Having finished a poor third in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Prime Minister is again blaming voters — this time for falling for the Greens’ divisive sectarianism. Even as oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapses after the bombing of Iran, jeopardizing vital imports, it is impossible for light from the outside world to penetrate the passivity of his consciousness.

But the realities that have crushed the British political class render the outcome of last week’s by-election a bigger event than the cataclysmic mismatch of Starmer’s ambition and his utter unsuitability for political office. The four political forces that destroyed Labour in Gorton and Denton originally materialized during Tony Blair’s second term, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives has ever really recovered.

The first of these, and the overriding one, is the deterioration in Britain’s economic performance. In her victory speech on Friday morning, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, said that she did not think “it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life”. Once “working hard … g[o]t you something … a house, a nice life, holidays. But now, working hard, what does that get you?”

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It was apt language. As the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, foresaw two decades ago, the years of “NICE” – Non-Inflationary Continuous Economic Growth – are long over.

Rising Asian oil consumption driven by China’s economic transformation ended the relatively benign world economic conditions that prevailed between the mid-Eighties and the early 2000s. As oil and gas production in the North Sea declined, Britain was particularly vulnerable in the emerging energy world.

From 2004, Britain became a net energy importer. To manage a structural energy-shaped trade deficit without dependence on volatile international capital flows, a state needs a strong export base. But Britain had a de-industrialized economy and was already running a sizable trade deficit. The past five years of high gas prices have accentuated this weakness. Without coal or hydropower, and with a declining nuclear sector, Britain is highly dependent for electricity on importing natural gas. Amplified by policy and network charges, our industrial electricity prices are the highest of any G7 economy. This burden has decimated the chemical sector, and contributed to Britain registering a record trade deficit in goods in 2025. A report by the CBI and Energy UK, published this month, reported that 40% of manufacturing firms have cut back investment because of high energy costs. Without some relief, NICE retreats ever further into the past.

The second force at work against Labour in Gorton and Denton was the penetration of British politics by the Middle East. Across the coalition mobilized by the Greens, Gaza hurt Labour, just as the Iraq War helped lose Labour 11 seats to the Liberal Democrats at the 2005 general election — including Manchester Withington, one part of which is now in the Gorton and Denton constituency. A year later, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was the inciting incident for Tony Blair’s early departure from office.

As strong support for Israel was part of the New Labour project, that internal party coup was a symbolic moment. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Starmer’s attempt to replicate Blair’s playbook in opposition, by staging a confrontation with the Left of the party, centered on suspending Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism. But as progressive politics since Iraq has been bound to objecting to Israeli and US policy in the Middle East, Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks casts a very long shadow. A Labour government cannot sit in the position New Labour did when there was genuine hope of a two-state peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians without shedding votes to its Left. Nor can it chase those votes without the risk of embroiling Labour again in the antisemitism crisis of the Corbyn years.

The third long-standing force punishing Labour in Gorton and Denton is the graduate debt borne by the millennial and early Generation Z urban precariat. Labour has had problems with university tuition fees since 2004, when, having ruled out any change to university funding in its 2001 manifesto, Blair’s government legislated for English universities to charge up to £3,000 a year: from 2006-7, students would pay by loans, rather than the previous means-tested upfront charges. Labour’s majority on the bill was five, with Scottish Labour MPs delivering the necessary votes, even though the fee regime would only apply in England. While it was the Liberal Democrats who took the political blame for the next hike in tuition fees, in 2012, it is the young graduate voters wishing to identify with Labour who bear the brunt of this fee regime — and which has, with higher inflation, resulted in higher interest loans.

If this cohort were not already resentful enough, the Chancellor’s last budget froze the threshold for repayment for three years to patch up the fiscal gap caused by the welfare debacle in the summer. Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s presumption that these voters have nowhere else to go has been blown apart by Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Greens. Indeed, with graduate urban millennials having constituted the social base for Corbyn’s movement-based Labour party, the Greens are now the very version of Corbyn’s Labour that Starmer thought he had slain — this time with the right generational leader for the cause.

The final force at work is the one that delivered Reform 28.7% of the vote in inner-city Manchester. Quite simply, Labour can no longer be the party of the working class. For two decades the party has tried to face both ways or, more precisely, danced one way and then, shortly after, the other, on those issues that have alienated much of the working class from both main parties. Blair’s second government was sufficiently complacent about these voters to eschew transition arrangements for the right to work in Britain of EU citizens from eastern Europe, even as it was sufficiently worried about rising Euroscepticism to offer a referendum on the constitutional treaty. Since Shabana Mahmood became Home Secretary, Starmer’s government has moved quite decisively on migration and asylum, but she cannot win the argument in Labour that she is right to have done so.

Come May, whoever will be leader of the Labour Party has two forms of nostalgia on offer: try to restage the Brexit referendum, as is Starmer’s obvious aim; or take up Polanski’s tacit offer of a “progressive” alliance as a backdoor return to the domestic and foreign-policy Corbynism. Each is an attempt to escape from the realities that face Britain: a deindustrialized economy highly dependent on inward international capital flows that cannot offer high earnings, or home ownership, to those many millennial or Generation Z graduates, and the decline of Europe in a world of great power competition between the United States, China, and Russia.

Britain cannot reset relations with Europe by dint of one faction in the political divide using the issue as identity politics. Treating the EU as a means to bash the Conservatives, while simultaneously opting out of anything in EU membership that was too demanding, was one of the ways by which New Labour opened a path to Brexit. Either British politicians accept what is required to integrate with the EU and find a way of persuading a broad coalition of the electorate of its merits, or they have to work out a serious alternative European strategy that engages with US, Chinese, and Russian power.

However deeply a set of British voters cares about what happens in the Middle East, Britain cannot influence US or Israeli policy. Starmer’s unwillingness to let the US use the Diego Garcia airbase or RAF Fairford for the initial attack on Iran made no difference at all to the outcome. Grandstanding with Washington, and then equivocating afterwards about the Iranian regime’s fate, is no strategy for deciding what approach to take to the US-China-Russia competition in a world in which the Trump administration is laying assault to China’s energy vulnerabilities and bidding to reopen Russia for US oil companies.

