The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration
416
The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration
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Overview
One of Britain's most influential centre-left thinkers examines UK immigration policy and argues that there have been unforeseen consequences which urgently need to be addressed.
In The British Dream, David Goodhart tells the story of post-war immigration and charts a course for its future. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with people from all over the country and a wealth of statistical evidence, he paints a striking picture of how Britain has been transformed by immigration and examines the progress of its ethnic minorities - projected to be around 25 per cent of the population by the early 2020s.
Britain today is a more open society for minorities than ever before, but it is also a more fragmented one. Goodhart argues that an overzealous multiculturalism has exacerbated this problem by reinforcing difference instead of promoting a common life. The multi-ethnic success of Team GB at the 2012 Olympics and a taste for chicken tikka masala are not, he suggests, sufficient to forge common bonds; Britain needs a political culture of integration.
Goodhart concludes that if Britain is to avoid a narrowing of the public realm and sharply segregated cities, as in many parts of the US, its politicians and opinion leaders must do two things. Firstly, as advocated by the centre right, they need to bring immigration down to more moderate and sustainable levels. Secondly, as advocated by the centre left, they need to shape a progressive national story about openness and opportunity - one that captures how people of different traditions are coming together to make the British dream.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857899750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 778 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
David Goodhart is the founder and editor of Prospect. He was formerly a German correspondent for the Financial Times and is a regular broadcaster and contributor to the national press. He is married to Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway. They have four children and live in London.
Read an Excerpt
The British Dream
Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration
By David Goodhart
Grove Atlantic Ltd
Copyright © 2013 David GoodhartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84354-806-5
CHAPTER 1
The Bigger Picture: Globalisation and the Economics of Immigration
Nations and People
Our British story is, of course, set in a bigger global one. There are two commonplace assumptions that inform the debate about globalisation and mass immigration. Humanity is on the move on an unprecedented scale and the nation state is inexorably losing power. Neither is true.
Human beings have not given up the largely settled life we have lived since hunter-gathering gave way to the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. There is, it is true, a vast movement within poor countries from the rural to the urban, but people have not suddenly become country-hoppers. The number of people living in countries other than the one they were born in is very small. Even within the European Union in 2000, prior to the opening up towards Central and Eastern Europe, less than 0.1 per cent of the EU's population moved to live in another EU country each year. Rootedness remains a strong human impulse.
And nor is the nation state dying out. As the Soviet empire collapsed at the end of the cold war, there was another burst of nation creation, just as there had been earlier in the century with the disappearance of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and later the French and British empires.
It is true that the world is more economically interdependent than fifty years ago, and more national sovereignty is vested in international institutions such as Nato, the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations. Moreover, the technology of travel and media reinforces the metaphor of a 'borderless world'. But it is mainly a metaphor. More of us than ever before are rich enough to frequently travel long distances, and sometimes work abroad for a few years, but most of us in the developed world come back to places we call home in solid nation states – we cross national borders into countries with national armies, national economies, national languages (in a few cases more than one).
Indeed, to a remarkable extent ours remains the age of the liberal democratic nation state and of liberal (or in some cases illiberal) democratic nationalism. Not all states are nation states but much conflict in the world – from Palestine to Tibet and Chechnya – involves stateless people seeking nation states of their own. And more of the world's problems arise because nation states are too weak rather than too strong: why was rapid economic development possible in the East Asian tigers but not in Africa? Partly because national solidarity has been too weak in parts of post-colonial Africa to prevent the state being hijacked by sectional or tribal interests.
Why is this remarkable? Only because the ideology of globalisation has told us that it isn't so. Open one of the serious newspapers any day of the week and you will read paragraphs like this one from Philip Stephens in the Financial Times.
'Governments have ceded power to mobile financial capital, to crossborder supply chains and to rapid shifts in comparative advantage. Control of information now belongs to 24-hour satellite television and the cacophony that is the web ... Citizens expect national politicians to protect them against the insecurities – economic, social and physical – that come with global integration. Yet governments have lost much of the capacity to meet the demands.' This is not completely wrong. Officials at the UK Borders Agency will tell you that the internet, for example, has internationalised the job, student and even marriage markets. But by focusing on those forces – trade, finance, transport and communications technology, immigrant diasporas – which do flow constantly across national borders, it ends up painting a partial picture. Most of those things are, in any case, still regulated by national laws or international agreements drawn up by national governments. It also leaves out of the picture the areas – like welfare – where the nation state is more, not less, enmeshed in people's lives than fifty years ago.
And in some versions of the ideology it is not just describing, it is advocating – it is saying that by transcending the nation state these forces are promoting the cause of peace, economic growth and human well-being.
