Scruton on Loyalty (as war approaches)

(Scruton is a genuine English conservative, a lawyer & philosopher and always worth reading --P.T.)

Where does England's loyalty lie?
Roger Scruton says that our tradition of common law - which we share with America - is the best defence against tyranny

In his widely commented-upon book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt tells us that the nation-state will soon be a thing of the past, that humanity is evolving inexorably in the direction of the market-state, in which the bond between citizen and state is conceived not as a hereditary obligation like that of family or tribe, but as a freely chosen contract, where the state is expected to deliver benefits (security, prosperity and other secular goods) in return for obedience.

This kind of 'end of history' analysis of the modern world is familiar in other terms - for example, those of Daniel Bell, Francis Fukuyama or Jean-François Lyotard - but in all cases it seems to me to leave one crucial matter out of account - namely, human beings. People don't die to uphold contracts; in emergencies contracts are repudiated, loyalties deepened. It is because the USA exists as a nation-state, determined to defend its people and its territory, that war on Iraq is now conceivable. No American soldier who takes part in that war (should it occur) will see himself as carrying out some clause in a political contract. He will be preparing to sacrifice himself for those that he holds dear - family, country, nation.

Writing on openDemocracy.net - the webzine edited by Anthony Barnett - in a fascinating series in which writers discuss the likely war, Bobbitt argues that 11 September made the difference, since it imbued America with the will to take decisive (and, in Bobbitt's view, necessary) military action. This will was, he plausibly argues, absent from America at the time of the Gulf war. He is surely right. But another way of putting the point is that the Gulf war was not really fought by the American nation. It was fought in the spirit of Bobbitt's 'contract state', by a military that was 'doing a job', trying to minimise risks and to get out alive. Hence it was more or less futile. If Saddam is the kind of threat that Bobbitt believes him to be, then he can be unseated only by a genuine war, in which a nation commits itself to victory. The conditions for that are now in place, and they are the conditions which refute Bobbitt's political theory.

Of course, the Iraqis won't put up a fight, since they do not see themselves as citizens of a nation-state, bound each to each by a trans-generational loyalty that demands the supreme sacrifice on behalf of strangers. They see themselves as members of families, of religious sects, of national minorities, all groaning under the yoke of a madman. Whether that justifies war on their behalf I don't know. But it fully illustrates the inapplicability of Philip Bobbitt's view of modern politics, in those circumstances where political loyalty is put to the test.

Where does that leave us, the British people? We too are turning towards war, and we too are being compelled to confront the question of national loyalty and national identity. Nor is it only war that is forcing this question on us: the mass immigration of uninvited people reminds us that our country is our home, that you do not offer hospitality in your home to those who impose themselves upon you, and that there comes a point where you must fall back on inherited loyalties if law, order and mutual protection are to survive.

Even without the threat posed by mass migration, we might reasonably wonder how long our country will exist. By 'our country' I mean first and foremost England, the place whose name is commemorated in our language, our literature, our Church and our crown, and which has been the object of the patriotic sentiments that have seen us so far into the modern world without suffering the indignity of conquest. Of course, England is only one part of the United Kingdom, but it is the part that gives sense and order to the kingdom as a whole. Without England the parliamentary democracy to which we remain collectively wedded would lose its meaning, for its meaning is that of a nation-state.

England gave us other good things besides the richest language and most powerful literature in modern Europe. In particular it gave us the common law. Our law is not a collection of decrees dictated by the sovereign but a developing set of answers to concrete human conflicts, discovered by impartial judges in the courts. It embodies the old idea of natural justice, according to which law stands in judgment over the sovereign and does not merely transmit his decrees. The common law is the true origin of our freedoms, of our safety in the face of state power, and of our ability to lead our own lives, however eccentric, without asking anyone's permission. The EU has been built upon a conception of legal order that takes the decree (or 'directive') rather than the particular case and its ratio decidendi, as its paradigm. This, in my view, is the real reason why the English rebel against it - even those who have no knowledge of the history and the inherited conception of justice that make this rebellion inevitable, obligatory and right.