Under Polanski, the Greens have an answer to the geopolitical question Starmer evades: break with Washington and leave Nato. But the corollary of that for any European state has to be accommodation with Russia over Ukraine, closer ties with China in the tech and resource war, taking more responsibility in the Red Sea, and ending energy dependency on the US. The first two are not appealing to at least parts of the progressive coalition, the third to any section of it, and the last would presently be impossible without a reset with Russia.

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Where energy is concerned, there is a Green vacuum. In the 2019 general election, a Green New Deal to achieve an alternative energy system that realized net zero carbon emissions during the 2030s was the centerpiece of Corbyn’s Labour. Polanski calls himself an “eco populist”, but any such ambition was near entirely missing from the Greens’ campaign in Gorton and Denton.

Whatever the attempted distractions, energy is where the underlying material reality of the British political crisis can no longer be avoided. If the next election is heading for an identity and generational contest between Left and Right coalitions, in which the Greens and Reform define the stakes, Net Zero as an energy strategy will be a consequential substantive divide. As much as it was driven by climate change, Net Zero 2050 was a bid to solve Britain’s problem of foreign energy dependency and the burden that creates for a deindustrialized economy. But as a legal commitment, Net Zero constrains policy-making in the energy world as it is, and insulates decisions from voters’ worries about the cost of living. Britain cannot substitute wind and solar for gas on an hour-by-hour basis without grid-level storage, and it cannot electrify much of present hydro-carbon consumption without subsidies for electric vehicles and a housing stock better suited to heat pumps.

The fantasy that the British economy can grow faster without a realistic energy policy is causing another round of deindustrialization. Britain can prioritize Net Zero for climate reasons or it can have an energy strategy. It has been another of the deceits of Starmer’s administration that there is no choice to be made. Already, former Labour ministers and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change are calling for drilling in the North Sea to be kept going for as long as possible. Now, as the fallout from Iran spreads through oil markets, those demands will intensify. There is no escape from choosing. Accelerated by events that no British government can meaningfully influence, the next act of our political crisis will likely force the long-coming energy reckoning. If, come the summer, the Labour leader, guided by Gorton and Denton, follows the Greens, the party will push what remains of New Labour, however unpalatably, to the same side as Reform in a battle over Net Zero.

There will be no putting Labour back together again, any more than there has been a remaking of the Conservatives after their humiliation in 2024. There never was a way back to the old version of NICE, any more than there was a way to reinvent the entire energy base of Britain within three decades. What is still required is a path forward informed by the real world within and beyond.

Since China accounted for more than 90% of global production in 2010, nothing could be the same again for consumers of the 17 rare-earth elements. In 2011, a US House of Representatives sub-committee held hearings on the national security implications of China’s monopoly. In 2012, the US, Japan, and the EU launched a case against Beijing’s restrictions at the World Trade Organization. After losing in Geneva, China agreed to dismantle the quota regime, but Beijing would no longer be trusted as a reliable long-term trading partner.

Yet, even as China’s share of global production has fallen to around 70%, its power as a rare earth exporter has loomed more seismically over the world economy for the past few months than ever before. On 4 April, China announced new license requirements for exporting seven specific rare earths and associated magnets to all countries in response to Trump hiking tariffs on Chinese goods to 54% earlier that week. One of these metals, samarium, is exclusively produced and processed in China, and it is essential for, among other military weapons, the Pentagon’s F-35 fighter jets.

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The result was an immediate slump in imports. At the start of May, America’s auto-industry representatives wrote to four Trump administration officials, warning of imminent disruption to the sector. Within days, the President had reversed course, albeit dressing up the agreement in Geneva as a “historic trade win”. When that truce failed, Trump’s officials blamed China for not delivering on the rare earth measures. The economic pressure China was placing on the US and European economies became highly visible. In early June, Ford revealed that it had halted production at several factories the previous month because of a shortage of rare earth magnets. Meanwhile, the European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, Maroš Šefčovič, complained the EU car industry faced an “alarming situation”. In boasting about a second agreement desperately struck in London on 11 June, Trump emphasised that this time China would supply rare earths “up front”. Still, supply remained tight, requiring the administration to seek a third agreement within little over a month, with uncertainty throughout over samarium imports, even as the situation eased for car makers.

On the surface, China’s rare earth leverage seems the result of Beijing’s careful exploitation of geological good fortune. China possesses nearly half of the world’s known rare-earth deposits. As the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once quipped, “the Middle East has oil and China has rare earths”.

But China’s pre-eminence is at least as much the story of an earlier US presumption that Washington could safely avoid environmentally toxic mining at home by importing these metals, often found with uranium, from across the Pacific. Before the early Nineties, most of the world supply of rare earths was extracted by a US company, Molycorp, from Mountain Pass in California. Rare earth magnets unveil a similar story of complacent US outsourcing. In 2002, Magnequench, the last surviving US producer, was sold to a Chinese company and the plant in Indiana was closed four years later. Politically, the vulnerability of this bet on a Chimerican resource trade did not go unnoticed. When Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008, she castigated the Bush administration for the fact “we now have to buy magnets for our bombs from China”. But the politicians who rhetorically scored points from offshoring offered no serious plan of action for reshoring production.

Whatever the fright in 2010, there was no systematic reversal of course until it was too late. In 2012, Molycorp re-opened Mountain Pass only to declare bankruptcy just three years afterwards. When the Las-Vegas-based MP Materials then acquired the mines, it sent the minerals to China for refining. Although in 2022 the Pentagon awarded the Australian mining company Lynas $35 million to build a processing plant in Texas, MP Materials’ practices only stopped after China placed 125% tariffs on the exports as part of its measures in April. The alternative depends on a partnership with a Saudi company formed this year. On the magnets side, MP Materials launched an operation in Fort Worth in 2022, but if the plant operates to schedule at the end of this year, it will be producing just 0.0003% of what China did in 2024.

Such is the scale of the present emergency, the Pentagon has agreed this month to become MP Materials’ largest shareholder. This injection of federal capital will fund a second magnet plant. Explaining the deal, MP Materials’ CEO said it is the means required to defeat “Chinese mercantilism”. The question is whether this move will be any more effective than the executive order Trump issued in 2020 to build domestic capacity for the same reason and which did nothing to avert the current crisis.

