Authors: Ian Buruma
The battle against Europe contains a nasty edge of nativism. I picked up a pamphlet in which one Professor Marsland explained that democracy, tolerance, and honesty were “specifically British values” under attack from Hampstead intellectuals and
The Guardian
newspaper. I thought once again of Voltaire and his coconut seeds. Once people talk of political freedoms as purely native fruits, you know that freedom is no longer the point. Voltaire and Montesquieu recognized that liberties were protected by laws, not values. That is why they admired Britain. The idea that society should be ruled by specific national values was in fact the mark of Continental tyrannies, not of British liberalism.
Among the pamphlets I received advertising fringe meetings was one that announced a celebration of the Britishness of British fish. This sounded intriguing. I didn’t know fish had nationalities. One advantage of being a fish, you would have thought, was the freedom to cross borders.
The celebration was held in an airless reception room in one of the
seafront hotels. The room was packed with people, some of whom were drunk and clearly distressed. Fishermen, like the miners before them, were losing jobs. Modern technology and improved efficiency had reduced the need for large numbers of them. And fish stocks were running dangerously low. The European Union tried to tackle the problem by establishing fishing quotas for each country. One of the ways around these quotas is for fishermen to buy foreign boats and thus the right to fish in foreign waters. British fishermen, for example, have made considerable sums of money by selling their boats to Spaniards. This made it easy for demagogues to blame the plight of local fishermen on those foreigners who catch British cod by flying the Union Jack.
In the crowded room, a middle-aged gentleman in a tweed suit was trying to calm down the noisy fisherfolk, dressed in leather jackets and jeans. Even as he did so, the speakers were doing their best to work those same people into a frenzy. There was a large banner at the back of the room celebrating Nelson’s victory over the French in 1805. It was illustrated by a picture of the Spanish Armada. “Beat both of them once more,” it read. “Let history repeat itself.” Various speakers were sitting behind a table: Sir Teddy Taylor; Chris Gill, MP; and others, all dressed in immaculate suits.
The speakers made it clear who the enemies were: “Their fleets come as armadas into our waters!” said one. “Foreigners can catch British fish,” said another. “We British,” said a third, “have a historical, cultural, and economic right to our fish.” Sir Teddy Taylor, once again, remembered the war: “I remember how the fishermen were the greatest patriots of all. It makes me weep to think what is being done to them.” A fisherman with a swollen red face, who had been steadily drinking gin straight from the bottle, struggled to his feet and shouted in a Scottish accent: “Why should we throw out our families from our own houses to make room for our neighbors? We have been betrayed by the politicians!” This was greeted with grins behind the table, but when the hollering from the crowd refused to die down, the grins began to freeze over. The gentleman in the tweed suit looked jumpy. The Scottish fisherman gazed round the room with a look of triumph before being pulled to his chair by his wife.
The crowd calmed down a little. But the fisherman’s intervention had changed the mood. The animosity toward foreigners began to turn
toward another target, with greater venom: British traitors in Parliament, those who were lacking in British pride, who had sold out their own people to “Europe.” This provided easy pickings for the men behind the table. “There’s no use in talking to the Europeans,” said one of them. “We must get rid of every MP who betrayed you!” His eyes swiveled around the room. The crowd was getting restless again. A thin man in glasses got up to speak. He had a look of extreme belligerence. The gentleman in the tweed suit asked him to sit down. Several people in the crowd shouted: “Let him speak!” The politicians smirked. The man worked his jaws in silence, waiting for the crowd to be quiet. Then he said: “Treaties don’t bind Parliament to Europe. What binds Parliament is the will of the British people. Parliament is to blame for giving in to Europe. We must take back what Parliament surrendered!”
There was wild applause. A woman standing in front of me was shivering with excitement. The fisherman who had spoken up before took another swig from his bottle and shouted: “I’m not a European fisherman, I’m a British fisherman, and I’m proud of it. I wish some of our politicians were as proud!” After that, the crowd exploded. They yelled and they hooted. Men swore and women shrieked. But this was not happy excitement. These were people in the mood for violence. I felt sorry for the Spanish official standing next to me. He was slowly shaking his head. The politicians behind the table were gloating and whispering. One wetted his lips with a flick of his tongue. The gentleman in the tweed suit was now visibly agitated. He tried to usher the drunken fisherman out of the room, with no effect. “Now look here,” he said, “don’t try and spoil it all.”
