Abstract
The Second World War marked the beginning of the end of the state-empire system of the British Empire — the dissolution of a set of territories accumulated over several centuries took only a couple of decades — and the British elite and wider population of the hitherto central territory, the British Isles, were confronted with the task of making sense of events and making sense of the place in the world of their newly constituted, territorially limited nation-state polity — this process involved both denial, thus the empire was downgraded as never essential, and confection, thus the newly restricted territory was reimagined as the unproblematic continuation of a long-established polity. Much of the work of the elite was pragmatic — inevitably — first, the attempt to secure so far as they could continuing economic access to their lost overseas sphere — then the parallel task of the reconstruction of state, society and economy within their newly delimited domestic territorial sphere — and finally some of their work was cultural, that is, the construction of novel narratives able to mobilize and order their local population — it is here that the occasion of the ideas of‘the war’ and ‘wartime’ can be found — together they came to provide a new foundation myth for the polity as the unfolding mixture of elite denial and confection gave rise to the idea of a ‘continuing Britain’.
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Notes
The term has been popularized by Joseph Nye but a better source is Susan Strange’s structures of power, including ‘knowledge’ — both science and culture — S. Strange 1988 States and Markets, London, Pinter.
After the style of Norman Davies geographical territory and political unit should be distinguished — thus the geographical territory of British Isles have has been home to a number of polities — the most recent dramatic change was the collapse of empire — what was left was the pursuit of statehood in the peripheries (what is familiarly known as decolonization) and the creation of a post-empire state in the hitherto core — this is usually veiled by speaking of a ‘continuing Britain’ which once did not have colonies, but then did, and a bit later did not — the claim to continuity is false — the business of reconstruction in the core was as significant as it was in the peripheries — see Norman Davies 1997 Europe: A History, London, Pimlico
Norman Davies 2000 The Isles: A History, London, Papermac.
Cf. Alan Milward 1992 The European Rescue of the Nation State, London, Routledge.
Tony. Judt 2005 Post-War: A History of Europe since 1945, London, Allen Lane, see especially the annex on historical memory — a mix of active remembering and equally active forgetting.
In respect of ‘finding a role’ David M. McCourt 2011 ‘Rethinking Britain’s “Role in the World” for a New Decade’ in British Journal of Politics and International Relations 13, offers a Wittegensteinian-informed critique of the elite’s preoccupation with ‘Britain’s role in the world’ and notes that academe is disposed to reflect back to the elite this same preoccupation — McCourt notes that all this does not help useful thinking or policy-making; and whilst one might expect foot-dragging from an essentially conservative elite, the same is true of the Labour Party, discussed in Mathew.
Broad and Oliver Daddow 2010 ‘Half Remembered Quotations from Half forgotten Speeches’ in British Journal of Politics and International Relations 12.
On this, see D. Urwin 1997 A Political History of Western Europe Since 1945, London, Longman; British elite opposition to the nascent European Union (EU) was deep-seated.
These ‘white dominions’ also had to ‘relocate and reimagine’ themselves — on shifting identities within the Australian population, see G. Whitlock and D. Carter eds. 1992 Images of Australia, University of Queensland Press.
A slow business, not especially wanted in Canada, particularly given a giant neighbour to the south; see David. Cannadine 2011 Making History Now and Then, London, Palgrave, Chapter 8 ‘Dominion: Britain’s Imperial Past in Canada’s Imperial Past’.
There are many texts of the Second World War — one that summarily grasps the catastrophe which Europeans contrived for themselves is offered by M. Mazower 1998 Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, Penguin
see also T. Garton-Ash 1998‘Can Europeans Really Find a Way of Living together in Democracies other than Living Apart’ in London Review of Books 20.18, 17 September 1998.
There were debates as to how — Edgerton 2011 (p.31) reviews options — ’appeasement plus military upgrade’ looked to accommodate Germany — a rational strategy (recall E.H. Carr 1939 [2001] The Twenty Year Crisis, London, Palgrave) — other strategies ranged from pacifist through to ‘rearmament and resistance’ — Edgerton, focusing on science and the economy, argues that the British Empire was very strong — early defeats were read back into time as unpreparedness — this is wrong, they were prepared, they just got defeated — the myth of unpreparedness continues down to the present day, obscuring the actual strength — that said — origins and character of the Second World War are not concern of this text — there are well established debates —
pursued in P.W Preston 2010 National Pasts in Europe and East Asia, London, Routledge — what happened was a general crisis, the collapse of the system of state empires.