If the damage China can cause as an exporter is now as clear as crystal, the significance of China’s own need for rare earths is still underrated. Back in 2010, most consumption occurred in Japan and the United States. But Made in China 2025 was in this respect, as in so much else, transformative. Almost all the 10 sectors identified in Xi Jinping’s decade-long strategy to make China a high-tech manufacturing superpower relied on rare earths or rare earth magnets. Realizing that objective has made China a net importer of rare earths. This change renders China a competitor for the United States in developing new mining as Washington urgently seeks to escape reliance on China.

At the moment, more than half of China’s imports come from Myanmar, which is relatively rich in the heavier rare earths. This dependency embroils China in Myanmar’s political instability, especially since the Kachin Independence Army — the northern armed rebels seeking autonomy — seized control of the country’s main mines in 2024. Even as China has inflicted rare earth pain on Western countries this year, it has faced its own sharp decline in imports. Consequently, China too wants new rare earth opportunities.

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This dynamic alone accounts for a significant amount of the geopolitical tension between the US and China, especially in the Arctic. Since 2016, a Chinese company has been the largest single stake in the Energy Transition Minerals, which has the exploration license for the rare earth deposits at Kvanefjeld in southern Greenland. The Chinese commercial presence on Greenland is far from the only reason for Trump’s ambition to seize sovereignty over the island. But it certainly intensifies the interest, a reality evident now the US-Export Import Bank has offered Critical Metals Corp, a subsidiary of an Australian mining company, a $120 million loan to accelerate a rare earths project in the same vicinity.

There are no immediate prospects for mining starting on Greenland. The physical conditions around the deposits are exceptionally tough and, in 2021, the government in Nuuk banned uranium mining without which the deposits at Kvanejfeld cannot be extracted. But, as the geographer Julie Klinger recounts in her book Rare Earth Frontiers, long-term persistence amid adversity is the origin story of China’s rare earths industry. In the 1920s, European, Soviet, and Japanese scientists scoured Republican China for minerals. Rare earths were confirmed in Inner Mongolia at what is now the mining district of Bayan Obon in 1933. The Chinese geologist responsible foretold that “these deposits will become an important treasury of China”. Any quick development was derailed by Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, in part driven by Japan’s desire to control these resources. Realizing Communist China lacked the technological and financial capacity to extract the metals, Mao procured Stalin’s assistance, only for the project to collapse after the Soviet withdrawal in 1960. Fifteen years later, Deng Xiaoping drew up a 10-year national plan for rare earth production and research. Then, finally on schedule, serious mining began at Bayan Obon in the mid-Eighties with the expressed purpose of exporting to Japan and the United States.

Needing for its own economic and military future more rare earths than these mines can supply, China is now planning not just to develop overseas deposits but lunar resources. Last year, it became the first state to bring back materials from the far side of the moon. Any number of contingencies may mean Beijing’s technological success will not matter resource-wise for decades. Perhaps it never will. But compared to Washington’s inability to solve a problem it saw coming 15 years ago, the Chinese leadership’s ability to act in the face of long-term uncertainty has become an overwhelming structural advantage in this geopolitical age of resource competition.

Part of the problem is the President’s shape-shifting character. Trump began his political rise as a Trickster, saying crudely and humorously what was supposed not to be said. In 2016, Trickster Trump did not seem to want to win; he triumphed primarily because his competitor was the perfect symbol of the decay in which he reveled.

Trickster Trump was also a symptom. The United States was highly likely to have produced a candidate in 2016 who on some crucial policy matters stood on Trump’s ground. Trump won the Republican nomination by exploiting the chasm between many Republican primary voters and the party establishment over the Mexican border. As US geopolitical choices hardened under the emerging multipolar world, Trump served as the “Confront China” candidate against a “Confront Russia” Hillary Clinton. Since China’s industrial rise was tied much more directly to US voters than Russia’s annexation of Crimea or intervention in Syria, the victory of Confront China could have been expected. Afterwards, Confront China won the policy debate because the national security implications of Xi’s 2015 “Made in China” strategy, following its rare earths embargo on Japan in 2010, had begun to strike terror into the US political class.

Although a geopolitical omen, Trump’s turn as a Trickster president occurred in a relatively benign short-term international environment. Despite chronic strategic weakness in the Middle East, the shale boom and the Federal Reserve’s post-2008 monetary primacy both strengthened relative US power compared with the previous four decades. Such was China’s macro-economic vulnerability to US monetary policy in the middle of that decade that just the prospect of a 0.25% interest rate hike in late 2015 was enough to push China into a financial crisis.

By contrast, the second Trump presidency is playing out under conditions of systemic crisis not envisaged even by the most pessimistic observers in 2016. As it constrains US governments’ ability to respond to other elements of the crisis, this change begins with the monetary and financial environment. The energy-driven inflation of 2021-22 ended the post-2008 monetary order built around the Fed’s quantitative easing programs, raising the costs of the huge increase in US debt authorized during the pandemic. Now, up to 25% of the US’s existing debt — $9.2 trillion — either matures or needs refinancing this year.

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In a harder investment and fiscal environment, the prospects for reversing US deindustrialization, after the lack of progress in easier times, deteriorate. American manufacturing as a share of GDP fell from 11.3% in 2015 to 10% in 2024. In the same period, China’s share of world manufacturing rose from around 20% to 30%. Beijing’s success with “Made in China 2025” has proved highly disruptive in high-tech sectors. While DeepSeek’s breakout was an overt psychic shock in the AI race, a less-commented-upon victory in the space race was won when, as interest in lunar mining deepened, China became in 2023 the first state to bring materials back from the far side of the moon. Meanwhile, Tesla has been overtaken by BYD as the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, just as China has created by far the world’s largest domestic market for these cars. BYD’s dramatic rise as a producer and consumer of electric vehicles has left the United States well behind on the electrification of auto-transportation, exposing the Biden administration’s erroneous bet that it would take care of the problems posed by imminent peak US shale oil, now predicted to arrive in 2027.

