Several high-profile and quite epochal developments are dominating the global political economy and threaten to tilt the world further away from continuity towards rupture.
They are the (apparently) perturbatory event that is Donald Trump; wars in the Levant, on the Eurasian Steppe and in Sudan; and China’s continued march. China will, for better or for worse, get to the future before anyone else. That was how a certain Karl Marx described Europe’s rise when he was a journalist at the New York Tribune between 1852 and 1862.
Let us spare a thought for Britain, which withdrew itself from the EU, the bloc that has been integral to domination of the world since World War 2, and now relies on the goodwill of the US.
Almost exactly 30 years after I made a brief and probably inconsequential contribution at a conference in London — “Britain in the World” hosted by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) to mark its 75th anniversary — that country is once again sitting in Rodin’s sculptured pose of Dante Alighieri contemplating the abundance of reality in the world and Britain’s place therein.
Earlier this year the British government pledged to bring together “experts from across culture, sport, the creative industries and geopolitics”, to promote Britain globally and provide a boost to the economy. This was a kind of admission that Britain’s influence and power had diminished. In apparent exasperation, British officials suggested last week that that country was somewhat belatedly waking up to the reality that its political, economic and cultural influence reach may have receded to the Thames Valley.
Within a century or so Britain had gone from being the greatest empire in history, covering about 25% of the Earth and including about half a billion people around the world, to settling back down on a dull, grey little island. Let’s be honest. As much as I love Scotland, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales, the Lake District and Arsenal, I never did go to Britain for the weather.
Nevermind. Contemplating the longue durée, it will forever remain a mystery why Britain broke its relationship with Europe in 2016 and chose to remain a junior partner in the “special relationship” between Blighty and Washington. And now, the last vestiges of its influence, most notably the BBC and the British Council — historically at the forefront of British soft power — are losing ground to the Chinese and Russians. This panic over China and Russia has a lot to do with the vagaries of fashion driven from the US.
Last week Universities UK CEO Vivienne Stern warned that when compared with China’s soft power efforts “through investment and things like scholarships, media, music and cultural efforts you just think we’re asleep at the wheel... We’ve got this position which we have inherited, which we believe to be our divine right — it’s not... You have to work to maintain it. I’ve benefited from having the British Council’s support around the world as the university sector tries to extend its links. Yet we’re knocking lumps out of it. We need to wake up.”
The BBC’s credibility has collapsed almost completely (I have listened to the BBC since the age of about 10), and the British Council (which facilitated much of my education in the UK) faces heavy cuts. In general, Britain simply can no longer compete or extract wealth the way it did in, say, India (cotton), pre-independence Malaysia (tin) or SA (gold). In this sense it might be worth reflecting on Britain’s past through the words of Khalil Gibran: “Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats a bread it does not harvest.”
The British cannot expect much goodwill from its old bedmates in Europe and some day the Trump doctrine (in foreign affairs) may look less like a street carnival than a symphony orchestra. It may be too late for Britain.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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