When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The great experiment to test this proposition took place in Berlin, the city that, as we have seen, became a Gettysburg away from home for American presidents. In the early hours of 13 August 1961, the people of Berlin had woken to the sound of heavy machinery. Soldiers were stringing barbed wire across a line that divided East and West Berlin. At the end of the Second World War, at the Potsdam Conference just outside Berlin, Germany had been split into quadrants. Berlin was deep within Soviet-controlled Germany. Armed troops stood sentinel over the city’s crossing points. The barbed wire was soon replaced by a concrete wall 3.6 metres high which Walter Ulbricht’s East German government called the antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the anti-fascist barrier. The wall wound through the city centre, encircling the Brandenburg Gate, the ostentatious arch that Friedrich Wilhelm II had modelled on the Acropolis in Athens. Sealed off from the West, the inaccessible Brandenburg Gate became the symbol of a divided and impassable Berlin. The Berlin Wall was the Cold War set in concrete.

  It was here, on 26 June 1963, that John F. Kennedy gave one of the great war speeches. During a visit on foot to the Checkpoint Charlie crossing point on Friedrichstrasse, Kennedy had been deeply affected by the state of East Berlin. As he went through his last-minute preparations in the office of Berlin’s mayor Willy Brandt, Kennedy was not happy with the speech he was about to deliver. Just before he took the stage, he remembered a phrase from Cicero’s In Verrem: Civis Romanus sum. I am a citizen of Rome, we are all citizens of Rome. Any such citizen was guaranteed safe passage across the Roman Empire, in the manner of Paul the Apostle claiming his right to be tried before Caesar. Kennedy wanted to link the Roman republic to the city of Berlin, and by implication to the province of freedom everywhere, by repeating the phrase in German. He added the famous four words to his script at the last minute, scribbling them on the text in his own hand, phonetically so that his pronunciation would be accurate: ‘Ish bin ein Bearleener’.

  On the way to the West Berlin City Hall at Rathaus Schöneberg, the president’s entourage was showered with flowers, rice and torn paper. The schoolchildren of West Berlin were given the day off and a million Berliners, perched on signposts, balconies and rooftops, watched Kennedy pass through the streets in his open limousine on his way to speak to an ecstatic crowd 450,000 strong. He delivered a devastating critique of life on the communist side of the wall and the fundamental difference between a life lived at liberty and a life under state command. ‘There are many people in the world,’ said the president, ‘who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin.’

  Of Kennedy’s 674 words, fifteen are either ‘free’ or ‘freedom’. He then goes on to predict that the wall will fall and that democracy will in time spread through Eastern Europe. Democracy may not be perfect, says Kennedy, but ‘we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in’. He ended by repeating the best line: ‘Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner!’ Most of the president’s team, including National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, thought that Kennedy had gone too far, but the president’s words were punctuated by rapturous rounds of applause. At the conclusion of the speech, the Freedom Bell tolled from the belfry of the Rathaus. ‘We will never have another day like this one, as long as we live,’ Kennedy told Sorensen on the flight home. Alas, that was true. The trip to Berlin was the last foreign excursion Kennedy would ever make before he was assassinated.

  Kennedy’s argument lived on and his successors came to Berlin to repeat it. Twenty-six years after Kennedy’s triumphant day in Berlin, the results of the experiment came in. The Cold War had been won emphatically by liberal democracy and market capitalism, for the reason that Ronald Reagan had the insight to point out. It was an old point. In 1795, in the midst of the French revolutionary wars, Immanuel Kant published an essay called Perpetual Peace, in which he made the case that trade between nations will preserve peace in the world, especially in concert in a league of nations. It is still true. Military conflict does not take place between trading nations, and trade helped to win the Cold War. Between the West and the East, it was the quality of the goods in the shops that mattered as much as it was the military hardware, the diplomatic manoeuvres and the philosophical traditions. When Khrushchev took power in 1953 the American economy was three times as large as its Soviet counterpart. Armed with specially computed statistics that drastically overstated the Soviet growth rate, Khrushchev declared that the Soviet economy would overtake America by 1970. The year the Berlin Wall came down, annual GDP growth in the USSR was −3 per cent. In the USA it was 1.9 per cent. By 1991 Soviet GDP per capita had still not reached the level that America had reached in 1945.

