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Lecture FOUR:

FIVE Consequences of the Second World War (I) (II)

Because of Germany’s exclusion from the Peace and Treaty of Versailles, which left it out from
the international network of agreements – and free to pursue its ways, the Second World War
broke out. Germany became allied with Italy and Far East countries, such as Japan. Owing to the
victory of the Allies in the Second World War (thanks to America joining the Allies in 1942). In
the context of the economic and political weakening of the belligerent countries in Europe,
America came much closer to Europe after the Allies won the War – and the same thing
happened, plus more intensely, after the Second World War (see the American money and the
*Marshall plan effects - in Greece, for example and the fact that the Microsoft Corporation
headquarters is in Seattle, Washington in the US ; see the popularity of American movies and
life-style). At the Yalta Peace Conference (and thanks to a secret agreement in Potsdam), the
Russians were requited by being given control over countries of Central and Middle Europe, to
the east of the Iron Curtain. TWO A new Bolshevik/Soviet empire was created in the name of
triumphant socialism (which became a mere ideology at the time). Totalitarian terror, poverty
and backwardness separated the socialist republics which were under Russian rule ( in a
European, Old World empire of sorts) from the liberal, democratic and capitalistic west, a
situation described in the frightening/dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1949 by
George Orwell.

THREE The appearance on the world map of the British Commonwealth of Nations:

- In the 1921 Treaty with Ireland, after the Anglo-Irish war, the oath of allegiance required of the
citizens or politicians under the Treaty was to be one to The British Commonwealth of Nations
rather than to The British Empire.

-The Balfour Declaration of 1926 named “autonomous [the] Communities within the British
Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or
external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as
members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”; the 1931 Statute of Westminster made the
dominions sovereign nations.

-the London Declaration of 1949 dropped British from the title and allowed the Commonwealth
to admit and retain members that were not dominions.

–FCO The Foreign and Commonwealth Office , an institution created in 1968, when the Foreign
Office merged with the Commonwealth Office

WIKIPEDIA MATERIALS
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5 April 2016
Foreign Secretary comments on the Foreign Affairs Committee report on human rights

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said:

I do not recognise this characterisation of our human rights work. Improving human rights is a core
function of the Foreign Office and is the responsibility of every British diplomat around the world.
The UK supports over 75 human rights projects in more than 40 countries and this year we are doubling
the funding available for human rights projects to £10 million – a true measure of the importance we
attach to this agenda.
By mainstreaming human rights within the Foreign Office, we have ensured it will always be a central part
of our diplomacy, delivering tangible results.

NB The Wikipedia briefing below is transformed into a narrative in McDowal “The loss of the
British Empire” –; p. 170-171-172. (see the first hour of the next seminar)

A free association of member states who were former British territories; the symbol of this free
association is Queen Elizabeth II who is the Head of the Commonwealth. The Queen is also the
monarch of 16 members of the Commonwealth, known as Commonwealth realms. The other
Commonwealth members have different heads of state: 32 members are republics and five are
monarchies with a different monarch.
Member states have no legal obligation to one another. Instead, they are united by language,
history, culture and their shared values ofdemocracy, human rights, and the rule of law.[5] These
values are enshrined in the Commonwealth Charter[7] and promoted by the
quadrennial Commonwealth Games. On 3 October 2013, after 48 years of membership, The
Gambia became the most recent nation to withdraw from the Commonwealth. [8]
The Commonwealth covers more than 29,958,050 km2(11,566,870 sq mi), almost a quarter of
the world's land area, and spans all six inhabited continents. With an estimated population of
2.328 billion, nearly a third of the world population,[9] the Commonwealth in 2014 produced a
nominal gross domestic product(GDP) of $10.45 trillion, representing 17% of the gross world
productwhen measured in purchasing power parity (PPP) and 14% of the gross world product
when measured nominally.
xxx
After World War II ended, the British Empire was gradually dismantled to the 14 British overseas
territories still held by the United Kingdom. Burma (also known as Myanmar, 1948)
and Aden(1967) are the only states that were British colonies at the time of the war not to have
joined the Commonwealth upon independence. Former British protectorates and mandates that
did not become members of the Commonwealth are Egypt (independent in
1922), Iraq (1932), Transjordan (1946), British Palestine (part of which became the state
of Israel in 1948), Sudan (1956), British Somaliland (which united with the former Italian
Somaliland in 1960 to form the Somali
Republic), Kuwait (1961), Bahrain (1971), Oman (1971), Qatar (1971), and the United Arab
Emirates (1971).
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On 18 April 1949, Ireland formally became a republic in accordance with the Irish Republic of
Ireland Act 1948. Because it did this, it was automatically excluded from the Commonwealth.
While Ireland had not actively participated in the Commonwealth since the early 1930s and was
content to leave the Commonwealth, other dominions wished to become republics without
losing Commonwealth ties. The issue came to a head in April 1949 at a Commonwealth prime
ministers' meeting in London. Under the London Declaration, India agreed that, when it became
a republic in January 1950, it would accept the British Sovereign as a "symbol of the free
association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth".
Upon hearing this, King George VI told the Indian politician Krishna Menon: "So, I've become 'as
such'".[21] The other Commonwealth countries recognised India's continuing membership of the
association. At Pakistan's insistence, India was not regarded as an exceptional case and it was
assumed that other states would be accorded the same treatment as India.
The London Declaration is often seen as marking the beginning of the modern Commonwealth.
Following India's precedent, other nations became republics, or constitutional monarchies with
their own monarchs, while some countries retained the same monarch as the United Kingdom,
but their monarchies developed differently and soon became fully independent of the British
monarchy. The monarch is regarded as a separate legal personality in each realm, even though
the same person is monarch of each realm.

