Blair Does Not Understand History
Linda Colley • The Guardian Newspaper of London

LONDON, 30 July 2003 — The Newspaper’s silly season
approaches. The UK government is closing down. And a
battered prime minister is about to go on vacation.

His now infamous remark that “History will forgive us” did
not stem from any profound interest in the subject. If
anything, it only illustrated yet again his lack of
understanding of what history is — and this has been part
of his problems. Why and how, future historians will surely
ask, did such a consummate politician, possessed of an
impregnable parliamentary majority, as well as
intelligence, industry and fundamental decency, get himself
into so much controversy and mess? What went wrong? Of
course, the pundits and politicians have been asking these
questions incessantly too, and coming up with all sorts of
highly specific answers.

“There has never been a time,” Blair declared during his
recent visit to Washington, “when... a study of history
provides so little instruction for our present day,” and he
was utterly wrong. History cannot tell you what to do. But
in Blair’s case, it might have warned him what to avoid —
and expect.

It might have made him more cautious, for instance, about
what Richard Hofstadter famously called, “the paranoid
style in American politics”. America is a great country.
But, ever since independence, Hofstadter demonstrated,
sections of its political class have repeatedly viewed
“conspiracy as the motive force in historical events”. At
different times, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, Jews and
communists have been identified as the conspirators in
question. Whatever the perceived enemy, the “central
preoccupation” has always been with “a vast, insidious,
preternaturally effective international conspiratorial
network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish
character”. As a result, Americans have been regularly
prone to seeing a “wrestling match between good and evil”
as the “archetypal model of the world struggle”.

This kind of paranoia occurs in many countries and groups.
But in America, Hofstadter argued, it has usually been
prompted by religious and ethnic tension, and is
particularly characteristic of the political right. Does
any of this ring bells? It should. Sept. 11 was an
atrocity, and there are doubtless still more to come.
Heightened security and improved intelligence are certainly
called for. But by representing all this as an epic,
ongoing war against “shadow and darkness” that requires
pre-emptive attacks against sovereign states, it seems
likely that Blair, like Bush, has succumbed to the paranoid
style in American politics, and with far less partisan
benefit.

Embarking upon war is always dangerous for national leaders
because it makes them more than ever at the mercy of
events. When domestic opinion is acutely divided, however,
war can be politically lethal for its makers. In
Washington, Blair joked that at least he wasn’t like Lord
North, the prime minister who lost the American colonies.
But one of the main reasons for this historical defeat was
that North’s fellow Britons were split over the merits of
the war. And North not only lost the colonies; he lost his
job.

For Blair, the past is irrelevant, because this is a new
world facing entirely new dangers. Globalization and WMD
mean, in his view, that all freedom-loving peoples must
necessarily unite under American leadership to defeat the
“virus” of terrorism. Individuals at home, and foreign
countries such as France, which analyze the world and its
dangers differently, are briskly dismissed as
anti-American. Yet it could simply be that their
understanding of the past — and consequently of the present
— is rather better than his.

Globalization is not remotely new; it has been occurring,
at differing rates and with differing degrees of scale, for
centuries. But in the past, as now, it has not always
produced a community of interests. To employ this
phenomenon as a reason for freezing Britain into the role
of battered Boy Wonder to America’s global Batman is
therefore distinctly questionable. Much of the British
public’s alienation, not just from Blair, but from
politicians in general, stems from a sense that, as one man
put it to me: “We’ve been sold.” There is deep resentment
that politicians have proceeded so far with the European
Union without consulting the public. And there is anger
that so much British policy — as over Iraq - seems to be
determined in Washington, and not always for obvious
national interests.

This failure to carry the people along is in part due to
Labour (and Conservative) politicians’ arrogant and
self-serving notion that voters don’t care about foreign
affairs. But the more fundamental reason, once again, is
structural and historical. Over the past century, Britain
has moved from being a “disguised republic”, as Walter
Bagehot called it, to having a barely disguised and
insufficiently provided-for presidency. Many of Blair’s
current problems are due to the fact that he is much more
than a prime minister, without being an acknowledged,
full-blown president.

At one level, this means that he can disregard large
sections of Parliament and the public and embark upon a
deeply controversial war, and that, unlike the Americans,
we lack the means to interrogate him and call him to
account. But the insufficient transformation process from
prime ministership to presidency also means that Blair is
desperately overstretched and unable to govern as well as
he might. His ravaged face, as well as his uncertain record
of reform in his second term, makes this point. Were he to
have a proper vice president, and the massed ranks of
expert advisers a president can command, Blair might be
more able to make the trains run on time at home, and
perhaps be less inclined to embark on messianic adventures
abroad.

However satisfying it may be to some to shower criticism on
him, we badly need a deeper, longer view. And so does he.
Blair may be in part responsible for his current problems.
But it is long-term trends and failings abroad and at home
that underlie them. Blair is instinctively impatient of
history. But like the US troops in Iraq, who are now
wrestling with the same sort of problems British imperial
occupiers experienced there last century, he is still
constrained by, and entangled in, history. As are we all.



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