Conflict averse – but we still need armed forces that work
Multicultural Britain is reluctant to engage in foreign wars and mismanaged military interventions are to blame
One of the many enthralling books I’ll never write is called The Politics of Diaspora. I thought of it again today when I read the Guardian’s level-headed report that multicultural Britain is increasingly reluctant to engage in overseas military interventions, especially those that go badly.
The impact of the global diaspora living here, all those newcomers from different parts of the world, are part of that trend which is worrying defence planners, according to Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill’s report. Many come from once-colonised places and Muslims are particularly sensitive to what they detect (sometimes wrongly) as a bias towards interventions that kill other Muslims.
Like Balti curry, it’s an instance of the law of unintended consequences. But it’s also quite a big leap from conflict aversion to Seumas Milne’s proposal today that, since British troops are finally withdrawing from Germany almost 70 years after the death of Hitler, we should consider asking the Americans to go home from East Anglia (and GCHQ?) too. Gosh, whose hand do we expect to hold if the political weather turns nasty? François Hollande’s? His are already full (of women).
But Ministry of Defence concerns and familiar neutralist arguments (remember the Rapacki plan are part of a wider secular trend in our society that is growing I was about to write “post-imperial” trends there and that’s certainly one reason in play. But disdain for costly foreign wars that spilled British – and foreign blood – were often unpopular in the imperial era too, as they are in below-the-line comments in the Guardian.
The Crimean and Boer wars attracted huge criticism in Queen Victoria’s reign – both self-interested protest about higher taxes and the more idealistic kind. The centenary of 1914, a not wholly futile conflict, will fuel public disaffection, as it should. What a slaughter, what a waste!
So it’s understandable that people feel the money could and should be better spent on schools, roads and hospitals, that the research funds should go to life-saving and enhancing discoveries, not to an even nastier version of the M16 rifle or the Challenger tank. I once heard Jesse Jackson aske a campaign audience how many of them owned a VCR (video machines were once our DVDs) and how many owned cruise missiles? When he got the inevitable answer, this ever-witty man explained: “That’s it, you see. The Taiwanese make the VCRs, while we [the US] make the cruise missiles.”
All true, but I never got the impression that the Rev Jackson was ever anything other than an American patriot and certainly not a pacifist. But the economic case against what Tony Blair famously hailed “liberal interventionism” – here’s Blair’s under-reported Chicago speech from April 1999 – get stronger as the UK economy weakens in comparison to the rising states of Asia, Africa and South America.
Mismanagement of some interventions serves to intensify what I …read more
