by Ian Buruma
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.
Berlin’s England was, however, not just about the United Kingdom. At one of our Italian lunches, the subject of “Europe” came up. Somewhere between an anecdote about Stephen Spender and an exposition on the arrogance of German Jews, he asked me whether I thought a European federation would ever come about. I answered that I rather thought it would. After a rare moment of silence, he said he rather thought so too, and immediately launched into a story about Verdi attending a Wagner opera in Paris—and hating it. It was impossible to tell whether the prospect of a federal Europe pleased or alarmed Berlin. I don’t think the problem exercised him much one way or the other. He wouldn’t live to see it, and his England would survive anyhow, while he lived, if only as an ideal.
THE IDEAL OF a united Europe is old and stained with blood. Since the collapse of Rome, it has been predominantly a Franco-German enterprise. Hitler, like the kaiser before him, saw himself as the successor of the German kings who ruled over the Holy Roman Empire. Those kings had behaved as successors to the Roman emperors. And Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself in a quasi-Roman ceremony, after transferring the imperial center from the German lands to Paris. Britain was on the periphery
of these developments and usually hostile to them. Napoleon regarded Britain as his archenemy. His dream was to unite Europe as a federation of “free” peoples, clustered gratefully around glorious France and ruled by Napoleonic laws. And this, in his view, excited the envy of perfidious Albion, whose eternal goal was to keep the Continent divided.
Something of Napoleon’s attitude persists in France to this day. And so does the British distrust of Franco-German schemes to unite Europe. This distrust owes much to the central myth of Berlin’s England, the island of freedom facing a Continent of darkness. But it has become as threadbare as the idea of enlightened upper-class rule. For Voltaire has been proven more right than wrong. For the first time almost all Europeans have the right to speak freely and elect their own governments. Absolute monarchy has vanished everywhere, and, apart from some rare exceptions, dictators no longer rule. The examples of Britain and the United States have played a part in this. But there is an irony in the result: other European nations have written constitutions, encoding citizens’ rights, while Britain, the model of the philosophes, does not Europeans are citizens, the British are still subjects. And yet it is the British, above all, who see “Europe” as a threat to their freedom.
The postwar attempts to build a united Europe were not, in fact, made in a spirit of Anglophobia. The European Economic Community was conceived not to unite Europe against Britain but to stop France and Germany from going to war again. Jean Monnet, the debonair diplomat from Cognac who designed the foundations of a federal Europe, was an Anglophile with an intimate knowledge of British and American institutions. In 1940 he suggested to Churchill that France and Britain should merge into one nation. (Churchill showed a flicker—no more—of interest.) Monnet wrote in his memoirs that Britain’s greatest contributions to civilization were the respect for liberty and the functioning of democratic institutions. “What would our society be,” he wondered, “without habeas corpus and the parliamentary system which keeps the executive power in balance!”
Monnet simply believed, very much in the enlightened spirit of Voltaire’s coconuts, that European institutions would function as well as the British ones. Indeed, they would function better, because they were rational, unencumbered by national prejudices, and designed to guarantee not just the prosperity and freedom of Europe but peace for all time. It made sense, Monnet might have said, in the way the union of England and Scotland made sense in 1707. The European Union is a belated product of the Enlightenment. That is why Monnet was convinced that the British, though temporarily deluded by a false sense of grandeur and untouched by the traumas of military defeat, might resist it for a while but would surely see sense in the end.
And yet rationalism, however civilized and enlightened, is not enough to build a home where citizens feel free. Isaiah Berlin was a Zionist because he wanted Jews to have a country of their own, where they could feel at ease. In this sense, he was more a man of the nineteenth than of the eighteenth century. He recognized a human need to feel attached to a nation. Having lost his native land as a child, perhaps he recognized it more readily than most. The trouble in the last two hundred years of nation-building is that nationalism was associated not just with democracy but with the exclusion and persecution of minorities, and with wars. The reason so many “rootless cosmopolitans” became Anglophiles is that Britain was unusual. It combined a strong national culture with a relatively open, liberal society. That is why Anglophiles, like Isaiah Berlin, have been prone to idealize the culture that produced that society.
The difference between Britain and other European nations is not, however, that British institutions are natural and that French or German ones are not. All political arrangements are a mixture of historical accident and human decisions. The difference is that most Europeans, having seen their nations occupied, humiliated, impoverished, or taken over by thugs, had lost confidence in the nation-state as the only, or indeed the best, guarantor of liberty, prosperity, and peace. Britain never had this problem. So perhaps de Gaulle was right. Perhaps Britain never should have joined “Europe” in the first place. The fact that Britain did so anyway, largely for commercial reasons, only confirmed the old suspicion that the British are nothing but shopkeepers at heart. As the exiled French politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin put it in 1850, England “has never raised its eyes or its heart above its masts and its cargoes.”
