There are moments in history, two now, in my lifetime…when
everything falls apart and, conversely, everything seems to fall into place.
100 years ago this morning, at the battle of the Somme, the
international system that had lasted since Waterloo, more or less, came to
symbolic and actual bloody and catastrophic grief. Those years of war, at
which, for the British, the Somme sits as a particular trauma of local remembrance
as well as global import, remade the world…initiated what Eric Hobsbawm called
the “short Twentieth Century” - years of crisis and conflict that ended, he
felt…and we all felt, I think, came to an end when the Berlin Wall fell in
1989, and European Communism, which had seemed like a permanent factor in our
lives while I was growing up, collapsed
like a house made of dried cowpats in less than two years thereafter.
Thus was born the global world. It was the End of History. The rule of the universal market, with
universal democracy, with enshrined universal equality, policed by the forces
that no longer needed to hold the red beast at bay, would settle upon us like a
blanket of security and conspicuous consumption. Why, we might even be able to address climate
change…
So here we are now in our own wee corner of Globalization
and its Discontents. And if Boris
Johnson (now exited stage left, pursued by a Gove) was the flag waving buffoon
at the centre of the UK comedy Stage of the last few months, Gordon Brown has
been the hero of his own tragedy on another part of the stage. He wrote last
week in the Guardian, trying to put all this chaos in the context of the New
Global Order…and suddenly, all that seems like so very long ago
Brown it was, along with Tony Blair, who in 1994 became the
Globalisation Project leaders of the UK Labour Party, who would steer us into
the brave new world where there were no countries any more – just a single
market inhabited by identical consuming ants whose only collective identity was
as individual players in the global game of buying and selling whatever we
could lay our hands on, our industry, our labour, each other, our kidneys, our
blood. Owing no loyalty except to themselves…oh, and the maintenance of the
necessary “stability” of course, a stability that, it soon became apparent,
could tolerate no other self-identification that its functional insects might
be tempted to come up with or cling to.
Globalisation had its good points, don’t get me wrong. It was predicated on human equality,
universal assumptions about legality, property…oh yes, and “freedom of worship”
if you were still interested in that kind of thing. Now that the communists (at least the Russian
ones) were out of the way of a universal ideology of the individual and the
global market, in the early 1990s, we were setting sail into a peaceful,
uniform sea where there would be no more storms, where calm…or “stability” as
the “markets” like to call it…was hard wired into the ocean.
Of course, it was never quite like that. For one thing, the
economic and manufacturing dynamo of the whole system was Communist China. But
back then, John Major’s Euro-hating “Bastards” were a Thatcherite nostalgia
cult at the edge of the Tory party, as apparently marginal to the future as the
UKIP nutters who got themselves going back then, or indeed the SNP -irrelevant
throwbacks to old political conflicts from the seventies, and even more buried
tribalisms - no more to be considered as players in the new world than…say…Islamic
fundamentalists.
Look where we are now.
Well, what do we
know, and what remains to be found out? Let`s start in the middle of the scale and
work our way up and down.
Theresa May, who kept herself wisely off the radar and off
the telly during the referendum campaign, is going to be the leader of the Tory
Party who, quite happily I expect, but with a concerned looking face on, will
steer the UK into mid-Atlantic where it will presumably be sunk with a flag on
top as a warning to shipping. Barring of course, some unforeseen series of
accidents which will land us all in the shaking hands of Dr Liam Fox.
The Labour party, whose devotion to the values of fellowship
and solidarity have been on such prominent display in the last week, will run
the leadership contest they have been so desperately trying to avoid. If Corbyn wins, the Labour party will plit in
two…leaving 30 odd socialist saints on the one side, and The Gang of Two
Hundred Zombie SDP on the other.
What both of these leviathans of the world`s leading democracy
will try to avoid like the plague, of course, is the people…who have just
proved they cannot be trusted. There will be no snap election if anyone can
help it. Though it will be tempting for
the Tories to grind their heels into the faces of the Labour party or what
remains of it, wiser heads know that an election right now, with UKIP hoovering
up votes from Labour like demented hausfraus, isn`t worth the risk. After all, getting rid of UKIP was the whole
point wasn`t it?
Last week seems long ago and far away.
As for the wider context of Europe, the threat to the EU is
on the one hand, existential, but on the other hand, hard to measure. After all, without the Brits there to be
annoying and tell everybody else in Europe what they`re doing wrong all the
time, the prospects for a revived and redesigned EU are possibly brighter than
they were last week in the lost epoch of one rule to rule them all. It may well be that a multi-tiered Europe
emerges from all this. Or the whole
thing will fall apart and France and Germany and the Benelux countries will
start again from scratch.
Crystal ball gazing has never been such a murky activity as
it is now.
I think it is safe to say, however, that if the twentieth
century of hot and cold war was short, the twenty-first, that of Globalisation
and the Series Box Set, is already definitely at the end of season one even if
it hasn`t quite been cancelled yet. Can
we be saved in any form of civilisation before the climate gets us? Ask the Chinese…I`ve got no idea. This is the
century of newly invented nationalisms…and as we know, and as the UK
establishment has just found out, nationalisms come in many guises. And English nationalism has just declared its
independence day as June 23rd 2016.
Who knew it was that easy?
One thing I do know, though.
That amid this chaos, Scotland needs its own voice, its own place, its
own presence. We need to be a distinct,
visible factor in whatever comes next. And that we are, that Nicola Sturgeon is now getting
profiles written in newspapers all over the world, just like she did in the UK
press last year is yes, a tribute to her.
But it is mainly a tribute to “yes”, to the campaign of
2014, without which nothing, and of which this presence in the world`s
consciousness , is a tangible result.
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