar civil wperiph-ar The sequence culminperiph-ated in the Second World War when Europeans finally contrived a war so destructive that

it led to the occupation, division and systematic reconstruction of their continent.13 Running in parallel with these conflicts there were numer-ous problems in the peripheral territories where metropolitan-centred arrangements slowly weakened as colonized people both sought to

be rid of distant masters and looked to settle their own affairs, both domestic and international, and the region dissolved into war And, subsequently, from 1945 there were further wars marking the end of

empire: in East Asia; in the Middle East; sub-Saharan Africa; and North Africa And, after 1945, and running in parallel, the cold war quickly developed The principal wars of the Americans in Korea and Vietnam also had an impact on Europe, drawing in countries and affecting domestic politics At home, for Europeans, the cold war entailed repres-sion in the West,14 small-scale military actions in the East15 and identi-fied Europe as the potential battleground in a war that might in terms of NATO military doctrine become nuclear, thereby producing widespread anxiety in regard to a defence policy predicated upon an eventuality that would have reduced the continent to radioactive ash.16

The violence of these wars affected whole peoples It was not restricted

to elites or soldiers, and its reach extended throughout their societies:

in the Great War, indirectly (casualty lists, war memorials, widowhood, spinsterhood, the rise in spiritualism and so on); in the Second World War, directly (invasions, occupations, refugees, population displace-ments and the extensive bombing of civilians/cities); in the Far Eastern Wars,17 directly (collapsing empires, civil wars and invasions),18 in the wars of colonial withdrawal, directly (rebellions, wars, and inter-ethnic conflicts); and in the cold war, indirectly (through anxiety plus intru-sive mechanisms of social control) The violence had major economic, social, cultural and political consequences; it is now a part of the mod-ern experience of the peoples of these regions

General crisis: scale/costs

In the early part of the twentieth century European elites sought tage in regard to their metropolitan competitors through war In East Asia some local elites also chose war In all the confusion numerous local nationalist groups in both core and periphery took their chance and lodged bids for statehood, producing thereby a further round of wars In both the core and in the periphery the state/empire system19 was fatally undermined The general crisis destroyed the pattern of state/empires, re-drew the map of Europe, swept away colonial territories20 and ushered

advan-a spreadvan-ad of new stadvan-ates onto the globadvan-al politicadvan-al scene In Europe madvan-atters did not return to peace until 1989/91, whilst in East Asia the analogous processes of collapse, war and rebalancing ran on until the 1990s.The inter-linked wars of collapse; 1911–14 to 1949–91:21

1911–14 Chinese Revolution

1914–16 Yuan Shikai Era in China

•

•

1914–18 Great War

1916–26 Warlord Era in China

1917–22 Russian Revolution and Civil War

1918 Collapse of Hohenzollern monarchy

1918 Collapse of Hapsburg Empire

1918–41 First-phase anti-colonial movements

1919–20 Russo-Polish War

1926–28 Northern Expedition in China

1927–37 First Chinese Civil War

1931–34 Jiangxi Soviet

1931–32 Japanese invasion of Manchuria

1932–37 Japanese expansion in Northern China

1933 Collapse of Weimar Republic

1936–38 Spanish Civil War

1937–45 Sino-Japanese War

1936 Reoccupation of Rhineland

1938 Austrian Anschluss and invasion of Czechoslovakia

1939–45 Second World War

1941–45 Pacific War

1945–50 Indonesian Revolution

1946–51 Huk Rebellion

1946–49 Second Chinese Civil War

1946–49 Greek Civil War

1946–54 First Indo-China War

1978–91 Third Indo-China War

The resultant death toll:22

Great War 1914–18 8,000,000Inter-war conflicts Europe 1918–39 3,500,000Warlords and civil war 1916–37 4,000,000Sino-Japanese and Pacific War 1937–45 12,600,000Second World War 1939–45 41,000,000

