Political commentary

The boundary obsession

Ferdinand Mount

Stephen Leacock once complained about the unseemly haste with which visiting lecturers picked up their impressions of North America: 'British lecturers have been known to land in New York, pass the customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward to England from the closed taxi itself ten dollars' worth of impressions of American national character.' When English observers detected 'a note of optimism' in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, Leacock's belief was that It indicates nothing more than that someone gave the visitor a cigar.'

Over here, it is Cabinet Ministers who are quick on the draw. One thing any British politician, however apparently imperceptive in other departments of life, can detect Is a New Mood of Realism. Five minutes after being decanted at Birmingham or Liverpool, ushered through the police cordon, harassed by the lady from the AntiVivisection League and basted in flattery by the Area Chairman, he will declare: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, I detect a new mood of realism tonight in Birmingham. [or, as the case may be, Liverpool]: Now it may even be true, as Mrs Thatcher insists, that hard times really have compelled trade unions and employers to face reality, for the time being anyway. But to the layman at the end of 1980, there seems to be a great deal of the old unrealism about too. In fact, there is so much of it sloshing around that you could argue that, in political circles anyway, the very newest mood is one of brusque, passionate and irrational flight from reality.

I don't mean here the economics of Mr Peter Shore, Labour's new Treasury spokesman, beautifully bananas though they are (Mr Shore's view is that money doesn't matter at all and that the more of it he prints, the richer we all will be). What I am referring to are a whole clutch of views on different subjects which have been often expressed before but rarely with such zest or by normally sceptical people.

Among such views are: that we can and should withdraw from the Common Market and that Britain would be richer as a result; that Britain should set a timetable for withdrawing her troops from Northern Ireland as a prelude to Irish unity; that for the British government to 'hob-nob' (Mr Enoch Powell's rude word) with the Dublin government is 'a mini-Munich' and is a prelude to bouncing the Unionists into a united Ireland; that the protection of British industry, by means of a high general tariff on foreign goods, would revive the British economy; that multi-national companies pose a threat to this country, which requires drastic action by the British government; that there is a looming conflict between the rich North and the poor South, which can be avoided only by a 'massive transfer of resources from North to South', as recommended by Willy Brandt, Ted Heath and others in the Brandt Report.

I have deliberately lumped together this assOrtment of overlapping and conflicting views. Some are generally described as Little-Englander, Nationalist or yowellite; others as Euromaniac, Third Worldish or Heathite. But what they all have in common is the belief that existing national boundaries are at the heart of Britain's problems.

Either our boundaries are too rigid and impermeable, or they are too vague, porous, sloppily defined and inadequately defended. Either we let in too many foreign goods and foreign bureaucrats; or we are too insular and selfish and xenophobic. Either way, the trouble lies in our borders and not within ourselves. All through 1980, this 'border-itis' has been gathering momentum. There can, I think, be little doubt that it is an unconscious reaction to the grim and seemingly inexorable pressures of the recession.

At the extremes of the panic spectrum, Mr Heath and Mr Powell meet. For they share the belief that lines drawn or re-drawn on the map, or inked in with a thicker nib, or rubbed out altogether, have power magically to improve our fortunes. Only set the boundary at the White Cliffs of Dover, or from the Atlantic to the Urals, or abolish the boundaries between North and South, and immediately problems which previously seemed insoluble will disappear — racial friction, unequal development, the decline of heavy industries.

Now the facts are not helpful to such schemes. More than 40 per cent of our trade is now done with the EEC; soon it may be half; our share of world trade happens to be rising at the moment. The EEC aiready negotiates trading arrangements with the rest of the world on our behalf. If we left the Common Market, our textile, steel and shipbuilding industries would be finally done for. If we were to survive outside at anything like the present level of trade, we would require trading arrangements so elaborate and so improbable that withdrawal would scarcely have been worthwhile. The alternative to general protection would soon reduce us to the standard of living of say, Poland. As for the multi-nationals, how would Dagenham like it with only our homegrown Heffer Popular and Benn People's Car for competition?

And quite clearly, in the case of Britain's relations both with the Irish Republic and with the Third World, what is needed is steadily growing co-operation, rather than the disruption of 'radical reforms' — which would only bring more violence to Ireland and more inflation to the Third World.

Border obsessions seem quite untouched by historical considerations. First, such excessive reverence for boundary lines ignores how recent are the boundaries of almost all nation-states, the United Kingdom included. Very few antedate the invention in 1830 of Belgium, the archetypical art.lcial state — certainly not the USSR or the US or France or West Germany or Italy. And yet all attempts to erase or alter these lines, arbitrary though they may be, have provoked an appalling cost in blood and treasure. Millions have now been killed in Africa, and yet the boundaries of the old European colonies survive almost unaltered.

In any case, to prosper in a tolerable degree of liberty, a nation does not seem to need boundaries which are either far-flung, or rational, or long-established or even secure; look at Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, West Germany. At the same time, you cannot help noticing that the most immediately fruitful arrangements are those simply conducted between nationstates — like NATO, and the FrancoGerman agreement between Adenauer and de Gaulle. Attempts to federate or confederate existing nation-states have almost always failed in recent years; witness the abortive unions in the Arab world and the various attempts of the British colonial office to federate in Africa and the Caribbean._ On a smaller scale, the fiasco of 'devolution' for Scotland and Wales was a classic example of how to waste time by failing to think through the implications of constitutional change.

The European Communities offer examples of both good and bad. Where the member-states have acted as a bloc towards the outside world — for instance, in trade negotiations — and where they have agreed on free trade amongst themselves, they have proved dazzlingly successful. Attempts to integrate, on the other hand, such as the Common Agricultural Policy and the various schemes for monetary union, have proved an interminable cause of wrangling and confusion — and have at best done no better than if the business had been left to individual member-states.

At best, messing about with national boundaries is futile; at worst, desperately dangerous for the people on both sides; but always it is a distraction from the business of solving your own problems and reaching sensible accommodations with your neighbours.

The poet Tennyson, it will be recalled, advocates ringing in along with the New Year the common love , of good, the thousand years of peace, the larger heart and the kindlier hand. He does not suggest ringing in either the European Monetary System or a phased withdrawal from the European Communities.