The Politics of Pain: Post-War England and the Rise of Nationalism by Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole spins a dizzying, intellectually bracing and mind-opening tale in his new book.
Explaining the “why” of Brexit, O’Toole traces its roots to deep British psychological traits, illuminated by rich perspectives from history (the 100 Years War to World War II) and literary references ranging from Shakespeare to post-World War II novels.
From this often “sporty,” sometimes smile-producing and incisive history comes the compelling explanation for me of the “why” of Brexit. It raises important questions and demands of the British people (and all of us) for the future.
At the outset, the book recounts Britain’s tentative, reluctant entry into the Common Market. It recalls that it did not get off to a good start. The decade after the U.K. joined was, in fact, “the most dreadful of the post-war era, a litany of racial conflict in England, nationalist discontent in Scotland and Wales, war in Ireland and perpetual strikes everywhere.” The years in which Britain decided to join and then settled into membership of the Common Market were notably “panicky.”
A feeling grew that England had become a victim, and how unfair that was, with all they had done for the Continent.
Three conditions combined: the disappointed expectations (the positives of belonging to the Common Market were not emphasized); the need for a scapegoat (the Common Market); and the erosion of the welfare state. Together, they called out for an action that would set Britain free and reclaim its independent glory.
A feeling grew seeing the U.K. as a “vassal”—a vassal of the Continent, especially Germany—yet still imbued with pride.
O’Toole asserts Britain was playing the role simultaneously of the “underdog” and the “over dog,” fueled by some by the idea of a reinvigorated Anglo empire.
For many, Brexit came to be seen as imperial England’s last stand. The Brexit campaign put together two fears: the loss of Britain’s status after 1945, being the older one; losing the privilege of whiteness as immigration increased being the more recent.
For people who feel anxious about losing their status, self-pity is attractive because it contains righteous anger with assurance. You are reassured because you know you deserve a great deal. You’re righteously angry because, for some reason, you have not been getting what you so obviously deserve.
This same dynamic explains the appeal of many of President Trump’s supporters.
In Britain’s case, it was the EEC acting as a virtual colonial oppressor, preventing Britain from getting what it deserved, especially recognizing all that it had contributed to the victory in World War II. Many imagined Britain as “a colony, with its own deep traditions that had been annexed by a European super-state.”
O’Toole makes it clear that “being angry about the European Union isn’t a psychosis—it is a mark of sanity. Indeed, anyone who is not disillusioned with the EU is suffering from delusions.” O’Toole calls the Union to task for moving away from “evidence-based economics”; for not recognizing there are 123 million people in the EU at risk of poverty, a quarter of the EU population.
This has been allowed to happen because the fear of social and political chaos went out of the system.”
The EU had forgotten some of its founding precepts. It knew at the beginning that, “if things are not held together by a reasonable expectation that life will get better for ordinary people, they will fall apart.”
O’Toole continues, “Working class communities in England, like their counterparts in most of the EU, are absolutely right to feel they have been abandoned. The distress is real, and Brexit gives the pain a name and a location—immigrants, and Brussels bureaucrats. It counters their sense of powerlessness with a moment of real power—Brexit is, after all, a very big thing to do.”
But, O’Toole concludes, clearly showing where he stands: “It’s still self-harm. For the cynical leaders of the Brexit campaign, the freedom they desire is the freedom to dismantle the environmental, social and labor protections that they call ‘red tape.’ They want to sever the last restraints on the very market forces that have caused the pain. They offer a jagged razor of incoherent English nationalism to distress then-excluded communities. It is exhilarating and empowering. It makes English hearts beat faster and the blood flow more quickly—even it’s their own blood that’s flowing.”
The most surprising thing I took away from the book is O’Toole’s well-documented assertion that underlying the drive for Brexit was the English people’s rapid drive to choose “to be English rather than British and, therefore, becoming alienated from British governance.”
He cites several research studies that show a dramatic turn in recent years on the English population prioritizing an English over a British identity. These were not rogue studies. In some parts of England, particularly the Northeast and Northwest, the contrast is overwhelming. Not so much in London. There was little recognition of this shift in the mainstream and political discourse even though it was going on in the minds and hearts of Englishmen. Interestingly, the Scots and Welsh identified the layer of government most influencing their lives to be their own country; almost none the EU. England for years was the exception.
