Tony Blair's ignorance of history, while appallingly dangerous, is also one of his chief assets, allowing him to construct whatever narrative is useful to him. David Marquand on a truly postmodern prime minister
The Politics of Good Intentions: history, fear and hypocrisy in the new world order
David Runciman Princeton University Press, 211pp, £18.95
ISBN 069112566X
The long death agony of the Blair regime should have prompted more soul-searching among the radical intelligentsia than it has done. The proximate cause of Tony Blair's decline is self-evident: the Iraq war and its sequel. However, as David Runciman shows in this mordant study of political hypocrisy and the misuse of history in our time, the inability to distinguish make-believe from facts, the contempt for due process and the almost wilful ignorance of history that were the hallmarks of Blair's Iraq adventure could, and should, have been detected well before it. They were not detected because we radical intellectuals (I include myself in the indictment) did not want to detect them. We wanted a saviour, a hero, a knight in shining armour - and we persuaded ourselves that Blair would fill the bill.
Runciman is splendidly caustic about the role bad history has played in Blair's (and Bush's) statecraft and rhetoric since 11 September 2001. As he suggests, no one with any knowledge of 20th-century history could possibly believe that the attack on the twin towers "changed everything"; that al-Qaeda and its offshoots pose a greater threat to our way of life than anything we have known before; that we are now engaged in a "war on terror" of unprecedented difficulty and danger; and that, as Blair put it after the London bombings last July, "the rules of the game" have therefore changed for ever. Compared with Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was a pinprick. The 20th century was studded by mostly unsuccessful attempts on the part of European governments, including British ones, to stamp out terrorism. Zionist terrorism helped to drive us out of Palestine, Eoka terrorism helped to end our rule in Cyprus, and we brutally suppressed Mau Mau terrorism in Kenya - at enormous cost in political and moral capital.
Terrorism, attempts to suppress terrorism and ultimate compromise with terrorists have been central themes of Anglo-Irish relations for 200 years. The Republic of Ireland is a separate nation state today because IRA terrorists fought the Lloyd George coalition to a standstill after the First World War. Northern Ireland enjoys an uneasy peace because a 30-year attempt to suppress a later manifestation of the IRA ended in a stand-off. As for al-Qaeda and its offshoots, no sane person would deny that they pose a serious threat to our security, but nor could any sane person believe that it is comparable with the threats once posed by Hitler and Stalin, or even Khrushchev. After the London bombings last summer, Blair told us we faced an existential threat from Islamic terrorism. It is not clear what he meant - I suspect he didn't know himself - but the term "existential" clearly implied that the very existence of the British state, or the British people, or the British way of life, was somehow in danger. There is something indecent about that claim. In the summer of 1940, the British state and nation really were in mortal peril. To use language implying that the threat from al-Qaeda has something in common with the threat once posed by the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht is to demean the memory of what Winston Churchill was right to call our "finest hour".
Bad history goes with a strange kind of anti-history. As Run-ciman points out, Blair's claim that 9/11 changed the world is extraordinarily useful to him. It means that past standards no longer apply; that he can no longer be judged by the old rules, but only by new ones known only to himself; that he is a free spirit, operating in a self-defined sphere beyond the familiar world of history and experience. Yet, as Runciman reminds us in his equally caustic treatment of the Millennium Dome affair, Blair's post-9/11 claim is not, in itself, new at all. Once upon a time, the Dome was new and, because it was new, that it was also unspeakably naff was not allowed to count.
The truth is that Blair has been on the hunt for new dawns, new openings, new threats and, above all, new lines ever since he became leader of the Labour Party. "New, new, new," he told a meeting of European socialist leaders just after he became Prime Minister. "Everything is new." This was the quintessential "new" Labour moment. The novelties Blair instanced were remarkably banal and not particularly new. Huge sums were traded every day across the world's exchanges, he declared. Women worked. Family structures had changed. Europe faced intensifying competition from the Far East. The banality detracted neither from the inner meaning of the speech, however, nor from its rhetorical force. What Blair was really saying was that the world had changed so profoundly that past experience no longer offered any guidance to those who had to deal with it; that his party and country were sailing in uncharted waters that only he could navigate; and, above all, that History with a capital "h" was an autonomous force, with which Blair was uniquely in tune and to which resistance was futile.
At first sight, there is a paradox here. How can it be that Blair, with his ignorance of history, has so insistently evoked history in his aid? The truth, I think, is that the paradox is only apparent. If Blair knew more prosaic, real-world history with a small "h" - if, to take just a couple of Runciman's examples, he knew that Britain did not go to war in 1939 to stop Hitler persecuting the Jews, or that present-day Iraq does not in any way resemble post-1945 Germany - he would not have the gall to appeal to "History". His ignorance of history is appallingly dangerous, to himself and to the rest of us: that is the most obvious lesson of his Iraq misadventure. But it is also one of his chief assets. It liberates him from the constraints of fact. It allows him to construct whatever narrative, or narratives, seem most serviceable to him at any given moment. It makes him a truly postmodern man, able to slough off old identities and construct new ones as the mood takes him.
At this point the radical intelligentsia comes back into the story. Blair is not alone in being an anti-historian. The wilder shores of sociology and international relations are thronged with them. Hardly a month goes by without some book appearing, proving that we live in a new world order, a new culture, a new society or a new economy, in which the past has nothing to teach us. Not all the authors concerned are radical intellectuals; but some of them are, or at least were. New Labour, the Third Way and the once-famous Blair project were the children of this kind of anti-history. Radical intellectuals fell for him not just because of his engaging smile and bright eyes but because he seemed to personify the new, the up-to-date, the fresh and unencumbered. If Iraq has taught us anything, it should have taught us to beware postmodern men. A new version of Henry Ford's saying is needed: it is not history, but anti-history, that is bunk.
David Marquand's most recent book is The Decline of the Public: the hollowing out of citizenship (Polity)
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