The old energy world is very far from dead, and the United States still has very considerable hydrocarbon advantages over China. But all states have to diversify from fossil fuels, and BYD’s innovation, including in batteries and chip production, is such that it offers non-Western countries opportunities to construct low-carbon infrastructure that US firms do not. Nowhere, probably, is this change more consequential for the United States than in Mexico.

This general economic penetration by China in the Western hemisphere is a serious threat to the Monroe Doctrine. Canada is no less part of this problem than Mexico, with Chinese money pouring into the Canadian critical mineral sector in 2023. The expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline in 2024 also allows for more Canadian sales to China, upending a US assumption going back to the start of the post-1945 era that Western hemisphere exports go to the United States and thwarting a 2020 agreement with Washington that Canada would collaborate on critical minerals and tighten investment rules.

All Washington’s China issues are compounded by Russia’s resilience. After initial caution, the Biden administration sought to deliver a strategic blow to Moscow in Ukraine: and then failed in the endeavor. When, in the autumn of 2023, it became clear that Ukraine could not defeat Russia, the US commitment to Ukraine became hostage to US domestic politics, leaving Zelensky without new funding for eight months. That in the interim the European states could not replace US military supplies only laid bare the structural problem that when the larger European states are militarily weak, the United States is over-committed within NATO.

Yet the irony is that the Arctic renders the North Atlantic more of a site of geopolitical tension than ever before in the history of the trans-Atlantic security alliance that bears the oceanic region’s name. Although NATO’s two new entrants in Finland and Sweden are Arctic states, they are a defense neither against Chinese commercial influence in Greenland and Canada, nor China moving to partner Russia in Arctic hydrocarbon projects.

Seen in these geopolitical terms, some of Trump II is explicable. If the NATO security guarantee has been exposed as hollow, yet the United States cannot disengage from Europe, then it is rational to make European relations transactional. If the US will soon need to import more oil, then it will put relations with Russia and Saudi Arabia above those with Ukraine and Israel — as we have seen this week in the Gulf. If any chance of reindustrialization now requires direct economic harm on China, then the United States will force European allies to decouple from China, as the US-UK trade agreement requires London to do in steel and pharmaceuticals. If Canada is a geopolitical vulnerability, there is some rationale for pushing to the surface the fault lines of the Canadian federation with its population highly concentrated around the US border and a strained internal territorial politics around energy-rich Alberta.

In this crisis, even Elon Musk becomes a geopolitically originating phenomenon. Without Musk’s company SpaceX, NASA would not have a program for lunar landings or to reach Mars, each a response to China’s success in space.

Yet it is unimaginable that anyone other than the Donald Trump of this moment would have governed over the past five months in as incendiary a manner. If Trump mused about buying Greenland during his first term, he certainly did not threaten to annex Canada.

He appears transformed by the political campaign against him in 2023 and 2024 into a political figure intent on accelerating the disruption to destroy what remains of the old order, whatever comes down with it. Figuratively, he is no longer a Trickster but a would-be Caesar, the metamorphosis symbolized by the image of him bloodied and defiant under the Stars and Stripes after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania last July. Nobody could seriously think that that Trump did not want to be President.

Quite notably, Caesarist Trump has moved beyond attacking the hypocrisies of the professional political class to attacking the pieties of voters, best illustrated in his comment this month that “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls… and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally”. These words admit an unpalatable truth: if the reset is to get the United States to produce more and China to consume more, its painful underbelly is that Americans must consume less.

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The overriding issue that now defines the conflict between the force of Caesarist Trump and the force of the underlying systemic crisis is the position of the Fed. Trump wishes to deal with the US debt by reducing borrowing costs, an imperative intensified by the failure of DOGE to make any meaningful dent in federal expenditure. But lower interest rates would require the Fed to act, and the Fed is still fretting about inflation. Since Trump has no legal authority to fire the Fed chairman, Jay Powell, Trump could only prevail by precipitating a constitutional crisis.

Quite palpably, the debt crisis creates constraints beyond any Caesarist ambition. Either Trump has to make decisions on tariffs that calm bond markets and push down yields, as he appears to have done over the past month; or, he will have to rely on the Fed’s willingness to activate more QE to compensate for foreign creditors losing confidence in holding US Treasuries — an outcome he has largely caused.

But this same debt predicament probably cannot be accommodated for much longer within what remains of normal US politics. The signal from both the systemic crisis and at least some of those with Trump’s ear is that United States will eventually default on its debt by one backhand way or another. As the Mar-a-Lago Accord proposal of Trump’s Chair of Economic Advisors Stephen Miran reveals, the ultimate backstop of Trump’s implicit threats to America’s present security allies to accommodate that default and replace some of US military expenditure are dollar swaps. The Fed’s capacity to provide dollar liquidity to foreign central banks in the emergency is ultimately an instrument of coercion, even indirectly against China, which acquired an effective equivalent credit facility during the pandemic. Dollar swaps could only come into play in a financial crisis, the very scenario the Fed would wish to avoid. That it has become possible to conceive, yet not predict, that Trump may have the nerve to embrace one, and fight the Fed for control of this weapon, is a measure of what has changed in Trump and the world.

It has been a terrible few months for most of the world’s once-leading automobile companies. In September, Volkswagen gave notice of plans to shut at least three of its 10 German factories and cut wages by 10%, breaching a 1994 agreement to protect jobs in its home country until at least 2029, prompting rolling two- and four-hour strikes. As production ground to a halt again at Mirafiori in November, Stellantis made public that the Vauxhall plant at Luton would close in April 2025, canceling the company’s prior plan to produce Vivaro electric vans there. In the same month, Ford indicated it would cut 3,800 jobs in Europe by 2027, while Nissan announced 9,000 job losses and a 20% cut in worldwide production. A senior official at Nissan is reported to have said that the Japanese company has “12 or 14 months to survive.”