It was a bad scene. Not just because these fishermen were being exploited by demagogues; that was unpleasant enough. But what I found most disturbing was how words like “freedom,” “sovereignty,” and “democracy” were being used to work up mob hysteria by men who looked too much like the kind of people Britain had done so much, twice in this century, to defeat.
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under the domed roof of the Hampstead Synagogue as on the occasion of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s memorial service on a blustery morning in January 1998. The grandees were mostly of a liberal, secular kind, as was Berlin himself. But this was an Orthodox synagogue. The men were seated separately from the women. There was Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, and there Lord Annan, looking faintly Russian in a black astrakhan coat, and there Lord Carrington, and Lord Gowrie, whose splendid hair resembled a powdered wig, and, as a touch of peculiar grandeur, Sir Yehudi Menuhin as “representative of Her Majesty the Queen.” There they all were, the great and the good, in electric blue yarmulkes, Garrick Club ties, and trilby hats, standing up as the kaddish was read for a man born in Riga who had always insisted that he was not an Englishman but an Anglophile Jew.
The service was Sir Isaiah’s posthumous way of asserting tradition, of paying ceremonial deference to faith and continuity, without which he believed liberalism could not be sustained. Reason is reason, faith is faith, and in Berlin’s mind, it made no sense to reconcile the two in
some wishy-washy attempt at religious reform. My great-grandfather had worshiped at this synagogue. But it was too late for me to feel unself-conscious there. Whatever sense of ancestral continuity I might have felt, it didn’t run through the synagogue, let alone an Orthodox synagogue. On this Anglo-Jewish occasion, I felt neither Anglo nor Jewish.
Lord Annan, that consummate English grandee, recalled his long friendship with Isaiah Berlin. He spoke with tears in his eyes and a dramatic vibrato. The delivery owed something to the style of John Gielgud in the 1950s Old Vic. The sentiments were of that same generation. Lord Annan remembered how, in the beginning of the war, the continuity of Britain itself was in the balance, and the state of Israel still a distant dream. It was a moving speech, because what was being mourned was the passing not just of a great man but of an idea of England, of Berlin’s England.
A synagogue was a good place for such an act of mourning. For the memorial service brought to mind that other synagogue, built in 1700 by a Quaker in the City of London. Bevis Marks, the Sephardic temple held together by beams donated by Queen Anne, symbolized the tolerant society that had attracted the French
philosophes
. Berlin’s Anglophilia was not so different from Montesquieu’s or Voltaire’s. It, too, was centered round an eighteenth-century ideal of reason, tolerance, and stylish free-thinking, an ideal linked to a potent myth of British exceptionalism, of a free Britain standing alone against Continental tyranny.
No one was more English and yet less English at the same time. That was how the novelist Chaim Raphael described a fictional character based on Isaiah Berlin. In the four years before he died, I used to meet Berlin for lunch at regular intervals, always at the same Italian restaurant, near his Albany flat. He would arrive, a shrunken but always dapper figure in his eighties, wearing a chocolate fedora and a dark gray three-piece suit, which looked a little too big for him. Every time he made a point of studying the menu closely, always to end up ordering—in serviceable Italian—the same simple risotto. He then launched into his famous torrent of talk while slowly crunching his bread roll into tiny bits, which he would scoop into his mouth like a squirrel. His voice was a soft basso and he spoke so fast that I couldn’t
always follow him. I would fix my face in an expression of amusement, hoping it was appropriate. It usually was.