England is not recognised by the EU, even though it is supposed to be a part of the EU, politically, socially and geographically. Our country has no place on the official map, which mentions only historically meaningless 'regions'. These correspond neither to traditional loyalties nor to existing county boundaries. The Labour party endorses this balkanisation of our country, and has rapidly and covertly installed the regional assemblies that the EU would like to see, so as to kill off all hope of an English Parliament. The Welsh and the Scots have assemblies, and can be relied upon to send anti-English representatives to Westminster. But if the English had an assembly of their own, not only would it have a permanent Conservative majority, but it would facilitate the revival of the old English patriotism that would bring the EU's ambitions for our country to an end. It is to Mr Prescott's credit that, despite having exhibited very few other signs of native intellect to date, he has understood the temporary advantage to his party in the plan to abolish England.

The artificers of the new European Constitution are not like the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution, who were serious thinkers, profoundly attached to the common law and steeped in the thought of Locke and Montesquieu. The European Constitution is being prepared by obscure apparatchiks - people sufficiently ill-educated to think that 'subsidiarity' offers some kind of substitute for our ancestral freedoms. An unscrupulous belief in progress is the natural refuge of the bureaucratic mind. Hence, while the Founding Fathers looked back to a tradition of liberty, public spirit and patriotism that they sought to safeguard, the Eurocrats look forward to a future order which is defined so abstractly as to engage with no historical loyalty at all. The goal is not merely to extinguish the local sovereignties of the existing nation-states, but also to eliminate the very idea of the nation-state from the consciousness of Europe. In the thinking of the Eurocrats, nation-states mean nationalism, and nationalism means war. This little equation was of course true of Germany; but it was never true of England, Scotland or Wales; not true of Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia; not true of Italy, Greece or Spain; not true, in particular, of the United States of America.

Our Bill of Rights was taken up and re-affirmed in the first Ten Amendments to the American Constitution. This fundamentally backward-looking document did not destroy the common-law jurisdiction, but upheld it, both endorsing its principles and ensuring that the courts remain the final source of law - which is why the American Constitution can now be understood only through 400 or so volumes of case law. In this and many other respects the US Constitution is heir to the Anglo-Saxon experience of law, as the voice of the people against the sovereign, and the defender of individual freedom against the state. This experience separates both us and the Americans from the history of Continental Europe since the Reformation.

We the English have a crucial choice to make. Do we hold on to our national loyalty, and to the democratic state that has been built on it? Or do we submerge our identity in that of the European Union (supposing that it retains the name)? In the first case we will join the United States in upholding the Anglo-Saxon idea of common law, common language, common territory and common loyalty as the foundation of political order. In other words, we will continue to be a nation-state. In the second case we will become a disenfranchised minority in a continent governed by institutions that command no loyalty from its 'citizens'.

That this choice has become a real one can be witnessed in recent events. The collapse of Yugoslavia did not merely offer a lesson about what European federalism will really mean in the long run. It showed the impotence of the EU either to defend the interests of its members or to offer help to its friends. The UN took action, but only because the UN means (in any case where action rather than passion is required) the US. Exactly the same is happening in the matter of Iraq. The EU is unable to make a decision of its own. Its deliberations reveal a collective retreat from serious decision-making, and a refusal to take responsibility for the new global order that it claims to embody. But the Anglo-Saxon world, for all its doubts and hesitations, is re-affirming its historical experience of an empire acquired 'in a fit of absence of mind', and its willingness to face up to threats, from wherever they might emanate. Blair may not have his party behind him. But then, his party is anti-English, enjoying a carnival of denial towards our country and its past. He himself is expressing a gut reaction which I suspect is that of the English majority. In standing by the United States, rather than by Europe, he is following the American example in choosing the nation-state, against the market-state of Philip Bobbitt and the Eurocrats.