  When put to the test, in the laboratory conditions of a city divided by a wall into ideological segments, liberal democracy had triumphed over communism. The claim that runs through the rhetoric of Pericles, Lloyd George, Wilson, Churchill and Reagan is that democracy is the crucible of peace. The history of war speeches exhibits the politician who has turned, fleetingly, into a warrior although the only weapons wielded are words. The arguments they all prosecute for the war is to commend the procedures of politics. Pericles turned a eulogy for the war dead into a paean for the polis. Wilson echoed Kant’s insight that international relations are better conducted in the chambers of conversation. Churchill mobilised the English language for free politics over tyrannical command. Reagan clarified that capitalist prosperity would help to win the war of ideas against communism.

  In the annals of war rhetoric the most lasting image of what politics can do that war cannot is Lloyd George’s scrap of paper. The words on that paper are those scribbled at the last moment on Kennedy’s script. Ich bin ein Berliner. I am a citizen of the world. They are the words that guarantee peace and the promise of rules rather than force majeure. These are the words that democratic politicians have to use to justify the war they advocate.

  The Fog of War

  There is a lot of fog out there on the battlefield, said Clausewitz. The public arguments for war in democracies are also now lost in a fog. The beneficial consequences of the intervention in Kosovo, which provided the context for Blair’s Chicago speech, have been overwhelmed by the contrary instance of Iraq. The verdict on the great speeches is always hard to separate from the verdict on the wars they justify. It is generally thought that, if the Great War had the poetry, the Second World War took the prize for rhetoric. Yet Lloyd George and the great pinnacle of sacrifice shows this is as much an account of our retrospective view of the war as it is an appreciation of Churchill. As the historical scholarship revises our view of the Great War as a necessary conflict, then the speeches that were made in its defence will be subject to a reassessment.

  Yet stasis has its consequences too. Whereas the consequences of action can be visibly appalling, inaction can likewise do harm. The free reign of terror granted to President Assad in Syria might, conceivably, be marginally less gruesome than the upshot of Western intervention, but it is in the nature of such calculations that no answer will ever be known. It is not obvious that we are doing, or not doing, the right thing. Cowed by sins of commission and shamed by sins of omission, democracies seem unsure how to respond to this, the most grave of perils they ever encounter. The template is broken. We await the great speech setting out the circumstances in which it is just not to act. We are now, more than ever, in need of the tradition of the just war which lay dormant in the academy for centuries until the prospect of nuclear annihilation revived it. The terrorist attacks on New York of 11 September 2001 made the just war a required concept again.

  A just war must be the last resort, after the exhaustion of diplomatic good faith. The power of words must have been thoroughly explored first before physical force can be justified, and only then with reluctance. But when the cause is just, the words will be noble as well as memorable. War is the opposite of politics, but sometimes politics has
to be fought for. This is a point that Woodrow Wilson makes in his book Man Will See the Truth. The very idea of the war speech is to declare war with regret and commend politics with relish. In Just and Unjust Wars Michael Walzer argues that states, the power that protects the rights of individuals, have a right to defend themselves against external threat. People have the right to develop a common life together and to live in concert in a political community.

  Pericles gives birth to that idea of the political community in a speech ostensibly dedicated to those who fell in battle. He inaugurates the idea that the war has the noble purpose of strengthening the commitment to democracy. At a remove of twenty centuries, it is astonishing how similar David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson sound amid the thunder of the Great War, and then again what echoes ring from the resounding rhetoric of Winston Churchill in the summer of 1940. By the time Ronald Reagan implores Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, democratic politics has become not just the purpose of the war but the method by which it is fought. The aim is always the same. It is, at the final and in the finest hours, to create, through the expedient and unfortunate necessity of war, a land fit for heroes.