But nation states still underpin the institutions that manage the greater interdependence of the modern world, and only they can mobilise their publics for global collective action. Global institutions are mainly forums where the great powers try to find common interest. Those that operate a nominally democratic system of 'one country, one vote' like the UN or WTO do not express a global 'demos' and seldom try to impose their will on dissenting states.
Meaningful international agreements are still notoriously difficult to reach, but as global governance grows in importance so too must the nation state. As the centre of power close to where people live and have their attachments, it is only the nation state that can confer legitimacy and accountability on global bodies and thus prevent the emergence of global Leviathans like those imagined by George Orwell in 1984.
One group of rich nation states has, of course, gone a bit further and created in the European Union an institution that is partly designed to transcend national interests and identities. But most of the EU's work is just a conventional pooling of national sovereignty to achieve together what cannot be achieved by individual nation states acting alone, in global trade negotiations for example.
Despite the best attempts of the European Commission and Parliament over many decades there is no significant 'European' interest or identity over and above the pooled, and sometimes conflicting, interests of its member states. There is a kind of European democracy in the European Parliament but elections to this body are mainly national affairs. And there is a degree of redistribution between richer countries (and regions) and poorer ones but the sums involved remain small. The recent Euro bail-out funds have so far
amounted to only about 50 billion euros divided proportionately between Eurozone members, and they are at least in theory loans.
Although the EU mimics the nation state in some trivial ways, it is not a nation state and to the extent that it commands loyalty it is at a far lower level than national loyalty. Very few people would die for the EU and very few would make big economic sacrifices for another EU state. We have seen this clearly in the case of Germany, one of the least overtly nationalistic of the big European states, which was happy to spend about one trillion dollars on unification with East Germany but is very reluctant to spend far smaller sums helping to support the Greek economy and what they call a European 'transfer union'.
The modern law-bound, liberal nation state is not a menacing political institution. You join automatically by birth (or by invitation) and an allegiance to the liberal nation state is compatible with internationalism, with the rapid advancement of developing countries and with support for bodies like Nato and the EU. It is also compatible with a high degree of localism and devolution to sub-national authorities.
Indeed, after a long and often bloody prehistory the modern nation state is the only institution that can currently offer what liberals, of both right and left, want: democratic legitimacy for the exercise of power and upholding of the rule of law; cross-class and generational solidarity and even, in Europe's post-religious age, a sense of collective identification that is bigger than families and neighbourhoods but more tangible than the whole world.
At this stage in human history the liberal nation state is simply the political form that democracy and welfare states take. It is possible in the future that more global or regional institutions might be able to deliver these things; the EU is one prototype but its current difficulties underline what a slow and stuttering process this is likely to be.
This is ultimately a pragmatic argument. The nation state is not about mystical attachments, it is not a good in itself, it is rather the institutional arrangement that can consistently deliver the democratic, welfare, and psychological outcomes that most people, when given a choice, seem to want.
It is true that the mainstream political and media debate can often be stridently chauvinistic in tone, but in left-wing and liberal circles in universities, business, the law, the media and politics the debate is too often the mirror image of this – positively hostile to even moderate national feeling and the idea that one might favour the interests of one's fellow citizens before others (see my Oxford encounter in the introduction).
The progressive assumption seems to be that it is fine to have an attachment to friends and family and perhaps a neighbourhood or a city – 'I'm proud to be a Londoner' – and, of course, to humanity as a whole. But the nation state – especially a once dominant one like Britain – is considered something old-fashioned and illiberal, an irrational group attachment that smart people transcend or ignore.
One reason why modern liberals are tempted by the globalisation narrative, even those who are critics of global capitalism, is because many of the 1960s generation cut their political teeth battling against the prejudices and conformism of their respective nations in the decades after the Second World War. It was a time when nationalism was tarnished by war and fascism and often resisted the idea of human equality for non-natives.
As I argued in the introduction, the nation state has changed radically since then, especially in rich countries, yet many people on the left are still transfixed by its historic sins. If people are squeamish about the associations of the word 'nation' they should use something else: citizenship or just society.
Raymond Aron, the French political writer, once said that in the second half of the twentieth century 'with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes on the significance that inequality between classes once had'. The idea has had a particular resonance in once-imperial Britain.
And there is a bigger story here about western values. In the mid-twentieth century, elites in the liberal democratic west began to embrace what the sociologist Geoff Dench has called the 'universalist shift' – the belief in the moral equality of all people. This meant that differences of sex, ethnicity and, above all, race were no longer deemed obstacles to someone's full membership in a society. Although the idea did not extend to economic inequality it was profoundly anti-hierarchical and socially egalitarian, and demanded that power and rewards in society be justified by performance rather than inherited characteristics (whiteness or maleness).