Southeast Asia Occupations 1941–45 5,000,000

Chinese civil war 1945–49 2,500,000

First Indo-China War 1945–54 600,000

Korean War 1950–53 2,800,000

Second Indo-China War 1960–75 2,700,000

Indonesian Regime Change 1965 500,000

Third Indo-China War 1978–91 1,500,000

Total 83,700,000

Intra-imperial competition triggered a general crisis which unfolded into multiple wars across two continents over a period of some thirty years; viewed in hindsight the loss of life and related destruction of material resources – cities, towns and villages – are difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to credit, for it is easier to set aside any search for reasons and judge that elites simply went mad At any event, these matters bore most heavily on one generation as the survivors faced daunting problems; they were the generation that perforce had to come

to terms with events

The early sequence of wars and social revolutions centred upon the European continent but there were further conflicts in East Asia embrac-ing both internal threats to state/empires and prospective external threats associated with the rise of Imperial Japan Within the peripheral territories of empire aspirant replacement elites lodged demands for independent statehood and whilst colonial authorities could meet such demands, the military campaigns of the Imperial Japanese disturbed extant political settlements and created opportunities for hitherto mar-ginal groups In the USA a generation schooled by the experience of depression and war sought to refashion the global system and in Europe itself the actions of Soviet and American armies ensured that the status quo ante was beyond anyone’s grasp A new settlement was inevitable

General crisis: the consequences of war

Such episodes of war produce unexpected problems for survivors: the ongoing adjustment to the shock of the experience; or, more subtly, problems attached to the contingency of survival Coming to terms with events is not straightforward And nor is it easy for successor gen-erations to engage with the business of extensive quasi-ordered killing.23

Setting aside the realms of official memory, several familiar strategies are available: indirection, approaching the business sideways in literature;24

softly, approaching the business through art;25 sugared, approaching

through popular entertainment;26 or grittily direct, approaching the business with feigned insouciance;27 and picking up this last-noted approach, here the recorded lists provide a point of departure for further enquiry.

Dead, injured, displaced and damaged

The scale of the catastrophe of the general crisis of the twentieth tury escapes any simple grasp: a count reveals the numbers of dead, injured, displaced and damaged; such commentary provides a starting point for reflection

cen-The dead and injured were concentrated in Europe and East Asia, their numbers were measured in millions, and they were predominantly civil-ians;28 the raw figures have been given above; they are conservative and they beggar belief Many of the dead belonged to the armed forces of the various participants, but they provided the smaller proportion of the dead and injured The industrialization of warfare made killing more effi-cient, increasing the numbers of dead; however, the wars of the general crisis evidenced a general indifference to civilians Such disregard encom-

passed: casual informal violence (thus, for example, the Nanjing Massacre,

where Japanese soldiers rampaged through the city immediately after its capture leading the commanding general to comment that his men had

‘done terrible things’;29 such violence is common, part and parcel of the disorder of war fighting, a characteristic of all participant armies30); casual

organized violence (the early ethnically informed semi-systematic killing

in Eastern Europe31 or the Sook Ching in Singapore32 or the process of the recapture of Manila33 or the revenge attacks of newly liberated popula-tions34 or the 1968 My Lai Massacre35); and carefully organized violence (the

later systematic quasi-industrial ethnic killing in Eastern Europe36 or the flooding of the middle Yangtze River valley37 or the allied area-bombing campaigns directed against Japanese and German populations/cities38 or the massacres carried out by the Pol Pot regime)

The displaced were concentrated in Europe and East Asia; their

num-bers measured in millions So, first, there were displacements throughout

Europe, in particular in the East where these initially took place

dur-ing and immediately after the Great War, with invasion, revolution, imperial collapse and state formation (the mixture of power politics [armed force] and the elite political drive to put nations into states [drawing lines, allocating populations]); and there was a further round

of displacements during and immediately following the Second World War, occasioned first by the German drive for empire in the East and then the project’s collapse followed by all the subsequent population

movements.39 Then, second, there were displacements in China

conse-quent upon an almost unbroken sequence of wars from 1911 onwards, involving revolution, imperial collapse, warlords, civil war, inter-state war and revolution (again) plus utopian grass-roots mobilizations, which impacted, at one time or another, most parts of China.40 Relatedly, in

