Britain As a World Power: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Six)

Britain As a World Power: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Six)

According to news reports, Tony Blair is to give a speech today in which he will put the case for Britain retaining a role as a “major player on the world stage” (sounds like himself after leaving his post as PM), i.e. remaining what you might call a ‘world power’. In Blair’s view, this is important above all in the context of the fight against global terrorism, whereby Britain has a duty – alongside its allies – to stand up for the values it believes in.

Most people would agree that it’s important to try to defeat homicidal terrorist organisations and prevent any further atrocities such as 9/11 or the July 2005 London bombings. However, most British people would now, I think, be sceptical that the best way to do this is to send our troops to former outposts of the British Empire such as Afghanistan and Iraq to wage futile wars we cannot win, in the usual sense of the term.

But I’m not intending to enter the debate over the ‘War on Terror’ here. What Mr Blair’s sense of Britain’s global mission exemplifies, it seems to me, is what I termed the ‘British’ value of ‘ethical imperialism’ (see the second blog in this series, dated 3 December). The idea that Britain in and of itself – irrespective of the degree to which our European allies are prepared to co-operate with this mission – has a moral duty to remain a world power and help lead the struggle against the evil of terrorism is a clear inheritance of the British Empire and the ethical purpose that Britain always strived to bestow upon its imperialism. This purpose was then – and is now increasingly once more becoming – one of establishing and maintaining a particular Western form of civilisation, which elsewhere I’ve referred to as ‘Christo-liberalism’: an ambiguous combination of social and economic liberalism with an ethics and humanistic spirituality derived from (but not necessarily completely consonant with) traditional Christian beliefs.

Wanting to help defeat murderous terrorism, and maintain international peace and security, is one thing. But with Blair, this comes with a mission: ultimately, that of defending and perpetuating a vision of Britain’s very identity as in some sense indissociably bound up with Christo-liberal values and the future of Christo-liberal civilisation. Whether this set of values is in itself coherent and capable of building cultural integration and national unity within Britain is a debate in itself. Whether this set of values is the flagpole on which British forces should be pinning the Union Jack in battles against Muslims (as if this could defeat ‘Islamist’ ideology rather than inflaming it) is of course another.

But really, is it sustainable for Britain (or should that be Tony Blair?) to keep posturing as a world player? In the business world, most people agree that in the era of globalisation, the real powers in the 21st century – along with the USA – will be Brazil, China, India and Russia. Islamism could be seen as an attempt to reunite the Arab-Muslim world into a rival power to these massive states. Curiously, Afghanistan and Iraq are frontier lands between the Arab-Muslim world and three of those 21st century powers.

Dear old Little Britain, on its own, doesn’t have a prayer. Don’t we need to reinvest our energies, and – in the context of the threat of climate change – energy, into trying to build a sustainable economy and security situation in partnership with our European neighbours?