This political and legal egalitarianism was not new but in earlier eras it was a largely utopian idea associated with religion (we are all equal in the eyes of God) or radical political movements or abstract philosophising – the Enlightenment, the French and American revolutions (not including slaves in the latter case). What brought this idea of moral equality into mainstream politics? Two world wars, the Holocaust, anti-colonial movements and the stirrings of the civil rights movement in the US all combined to change human consciousness, at least in the developed world, in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover democracy itself, which implies an equality of status within the community of citizens – one person, one vote – was only newly establishing itself in most rich countries in the first part of the twentieth century.
After the publication of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights the principle of moral and political equality came to be written into the constitutions and legal systems of all liberal democracies. Along with the American civil rights movement it prompted, for example, Britain's pioneering anti-race-discrimination legislation of the mid-1960s. The moral and legal equality implied in the universalist shift – completing and making real the idea of equality before the law for all groups – was not always fully embraced in practice but it became a standard to judge the behaviour of states and organisations against; and it was so used by the 1968-ers against authority in general and by the leaders of the first, post-colonial, immigrant wave into Britain against racism.
It now seems so banal to believe in the moral equality of all people that we have forgotten what a novel and revolutionary notion it is, and how many people around the world still have traces of more racial and 'groupist' world-views. (The political theorist John Dunn has explained the triumph of liberal democracy as the victory of individualism over collectivism.) And in the lifetimes of many older people still alive today very different official views prevailed. As recently as the 1940s and 1950s respectable strands of British political opinion were arguing that many colonised people were not yet mature enough to govern themselves; they were like children or teenagers not yet able to join the adult community of self-governing states.
Indeed, at the time of the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919, Japan asked for a protocol to be included proclaiming racial equality between all nations. But this idea was scuppered when US President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the vote in favour must be unanimous while knowing that Britain and Australia would vote against, mainly to defend the latter's 'white Australia' immigration policy. Just twenty-nine years later the UN Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up.
All people in mainstream politics in the developed world now believe in human equality. But among some groups, especially on the liberal left, the universalist shift turned into something else – a rejection of all national borders and loyalties. If all people are worthy of equal respect (at least until they have proved themselves unworthy of it) then how can we any longer favour our fellow national citizens over the impoverished masses of the global south?
This 'post-nationalism' is not a dominant view but it is certainly an influential minority view, and it nags away at the conscience of many liberal-minded people. Here are some people who do embrace post-nationalism.
According to George Monbiot, a leading figure of the liberal left, 'Internationalism ... tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington ... Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?'
And here is the respected academic Danny Dorling, in the course of an argument for an open-door immigration policy, questioning the moral legitimacy of the rich west: 'At present the proportion of the world's population that enjoys developed economic and social rights and can afford to travel the world on a legitimate passport is, to my mind, rather like the white population of apartheid South Africa in relation to the majority black population.'
They are not alone in believing that national preferences are wrong or even racist. Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights group Liberty, argued recently: 'In the modern world of transnational and multinational power we must decide if we are all people or all foreigners now.'
Such views are not exclusive to the liberal left. On a Moral Maze programme in 2011 about development aid, the former Tory cabinet minister Michael Portillo said: 'It is quite old-fashioned to think about national borders, and rather nationalistic to say we must help people who are only moderately poor because they happen to be in the UK rather than helping people who are desperately poor because they happen to be a long way away.'
The centrist commentator Oliver Kamm said to me recently that it was morally wrong to discriminate on grounds of nationality, effectively ruling out the 'fellow citizen favouritism' that most people think the modern nation state is based on. This argument seems to confuse national citizenship with race, as did many of the liberal critics of Gordon Brown's infamous 'British jobs for British workers' speech.
Much of this seems to be a kind of category error. It does not follow from a belief in the moral equality of all people that we owe the same obligations or commitments to them all. We feel special obligations to family members but not because they are morally superior to other people. Monbiot and the others seem to elide the necessary political and legal specialness of national citizenship with superiority and even racism.
So ideas about globalisation and the inevitability of mass migration along with this morally appealing ideology of liberal universalism have combined to reinforce a carelessness about national boundaries among intellectual, and business, elites in many rich countries. Britain is especially vulnerable to this carelessness, partly because of its own multinational and imperial history. For the liberal wing of Britain's baby-boom generation guilt about empire has played a similar, albeit less wrenching, role to the post-war German generations' repudiation of the Nazi period.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The British Dream by David Goodhart. Copyright © 2013 David Goodhart. Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,A Note on Language,
Introduction,
Part One Setting The Scene,
1 The Bigger Picture: Globalisation and the Economics of Immigration,
2 The Way We Live Now: How Are Britain's Minorities Doing?,
Part Two How Did We Get Here?,
3 The First Great Arrival 1948–92,
4 The Multicultural Odyssey,
5 The Second Great Arrival 1997–Today,
Part Three Why It Matters and What We Do About It,
6 Progressive Dilemmas,
7 The National Question,
8 Where Next?,
Bibliography,
Note on the Author,
Index,