Berlin had cultivated the mannerisms of a prewar Oxford don: the stuttering delivery, the anecdotes, the relish for gossip, the absolute refusal to be too obviously serious. There was something studied about this, as if he were behaving as an Eastern European Anglophile believed an Oxford don should. But there were twists and angles to his conversation that were idiosyncratic. Not only did he produce gossip from the 1930s, breathing life into the sepia snaps imprinted on his voluminous memory, but he would tell sharp little anecdotes about obscure nineteenth-century German thinkers, preferably anti-Semites, as though they were people he had just observed at some dinner party. Like so many others, I was captivated by Berlin’s talk. In a way he was his own greatest creation. Out of his Russian, Jewish, and English materials, he had forged his eccentric version of the perfect Englishman.
Like all forms of Anglophilia, Berlin’s was an ideal, a flattering portrait in the émigré’s mind, gratefully, and sometimes complacently received by those it portrayed. But Berlin’s England, although idealized, was recognizable in his own lifetime. It was Arthur Koestler’s “Davos for internally bruised veterans of the totalitarian age,” the burial ground of Utopian dreams and ideologies, the fabled land of common sense, fairness, and good manners, the revered country governed by decent gentlemen with grand titles and liberal views, that half-mythical place where liberty, humor, and respect for the law always prevailed over the radical search for human perfection. I looked around me, inside the freezing Hampstead Synagogue, at the old men who had come to pay tribute in this oddly orthodox setting, and wondered what was left of Berlin’s England now.
The chief rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, spoke about the end of an era. He meant the demise of a particular generation of mostly Jewish immigrants who fled to the island Davos from various forms of state terror. Many, including Berlin’s father, Mendel, a prosperous timber merchant in Riga, had admired England as a “civilized” place long before they made their move. In fact, however, many of them did a great deal to civilize Britain themselves. Publishing, art history, philosophy, and the writing of British history were transformed by European immigrants. The idea of England as the uniquely stable society in Europe
owes much to Sir Lewis Namier, a Jew from Poland, whom Isaiah Berlin knew well. Listening to the chief rabbi I wondered who would supply the cosmopolitan oxygen now that Berlin’s generation had largely gone. Those known collectively and rather too vaguely as Asians? Or would it be “Europe,” or at least the young Europeans who still come to London for its popular culture and its air of freedom?
Of course the European civilizing mission of the British Isles did not start with twentieth-century refugees. It had been going on since the Romans arrived in 55
B.C
. The image of England as an island of freedom battling European tyranny goes back at least to Tudor times. But the liberties that Anglophiles (and the English themselves) have praised were often inspired by Greek, Roman, Italian, French, and Dutch examples. Britain was neither uniquely democratic nor necessarily always the most democratic European nation. Theodor Fontane, in England during the 1850s, thought, rather wildly: “No country—its civil liberties notwithstanding—is further removed from democracy than England, and more eager to curry favour with the aristocracy, or mimick its flash and dazzle.” Tocqueville marveled at the political survival of the aristocracy. And many an Austrian refugee in the 1930s saw the last decades of the British Empire through a rosy haze of Habsburgian nostalgia.
The empire, however, is gone, and the last vestiges of aristocratic privilege are disappearing. And not because of “Europe.” Only months before Isaiah Berlin’s death, the British government was planning to abolish hereditary peerage in the House of Lords. I don’t think Berlin would have minded particularly. He thought of himself as a man of the moderate Left. But his idea of England still contained a great deal of the ancien régime. He arrived in England as a small boy in 1921, when British domination over its empire was taken for granted. And although he often said, and no doubt meant sincerely, that Britain paid too high a price for its public schools, in terms of social inequality, Berlin’s England was governed mostly by former public-school boys.
His England would have been recognized by Hippolyte Taine and Baron de Coubertin. It was a country of clubs and coteries, societies and ancient universities, a place where the trappings and rituals of old hierarchies were still observed, not least by Berlin himself, even as he kept the outsider’s eye for their absurdities. Like Alexander Herzen, a
writer whom he loved above all others, Berlin appreciated the stability of British institutions and even saw merit in a kind of English philistinism, or at least a lack of intellectual recklessness. He once said he was not an imaginative man, but then nor were the English, which was why he felt at home with them. Like most Anglophiles, he was also a snob. He shared Theodor Herzl’s weakness for liberal goyim with aristocratic manners.