David Reynolds - Island Stories - Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit

Here were hints of how Brexit might be seen in historical perspective: as the latest attempt to resist a continental tyrant, or as the chance to resume a global role that had been rudely interrupted by joining the EU. But neat historical analogies are not adequate. Nor are simplified benchmarks like 1940 or 1973. We need to probe more deeply what is still often called ‘our island story’ – and to do so with greater geographical breadth and over a longer time span – in order to gain some perspective on the Brexit malaise.

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Our Island Story was the title of Henrietta Marshall’s best-selling History of England for Boys and Girls , first published in 1905. In 2010 the education secretary Michael Gove told the Tory party conference that he would ‘put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum’, so that ‘all pupils will learn our island story’. In 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron lauded Marshall’s stirring account of the country’s inexorable progress towards liberty, law and parliamentary government. [6] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. But today a simple ‘Whiggish’ narrative is implausible. This is a book about ‘stories’, plural – about different ways in which to see our complicated past. In particular, we need to move beyond the idea of a self-contained ‘island’, portrayed as adopting various roles over the centuries – empire, Europe, the globe – as if these could be tried on and then taken off, like a suit of clothes. In reality, ‘we’ have been ‘made’ by empire, Europe and the world as much as the other way round.

And the ‘we’ – the United Kingdom – has also been a shifting entity, a historically conflicted archipelago, comprising more than six thousand islands, and not a unitary fixed space occupied by a people whom many in England still tend to call, interchangeably, ‘British’ or ‘English’. [7] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. In particular, ‘our island story’ omits Ireland – ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as George Bernard Shaw entitled his satirical comedy of 1904 about an English con man who dupes Irish villagers into mortgaging their homes so he can turn the place into an amusement park. Ireland was brought under English rule in the Norman period but never really subdued, despite the Acts of Union in 1801. Its centuries of turmoil and tragedy, in turn, had a profound impact on the island of Britain.

This, then, is a book about history, framed by geography. But it is also a book about ways of thinking, because being ‘islanded’ is a state of mind. [8] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. The English Channel did not always seem a great divide: for four centuries the Anglo-Norman kings ruled a domain that straddled it and treated water as a bridge rather than a barrier. The sense of ‘providential insularity’ came later, as a product of England’s Protestant Reformation, followed by several centuries of war against the continental Catholic ‘other’, embodied in Spain and then France. As the power of Protestantism waned in twentieth-century Britain, providential insularity was given a new lease of life by two wars against Germany, and especially by the way that 1940 has become inscribed in national history and popular memory.

Nor would the ‘island’ narrative have proved so enthralling had medieval English kings not created such a strong state, which they then tried to impose by force on their neighbours. The Welsh were incorporated in the 1530s, the Scots not until 1707, but thereafter – during the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries – the London government effectively directed the whole of ‘our’ island of Britain. Yet making the ‘other island’ across the Irish Sea ‘British’ as well proved a far more difficult task. The English failed to do so, but the struggle ebbed and flowed for centuries, costing several million lives through war and famine. At points along the way the ‘Irish Question’ also tested the unity of Britain itself – in the 1640s, for instance, when it was the catalyst for civil war, and in the Home Rule crisis before 1914. In 1920, after the brutal war of independence, it resulted in the partitioning of the island of Ireland in two between an independent Catholic state and an embattled, Protestant-dominated Ulster clinging on to its Britishness within the UK.

In the mid-1960s the rancorous issues of partition and sectarianism escalated into the three-decade long ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, whose brutal violence was quelled only by the Good Friday agreement of 1998. This brought a ragged peace to Ulster and also redefined the political geometry of Ireland, opening up the border between the two states. Yet during the EU referendum debate, the Conservative and Unionist Party closed its eyes to recent history. Only after the vote to leave the EU did it start to grapple with the profound implications that Brexit would have for Northern Ireland, the peace process and the unity of the UK.

By the end of the twentieth century, both the Good Friday agreement and the institution of devolved governments in Scotland and Wales presaged a different set of relationships between and within the two main islands. In England the apparent indifference of London to the socio-economic problems of the regions, especially in the north, played a significant part in the Leave victory in 2016, and the failure of the Westminster Parliament to resolve – or even address – the challenges of Brexit aggravated this sense of alienation. Yet the saga of Britishness – forged by war and burnished by retelling – continues to exert immense power, whether deployed by politicians or dramatised in movies. Equally potent are the individual national stories of the Scots, Welsh and Irish – even of the English without the others [9] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. – all reinvigorated by the crisis of the Union. In a struggle for the future, the past really matters. Yet not just the past of the two islands and their tangled relations with continental Europe. The global dimension is equally important.