It was, of course, an unfair accusation; British ideas have had an profound and usually benign influence on Europe. And some of the best ideas are linked to commerce. The two most liberal nations in Europe, Britain and the Netherlands, have always been accused by their enemies of thinking of nothing but gold. But the accusers were seldom people who prized liberty. Suspicion of commerce tends to go with a love of authoritarianism. The Europe of commercial cities—Venice, Hamburg, London, Lisbon, Amsterdam—has enjoyed more freedom and prosperity than the European hinterlands, dominated by autocrats, and by the lures of blood and soil.
Today’s “Europe” is neither a commercial empire nor a tyranny, nor anything that the kings of the Holy Roman Empire, or Napoleon, or Hitler would recognize. It is certainly not a democratic state either. It is the half-finished outline of a political ideal, fueled by fear of war and by a dream that a unified Europe would replace the failed nation-states. The fear is passing with the generation that lived under Hitler. The idealism, too, is fading. But what about the British myth of unique insular freedom? Myths can serve different, even contradictory ends. So it is with the British myth, which can serve liberty, but also a resentment of anything foreign. When Britain joined “Europe,” there could be no more splendid isolation. But the myth was given a longer life by British misgivings about the European ideal. The desire of other Europeans to unite made Britain feel more exceptional. It was as though it had to fight the old European dream of the Holy Roman kings, Napoleon, and Hitler once again, but from the inside.
There is something grand about British resistance to Continental ideals, something of Baudelaire’s tragic dandies affecting an aristocratic style in a mediocre bourgeois age. The heroic myth of insular freedom has been useful, not just in wars against foreign tyrannies but also in defense of a conservative, inegalitarian, deferential, harsh, archaic, and sometimes absurd system of government, which has still been more decent than most. But more decent than most is not good enough. “Europe” will change Britain, and, I hope, vice versa. It will speed up the end of Britain’s ancien régime, and with it some of the grandeur Anglophiles admired. But if “Europe” is always seen as a threat to unique British liberties, the phantom of European idealism can be used to resist any change for worse, but also for better. “Europe” does not have to end up as an authoritarian superstate. It could be a federation of free nations.
Britain has many allies on the European continent. That Anglophile arc of trading cities from the Baltics, via Hamburg, down to Lisbon and Milan still exists. That Europe, my Europe, could not survive without Britain, as the champion of popular sovereignty and free trade. I do not want to live in a Europe dominated by French technocrats and anxious Germans, hiding behind the federalist flag. But Britain cannot cultivate its allies by fighting “Europe” in the spirit of Dunkirk. For European democracies to survive, Europeans must regain the confidence to govern themselves, and that cause is not helped by the notion that only Britain, by some historic miracle, has the organic, homegrown political traditions to sustain a liberal state. For Europe to become more Anglophile, the Anglophile myth must go.
MYTHS DIE HARD, however, and the dying process can be painful. At a meeting of historians in Amsterdam, I heard a young Dutch historian lay into the myth of Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation. It was a touching myth: the nation of heroic resisters who stood up for the Jews when no one else did, the one candle that refused to be snuffed in a continent of darkness. Touching, but alas, largely untrue. The next speaker was an Israeli journalist. He had heard the young historian, and praised him for his honesty. He would do the same in Israel,
destroy every myth in sight. But at the same time, he was dismayed. For he had always taken comfort from the Dutch myth, which held out a last hope for humanity. He would continue to cherish it, whatever the facts of history might reveal. He had grown up with it. It was part of him. That is rather the way I feel about the Anglophile myth too. I grew up with it. I salute its grandeur. Part of me would like to live in Berlin’s England forever.
As a child, going back and forth between the Continent and Britain on ferryboats that often stank of vomit, disgorged by drunken British soldiers, I used to get a little sentimental at the sight of the Dover cliffs looming up on cold winter mornings or disappearing into foggy nights. Crossing the Channel was an adventure. The sea was like a moat between different worlds, where people wore different clothes, ate different food, abided by different rules, and weighed with different measures. We would leave the Continent from the coast of Belgium, where the land was industrial and flat, the streets were lit by sinister yellow lights, and the air smelled of seawater and frying fat. Britain just smelled of smoke, curling from countless Victorian chimneys. The roads were narrow and twisty. Children wore uniforms. Cars looked old. Double-decker buses gurgled and screeched. There were signs that read KEEP ON THE LEFT. I noted these differences with a mounting sense of excitement. For I knew we were on our way to my grandparents’ house.
My grandparents are no longer there. And I no longer take the ferry. It is too inconvenient, the crossing too long. I take the tunnel instead, by train. You pass through Folkestone without seeing a cliff, and Calais without a glimpse of the sea or a whiff of frites. An announcement is made in English, sometimes with a French accent, and French, sometimes with an English one. You open your Herald Tribune, take a sip of espresso, wonder what it would be like to get stuck in a tunnel under the sea, halfway between Britain and the European continent, marvel at the way the train speeds up as soon as it enters France, and before you know it you’re there.
