Thursday, May 10, 2018

Brexit and the parallels of WW1: a study in complacency

For all the many commemorations of the events of the First World War that have happened in recent years, what the media have spent little time looking at are the lessons learned from the events leading up the the outbreak of war, and how the war itself was conducted.
This blogger's own study of Kaiser Wilhelm (and his connection with Turkey's Enver Pasha) tells us how important the psychology of those in power can have such a great effect on outcomes; literally, making the difference between life and death, war and peace. The contemporary parallels with Donald Trump - and any potential comparisons with "Kaiser Bill" - are interesting in themselves, as they tell us how easy it is for dysfunctional personalities in positions of power to attract other like-minded misfits. Thus they create a dangerously-combustible administration, both for each other as well as everyone else.

Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers" is one of the best studies of the run-up to the First World War, in terms of his analysis of the personalities and interpersonal interactions involved, as well as the wider context.
Related to this, "The Ottoman Endgame" (by Sean McMeekin, published in 2015) tells us the tale of the Ottoman Empire's last thirty or so years of life. British hostilities during the war are explained in excellent detail, and one passage of the book describes the misguided thinking behind the British government's decision to attack the Dardanelles straights and the Gallipoli peninsula. A hundred years on, in the current shambolic context of Brexit, it's hard not to be struck by the author's choice of words:

"The doctrinal conception of the Dardanelles campaign was still in flux when the naval bombardment began. At some level, there was an element of wishful, almost magical thinking involved. Churchill may or may not have really told Kitchener that the campaign would be won with the super-dreadnought (Queen Elizabeth) with her "astounding effectiveness" and "marvelous potentialities". But he did insist that the fleet could get through on its own. As for Kitchener, he changed his mind more often than anyone else. On the day of the bombardment, Kitchener insisted that an amphibious operation at Alexandretta (on the Mediterranean coast) was preferable"

The use of the McMeekin's phrase "magical thinking" cannot have been one purloined from the current Brexit mess, as this book was written long before the referendum campaign even started. But what this passage tells us is how complacency is the hallmark of all policy disasters. Not only that, but the strategic indecision that the British government were in over their campaign against the Ottomans a hundred years ago is mirrored by that of the current government over Brexit.
In this blogger's previous post, we looked some of at the Second World War myths that surround British identity, and marked out Churchill's elevation to that of historical icon as being particularly misguided. In effect, his role as Prime Minister during WW2 rehabilitated his discredited image from that known during WW1 and afterwards (as well as the morally-questionable actions taken when Prime Minister). But what everyone remembers today is that the man on the current Five Pound Note was a national hero.


The Sleepwalkers

This brings me to the personalities of the current government, and how they compare to the personalities in government a hundred years ago, sleepwalking as they are into a national crisis.
The fact that Boris Johnson has written a biography on Churchill, and the fact that he fancies himself as an articulate writer and orator in the same mould, tells us all we need to know. Interestingly, Boris' rise to the highest levels of government (The FCO) in his early fifties mirrors that of Churchill's at the same period in his life (when he was Chancellor in the Baldwin government in the 1920s). Boris seems to dominate political life in government in the same manner that Churchill did back in the 1920s, when, like Boris, he was an often exasperating figure.
Apart from the opportunistic Foreign Secretary, other prominent self-serving cads include the recently-elevated Gavin Williamson (now Defence Secretary). Meanwhile, there are Liam Fox and David Davis, whose attitude to Brexit and its intricacies is the complacent belief that somehow everything will work out fine, using solutions to problems that have never been tried before, and blithely expecting the EU to accept all this on trust. Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, seems to see Brexit through the same distorted free-market lens as Fox and Davis, where the potential opportunities that Brexit presents are given much greater weight than the far more real difficulties that leaving the single market brings to the economy. As with Gallipoli a hundred years ago, "magical thinking" is the norm.
It might be fair to summarize the rest of the personalities in government as being either a) clueless and complacent, or b) horrified but silent. The silence comes from the necessity to maintain the illusion of unity in government, by repeatedly delaying the required debate. And at the head of all this is Theresa May.

It is May, and her personality, that is perpetuating the absurdity of government inertia. Everything about her personality seems fatally unsuited for the deadly-serious task at hand: what has been called her "dull-witted rigidity" in refusing to reverse her decision to leave the single market and customs union; her reactionary instinct to close down debate; her small-minded parochialism that prevents her from seeing an outsiders' perspective; her naturally-conservative aversion to embrace a challenge or take a real risk.
All these factors come together to create a perpetual lethargy in government, where her administration is now a hostage to events. Instead, it somehow hopes that the EU itself will provide the answers to Britain's problems, from the unresolved (unsolvable?) Irish border, to a relationship with the EU that will be both outside the customs union but provides easy access to the single market. It is no wonder that Brussels is losing patience with such arrogance. Meanwhile, the arrogance is magnified as the British government treats the Irish position on the intractable border issue as though simply because Britain is bigger than Ireland, Britain must get its way. According to Britain, Ireland and the EU should help Britain to solve the problems it created for itself. Meanwhile, EU support for the Irish position is based on the simple fact that Ireland is in the EU and Britain isn't (or soon won't be), which is completely lost to the British government. They still see things through the lens of the Imperial power-plays of yesteryear, and yet wonder why outsiders don't trust them.

It is this arrogance that breeds complacency. The same kind of arrogance was found in the European capitals in 1914, when everyone expected that the war would be over by Christmas. Churchill's belief (arrogance?) that the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 would be an easy victory found fruit in the earlier victories that Britain had against the Ottomans in the first few months of the war (in Mesopotamia and Suez). Thus Britain created for itself the belief that Turkey was a pushover.
Britain's government today seems to have the same complacent belief about the EU. Because Britain usually got what it wanted from Brussels when it was in the EU, when it came to Brexit, the belief that "they need us more than we need them" infected the minds of the British government. It is clear that many of them still believe that, even after being repeatedly told by Brussels of the fundamental error of their thinking. Many of them still believe that, when push comes to shove, Brussels will cave in at the last moment. There is no rational basis for this assumption.

So what we are left to assume is that the current British government is dangerously deluded, almost as dangerously deluded as many European governments were in 1914. The difference now is that the only ones that will really suffer from the British government's "delusions of grandeur" will be the British people themselves.













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