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Isolation

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by hotmousemat (U2388917) on Saturday, 10th December 2011

  If British diplomacy has had any consistent theme, it is to avoid the situation of being without at least one (important) continental ally.
  
  Or to put the same thing another way, to prevent the formation of a European hegemony.
  
  As the history boards close, we must instead shift to being contemporary observers of what appears to be the end of that road. I wonder if as historians we will have any insights as to how it will work out - or without our usual advantage of 20/20 hindsight, we will turn out to be as blind as everyone else.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 10th December 2011

  hothousemat
  
  It has also been an important English/British tradition to stand on a position of strength and security aside from European troubles and attempts by overarching and potentially despotic powers to impose an artificial uniformity from above.. which is one reason why "The City" is the leading financial centre in the global economy.
  
  I am actually just today writing once again about the very different tradition in my wife's France, which has a long history of living with that kind of tradition, which has involved chaos and near desolation at times when such over-arching efforts have collapsed. In the tradition of the ancient world France can be submerged, swept away, destroyed by catastrophes that its over-arching power can not prevent, and yet just re-invent itself like some Phoenix.
  
  It is a history that has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. As I was growing up (born 1944) it was commonly argued that Britain did not suffer enough desolation during the Second World War.. We have had too much "Make Do and Mend" and places in Europe appeared to be (a) growing much faster economically, and (b) benefitting from economic planning in a near "command economy" situation.
  
  That misleading initial success of the ERP and then the EU created a misleading impression of the ability of states and groups of states to take charge of the task of creating and shaping economic growth.. a French tradition that goes back much further than Colbert. To some extent that "belief system" was also encouraged by the Cold War that cast its own restrictions and demands upon economic activity. And in fact the present crisis is not really caused by the Banks and the Financial System- but by the general political climate after 9/11 which accentuated a "Millennianism", a belief that in a new Millennium everything might be different.
  
  The attack on the World Trade Centre produced a 20% fall in stock values all around the world, and an almost universal reaction in the developed world to ask the public- in their function as consumers- to go out and spend, spend, spend on their credit cards. In the face of Islamic Fundamenalist Puritanism all forms of ostentation and living beyond one's means became the order of the day from the individual to the State- with the G8 meeting sanctionning the wiping off a whole tranche of "Third World debt" as if politicians were like the Gods on Olympus able to just agree to such things in defiance of the economic realities.
  
  It remains to be seen just what the financial markets- which created and create the financial instruments and mechanisms on which we depend- will make of the new EU deal. The admission yesterday of our daughter-in-laws Croatia is a reminder that perhaps to some extent the "post-war" conditions to which I have referred operate once more within parts of the EU, for the end of the Cold War (and then the subsequent peace settlements in the Balkans and Ireland) created new investment opportunities in essential infrastructure building and economic regeneration in regions with low costs in Labour and real-estate. But it is very easu to forget that Germany- by common consent the bedrock of the EU- has been disunited in its history much more than it has been united, and in its present form is not much more than a decade old.
  
  Perhaps the English especially are prone to prefering the "tried and tested".. But for all of those reasons it is most unlikely that Europe will ignore British "savoire faire" for very long. Charles de Gaulle used to say that the British would have behaved just like the French had the Germans managed to invade: and French people that I chat to have often pointed out that we do have the advantage of living on this island- which they do not. My response often that our "English" ancestors came to these thinly populated lands which offered nothing but work and potential. The Francs, Burgundians and others were drawn towards the Glittering Prizes in the Mediterranean- and all the problems associated with them.
  
  In fact the present crisis can not be divorced I think from the continuing attraction of those "places in the Sun" for the big-spending populations of Northern Europe during those years of credit boom. Tourism and second-homes became real areas of economic growth for Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland- until the crash of 2008. One MB member living in the Irish Republic on a UK pension found like many another that his disposable income fell by 30%.
  
  The real problem is not what the politicians are going to do, but how people are going to reclaim their ownership of their right to work-independently of "wage-slavery"- to start to build a real future as the Anglo-Saxon settlers did one and a half thousand years ago.
  
  Cass
  

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  Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Saturday, 10th December 2011

  A timely thread hotmousemat.
  
  I suspect that the notion of the importance of a continental ally has itself been overtaken by events. The maxim of the importance of a continental ally may have been true for Westminster and Whitehall in the centuries before 1914 when Europe was very much the centre of world affairs and the location of the capitals of so many of the world's empires. Within 31 years, however, this had all changed with Europe effectively partitioned between the USSR and the US in 1945. And 31 years on again in the mid-1970s the European empires had all but disappeared. We are now more than 31 years on from the 1970s and the world has again changed beyond all recognition with the USSR long gone and the US now in debt to China etc.
  
  People sometimes talk of us now living in a 'globalised economy' but hasn't the world economy always been globalised? For example some Dutch traders were making 1000% profits in the 17th Century transporting spices from the East Indies to Europe. And lapus lazuli (used in Mediaeval church decoration in Europe) was imported all the way from Afghanistan while silk was from China. And Roman artefacts been found by archaeologists in Ireland which was never part of the Roman empire.
  
  There is far too much emphasis (and hysteria) placed on the importance of being part of a 'big trading bloc' in the 'modern globalised world'. The current crisis of the Eurozone surely proves the fallacy of this illusory 'importance'. My view is that England should be neither in the EU nor in the UK. We should be free to run our own fiscal affairs while trading (and co-operating when need be) with our British neighbours, with our continental neighbours and with the wider world.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 10th December 2011

  Following Vizzer's points-
  
  Can anyone believe that the British electorate would have been happy at the surrender of this country's right to decide its own taxation policy? Or the need to submit its budgets- not to the scrutiny of the Houses of Parliament- but to Brussels?
  
  And what can we see in Greece or Spain or Italy or Ireland that suggests that penalties imposed by the EU will actually be accepted with submission? Surely the austerity programmes that have been imposed in order to get help under the existing terms have been bad enough.
  
  Of course having mentioned the Anglo-Saxons, in AS England, as in Thirties Abyssinia, it was still common practice for people who could not meet their debts to sell themselves into slavery in order to pay them off- working off the indebtedness to their master to regain their freedom. To make that choice for yourself is one thing, to be enslaved by others is quite another.
  
  Cass

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