Beyond Germany, the crisis in the European automobile sector has been long in the making. Employment at Vauxhall Luton peaked in the Sixties, and the plant ceased producing cars in 2002, as did Ford Dagenham. Fiat’s five-storey Lingotto factory, which began mass auto production in Italy in 1923, closed in 1982. Today, the building serves as a leisure complex, hosting the largest roof garden in Europe. In 2011, Fiat threatened to close down the Mirafiori plant too unless workers voted for a restructuring plan. When, three years later, Fiat merged with Chrysler, it acquired a company that had been propped up with US federal government money since the 2008 crash. The subsequent union of Fiat Chrysler Automotive with Peugeot in 2021 to form Stellantis saw more than 10,000 job losses in Italy.

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But the crisis also constitutes a more short-term failure around electric vehicles (EVs). It was only four years ago that Fiat Chrysler Automotive made a €700 million investment in producing an electric Fiat 500 at Mirafiori. Nissan’s Leaf was the best-selling EV of the 2010s, but since 2020 sales globally have slumped. Demand for Volkswagen’s ID 5 in the European EV market crashed by 28% in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023.

When, in 2019-20, European governments legislated for Net Zero 2050, they envisaged a rather different future. Of the 101.7 million barrels of oil the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the world consumed per day in 2023, more than 60 million was used for road transportation. Consequently, any serious move away from fossil fuels always required the automobile industry to be making and selling EVs at scale. It is scarcely surprising that Norway is the only European country that has made sustained progress in de-carbonizing road transport because its hydrocarbon wealth provides the fiscal leeway to make EVs affordable for a reasonable proportion of citizens. In Sweden, where EV penetration was also comparatively high, growth slowed notably in 2024 after it had ended the purchase-incentives regime in late 2022.

By itself, the sluggish demand in much of Europe for EVs would constitute a big problem for an automobile sector required to stop selling ICE cars no later than 2035, and 2030 in the UK. But China’s astonishing rise over the past three years as an EV manufacturer means that even the slow electrification of road transportation in Europe is accelerating European de-industrialization, rather than serving, as so many European politicians hoped, as an agent of re-industrialization. China has by far the largest domestic EV market in the world. On the IEA’s figures, of the 25% increase in global EV sales in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023, nearly 80% came from China. By contrast, sales in Germany during the same period fell. Chinese producers are now ascendant in their own country, with the Shenzhen-headquartered company BYD alone taking 30% of the market. Meanwhile, Chinese exports have grown astonishingly rapidly, rising 1,600% from 2019 to mid-2024.

China’s productive success cannot be explained simply by the labor cost advantages of late industrial development. Tesla aside, Chinese cars are technologically superior because the Chinese government systematically worked for them to be. As an industrial strategy for high-tech manufacturing, Made in China 2025 and the Five-Year Plan for 2021-25 have been highly successful. The Chinese state financially supports not just domestic EV firms but all parts of the supply chain from metal mining and processing to battery production. In comparison, European political efforts were financially paltry and much more fragmented, leaving its manufacturers dependent on Chinese-dominated supply chains. Escaping this dependency is extremely difficult, not least since China’s 2020 Dual Circulation strategy was in part a project to entrench permanently Chinese firms into the high-value parts of supply chains and force foreign reliance on them. These companies also benefit from the Chinese state prioritizing energy security and price over any political preference for one energy source over another substitutable for it. With coal still providing around 60% of China’s electricity and constituting more than 50% of the country’s overall energy consumption, China’s industrial energy costs are significantly lower than those in Europe, most of which is much more dependent on natural gas.

More than a coherent economic strategy to advance the existing European car industry, the tariffs on Chinese manufacturers provisionally imposed by the European Commission in July 2024, and made permanent in October, are a desperate political response to the crisis. When, in May 2024, the Biden Administration placed 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs entering the American market, Chinese manufacturers had barely any EV market share and no Chinese EV manufacturer has an operational plant for exports in either Mexico or Canada to access the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The EU, by contrast, is already China’s largest export market, while BYD will begin producing EVs in Hungary in the second half of 2025 and Turkey — equivalent to the EU’s Single Market for export purposes via the country’s long-standing customs union with the EU — by the end of 2026.

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By Helen Thompson

For the German car industry and its present government, then, European protectionism is a strategic defeat, risking retaliatory action in the world’s largest car market in which until very recently German companies thrived. Even, as the China EV shock intensified, Volkswagen made more than half of its profits in 2023 in China. Quite simply, if Volkswagen cannot even try to compete in the Chinese market, it cannot remain a global auto player. In this sense, the European car crisis is a symptom of the much bigger story of historical European relative decline driven by the rise in Asian living standards under late industrialization.

Ironically, the UK government has thus far adopted the free-trade-leaning approach the Scholz government would have done if Germany were not in the EU without the UK having domestically-owned manufacturers who compete in the Chinese market. But this openness to more Chinese exports is a nightmare for British-based car firms wishing to sell in the domestic market, especially when they already cannot meet the EV sales required under the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate that subjects all companies selling in the UK to probably the most demanding regulatory framework anywhere in the world for ending ICE sales. The week before Stellantis announced the closure of Vauxhall Luton, representatives from the major car manufacturers met with then transport secretary Louise Haigh and business secretary Jonathan Reynolds pleading for more latitude. Finding none on offer, Nissan blasted the Government’s inertia. As the job losses at Luton materialized, Reynolds retreated, promising an urgent consultation on the toughening of the targets due to take effect in January. Since in 2025 the cheapest Chinese EVs yet – one from Leapmotor in which Stellantis has a 20% stake and the other BYD — will arrive in the UK market, it is hard to see how Keir Starmer’s government can possibly retain both the ZEV and openness to China without wrecking what remains of the British car industry. If one single dread consumes the Labour Cabinet, it must be the closure of Nissan’s Sunderland plant even as it was little more than a year ago that Nissan announced it would build three EV models at the north-east site, supported by £2 billion of support for investment from Rishi Sunak’s government.

Over in Italy, Giorgia Meloni never suffered from the illusion that Net Zero in general and EVs in particular would open a path to re-industrialization for European economies. Immediately after taking office, Meloni stridently opposed the EU’s proposed ban on new ICE sales from 2035. Having found too few allies to stop the EU Council adopting the regulation in March 2023, she has continued to denounce the policy as “self-destructive” and promised Italian voters she will make Brussels “correct these choices”. With the likely arrival of the Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz in the Chancellery after the German general election on 23 February, she will find a powerful ally. Meloni has also been an arch pragmatist about the Chinese threat. Although she supported the Commission’s tariffs, she travelled to Beijing in July 2024 to reset relations after taking Italy out of the Belt and Road seven months earlier. At the top of her agenda is procuring Chinese investment in the Italian car industry, with negotiations in progress with the state-owned Chinese manufacturer Dongfeng Motor for a plant in Turin.