  3

  NATION:

  THROUGH POLITICS THE NATION IS DEFINED

  Imagined Communities

  A nation has to be spoken into existence. That arresting phrase from John Quincy Adams from his speech to the House of Representatives on Independence Day 1821 rightly puts the nationalism before the nation. No country exists before people talk about it. It is not providence, or nature, or blood or culture that defines a nation in its origins. It is speech. It is the proclamation that the people are identical with one another in one crucial respect – they share a nationality. This means the articulation of a common history, shared stories of origin and symbols of national belonging. This claim is then recognised by the panoply of civic laws and attendant rights and this conjunction creates the modern nation-state. Citizenship becomes a legal fact, but nationhood starts as a political claim, in speech.

  Nations are, in the title of Benedict Anderson’s fine book, Imagined Communities. That does not mean they are not real. Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging The Nation 1707–1837 is the story of a conscious process of historical creation. A nation is an achievement before it is a place. In the case of the strange multinational state of Britain this is an especially precarious task. Nationhood is the expression of solidarity rather than the discovery of a common race of men. Anderson dates national consciousness to the invention of the printing press, the creation of the novel and the appearance of newspapers. For the first time, men and women could experience the stories of people like themselves, being lived out in their own day.

  Nationhood remains the most potent form of allegiance in modern politics. Affiliation to the nation has always trumped the claim of class and has always stood in the way of durable multinational institutions. Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations lasted just twenty-seven years. It is revealing that no great speech has ever been made in defence of the United Nations, which ought to be a promising subject. As the Remain campaign unwittingly showed in Britain in 2016, it is also hard to find elevated rhetoric in defence of the idea of the European Union. Almost all of the memorable speeches about the European Union, certainly in Britain, as we shall see, have been in defence of the nation-state.

  In the history of speeches there are two stories of nationalism. The first was told, as we have seen, by Winston Churchill, whose speeches helped to bind the nation against the threat of a predator. This is the rhetoric of risorgimento nationalism which was the signature tune of the Greek and Latin American independence wars and the struggles in Indochina and Eastern Europe. The nation in this incarnation always marches in the pageant of progress.

  But thereby hangs the other, darker story of nationalism. Churchill’s eloquence was only required because it was a response to the egregious ethnic expansionism of Adolf Hitler’s German nationalism. Before Hitler, and before modern amplification, no speaker had ever used the ritualistic occasion of the speech to greater or more malign effect. The European Union was formed in 1957 precisely because of the excesses of blood-and-thunder nationalism. Its founding purpose was to ensure that war would be impossible in the European theatre again. Its assembly of nations would restrain the exclusive claim of superiority that had brought Europe to the brink of catastrophe. Whatever else can be said subsequently of the European Union, it succeeded in that noble and historic aim.

  As a community of the imagination, the nation needs to be enacted in rituals. A great deal of drama goes into embodying a nation in moments of communion. The oldest ritual of them all is the political speech. In each of the speeches that follow, the leader’s address defines the virtues of belonging to the nation. No individual personifies the invisible state more completely than a monarch. L’état, c’est moi. Louis XIV’s famous identification applies perfectly to Elizabeth I, whose rhetoric of indomitability was directed at two potent enemies – the Spanish Armada which was gathering menacingly in the English Channel and the sexism that greeted her claims to authority.

  There has never been a more consciously created nation than the United States of America. The founding documents of the American constitution do not verify nationhood that had already been achieved. They were themselves the formation of that nation. The founding fathers are the Romulus and Remus of the modern age. Chief among them was Benjamin Franklin, one of the most remarkable men of his or any other time, who spoke vitally in favour of the constitution at a moment of peril.

