Guardian, May 20 1999 Richard Gott thinks he sees just an old-fashioned British imperialist behind the righteous Tony Blair THE DRIVE TO INTERVENE The historian AJP Taylor used to argue, wisely, that present events help us to understand the past and not the other way round. So little purpose is served by invoking the appeasement policy of the 30s or the genocide of the 40s to explain what is happening in the Balkans in the 90s. What we might now better comprehend, in the light of the events of the past two months, is why people volunteered with such enthusiasm 100 years ago to fight against the Boers in 1899, and why so many went happily off to war in 1914, thinking it would all be "over by Christmas". It was "over by Christmas" in 1918, by which time most of the early volunteers were dead, and the British empire had received a blow from which it never recovered. Both those wars, as is the case today, caused deep and agonising rifts within the ranks of liberals and socialists. Some joined in the war fever, others held aloof. During the Boer war, the small buy influential group of pro war "Liberal imperialists", operating in parliament, and the press, were known by their opponents as the "Limps", a suitably disparaging tile which might usefully be revived. It is a tradition to which today’s phalanx of pro-war columnists and leader-writers in the Guardian clearly belong. Among their number then was Herbert Asquith, a pro-war politician whom Tony Blair may well increasingly come to resemble. Asquith eventually got his chance to be the Liberal party's war leader in 1914, and was rudely removed from office two years later, never to enjoy high office again. Yet for most of this century the accepted historical wisdom concludes that the opponents of war were proved right in the end, a fact that may explain why almost every British historian today is in the anti-war camp. The Boer war, with its concentration camps and its slaughter of civilians, is now perceived to have been pointless and barbaric, and newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian were bravely right to oppose it. The First World War, too, is rarely remembered today as an exemplary war that was worth fighting. John Morley, the Liberal former viceroy of India, who resigned from the cabinet on the first day, on the grounds, as he put it, that he was 'a notorious peace-man and little Englander', is thought to have made a wise and honourable decision, as is Ramsay MacDonald, who came out in active opposition. The ardent bombing supporters of today, suffering from the historical amnesia typical of the age, do not care to invoke the memory of these constant wars. Confounded by the unpredicted course of this new conflict, which has unleashed an unimaginable disaster undreamt of at the start, they hunger for battle on the ground, while remaining curiously reluctant to abandon their almost religious enthusiasm for aerial bombardment. They seem to forget that even during the Second World War a powerful movement of progressive opinion arose in Britain, led by the churches, to oppose the saturation bombing of Hitler's cities, on both moral and practical grounds. Yet the critics of the bombing proved to be right; the bombing of the Germans merely reinforced their will to continue the war. Today's bombing enthusiasts, unable to find convincing arguments to support their case, have concentrated their attacks on those who have long supported non-intervention in Balkan affairs, accusing them of moral blindness or of not understanding the bright new future of 'humanitarian interventionism' that beckons. Yet there is nothing new about this project. It is a throwback to the colonialism of the last century, when the imperial powers intervened at will in the affairs of independent states and peoples. Today's British Limps threaten a return to those old imperialisms, recommending intervention whenever they feel that an individual sovereign state is not behaving according to their definition of how states should behave. At first they thought they had the United States with them, but now, finding President Clinton reluctant to engage American ground troops in a Balkan war, they pour scorn on his lack of leadership and his failure to pick up the white man's burden. Clinton at least has some sense of history. He had the decency to acknowledge, when flying in to Europe for a couple of days, that he came from a country built up on ethnic cleansing. Milosevic is but a neophyte, he implied, in a very ancient cult. Clinton spoke movingly of the Native Americans who had been driven from their homes in the 19th century, and he suggested that America was still living in the shadow of those appalling events. Yet Tony Blair has never so much as hinted that Britain was responsible, during more than 200 years, for some of the most dreadful, institutional ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen: poisoning, shooting, slaughtering, and - yes - bombing, the indigenous populations of the British empire. An outsider might conclude from Britain's contemporary war fever that a powerful imperial drive still survives in the British cultural make-up. Two significant historical strands in national life, the military and the missionary, are still very much to the fore, and Tony Blair has clearly received a strong dose of both. We want to tell foreigners who to worship and how to behave, and we still want to use our strong right hand to smash them into submission if they disobey. That is old-fashioned imperialism resurrected. It is a curious time to revive this particular example of heritage culture, for never before has the bulk of the population been so obviously in a non-imperialist mood. No one really knows or cares any longer about foreign affairs. Newspapers have given up providing their readers with information about what goes on in distant parts of the world, for they believe that their readers would be bored. We have lost the informed elite that ran the empire, and we have not replaced it with a mass electorate educated to pass judgment about, let alone to run, imperial wars. For much of the past half century, in the specific case of foreign aid, well-meaning people have wrestled with arguments over foreign intervention. As a result of this long debate, almost everyone now knows that providing assistance from outside is endlessly problematic. You cannot bomb people from the air with food parcels, you cannot shower them with gold, you cannot even help to provide them with water, without asking a whole series of questions, of which the most significant is who will benefit? If you send food, you distort the economics of the local farmers' market; if you provide debt relief, you bail out the already wealthy banks. And if you want to control the farmers and the banks and the landowners, to make sure that they behave in the liberal and progressive way you would like them to, you have to set up a protectorate, however disguised it may be, to ensure that your wishes are carried out. This is what the Liberal imperialists now wish to construct, with the help of Nato, in the Balkans. The European empires and the Soviet Union have both disappeared from the map, and you might think this would be a good moment for the heirs to the imperial tradition to cut their coat according to their cloth and to abandon their American crutch. With the open hostility of China, India and Russia to Nato's war in the Balkans, it is now the manifest and expressed desire of the great majority of the population of the world. Richard Gott is the author (with Martin Gilbert) of The Appeasers. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
