There were always two types of empire. There were
those like the British and the French that spread overseas. British and French
people would move to Delhi or Saigon and pretend they were living at home only
it was rather hotter. These empires were always fragile. The other type of
empire spread from a small centre, but did not, for the most part, spread
overseas. The Russian Empire and the Chinese Empire are still largely intact
because where they spread was contiguous. The same, dare I say it, might be
said for the American Empire moving from a coastal strip to embrace most of a
continent by means of colonisation.
A feature of both the Russian/Soviet and the Chinese
Empires under communism was that there was always a pretence that they were
democratic and that their various parts were autonomous or even independent. Both
the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic held seats in the UN in 1945. So too did the countries that would
later make up the Warsaw Pact. But the Polish October and Hungarian Revolution
in 1956 ably demonstrated that these places had neither sovereignty nor any
real freedom. But this had already been made clear in 1953 when the German
Democratic Republic, with the help of Soviet tanks crushing demonstrators, had
shown its name to involve a contradiction.
The citizens of these empires could either pretend
along with their rulers that they lived in free democratic societies, taking
part in elections, campaigning for this or that or even trying themselves to become
part of the ruling elite, or they could just ignore as best they could the
whole thing. Just as the various parts
of the Soviet Empire pretended that they were free and democratic, so the
people, for the most part, pretended to take part. This was the only sensible
way to live. There was no point battering your head against a door that wouldn’t
open. Rather the key to existence was to retreat into private life, say what
needed to be said, play the game and keep your real thoughts to yourself.
Eventually patience was rewarded. While the Russian Empire
did not completely collapse, it turned out that by some miracle it was possible
for Warsaw Pact countries to once more become sovereign nation states and even
more miraculously it was possible for parts of the Soviet Union to leave. It
would have been utterly pointless for Latvians and Estonians to have attempted
to leave the Soviet Union in 1971. To have even suggested it would have been
unwise. My guess is that if the Soviet Union had been able to hold itself
together until Mr Putin reached power then it would have been impossible for
the Soviet Republics to have asserted their sovereignty. But there was a window
of opportunity between 1991 and 2000 when the Russian Empire for the first time
in its history was willing to lose territory without a fight.
It was something of a leap into the dark for the
Soviet Republics. They had to give up their currency (the Soviet rouble) and
the trading relationship they would have with the other members of the Soviet
Union including Russia was suddenly very uncertain. There were also conflicts
and border disputes some of which are still continuing. These have led to the
deaths of nearly 200,000 people. But countries could leave the USSR. They were
allowed to.
But while the Russian Empire reached its peak in1945
and went into decline in 1991 another empire has been rising out of the ashes
of its threefold defeat in 1806, 1918 and 1945. While Russia since the fall of
Constantinople has been the successor to the eastern half of the Roman Empire,
the EU is its successor in the West.
While Latvia was able to leave the USSR in 1991 by
2004 it was already a part of the EU. It had so to speak voluntarily entered
into a prison put its own key in the lock and then chucked it out of the
window.
It must have seemed to the Latvians and all the
other citizens of the EU Empire that they were free and that they had free and
fair elections which might really change things, but just like in the Soviet
Union these were all illusions.
We face momentous events, but it is becoming boring.
If it turns out that we really can’t leave the EU, then it is a subject that is
no more worth studying or writing about than Marxism/Leninism.
If politics in Britain is constrained within
carefully defined limits, then it rapidly becomes clear that certain debates
are pointless. If Britain can’t leave the EU then self-evidently Scotland cannot
properly leave the UK. If the one can be prevented, so too can the other with
rather more ease. I doubt very much that a radical Labour Government would be
allowed to be quite as radical as it thinks it might be. So too I don’t think a
truly conservative, low tax, low public spending, free market Conservative
Party would be allowed. We are left then with the mush that extends from the
Labour moderates to the Conservative moderates. They each believe more or less
the same. It isn’t worth arguing about.
We may still break free. Nothing we would have to
face would be anything like what the former members of the Soviet Union had to
go through in order to gain their freedom. A few traffic jams must be a price
worth paying for the cause that we are supposed to hold higher than any other:
freedom and democracy. But has this cause always just been a pretence? An opium
to get the masses to enlist.
Too much already has been written about the EU. Let
us await events. If it turns out that we are trapped, take comfort from the
fact that there will be other chances. There is no need to wear yellow vests.
Our present politics will not survive the failure completely to leave the EU in
2019, nor indeed, I suspect, will the EU. If Britain can’t leave the EU, then
no-one can. EU citizens will then retreat into private life just like Soviet
citizens before them, but we will wait for the moment when the walls begin to
crumble. I don’t think we will wait that long.
