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Crab-Like Into the Future the Strategic Vision of Thatcherism Has Given Way to the Pragmatism of Major and Kinnock

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Crab-Like Into the Future the Strategic Vision of Thatcherism Has Given Way to the Pragmatism of Major and Kinnock Crab-Like Into The Future The strategic vision of Thatcherism has given way to the pragmatism of Major and Kinnock. David Marquand speculates where the UK might be in 2000... rophecy has always been a By the same token, the only thing we 'The only two ago. mug's game. At a time of know for certain about the year 2000 is For most of the last 300 years, rapid and disorientating that it will be different from 1991, in thing we the state and civil society followed change, it is even more fool- ways we cannot now foretell. Yet trend- know for parallel trajectories. 'Modernising' hardPy than usual. Ten years ago, the spotting is more than a parlour game. It certain about states faced 'modernising' civil socie- second cold war was at its height, Shir- makes sense to try to anticipate the the year ties, and vice versa. Rationalisation, or- ley Williams had just been elected for future, even though things are almost ganisation, uniformity - the quin- Crosby, and the SDP-Liberal Alliance certain to turn out differently, if only 2000 is that tessential hallmarks of the state - was scoring around 50% in the opinion because the alternative is to drift help- it will be increasingly became the hallmarks of polls. Michael Foot led the Labour Party; lessly with the current. Though we can- different civil society, at any rate in what were Brezhnevite 'stagnation' reigned in the not know what the world will be like at from 1991, in held to be its 'advanced' sectors. Small Soviet Union; and although the Euro- the end of the century, we can chart the firms, craft guilds, self-employed pean Community was deep into its sec- course that events are taking now. Only ways we workers still survived, of course, but ond enlargement, worldly-wise British by doing so can we take avoiding action if cannot now they were seen as sociological detritus commentators took it for granted that they are moving in the wrong foretell' which history would soon clear away. the federalist dreams of the founding direction. The process reached its apogee in the fathers had been in vain. A correct There is not much doubt about the postwar Keynesian welfare states of prediction of what has actually hap- direction of the global trends which the West and stalinist-leninist states of pened in the last decade - in Britain, in have already transformed the political the East, with their rational bureaucra- Europe or in the world at large - would economies of the industrial West and cies, modernising agendas and teleolo- have seemed a sign of mental which seem, if anything, even more gical governing philosophies. Now it disorder. powerful now than they did a year or has come to an end. For good or ill (and, 38 MARXISM TODAY DECEMBER 1991 as always, good and ill have gone to- destroyed, rather than those of the 19th 'More and ciety; and, not least, on the accidents of gether), civil society has started to fol- or early 20th centuries. The state sur- personality and contingencies of fate. low a baffling new trajectory, cul- vives; but except in the formal, legal more, the turally, technologically and in the econ- sense it is no longer the supreme auth- true map of By any reckoning, the course followed by omy, in which differentiation, diversifi- ority within a defined territory. It has to governance the British state has been one of the cation and disorganisation are com- bargain with multinational companies in the least happy in the industrial West. The bined with a strange kind of trans- strong enough to play one state off worldwide upheavals of the 1970s hit an nationalisation. But the logic of the against another and anticipate or react modern already-debilitated British economy state is still the old 'modernising' logic; to the opinion swings of foreign world particularly hard. Successive govern- and it finds it painfully hard to accom- exchange dealers whose operations no resembles ments failed to mobilise consent for modate itself to the change. state can control. Partly because econo- the their attempts to cope with the con- he results have varied from mic development can now be fostered sequences, sometimes abjectly. Yet in place to place. In the former more effectively at lower levels of patchwork spite of a radical change of direction at communist bloc, the cultural government, and partly because the quilt of the end of the decade, the problems and economic transforma- cultural shift of the last 25 years has medieval which baffled the government of the Ttion of the last 25 years provoked a kind encouraged a rebirth of local and re- 1960s and 1970s are still in evidence in Europe' of implosion of the stalinist-leninist gional identities, it increasingly shares the early 1990s. The British economy is state. Despite crises of varying inten- its power with state or provincial autho- no more competitive now than it was in sity in some countries, however, the rities closer to the people. In its Euro- 1981. The symbiosis between public and liberal-democratic state is not dead, or pean birthplace, it also shares power private power, which is one of the hall- even dying. Its fate has been more com- with the now proto-federal institutions marks of the most successful econo- plex. Its boundaries - conceptual and of the European Community. It has mies in the modern world, is as elusive geographical - are losing meaning. Pol- ceased to be the sole custodian of the as ever. Meanwhile, Britain has found it icy areas where its writ used to run interests of its people. It is part of a more difficult than almost any other have slipped out of its control. New complex grid of overlapping and inter- member-state of the European Com- problems have emerged, which it can penetrating institutions with compe- munity to reconstruct its territorial solve only in concert with other institu- tences that cut across its own. constitution to meet the need for tions, at least partially independent of The liberal-democratic states of the greater local autonomy, on the one it. Other loyalties and identities have industrial West have encountered these hand, or to come to terms with the started to pull against the loyalties on upheavals in different ways. All states Community's transition from loose-knit which it used to call and the identities it have drawn in their horns to some confederation to quasi-federation, on used to subsume. And because of all degree. 'Heroic', top-down national the other. this, as Ghita Ionescu brilliantly shows planning has been abandoned almost The central question for the future of in an important new book1, the trad- everywhere. Most states have become British politics is whether the British itional notion of sovereignty, which has more parsimonious in their approach to state will adapt more successfully in the been fundamental to it since its first social welfare. Beyond such broad gen- next decade than it has done in the last appearance on the stage of European eralities, however, what strikes the ob- two. The obstacles are formidable; if politics in the early-modern period, no server most is the specificity of each they were not, they would have been longer has much purchase on reality. national experience. The course fol- overcome already. They have to do, not More and more, the true map of gover- lowed by any particular state has de- just with the vested interests of the nance in the modern world resembles pended on its own structures and tradi- political parties, important though the patchwork quilt of medieval Eur- tions; on the technological, economic those are, but with the genetic code of ope, which the emerging nation-state and cultural inheritance of its civil so- the state itself - with its reliance on 39 MARXISM TODAY DECEMBER 1991 inherited authority, immemorial cus- Thatcherite project required it to do. It which founded the community in the tom, tacit understandings; with its trad- could not defy the logic of European first place, and which still form its ition of passive, as opposed to participa- integration, any more than the French heartland, we can look forward to a tory, citizenship; with the related trad- state had been able to defy it in 1981. If single currency, a single central bank, a ition of strong and autonomous execu- Britain were to remain in the Commu- uniform monetary policy and harmo- tive power which was so widely nity at all - and not even the most nised budgetary policies by the end of celebrated in the postwar period. Most fervent Thatcherites ever contemplated the century. Political union is a different of all, they have to do with the nexus of life outside it - it could not draw a ring matter, but there too the pressure to values and presuppositions implied by fence around monetary union once its move toward a kind of quasi-federation, the notion of an indefeasible and abso- partners had recognised this to be an at the lowest level, is almost irresistible. lutely sovereign crown-in-parliament, inevitable corollary of a genuinely t is more difficult to guess what the sources of whose authority are im- single market. Much the same was true, will happen outside the heart- penetrable to mere human reason. though in a far more complicated fash- land, but the odds are that some, These values and presuppositions are ion, of central-local relations. Here, the at least, of the recent entrants plainly out of joint with a sensibility central state had the legal authority to anId even some of those now seeking that increasingly extols variety, auto- do what it wished.
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