  America was not the last time that separate states had to decide whether or not to join together in the more perfect union of a nation. The same task befell Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, whose words helped to usher into being a steadfast new nation out of its disparate principalities and competing ethnic and religious identities. The seventy-year story of Indian democracy has not lacked its travails and setbacks, but a nation resembling Nehru’s vision is still there, and there is something unlikely and magnificent about that.

  Nehru’s instinct to bring people together is too often denied in favour of a shrunken and exclusive idea of who truly belongs to the people. In the dock in Rivonia, South Africa, Nelson Mandela gave a magnificent retort to a racial definition of who belongs in his country. As a former resident returning to Burma from exile abroad, Aung San Suu Kyi was also denied standing in her own country. Swapping exile in Oxford for exile in Rangoon, she spoke to reclaim power for the Burmese people from the military dictatorship that had usurped their authority.

  It follows from the fact that nations are invented that there can be better or worse nationalisms. Some countries tell generous stories about who can be included in the definition of the nation. Others are more exclusive. Even though nations are usually described in the language of kith and kin, they are not natural human categories, and they need to be argued into life. The members of even the smallest nations on earth will never know most of their fellow citizens. Yet somehow in the minds of all citizens of the nation there is the idea of something shared with people they will never meet. That bond is more than obedience to a common authority. It is an idea of a country, a shared mental space. ‘There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space,’ said Salman Rushdie in Shame. Unfortunately, in the history of nationalism, shame is too often the appropriate emotion.

  ELIZABETH I OF ENGLAND

  I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King

  Tilbury

  9 August 1588

  Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) was the first English monarch to lend her name to an age. In the Elizabethan era, England first gained a national consciousness. Her reign was the time that launched England as a major sea power and saw the greatest flourishing of English literature yet and probably since. Elizabeth was queen of England and Ireland from 1558 until her death in 1603, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

  A life less extraordinary had looked like
ly when Elizabeth lost her claim to the throne after the execution of her mother Anne Boleyn by her father Henry VIII for alleged adultery and treason. Elizabeth was just two years of age. Later, after the tempest of the English Reformation, she was imprisoned by her Catholic half-sister Mary, who accused her of taking part in a Protestant plot. Following Mary’s death in 1558, Elizabeth was restored to the line of succession and acceded to the throne.

  She became only the third woman ever to hold the office of Queen Regnant in England, and there was a strong presumption that her time on the throne would be precarious and fleeting. Elizabeth’s two predecessor queens, her cousin Lady Jane Grey and her half-sister Mary I, had not lasted long. Their short reigns were ascribed at the time to their gender. The monarch was commander-in-chief of the army, the head of the English Church, and suzerain over a court that was fashioned to uphold a man ruling among his peers. It was simply assumed that a woman would struggle with such work. The obvious solution, much canvassed, would have been marriage. But Elizabeth refused to bow to the expectation, instead cultivating a reputation for being wedded to her subjects or, as we would now say, married to the job.

  It was a turbulent reign and Elizabeth needed all of her great strength and fortitude. This was an age of religious controversy, with England in the earliest stages of becoming a Protestant nation. The tumult led to constant, although mostly ineffectual, plotting in France, Spain and the Papal court to invade England and restore Catholicism. For the same reason, Elizabeth’s reign was punctuated by a string of revolts and assassination attempts, all of which, mercifully, failed.

  The speech that follows survives as a written text, transcribed from its Elizabethan idiom into English that is more readably comprehensible to us today. We cannot be sure, in truth, whether the speech as we now have it was ever delivered. The surviving text derives, rather unsatisfactorily, from a letter by Dr Leonel Sharp, a churchman and courtier later imprisoned for sedition, to the duke of Buckingham thirty-five years after the event. There are rhetorical echoes in the writing of other speeches Elizabeth gave, which is some nebulous evidence to suggest that the text is close enough to genuine. There is, however, no contemporary attesting evidence, so it is impossible to know.