See David Edgerton 2006 Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970, Cambridge University Press
David Edgerton 2011 Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, London, Allen Lane.
Precipitating the eventual collapse of the empire — see C. Bayly and T. Harper 2004 Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–45, London, Allen Lane; C. Bayly and T. Harper 2007 Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire, London, Allen Lane.
On the lines of metaphor and their plausibility/implausibility, see S.O. Rose 2003 Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945, Oxford University Press.
W. Webster 2005 Englishness and Empire 1939–1965, Oxford University Press.
Minimal impact thesis — argues, roughly, that the empire was accumulated haphazardly and disposed of largely indifferently — that is, empire was always incidental to Britain (Webster 2005, p.2) — the position has been called ‘rightwing propaganda’ — see J.M. MacKenzie 2001 ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’ (p.23) in Stuart Ward ed. 2001 British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester University Press.
Tony Judt 2002 ‘The Past is another Country: Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe’ in J-W Muller ed. Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, Cambridge University Press
Tony Judt 2008 ‘What have we Learned, if anything?’ in New York Review of Books 55.7
Tony Judt 2008 Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, London, Heinemann
Norman Davies 1997 Europe: A History, London, Pimlico.
On India/Pakistan, see Salman Rushdie 1981 Midnights Children, London, Jonathan Cape
Salman Rushdie 1983 Shame, London, Jonathan Cape.
On Malaya — see Anthony Burgess 1981 The Long Day Wanes, London, Penguin.
On decolonization, see M. Shipway 2007 Decolonization and Its Impact, Oxford, Blackwell ; on sub-Saharan Africa see Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest novel series.
J. Paxman 2011 Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British, London, Viking, pp.6–7
recall also David Cannadine 2001 Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire, London, Allen Lane
also Tom Nairn 2011 2nd ed. The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, London, Verso.
On the exchange see Robert Skidelski 2004 John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946, London, Macmillan.
On Bevin, see David Marquand 1989 The Progressive Dilemma, London, Fontana.
On the relationship see C. Hitchens 1990 Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, London, Vintage.
Stephen George ed. 1992 Britain and the European Community: The Politics of Semi-Detachment, Oxford University Press.
Finally, it seems, to be withdrawn fully in 2019 in the context of the 2013 government cuts — see M. Hastings ‘It is Rash to Blunt the UK’s Fighting Edge’ in Financial Times 8 March 2013.
In retrospect presented as the most successful period of Labour government — Prime Minister Clement Atlee is revered as a key figure — an iffy judgement — see P. Addison 1986 ‘Darling Clem’ in London Review of Books 8.7 17 April 1986.
See Patrick Wright 1985 On Living in an Old Country, London, Verso
see also review Paul Addison ‘Getting on’ in London Review of Books 8.17, 09 October 1986.
On the scale of the battle as revealed in casualty numbers, Norman Davies 2006 Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory, London, Macmillan.
Memoirs of the events offer clearer insight, for example: Paul Richey 2001 Fighter Pilot, London, Cassel
Irene Nemirovsky 2007 Suite Francais, London, Vintage
Anonymous 2006 A Woman in Berlin, London, Virago
and Vasily Grossman 2006 A Writer at War: With the Red Army 1941–45, London, Pimlico; on the camps see Gita Sereny — Also available in the arts
for example: Kazuo Ishiguro 1989 The Remains of the Day, London, Faber (also film)
Joseph Heller 1964 Catch22, London, Corgi (also film)
Kurt Vonnegut 1969 Slaughterhouse Five, New York, Delacorte Press (also film)
and Jonathan Littel 2009 The Kindly Ones, London, Chatto.
Davies 2006; W.I. Hitchcock 2008 The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, New York, The Free Press.
This characterization is from Patrick Wright 1885 On Living in an Old Country, London, Verso; on this see William Boyd ‘In the Days before Bond’ in the Guardian 22 October 2011 which argues that Ian Fleming’s early death from banal excess — booze and cigarettes — was symptomatic of a life which never recovered from the war years — action had made a difference, the rest was by comparison, of little account.
See D. Edgerton ‘Declinism’ in London Review of Books 18.5, 07 March 1996 — plus the subsequent exchanges with Corelli Barnett.
J. Paxman 2011 Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, London, Viking, p.286.
A. Leftbridge 2011 Losing Small Wars, Yale University Press.
Noted by many, see, for example, the Preface to B. Porter 2004 The Absent Minded Imperialists, Oxford University Press.
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Preston, P.W. (2014). Foundation Myths: The War, Wartime and ‘Continuing Britain’. In: Britain After Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023834_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023834_2
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