FOUR Britain’s position in international politics became uncertain since it remained more
attached to its defunct empire than to Europe

McDowal Chapter 23: Britain, Europe and the United States

(excerpts from pages 173 and 174)
It was, perhaps, natural that Britain was unable to give proper attention to its relations with Europe
until it was no longer an imperial power. Ever since the growth of its trade beyond Europe during the
seventeenth century, Britain had ceased to be fully active in Europe except at moments of crisis. As
long as Europe did not interfere with Britain's trade, and as long as the balance of power in
Europe was not seriously disturbed , Britain could happily neglect European affairs.
At the end of the eighteenth century Napoleonic France drew Britain further into European politics
than it had been, perhaps, since the Hundred Years war. In 1815 Britain co-operate d with the other
European powers to ensure peace , and it withdrew this support because it did not wish to work with
the despotic powers then governing most of Europe. For the rest of the century, European affairs took
second place to empire and imperial trade. After the First World War it was natural that some
Europeans should try to create a European union that would prevent a repetition of war. A few
British people welcomed the idea. But when France proposed such an arrangement in 1930, one
British politician spoke for the majority of the nation :
"Our hearts are not in Europe; we could never share the truly European point of view nor become real
patriots of Europe. Besides, we could never give up our own patriotism for an Empire which extends
to all parts of the world ... The character of the British people makes it impossible for us to take
part seriously in any Pan -European system. "
Since then Britain has found it difficult to move away from this point of view. After the Second
World War the value of European unity was a good deal clearer. In 1946 Churchill called for a
"United States of Europe" , but it was already too late to prevent the division of Europe into two blocs.
In 1949 Britain joined with other Western European countries to form the Council of Europe , "to
achieve greater unity between members", but it is doubtful how far this aim has been achieved.
Indeed, eight years later in 1957, Britain refused to join the six other European countries in the
creation of a European Common Market. Britain was unwilling to surrender any sovereignty or
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cont rol over its own affairs, and said it still felt responsibility towards its empire.
It quickly became clear that Britain's attitude, particularly in view of the rapid loss of empire, was
mistaken . As its financial and economic difficulties increased, Britain could not afford to stay out of
Europe . But it was too late: when Britain tried to join the European Community in 1963 and again in
1967, the French President General de Gaulle refused to allow it. Britain only became a member
in 1973, after de Gaulle's retirement.

….

De Gaulle's attitude to Britain was not only the result of his dislike of "les Anglo-Saxons" . He also
believed that Britain could not make up its mind whether its first loyalty, now that its empire was
rapidly disappearing, was to Europe or to the United States. Britain felt its "special relationship" with
the United States was particularly important. It was vaguely believed that this relationship came from
a common democratic tradition, and from the fact that the United States was basically Anglo-Saxon.
Neither belief was wholly true, for the United States since 1783 had been a good deal more
democratic than Britain , and most US citizens were not Anglo-Saxons. Even Britain 's alliance with
the United States was very recent. In 1814 British troops had burnt down the US capital,
Washington. In the middle of the nineteenth century most British took the part of the South in
the American Civil War. By the end of the century the United States was openly critical of Britain' s
empire. Britain's special relationship rested almost entirely on a common language, on its wartime
alliance with the United States and the Cold War which followed it.