The production and consumption of cars have long marked decisive junctures in Western political history. When in 1908, Henry Ford made mass ownership of cars affordable with the Model T, he imagined he was saving American democracy from the perils of a bitter class divide around the automobile. When, in March 1943, workers at the Mirafiori plant in Turin walked out on strike, they began a labor revolt across the north of Italy that domestically undid Mussolini’s regime four months before the Allied landings in Sicily. Symbolically, cars represented historical progress conceived as individual and democratic freedom. For much of the 20th century, the commercial competition between car companies represented an epoch of competing Western visions of modernity. Inspired by Ford but not wishing to be American, Fiat offered the Lingotto factory on its opening in 1923 as the height of Italian avant-garde industrial modernism. Because the perception of national economic success required a large and competitive auto industry, car workers knew they could inflict such political pain that they had to be feared.

But this psycho-material history began in a geopolitical world where China was stuck in its century of humiliation. China’s emergence as a manufacturing superpower leaves nothing of that old world untouched. Without its rapid economic development over the past 30 years, driving carbon emissions and accelerating oil demand after conventional oil production stagnated from 2005, the energy transition would have seemed less of an imperative.

By committing to end the energy-basis for western Europe’s early historical experience of industrial modernity without a viable strategy for realizing a different future, European governments only accelerated the long forces of de-industrialization. Now, China has claimed the most potent symbol of the energy transition for its own project of modernity. As the meaning of this change begins to be comprehended, democratic politics in Europe will necessarily enter a new era of tumult.

It is easy to put the tumult down to the spectacular failings of individuals in the party and around it. Without Johnson’s pagan personality, the risks of imposing pandemic lockdowns while life in No.10 continued in its usual manner would not have proved so hazardous. Only a wild-card character such as Dominic Cummings could have managed a campaign to leave the European Union that had at its centre a promise to restore democracy, and then try to launch a coup days after. Rishi Sunak might be a poor politician, but his reputation would have been less shredded if he had appointed advisors who understood there were no ifs and buts about his simple duty on D-Day.

The party’s failings were also structural, though, originating in the hard political world of the 21st century. From the start, the personal weaknesses of individuals were exposed by the inability of those at the top to grasp how realities far beyond the party’s manoeuvring for advantage at Westminster could overwhelm them.

To succeed, the Conservatives have always needed a cross-class coalition held together by an aura of being more competent at governing than first the Liberals and then Labour, and also being more committed to the Union. Even in the Thirties, when the Labour Party split, and during the Cold War years, when Labour twice ceded competence on defence with promises of unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Conservatives could never be the party only of capital and those who thrived under the economic status quo. During the interwar years and the Fifties they expanded their electoral coalition in part by getting more houses built.

But traditional centre-right parties will always struggle to construct such coalitions when growth prospects are poor and financial conditions inhibit younger generations  from acquiring property at the same rate as their parents and grand-parents. The unpopularity of large-scale immigration with the kinds of working- and lower-middle class voters who have historically eschewed the Left can only magnify the problem.

In this respect, the Conservatives have long required either relatively benign economic times in which to govern as in the Fifties, or the opportunity to make relatively easy to implement reforms as in the Eighties. But they came back to power in 2010 in an era marked by economic stagnation and political problems too big to confront.

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By the middle of the first decade of this century, what the ancient Greek historian Polybius thought of as “aristocratic excess” was rife across Western democracies. Being both democratic (in giving all citizens a vote) and aristocratic (in concentrating power in the hands of a few), representative democracy risks both democratic and aristocratic excess. But since it has historically co-existed with a form of economic organisation in capitalism that creates large-scale inequalities, and was from the, 20th century challenged by the rise of technocratic national and international institutions, it has long been vulnerable to the problem of aristocratic excess.

During the Nineties and early 2000s, the dangers arising from this lay largely buried under the democratic triumphalism let loose by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a reliance on finance-driven economic growth, and the EU’s moves to close down national democratic political contests over some economic issues, including pan-European migration, moved the problem of aristocratic excess centre-stage. In Europe, the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005 to the EU Constitutional Treaty shattered any presumption that European electorates were at ease with the drift of power away from elected representatives. Then, the 2007-8 Crash drew visceral lines between those who benefitted from 21st-century global capitalism, and those who paid the price. It also accelerated the already declining rate of home ownership.

From the moment he became party leader in December 2005, David Cameron appeared ill at ease with a political world in which the problem of aristocratic excess had to be contained. Indeed, his strong preference was to wish away any need for the Conservatives to reconstruct a cross-class coalition by rendering the social conservatism and Euroscepticism of working-class Conservative voters, rather than deindustrialisation, the toxic legacy of the Thatcher period. Certainly, the 2010 Conservative manifesto paid lip service to the idea that there should be no return to finance-led growth in the post-Crash world. But in practice, Cameron largely assumed the party could govern as if the relationship between the governing and the governed had not changed since Blair’s heyday. When he proposed changes to the planning laws, it was to make extensions easier not the construction of new homes. If there were a strategy to kick-start the economy, it was only his Chancellor George Osborne’s bid to secure Chinese investment to fix Britain’s infrastructural decay and make the City of London a financier for China’s Belt and Road project just a few years before Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 incentivised all western states to rediscover industrial policy.

It was a similar refusal to see how far consent to the Union had broken down that allowed Cameron to let the Scottish government campaign for independence for months on end in 2014 before the panic-driven Vow to deliver more devolution, as if Westminster was indifferent to the outcome. Saved by the fact that Alex Salmond couldn’t find a solution to the Nationalists’ currency problem in a post-eurozone crisis EU, Cameron then had the good fortune to find an SNP that was popular without being materially able to deliver independence. Now, with not that many more votes than were won in 2010, the Conservatives could take out the Liberal Democrats as soft on the prospect of Labour-SNP co-operation at Westminster without having to address the medium-term existential problem facing the party.