the 1940s, there were displacements throughout the European and American

state/empire holdings in East Asia As these territorial holdings collapsed

in the face of the military forces of Imperial Japan, existing foreign elites were swept away (killed in battle or fled or interned), local collaborators found their hitherto relatively privileged positions awkward to man-age and local people were subject to novel demands (thus, semi-forced labour of one sort or another) Displacements could be both physical, moving to a new place, or, more subtly, social, that is, relocation to a new social status, for as empires collapsed, familiar social structures failed;41 thus ‘we are the masters now’ seems to be a rather familiar

declaration Later, in the 1940s there were more displacements as sometime

colonial powers sought to reassert their authority; such efforts provoked

further wars42 and yet further rounds of elite and civilian displacements, perhaps local, attendant upon ongoing conflicts with minority groups, for example in Burma or Mindanao or Western Papua, and perhaps trans-oceanic as with Ambionese moving to Holland, French Algerians

(colons or pieds noirs) relocating to France, or Vietnamese boat people

heading to Europe and America, or most recently, following the 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to China, rich and middle-class citizens shift-ing their domiciles to Canada, Australia and maybe Britain And, last to

note, but involving millions, later in the 1940s there were displacements

amongst the Japanese in Northeast Asia as their colonial holdings

col-lapsed and nationals were relocated to the home islands.43

Finally, the many millions who suffered more or less directly from warfare; for example, with the deaths of family members, or the expe-rience of the ruin of home cities, or related disasters such as the 1918 flu epidemic, or widespread hunger;44 in brief; all the consequences for ordinary people of radical social upheaval

Such experiences do not simply end with the cessation of warfare; their impacts run on; most immediately, in the wake of the end of fight-ing when they shape social expectations, giving rise to new patterns of ideas and actions.45

Trauma: social, political and cultural

Once again it is difficult for successor generations to adequately grasp these matters, but it is clear that the direct impact of war upon those

involved is only the start of the trouble because people and ties are traumatized by the experience The record of the general crisis

communi-of the twentieth century reveals extensive trauma:46 social, political and

cultural.

Social trauma involved, as noted above, the deaths, injuries, ments and suffering All this created problems down the decades for the survivors:47 sometimes obvious (disabled soldiers plus their reserved

displace-seats in public places48); sometimes curiously non-obvious (in Europe, garded camp survivors before the invention of the holocaust); sometimes

disre-sadly predictable (in Europe, surplus women making lives as spinsters in

the years after the Great War); and sometimes heart-rending (in Europe,

the inter-war recourse to spiritualism in order to contact lost loved

ones) In addition, more broadly, there were the less obvious costs of social

disruption: loss of local networks; loss of community; the falling away of

routine order in social collapse, thus France in spring and summer 1940

or Shanghai in the period 1937–41 or Singapore 1941–45;49 or, finally, the business of necessary accommodation to radically novel demands (occupation or evacuation or compulsory labour or any of the other myriad consequences of crisis).50

Political trauma flowed from the sweeping consequences of conflict

and collapse First, the loss of those routines of ideas/actions associated

with familiar institutional structures State machines and the demands

they make upon their subject populations are not fixed, they can alter:

state machines can mobilize populations, for example, conscription or

direction of labour, as in much of Europe during the Great War and

the Second World War; state machines can be corrupted, as in Qing or

Nationalist China in the early parts of the century or a little later in National Socialist Germany, a period now read as a criminal regime; or

state machines can be radically reconfigured, as in the business of what in

hindsight is labelled ‘occupation’;51or in the extreme state machines can

be destroyed, as in Poland and large areas of Soviet Union in the early

1940s or in Germany a few years later, or in China in the period

fol-lowing the military victory of the Communist Party Second, the loss of

familiar patterns of ideas/actions associated with the established civil society and public sphere: thus disruptions to routine social interactions and anal-

ogous confusions within hitherto ordered parties and associations As the confusions of war rolled through political communities sets of estab-lished ideas/practices were impacted: the taken-for-granted ideas/prac-tices of settled communities were called into question and as familiar authorities disappeared so too did established rules/practices, sometimes obviously as in overt collaboration, sometimes subtler; thus in the 1940s

in occupied Europe gender relations were put under stress as men were controlled and later, after the war, women deemed guilty of ‘horizontal collaboration’ were ritually humiliated.52 Third, the loss of any familiar