FIVE The gradual and decisive slant of liberalism towards Realpolitik in the course of the
twentieth century. The division of democracies between a nucleus of politicians who ruled
according to the Realpolitik rules and a mass of outsiders who played it by the rules being
idealists or naïve. Realpolitik (military/marshal) power as the grounds for politics was first used
by Bismarck, the Prussian Prince and General, a kind of predecessor of Hitler – but in the course
of the twentieth century, with the two wars, Realpolitik was generalized as the principle for
political and military action which connected all the important figures who prepared, or
participated in, the Second World Wars (see Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day,
1989)
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II

From Nightmarish History to Dystopian Literature (George Orwell’s Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
written in 1949

Dystopias are fables of history, stories with a double meaning composed according to
the following recipe/pattern:

THE MEANING & SETTING: because they wish to demonstrate the proliferation of evil
until it becomes generalized and eradicates/annihilates whatever or whoever is in the way, they
are usually located in far-away places or in the remote future that cannot be interfered with.

THE CHARACTERS: as far as the characters are concerned, usually there is a minority of
good or happy people gradually defeated by the massive or stronger impact of evil

THE DRAMATIC MESSAGE: Dystopias are frightening because they exaggerate a

particular anomaly at the literal level (they are like horror movies, for example); they are
enlightening at the figurative/intellectual/philosophical level, where the anomaly is presented
both critically and analytically, because dystopias provide complete explanations about
instruments, causes and effects of evil.

Set in Oceania, and more particularly in a fictional London called Airstrip One, George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was written as a future projection of what was true about the
world, while also being intensely evil. The near-reversal of 1949 to 1984 in the Nineteen Eighty –
Four society criticized and analysed in detail the division of the world into two power blocks, the
Western/NATO one and the Eastern/Warsaw Pact and depicted the unbearable life of humanity
in the Eastern half of the world (the Western/Liberal capitalistic Block is called Oceania, and the
Eastern or Soviet Block, Eurasia). At the time when the novel was written, the Soviet Union
attempted to conquer West Berlin from East Berlin and this led to the beginning of the Cold War
and the Berlin Wall being erected, with the Allies’ troops stationed on one side of it, and the
Soviet Union troops, on the other. The political reality of the Soviet terrorist/dictatorial state led
by Lenin and Stalin, and the economical reality of poverty in all the Soviet satellites were joined
in Nineteen Eighty-Four to the latest technological advances placed in the hands of the
communist state terrorists (for example, there was a surveillance and disciplinarian system
which placed in each party member’s apartment a TELESCREEN, a television system broadcasting
the truths and rules obeyed by everybody). The Nineteen Eighty-Four society of the future was
called Ingsoc, which stood for English Socialism, but was expressed in the ideological propaganda
language of Oceania, called Newspeak. This new truncated, artificial language was one
instrument for falsifying reality, namely tailoring it so as to express the perfect ideas of socialism,
whose sole purpose was to cover the grim realities of political terror, poverty and
dehumanization; these were embelished with false language that presented the severest forms
of discipline as collective love (this combination of propaganda and constraint was called
*pastoral power by Michel Foucault). Just as discipline was enforced in the private lives of the
party members by telescreens, and in everyday collective life by a Two Minute (public) Hate, at
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the public level, discipline was enforced in the dystopian society by three ministries that
enforced discipline: the Ministry of Truth (in charge with falsifying history through journalistic
announcements about the latest triumphs of Oceania in the continuous war with Eurasia) and
whose name was Minitrue in the truncated language of Newspeak; the Ministry of Plenty (which
administered the endemic poverty and food ratios); the Ministry of Love (which was in charge
with punishing the enemies of the totalitarian state and with torture) and whose name in
Newspeak was Miniluv. The implacable Ingsoc order was wielded in the name of Big Brother, a
figure that looked like Stalin’s picture but had nobody behind it, an empty image. Behind Big
Brother was hiding the Inner Party, however, the real power structure. The life of the Inner Party
members differed from that of ordinary Party members (and there was a single party, of course,
unlike in real liberal democracies, where, as was seen in the Victorian age, Conservatives and
Liberals alternated in office); they led lives of material comfort, exactly as capitalists, while the
rest of the Ingsoc world…”enjoyed” the benefits of postwar socialism, which meant poverty and
totalitarianism in both the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Winston Smith is Orwell’s liberal minded /free thinking protagonist forced to live alone
and wistfully craving for the past comforts of genteel life. After keeping an illicit diary (and
committing thoughtcrime – criticizing the regime), living for love rather than for reproductive
sex, as ordinary party members did (though not the proles, too), a trap is laid for him by an old
informer with an innocent face, Mr. Charrington and by O’Brien, an Inner Party Member in order
to be annihilated. He falls into the trap, is tortured in the Ministry of Love until he loses all his
conviction in Room 101 (containing the worst thing in the world). At the end of the book,
Winston’s conversion to communism becomes complete, as we can read in the last paragraph:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel,
needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was
all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.