Only over the EU did Cameron appear fully cognisant from the start of what had changed since the Nineties. Judging that sooner or later, the UK’s semi-detached position would have been put to a democratic test, Cameron made several efforts to reset EU membership before his gamble on an early referendum. But Cameron, and indeed the whole British political class, had little idea how to act in the kind of politics where strategic predicaments were being directly confronted rather than evaded. Having made his wager on his own powers of persuasion, Cameron then surrendered any notion of prudence by banning contingency arrangements for a “Leave” vote while promising he would implement a decision he had no intention of seeing through. The climax of this botched reckoning saw Osborne try to terrify the voters with the threat of a punishment budget to appease the financial markets.

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Putin has enabled Ukrainian nationhood

By Helen Thompson

Then came Theresa May, whose honeymoon period arose because she seemed able to subordinate her own personality to the new political reality. For a few fleeting weeks during the 2017 general election campaign, her promise to deliver Brexit as a Remainer appeared as if it could finally restore a broad cross-class coalition for the party. But once the spectacular failures during the second half of that campaign exposed the near complete absence of Conservative voters among not just millennials, but younger Generation-Xers, a spectre of medium-term demographic obliteration began to form.

Soon, May’s erroneous post-election assumption that, despite all evidence to the contrary, she could borrow Labour votes to get a weak Brexit through the House of Commons administered a more immediate near-death experience for the Conservatives. Johnson temporarily resurrected the party by his willingness to deliver a general election and put Brexit to a second democratic test. Yet it soon became apparent that many in the party assumed that, having pocketed the votes of the cross-class coalition of 2019 Conservative voters, they could govern as if nothing had changed.

Of course, the pandemic was an unprecedented derailment for any new government. But mostly what went politically wrong was born of a party that did not adapt to its good fortune. The “Levelling-up” agenda required an industrial strategy to have any chance of success, but the economic need for one seemed to Johnson’s Chancellors, especially Rishi Sunak, to cede too much political territory to Labour. Keeping both Red Wall and Blue Wall Conservative voters on side required reducing migration, but Johnson’s rule changes propelled it to record levels. Building new houses required planning legislation, but swathes of backbench Conservative MPs, including Theresa May, objected. When Johnson’s premiership then imploded on his character in the very year inflation returned, most Conservatives MPs were ready to grasp at any rhetorical promise of growth, however loftily conceived compared to the economic facts on the ground.

In crashing her premiership in a confrontation with the financial markets and the Bank of England, Liz Truss destroyed what little remained of the Conservatives’ claim to comparative economic competence over Labour, especially since the turmoil hit first-time house buyers. Crucially, by swiftly restoring the prospect of Labour winning a majority of English seats, she cost the Conservatives any chance of tactically falling back on the Union card. Sunak’s attempts to compensate elsewhere by shifting Rightwards on migration and Net Zero have failed because Boris Johnson had already sailed too hard in the opposite direction.

No other party has simply gifted power to the opposition simply by so repeatedly demonstrating what has become its essential narcissism. Not only has it offered no remedy for the problem of aristocratic excess, it has come to exemplify it, abandoning almost every kind of voter who gave it power and — from Partygate to Cameron’s lobbying for Greensill Capital to the election-date gambling scandal — visibly indulging in the notion that rules and restraint don’t apply to the powerful.

There is a scenario in which the Conservatives’ most self-defeating legacy is still to come. Labour appears to have learned the one thing that, for conservative reasons, must and can be done to stop the further descent of British politics into fragmentation: build houses. But when it is so hard to govern, the political furies are indiscriminate. Beyond housing, Labour is economically committed to the same blueprint of Net-Zero-led economic growth that Boris Johnson found could deliver neither levelling up nor a manufacturing renaissance.

There will be no repeat of the Liz Truss moment. But when it becomes clear that most of Britain’s problems these past 14 years were being presided over by the Conservatives, rather than caused by them, the implosion will quite probably overwhelm British democracy as we know it.

This realignment was most profound in the country that sits at modern Europe’s heart. In the event of the invasion, the stakes for Germany involved not only one unopened pipeline — the already-controversial Nord Stream 2 — but its 50-year commitment to rapprochement with Moscow. Within 72 hours, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised to send German weapons to Ukraine, establish a €100 billion fund to increase military expenditure, and end energy dependency on Russia by opening the country to sea-borne gas. Since Putin had, Scholz told the German parliament, “demolish[ed] the European security order that had prevailed for almost half a century since the Helsinki Final Act” in 1975, everything had changed. “We are,” Scholz said, “living through a watershed era [eine Zeitenwende] … mean[ing] that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.”

In part the German chancellor was right. But Scholz’s version of why European history fractured in February 2022 also distorts reality. Self-evidently, the European security order before Russia’s war was nothing like the one that prevailed in the mid-Seventies: six new European states stood in the former western Soviet Union. Having no prior history of peacetime independence, Ukraine’s emergence in 1991 as Europe’s largest territorial state had constituted an extraordinary change.

But the new Ukrainian nation-state was always geopolitically precarious. Since at least 2009, Putin had openly denied the legitimacy of its existence. In the treaties Ukraine signed with Moscow during the Nineties, it ceded Russian military rights in Crimea. Then, in 2014, it lost the Crimean peninsula and entered a war against Russian-backed separatist rebels in the south-east of the country. If Russia’s invasion severed the present from the past, the shock was the scale of suffering Putin was willing to inflict to destroy Ukraine’s viability as an independent state, amplified by the chasm between the size of his initial ambition to seize power in Kyiv and a military mobilisation entirely inadequate to the task.

The unintended consequence for Europe is now clear: the emergence of a largely unified nation-state-in-arms with a pressing claim for EU membership that will prove hard to realise without concurrent Nato entry. Regardless of Ukraine’s prospects for entering either association with any alacrity, Ukraine’s resilience against Russia has rendered Ukrainian nationhood a crucial geopolitical fact. In a 1984 essay, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that the Ukrainian nation, “one of the great European nations… is slowly disappearing. And this enormous, almost unbelievable event is occurring without the world realising it”. Ukraine’s independence seven years afterwards only partly introduced western Europeans to Ukrainian history. But, by trying to eliminate Ukrainian nationhood, Putin has instead ensured that it has become a permanent feature of Europe with which the EU must grapple.