sense of citizenship (the ‘political self’) consequent upon confronting the novel, urgent and chaotic demands of unfolding circumstances: thus for some poli-

ties, circumstances produced collaboration or resistance (and the quent debates),53 whilst for others, circumstances produced profound yet indirect loss, most obviously of territories of empire (creating subsequent conflicts and further intellectual/moral confusions54)

subse-Cultural trauma included not only the costs of the conflicts, the death/destruction, but also the challenges to received ideas: thus in the summer of 1914 Europeans could and did claim the status of advanced civilizations, but in 1945 they were ruined, divided and occupied and any claims to the evident superiority of their civiliza-tion would have been absurd.55 The exemplary cultural/moral collapse was that of Germany but the experience ran through the whole of Europe; as state/empires failed, polities confronted the shock of core warfare and peripheral loss In East Asia the picture was mixed By

1945 the political- cultural project of an Imperial Japan had failed, decolonization was rolling through the region, yet China continued

to be embroiled in violence In the later 1940s it was clear that the state/empire world was fading rapidly but it was not clear what might come next Received ideas were changing and accommodating/criti-cizing the demands of empire was no longer necessary, but quite how the post-colonial scene might be conceived was not so clear Later, hindsight reworked the period as one of the achievement of liberty, thus positive, but this elides the sheer unpredictability of change and its unplanned costs States and nations were contingent creations and

so whilst new elites prospered, other groups did not; there were ners and losers Such loss could be clear, as with minority groups in Burma,56 but the trauma could be subtle, thus Singaporean authors now produce a literature of heritage, noting the lives of minorities now fading from view.57

win-Europe: accommodating the catastrophe

In retrospect, the scale of Europe’s wars is quite extraordinary; the sequence of intermingled wars58 were a catastrophe for Europeans In the autumn 1914 Europeans had worldwide empires59 but by spring

1945 the continent was ruined and in the process of being eclipsed

at the international level as their empires dissolved away These years

had seen death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale And

in the context of the developing European polity60 the intermingled sequence presents a series of issues for a contemporary analysis So, first, the business of war commentary faces a number of tasks: com-prehending the nature of the systematic killing (organized by whom,

of which groups and justified how and to which audiences); hending the nature of industrialized warfare (pursued both directly with machine guns, barbed wire, gas, tanks, aircraft and so on and in

compre-a forwcompre-ard-plcompre-anned fcompre-ashion on the bcompre-asis of the mcompre-ass mobilizcompre-ation of entire national populations); comprehending the central experience

of the bureaucratic mass production of death, with the civilian deaths, the camps and all the bombed cities from Guernica to Dresden Then, second, there is the related business of political incompetence (how did the processes develop whereby powerful elites managed to gener-ate the catastrophe) And, third, there is the rather more pressing issue

of the extent of continuing martial traditions in, for example, Britain and France

Elite remembering and forgetting

Given the extensive killing and trauma associated with the general ses in Europe and East Asia, it might have been thought that reflection would have been routine, a pervasive social habit It is true that collec-tive memory is rich, that is, the general understanding of the mass of the population, but this does not hold at elite level where the record is quite different; here recollection of the general crisis of the twentieth century reveals extensive editorial work, active forgetting and remembering These matters have been widely discussed but in retrospect the forget-ting is often striking in its reach/scale; elites can be heroic forgetters In Britain, for example, the single greatest military defeat experienced by the armed forces, the fall of Singapore, is more or less invisible in public recollection; or again, some 60,000 French civilians were killed by allied bombing, a figure more or less the same as those killed in the London Blitz, yet these deaths are largely unremarked.61 In Japan, an obvious example, discussions of the war years are either stylized, as in the realms

cri-of the elite where there has been a studied disinclination to engage with the history of the 1930–40 era, or reserved for the informally consti-tuted work of various social groups.62 Many have noted that public rec-ollection is a mix of active remembering and equally active forgetting,63

and that national pasts are elaborate constructs, however, in the matter

of war, all this seems to radically understate the intellectual/moral ibility of elites

flex-Elite forgetting is available in varieties Thus, first, the familiar habit of