In part, O’Toole believes this has grown from the establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999 and other “small nation liberation movements.” I would note the same development occurred in Russia post 1989 as it drew back to its singular individual identity as Russia rather than being part of the Soviet Union.
With this as background, O’Toole reaches the rather unexpected conclusion that, unable to exit Britain, the English did the next best thing and left the EU. “The long history of displacing on to the European Union the unresolved anxieties of England made possible a deft transference: if you can’t secede from Britain, secede from Europe.” I am unable to judge the correctness of this conclusion. But it is worth considering.
Stepping back, O’Toole views Brexit as a “gesture based on something imaginary: an enormous overstatement of the power of the EU on the governance of England. Something big has been erased but nothing has really been revealed. Englishness is no better expressed after the Brexit vote than it was before it.”
As an aside, there is an aspect of the support for Brexit which reminds me of the current situation in the United States. O’Toole cites as a “great mystery of Brexit” being “the bond it created between working class revolt on the one side and upper class self-indulgence on the other. There would seem to be an unbridgeable gulf of style and manner, let alone of actual economic interests” between the two groups.
There is a similarity here between the support we’re seeing for Trump in the U.S. between many in the working class who believe he is the answer to their frustrations and many of the most wealthy who see what he is accomplishing economically through the elimination of regulations and tax reform, to be to their and the nation’s advantage.
There is another analogy between contemporary British and U.S. politics. We’re seeing a showman arrive on the scene in Britain in Boris Johnson, just as we have in the U.S. with Donald Trump. O’Toole explains the breakdown in the effectiveness of the major parties as an explanation for this. The Tories and Labor in Britain; the Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S.; at least the traditional wings. This has allowed the emergence of populist leaders who would have been inconceivable in more stable eras. In fact, the same thing occurred in Germany in the 1930s with Hitler and in Italy earlier than that with Mussolini.
*****
The final brief section of O’Toole’s book presents a spirited call to action.
“England can no longer afford an eccentric ruling class. The harm is all too real: the indulgence of eccentricity brought clownish absurdity and self-centered recklessness into the heart of political power. Figures who would have been enjoyably ridiculous in a Dickens novel now get to determine a nation’s fate for a generation.
The other toxic waste from the fated myths of English character is pain—as—redemption.”
There is an antidote, O’Toole writes. “There is nothing innately shameful about the idea of England as a distinct political community—why should it not be one? Indeed, it is perfectly possible to see the re-emergence of England as the final stage in the dismantling of Empire. There is surely enough in the English radical, socialist and liberal traditions to inspire a more positive sense of national belonging. There is surely in one of the world’s great cultures, enough wit and energy and creativity and humor to infuse Englishness with hope and joy instead of pain and self-pity.”
“A nation state is, first and foremost, a shelter. In the hard rain of neo-liberal globalization, people know they cannot be fully protected. But they do reasonably expect an umbrella over their heads. The problem is that the umbrella is broken...for too many, hollow. Brexit is part of a much larger phenomenon and it speaks to two much wider truths. One is that it is not possible simultaneously to ask people to trust the state and to tell them that the state has no business in any part of their lives in which the market wants free rein. The other is that the gross inequality produced by neo-liberalism is increasingly incompatible with democracy and, therefore, in liberal democracies, with political stability.”
O’Toole concludes that “what we’ve seen with the lid off is the truth that Brexit is much less about Britain’s relationship with the EU than it is about Britain’s relationship with itself. It is the projection outwards of an inner turmoil. A part of that process of change must be reserved for a more sense of Englishness. In order to move forward, England has to move on. It has to dismantle the archaic political system that effectively disenfranchises millions of voters, to rid itself of the vestiges of feudalism, to generally allow communities to ‘take back control’ of their lives. It has to reanimate the spirit of social reform that created its great liberal and social democratic movements. If there is ever to be a time after Brexit, it will come when the people who share the current British state really do begin to negotiate with each other, collectively and honestly, who they are and where they belong.”
This short summary could serve as a coda, I believe, for much of what we need to do in the United States, today and tomorrow and in the years ahead.
It is no small task. It will require us to re-establish trust in one another and between our parties. It will require strong people to step up and brave the challenge and vicissitudes of seeking and gaining public office and then work together to implement improvements that benefit all the peoples
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