The passions of the British–whether in real estate, diplomacy or arms–matter more to America now than at any time since World War II, when GIs stormed the same beaches of Normandy that, increasingly, serve as vacation spots for English-speaking peoples. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is President Bush’s only truly powerful global soulmate in the war on terror. He is Bush’s best translator and sidekick. Without him, and without Britain, America would be even more isolated diplomatically than it is.
I am an American who covers his country’s politics for a living. But I have been coming to the U.K. and Europe for decades, every year for the last several. This time, my family and I traveled from Western Ireland through Dublin and Scotland to England and France. My bottom line is this: Blair may be morally right to stand with America in the post-9/11 world. But he is (sadly in my view) on the wrong side of the drift of British history.
The headlines in London focus on the inquiry into the death of British intelligence expert David Kelly. That controversy could take the Blair government down. But deeper historical forces are at work as well in pulling Britain toward Europe.
Real estate–important as it is–isn’t the half of it. Take the euro. I certainly am. Gone are the days when investors laughed at the new currency, which was launched high and fell fast. It’s a success, an unqualified political and fiscal hit. The jumble of continental currencies is gone. Trade within the euro zone is enhanced. The dollar/pound world now has a genuine competitor. Blair has remained aloof to the euro; defending the pound is a patriotic sentiment akin to a “strong military” in the U.S. But at some point, the city bankers may decide that they can make more money playing with euros than pounds, and all bets will be off.
The Irish are enjoying the euro for its own sake, and as a poke at the hated Brits. With American and continental investment spurring them on, Ireland is enjoying a boom unlike any it has ever known. In the West of Ireland, the last of the crofts have been abandoned, replaced by sturdy bungalows. The residents of Galway are proud to proclaim their city as “the fastest-growing in Europe” and they have the traffic jams in their suburbs to prove it. (I know: I tried without much success to navigate through them in a left-hand stickshift car.) So Britain is now literally sandwiched between the euro countries of Ireland and France. Irish officials, never at one with the allies, are no fans of the Bush-Blair military approach to the post-9/11 world.
Scotland is going its own way, too. They still have the pound, but they also have what amounts to their own government–and, in a sense, their own foreign policy. Scots grouse about the cost of the new parliament building under construction at the foot of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. It’s a hideous piece of neo-brutalist architecture, from what I can tell, but its symbolism is important. The Scottish members of the U.K. Parliament in Tony Blair’s Labour coalition tend to hate his policy on Iraq. If his government falls–and it might–the Scots could be the proximate cause.
It’s as if the U.K. is falling apart at its historical seams. I half expect Wales to declare its independence, and seek foreign aid from France. If only England is for the war, and only part of England, then Blair and Bush can claim little more than the ground around Grosvenor Square.
The media in the U.K. and France certainly won’t be any help. What used to be called Fleet Street has long since made common cause with the Continent in the war on terror. They are against the use of military force, pure and simple, and deeply suspicious of all Anglo-American claims and aims. Bush is derided and despised as no American president since Nixon. The conservative baron Rupert Murdoch owns the Times of London but you can’t tell from the news pages, which contain the same deep skepticism everyone else on either side of the Channel expresses.
The blame-America attitude gets silly at times. For example, you might have wondered what caused the suffocating heat wave that has blanketed Europe recently. I found out the moment we arrived in Rouen. There, on the front page of the newspaper Le Monde, was a cartoon: an oppressive sun, with eyes made of dollar signs, smoking a cigar/factory with dollar signs, sending out thunderbolts of heat that pierced a prostrate Europe. In Paris, I asked a young businessman about the cartoon. “Well, of course,” he said as if I were an idiot. “Your President Bush did not sign the Kyoto Accord.” In other words, America was at fault because it had not signed a treaty that will not go into effect for years. And France was NOT at fault, even though its auto fleet contains millions of diesel engines and its nuclear power plants are turning French rivers hot enough to boil mussels.
History and demography are drawing Britain toward France and the Continent. England and Normandy are cousins, of course–fighting cousins but cousins nevertheless, with a millennium of overlapping conquests and marriages that only a scholar can keep straight. There are white cliffs in Rouen just like the ones in Dover and what we think of as “Tudor” architecture everywhere in Normandy.
More to the point, Britain and France share a history of the Crusades–a history that is suddenly, painfully, relevant to the war on terror in the aftermath of an attack on New York planned and executed primarily by citizens of a Muslim kingdom that contains the holiest sites of Islam. In cathedrals throughout both countries, stained-glass windows glorify the exploits of the crusaders hundreds of years ago, who slaughtered untold numbers of Muslims in the name of Christianity (after sharpening their holy swords on the Jews of Western Europe).
This history is more than a little embarrassing now, especially since both countries are home to millions of Muslims whose families once lived in British or French colonies (or in the case of Germany, “guest workers” from Turkey and elsewhere). Take a walk in any park from London to Paris, as we’ve been doing, and you will see them teeming with men and women who justifiably loathe the very word “crusade.” The notion of the Coalition of the Willing occupying Baghdad–the oldest and most famous city in what is now the Muslim world–is an affront to them, no matter what the post-9/11 justification. The demographics influence French attitudes toward U.S. policy. They may well eventually have the same effect in Britain.
It’s not that the French, or the British for that matter, have forgotten more recent history. When we visited the American Cemetery in Normandy, an American official who was conducting a summer-long survey told me that fully 40 percent of the visitors were French, and another 30 percent or so were British. “The locals come in big numbers,” she said. “They don’t forget.” The cemetery is an awesome, humbling, inspiring sight: as far as the eye can see, row after row of white grave markers on a carefully clipped grass field at the edge of cliffs that plunge down to the sea. Even on a quiet day, you can hear the surf below. The beach itself is gloriously beautiful, wide and sandy, stretching for miles and miles in either direction below the cliffs.
If you can forget the carnage, it’s a beautiful place for a vacation.