neglect/indifference, as matters are set aside as of no great contemporary

interest: thus the British evasions noted above; thus the government of China disregarded the Nanjing Massacre for many years as it had hap-pened to a Nationalist city and the Communist government found no reason to make official note (something that changed in the 1980s) Or,

evasion/suppression, as matters are set aside for present convenience: thus

the conflicts between Britain and America about how the wars in Europe and East Asia should be run or how post-war economic regimes should

be constructed.64 And then direct refusal/denial, as sectional interests

refuse to treat issues which subsequently are rejected for contemporary debate: for example, American veterans’ groups and the matter of the bombing of Japanese cities,65 or right-wing groups in Japan disinclined

to acknowledge wartime error, or marginally more subtly, the British elite’s seemingly enduring refusal to acknowledge the loss of empire And on the other hand, the counterpart, elite remembering, also comes

in varieties It can be stylized/unreliable, as in the elite contribution to

the creation of the national past, with highly selective versions of the past, where such selections were shaped by present intentions and dis-ciplined by popular collective memory.66 It is an unstable and contested

form or remembering Or again, it can be clichéd/false as with the elite

ideological confections of official memory, the statements and tions made for various reasons of state (where, as noted, the affirmation

declara-of reason declara-of state drives ideas/action that have no intrinsic links to any notion of truth).67 Or it can fall away to the simply banal as with

the instant commentary upon events, acknowledged and promptly forgotten.68

There can also be forgetting produced by other groups within the broad social world, perhaps running along with the grain of elite wishes,

or maybe cutting against official views: thus the positively intended

eli-sions of popular efforts to ‘turn the page’ or ‘get on with life’ or ‘not

dwell on the past’ This particular response generates a division of lines

of argument in Germany: letting the past go versus continually ing and deepening enquiries into the years of National Socialism.69 And finally remembering produced by groups within the broad social world

revisit-includes, as noted by many, a number of elements: subjective/accurate, as with personal recollection or memoir; stylized/reliable, as with collective memories; stylized/clichéd, as in media representations of remembered

war;70 and scholarly, with the work of professional and non-professional

historians.71 It is only this last noted group who affirm a central concern with getting the story straight

Misremembering war

One aspect of the collective memory of war, more especially official or national past variants, is the routine misremembering of war As the activity is radically contingent it can only be subject to the process of making sense after the event; so all interpretations are made in retrospect; and war seems to induce systematic mischaracterization: the experi-ence, the political lessons and the peripheral but often noted matter of

technology.

In respect of the intellectual/moral experience of war, ing is familiar In Britain remembered war is understood as marking moments when ‘action made a difference’72 and the idea belongs, in particular, to those with experience of the Second World War The char-acterization is not entirely inapt as familiar routines were disturbed, yet the style of memory is odd as the crisis was systemic breakdown, and so whilst actions may or may not have made a difference, in general they were shaped by circumstances Action was local and highly situational (the ‘fog of war’) This particular style of misremembering seems to be liberal/romantic: recollection is cast in terms which suggest that people had choices and could act effectively, thus they could behave heroically

misremember-or shamefully, misremember-or they could contribute to the war effmisremember-ort misremember-or not, but this is misleading as most people, most of the time, had no choices

A familiar phrase is ‘caught up in the war’ Choices were deferred until

‘after the war’ Circumstances were shaped by systemic breakdown, plus rational organizations oriented to the fundamentally irrational business

of war fighting, and as people were simply caught up in events, action was local and perforce had limited aims One often discussed example concerns the survivors of camps; they have been read as heroic/victims, but this is false; they were just survivors, that is all they did, because it

is all they could do at the time.73

In respect of politics, war is read routinely in hindsight Elites of newly created states could look at war and see positive benefits, that is, the process of dissolution of empire and the achievement of statehood, but all such changes were contingent, war was systemic collapse not a scheme to create independent states and each achievement of statehood was highly contingent, often contested It may well be true that inde-pendence is a good thing, that is, one can argue that the political form

of a state is preferable in terms of the notion of democracy to ship of a state/empire74 but it is an error to point to the war period as

member-a contributory fmember-actor, member-as if somehow it could be remember-ad positively The war years created a space into which aspirant replacement elites could move, the creation of states was contingent, aspirant replacement elites

contested boundaries and lines were drawn on maps but they were not drawn easily War is also read in hindsight by those superseded; the elites of state/empires rationalized the end-time of empire in terms

of the realization of those promises inherent in the relationship to progress, to civilization, to the discharge of a duty of care Mostly hypo-critical nonsense, the collapse of empire was contingent; it was not a process of realization of deep-seated goals

