An elegy for Europe
Bruce Page
GAMES WITH SHADOWS by Neal Ascherson Radius, f18, pp.354 Anewspaper columnist's work gener- ally does not stand being printed again (once may be excessive). Neal Ascherson is an exception — indeed, a contrary case, for the columns collected here gain from being in their own society, rather than existing as individual currants in the weekend's ration of Observerpudding. This is not to say they are not journalistic. Any other old sweat can get considerable pro- fessional pleasure from Ascherson's crafty manipulation of The Peg (the gloss from a transient event which justifies the writer's excursus into whatever subject he or she finds it convenient — or necessary — to discuss).
The man who should be reading Games With Shadows is Neil Kinnock. Without its being Ascherson's main purpose, the essays — which are what they really are map out plausible ground for a socialist alternative capable of being something more than a complaint against Mrs Thatch- er's (admittedly selective) attack on the entrenched interests of British society. The problem is that the programme would be devolutionist, deeply sceptical of state power, and irredeemably — even romanti- cally — European. This, Ascherson rueful- ly notes, is a fairly good list of things which Labour has never been, and is having a lot of trouble looking as though it might be. Games With Shadows is an investigation of what it means to be European — and, within that context, to be English, Scottish, Jewish, Polish, Welsh, German or Ukrai- nian. Neal Ascherson can speak as an insider for many of those strains. Where he can't, his polyglot sympathy is almost as exact.
It would be surprising — even disturbing — to find a book of essays with which one agreed entirely. There is at least one item here which appears to me total nonsense: an essay against technology (labelled as 'precision'), which comes straight out of the Old Country Cottage Album of Liter- ary Attitudes. This, I think, must be the English part of Ascherson: I cannot im- agine the Scottish part having anything to do with it. The error, which is something like the one that Hayek made in The Road to Serfdom, consists in thinking that an increase of knowledge (precision) makes the future more predictable (and therefore dull, inhuman). But what contemporary science and technology tell us is that increased knowledge, while making some things more controllable, actually makes the world as a whole very much more unpredictable — not inhuman, but possibly all too human. Precision and control en- able the airliner to land safely in a foreign country with a cargo of passengers who otherwise would not have left their home- land. What they do after they disembark is quite another matter: for better or worse, they are/will be exercising a degree of freedom which did not exist before.
Leaving that sort of thing apart — and you get a lot more of it in many English writers — I find myself voting for nearly all of Ascherson's positions. (Probably I would like a bit less neutralism in the European cocktail, but one of the points is that people and nations should be able within reason to mix their own drinks.) But there is one major problem, which I suspect contributes to the relative unpopu- larity of the better arguments of the Left. The tone of Games with Shadows is ele- giac, and the historic standpoint comes at times close to a kind of radical pessimism which could not win popular adherents, and would be self-defeating if it did.
The Europe in which we live, says Ascherson, is 'Hitler's legacy', and he is a matchless guide to the present discontents and fearsome memories which appear to justify that phrase. But the fact is that what Hitler had in mind to bequeath us was something infinitely more terrible, and his intention was frustrated by the courage and sacrifice of a generation which is only just passing from the scene.
Complacency is a terrible enemy. But there is something to celebrate about the survival of Europe — and Games with Shadows does not seem to recognise that fact.
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