Both Ukip and Theresa May trumpeted their anti-immigrant credentials yesterday, with fresh and not-so-fresh policies for the election. Hostility to foreigners is now an established theme in the UK’s political discourse, partly because it has deep cultural roots. But there may be something we can learn from Emmanuel Macron about how this problem can be addressed.
Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the presidential election was a moment for relief, but hardly celebration. It remains the case that one in three votes was cast for an apologist for France’s role in the Holocaust, and there is no reason to imagine an overly sharp distinction with the other two thirds. No one who voted for Macron in the second round after supporting the brazenly Islamophobic François Fillon in the first, for example, could possibly be described as an anti-racist. And if Macron strengthens big business at the expense of the working and middle class, then the forms of alienation that help to fuel the far right are certain to increase.
There is, however, one reason for optimism about the Macron presidency: his honesty about France’s imperial past. The chauvinistic nature of French patriotism, and the pervasiveness of Islamophobia in particular, cannot be fully explained without reference to the resentment caused by defeat in the Algerian war of independence, and by the mythology of French colonialism more broadly. When Macron accurately described French rule in Algeria as “barbaric” and “a crime against humanity”, he was directly challenging a nationalistic narrative that has long poisoned French politics and nourished the Front National. It is an admission of which British politicians should take heed.
The less sophisticated forms of Marxism and liberalism have always had a bad habit of reading the politics of a situation straight off the economics. But while economic hardship can have a role in boosting the hard right, this won’t do as an explanation by itself. Why does being “left behind by globalisation” (or “screwed by neoliberalism”, if you prefer plainer speaking) not lead working-class people of colour to vote Ukip? Why did the Trump and Brexit votes comprise a majority of middle-class or wealthier people, either attracted to or not put off by the hateful demagoguery of the campaigns?
Sooner or later, one has to engage with the ideological factors at work, and this is where our understanding of national history comes in. A nation’s collective sense of self is bound to play a part in its politics, and a collective sense of self that evolves through centuries of imperialism, and the inescapable role of racism within that, is bound to develop a particular character.
In the French case, it is impossible to maintain a settler colonial regime on your own doorstep for over 100 years, with all the brutality inherent to such a project, without telling yourself certain stories by way of justification. If you can convince yourself that you are the agent of modernity and progress, while your colonial subjects are backward, superstitious and irrationally violent, then massacres, torture and repression become regrettable necessities or understandable aberrations. Then, when your subjects in north Africa and elsewhere overthrow your rule, end your empire, and then in some cases come to your country as economic migrants or refugees, you are ready to see these developments as a humiliation, an insult and a threat.
The chauvinistic myth of the righteous empire is alive and well on both sides of the channel. The thousands of Kenyans arbitrarily rounded up and subjected to nightmarish abuses in British detention camps in the 1950s might take issue with foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s view that “the problem is not that we were once in charge [in Africa], but that we are not in charge any more”. Fillon described Macron’s “dislike of our history” as “unworthy of a candidate for the presidency”, while Gordon Brown proclaimed that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over”. Much Tory Euroscepticism is grounded in nostalgia for a fairyland version of empire, airbrushed of its systemic violence and exploitation, and now to be somehow revived as a post-Brexit trading network. In spite of its bloody record, 43% of Britons believe the British empire was a good thing.
The British left is often scolded, including by its own members, for failing to embrace patriotism. But patriotism in a country whose sense of itself and others was forged through centuries of empire is not a politically neutral thing, equally available to left or right. The reality is that in Britain and France much of our patriotism has been toxified by imperial self-satisfaction, an inherited sense of superiority over others, and a refusal to climb down from this through an honest reappraisal of our history. It is here that we find the roots of the post-imperial status anxiety that characterises the rightwing Brexiteers. It is also here that we find the instinct to see Muslims as uncivilised, immigrants as an economic burden, and refugees as “cockroaches” or just chancers on the scrounge.
What Britain needs instead is a collective sense of self that is open and pluralistic, with more room for humility and kindness. We need to be honest about British history not to feel guilty about crimes committed by other people before we were born, but to drain our sense of nationhood – and our relationships with others – of the toxins passed down from the days of empire. Above all, we need to dismantle the hard boundaries between “us” and “them” if a progressive politics, or just a politics of basic decency, is ever to be revived.