Then, finally, in respect of production/technology, war is read in hindsight as occasioning the acceleration of technological advance plus routines of managing production (mobilization/management) The argument is simplified to the claim that war accelerates technological progress, thereby quietly linking the notion of war and the notion of progress-in-general However, such technical advances are contingent consequences; war was systemic breakdown, not a strategy for eco-nomic upgrading Some technologies were accelerated, but to argue from upgraded armaments to general scientific advance is spurious; advances were restricted to a narrow sphere, weapons; some had wider utility, some did not, and the overall package of advances in weaponry was a contingent accumulation, not an intellectual evolutionary speed-

up.75 Much was misremembered.76

Tony Judt77 has looked at the process of establishing an lar memory of the Second World War Judt argues that much of the official/common memory, East and West, is very poor history There was no simple end to the war78 and the period end saw a spread of local civil wars develop with many people and groups simply accom-modating themselves to unfolding events Yet the business of rebuild-ing demanded some political-cultural settlement (the more awkward

official/popu-as there wofficial/popu-as neither a peace treaty process, nor harmony, and the cold war soon began to build) and the unsatisfactory process of remember-ing and forgetting did serve to establish crucial foundation myths for contemporary Europe.79 On the subtle matter of official forgetting (both passive, not worth remembering, and active, where forgetting was preferred), the behaviour of all participants involved was available for processing and, as Judt80 points out, some matters were pursued, others were discreetly set aside

First, in respect of the behaviour of agents of the axis powers there were actions directed at various groups which the allies simply did not

care to remember: first, the victims in the camps where the scale was

noted but not much pursued and the survivors just went about their business, they did not embrace a status as survivor (with the idea of the holocaust coming much later81); second, the other victims including the

slave labourers, the displaced persons (those who had fled the fighting) and the expellees (those who had been expelled from the areas where they lived in eastern Europe82); third, the first victims amongst the

German population itself (which included a series of groups – trades unionists, opposition politicians, church figures, the mentally handi-capped and of course the extensively assimilated German Jewish popu-

lation); and fourth, the behaviour of those the allies found useful, which

included research scientists, members of the security services (as the cold war began) and influential members of the local populations (busi-nessmen, low-level officials and so on83)

Then, second, in respect of the behaviour of agents of the allied

powers there were actions directed at the defeated powers which the

allies did not care to examine too closely: first, asymmetrical justice

(practice), the principles applied to the defeated but not to the victors, thus defendants at Nuremberg were prohibited from calling attention to

allied behaviour in their defences; second, asymmetrical justice

(princi-ple), where allied behaviour was not examined according to the criteria being used to judge the defendants (and they were both individual and symbolic defendants), thus for example the British and American bombing of German cities where ideas of ‘area bombing’ and ‘destroy-ing enemy morale’ are euphemisms for systematically killing German

civilians; third, selective justice, thus some people were prosecuted but

many were not as it would have been not merely time-consuming but

inconvenient (as with research scientists); and fourth, the extensive

nature of the accommodation, collaboration and sometimes active port for the National Socialist authorities evidenced when European countries had been occupied

sup-And finally, in respect of agents of all sides in the war, the widespread dehumanization and racism evidenced in German claims to master-race status, the British wartime hatred of Germans, Russian hatred of Germans, and, taking in the Pacific War, the American characterizations

of the Japanese, American internal race divisions, Japanese tions of Americans or Chinese or Koreans and so on.84

characteriza-Overall, substantively, patterns of life of in Europe were radically changed by the war years as familiar economic, social and cultural prac-tices were overthrown The episode also had sweeping political impli-cations The continent was occupied and divided The USA and the USSR were the key players, pre-war regimes were swept away and novel high-political projects were affirmed with notions of the free world in Western Europe and ideas of socialism in Eastern Europe More pro-foundly, there was a pervasive cultural impact as the ways in which