So, provided the Royals perform well for the media (think showbiz dynasty) and provided they are discreet with their money, they can probably count on the sort of public goodwill that will keep the monarchy show running and running, and keep the K in UK. On the other hand, media editors must be drooling for the day when the young prince starts dating and, inevitably, screening for a wife. The precedents don’t bode well.
Identity and Change Some world powers are the product of revolution – France, the United States, Russia, China, India. Others have recast themselves after the turmoil of war or civil conflict – Germany, Italy and Japan being obvious examples. Almost alone among the world’s great industrial nations, Britain has no ‘Independence Day’ or ‘Liberation Day’ to celebrate.
Modern Britain is the product of evolution, not revolution. The British have never had a violent break with their past, never had to sit down together and write out a constitution or think up a completely new way of governing themselves. The legal system goes back centuries, with sedimentary layers of laws and modifications of laws. The British way has been to look to the past and tweak what worked before, rather than undertake a radical makeover.
This approach seemed to pay dividends for a long time. Over the centuries, the country amassed an empire that spanned the globe. Older Brits still recall nostalgically school atlases in which every continent had large areas of pink to mark British possessions, an era when ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’. But all that changed with World Wars I and II, which depleted the country and for ever loosened its grip on its colonial possessions.
Over the last fifty years, Britain has been forced to rethink itself, to abandon some cherished tenets of its self-mythology and to allow a new identity to emerge. The process has been long and painful, but it’s irreversible. In the mid 1990s, then Prime Minister John Major tried to stem the tide with a call for a ‘Back to Basics’ approach, along with a dewy-eyed evocation of old maids on bicycles and cricket on the village green. The country ridiculed his vision and voted him out at the next opportunity.
The British seem increasingly prepared, or perhaps resigned, to face a harsher future in which old maids won’t ride around on bicycles and the state won’t try to provide for all needs. ‘In the UK, a sea change is occurring,’ reports Gavin Heron, former strategic planning director at TBWA London, now based in Hong Kong. ‘People are moving from a dependency mindset to that of personal responsibility or control. They no longer believe the government will provide for them as it used to. The millennium is acting as a catalyst for a break with the past. It represents the future as now.’
Embracing Foreigners Britain is in the process of consciously becoming a multicultural country – a huge change from the days of the empire.
The United States forges its nationhood in schools with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. In France, immigrants are expected to put aside their origins and ‘assimilate’ French ways – as happened in France’s former colonies. The British, in contrast, have never expected foreigners to become British, so they were pretty much left to retain their own ethnic identities, as used to happen in British colonies. In Britain, immigrant groups have tended to retain their own ethnic flavour as they have found their way into society.
Absorbing immigrants has gone against the grain for many British people. Racial issues have been debated hard for many years and the anti-immigrant National Front enjoyed a brief spell of limited support in the 1980s. But an indication of the progress made can be seen in Mike Leigh’s award-winning feature film Secrets and Lies (1996), in which a working-class English woman is tracked down by the daughter who was taken from her at birth. The fact that the daughter is black and the mother is white is barely mentioned and has little relevance to the story, which is about family relationships and is virtually colour blind. Had the film been made ten years earlier, it would probably have been about race.
Much of Britain’s self-mythology has been about a plucky little country resisting foreign attempts to invade it – the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the French under Napoleon in the nineteenth century, and the Germans under Hitler this century. The country’s history of military and imperial success bred a feeling that Britain had little to learn from foreigners.
This British sense of effortless superiority has been severely eroded and even turned on its head. Over the last fifty years, as Britain has slipped down world rankings in all sorts of areas – GDP, income, standard of living, nutrition, education, sport – many British people began to acknowledge that maybe foreigners knew a thing or two after all.
A willingness to learn from foreigners is perhaps what distinguishes New Brits most from previous generations. A measure of this willingness is the fact that some of Britain’s most chauvinistic and reactionary clubs have thrown their doors wide open to foreigners. Britain’s football clubs – flush with cash from new TV deals – now field players from all over the globe. Even more surprising is that some of the top clubs have hired foreign managers – a radical development for the country that claims to have invented the game.
Big Next: an Independent Asia
One hundred years ago, vast tracts of Asia were under colonial rule or foreign domination. Powerful industrialized countries controlled the destinies of many millions of Asians – in the region, only Thailand and Japan could be regarded as sovereign nations. And so it continued for almost fifty years more, through and beyond the Second World War.
Now, as the twentieth century draws to a close, the continent can look back over several decades of extraordinary changes and rapid development. Many Asians enjoy levels of education and affluence that surpass even those of the old colonial masters. The last vestige of foreign dominion was removed at midnight, 30 June 1997, when Britain returned Hong Kong to China, thereby ending what many Chinese described as ‘150 years of shame’.
Asians now control their own destiny. The region’s response to several big issues will be crucial in shaping that destiny and determining what sort of century the next one will be.
Economic Adjustment
It is a great pity for the region that the Hong Kong handover celebrations on 30 June were almost immediately overtaken by months of headlines about a regional economic crisis that grew and grew, just as forest fires in Indonesia burned out of control and blanketed much of south-east Asia in choking smoke. The sobering effect of the crisis has led to widespread fears that the hard-won economic gains of the last decades may be lost in some countries and that the twenty-first century may not after all turn out to be ‘the Asian century’ as had been so widely predicted.
At the time of writing, the ramifications of the regional economic crisis are still working themselves through. Many analysts have come to the conclusion that the crisis was caused by structural problems, which the region is now being forced to tackle. According to this analysis, a good shakeout will help the countries of the region to discard unproductive practices and get themselves into shape for the next stage in their development. Lower currencies will provide an extra edge in export markets for manufacturers in the region who ride out the storm.
‘Structural,’ however, may be too pat an explanation, and if accepted at face value could deflect the deeper analysis and problem-solving necessary to restore the tigers’ roar. Rampant over-investment in icons such as office buildings, hotels and airports soaked up billions of dollars that may have been better invested in future productivity. Over-reliance on traditional relationships as the basis for business, at the expense of a truly open market, led to many self-interested decisions. And a natural business cycle was at play here, too. Boom to bust, expansion followed by recession, has been the hallmark of the twentieth century. No one should have believed Asia was immune.
Not all countries in the region were affected. The Philippines barely merited a mention in the frenzied media coverage. Perhaps it should