The post-Cold War EU relied on a measure of German-Russian reconciliation to allow for German reunification even as the eastern European states had only just successfully asserted their nationhood against the Soviet version of the imperial Russian empire. Thereafter, the Holocaust, as an end point for German nationalism and the catastrophic culmination of decades of ethnic division in eastern Europe, became pivotal to the imaginative construction of the idea of European unity. By contrast, in 2022, a state subject to the simultaneous experience of the Holocaust and Soviet mid-20th century terror became an official candidate for EU membership by fighting a defensive war for its territorial national sovereignty.

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In doing so, it claimed the right to nation-build, including by suppressing minority languages in the public sphere. No aspect of this experience sits easily with the notion of the post-Maastricht EU as a post-national and peace-oriented construction. An EU that admits Ukraine as a war-formed nation-state would necessarily become a different kind of entity, one that could not be rhetorically legitimated without a new narrative about its historical purpose partially grounded in Russia’s existence as a geopolitical opponent. In Berlin and Paris, an EU with such a relationship to Europe’s resource-rich, continental-size neighbour would indeed belong to a Zeitenwende.

The existential question of Europe’s energy supply triggered by Russia’s war also raises profound questions around nationhood across the rest of Europe. As they opposed Russia in ways that jeopardised their immediate energy security, European governments resuscitated the narrative of energy sacrifice once deployed by Jimmy Carter: reduce your energy usage for the greater good. In spring 2022, the Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, asked: “Do we want to have peace or do you want to have the air conditioning on?”

But the ghost of Carter’s political failure lingered. Palpably fearing a democratic rebellion on energy, European politicians did not ask citizens to endure too much economic pain in the name of any claim to political community — whether that community be the nation, Europe, or a democratic West. Throwing fiscal caution to the wind, European governments subsidised household fuel bills and some, notably the British and French, still faced a wave of strikes. None appeared to show qualms about European companies buying spot-market LNG already contracted to Pakistan. In Italy, Draghi’s government fell in July 2022 after Five-Star withdrew its support, charging that the former ECB president was prioritising Ukraine over reducing energy prices. Tellingly, when the subsequent general election once again saw the party uncompromised by technocratic and grand coalition politics win the largest number of seats — this time the Brothers of Italy — its leader, Giorgia Meloni, was allowed to become prime minister.

By contrast, reducing energy consumption in the name of lowering carbon emissions remained off-limits. Instead, in making a new case for the energy transition, the war emergency encouraged further the idea that economic transformation could recreate the cross-class interest in national manufacturing production lost from the Seventies. Yet the prospects for realising this ambition were much more propitious across the Atlantic. With the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, American climate policy near explicitly became a political bulwark against another 2016-style shock where Trump or a Trump-style candidate again won by appealing to the losers of American deindustrialisation. In contrast to its New Deal predecessor, this federal intervention is explicitly racially inclusive in its conception of nationhood. Indeed, for the Biden administration, it is an act of reparation for the restrictive American nationhood of the past as well as an attempt at restoring the New Deal-originating idea of economic nationhood.

Whether by reshoring manufacturing production it can succeed on its own terms is open to question. But the fact that the United States under Democratic Party rule in 2022 entered the same political space European governments had already sought to occupy in 2019 with their Net Zero 2050 commitments now constrains European ambitions. The American move establishes a competitive geopolitical contest between Western countries around using energy change to rebuild nationhood in which European states and the EU are disadvantaged by higher fossil-fuel energy costs and American financial power. Already the failure of Boris Johnson’s government, which bet its post-Brexit “levelling-up agenda” on investment in low-carbon sectors, testifies to the problem.

With the Inflation Reduction Act, the stakes for Britain in securing a post-Brexit free-trade agreement with the United States are now quite possibly high enough to force a future choice between British companies’ presence in US-centred low-carbon supply chains and the domestic burden of accepting Washington’s trade terms. Even in the United States, reconfiguring energy production towards national self-sufficiency cannot happen quickly enough to be democratically transformative. As a response to Trump’s 2016 insurgency candidacy, this project leaves the border and citizenship issues untouched. In betting on rapidly building a low-carbon America, the Biden administration has also left itself open to the charge that it is subordinating present energy needs to an unrealisable, future-oriented project to the benefit of those corporations that procure the available subsidies.

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Has the West lost control of oil?

By Helen Thompson

Here, the fundamental problems that the energy transition presents have not shifted. Of the transformative forces unleashed by Russia’s war, game-changing technological breakthroughs of the kind necessary for a low-carbon energy future, especially on the storage of electricity, was not one. Following hard on the 2021 China gas shock, the energy trade disruption caused by Russia’s war, meanwhile, intensified the separate problem of the energy present. The 2022 crisis demonstrated just how politically hard it is for European politicians to reduce the expectations for consumption formed in a prior geopolitical era, or ask their citizens to engage with the energy poverty of people in many non-Western parts of the world.

If Russia’s war has changed the prior democratic predicaments around energy, it is by spreading energy consciousness, including letting loose the spectre of future energy scarcity in polities premised on energy abundance. Where, in the West, energy consciousness was acute for those exercising power but often weak among citizens, the war means these citizens now better understand their material aspirations and fears as energy demands and anxieties. They do so at a time when Western democracies generally have still not recovered from the blows delivered by the 2008 crash — even without a new round of bank interventions in March 2023 — and when in France violent street protest has become a persistent feature of expressed discontent.

In principle, greater energy consciousness could loosen the technocratic logic behind the original European formulation of realising an energy revolution by 2050. But it is more likely to expose the chasm between the interests everyone shares in facing climate change and the inequalities that will come from electrifying personal transport and that are always generated by high fossil-fuel prices. In this future, energy will not be a subterranean source of political disorder, as in the first two decades of the 21st century, but the principal currency of it.

This is an edited extract from the paperback of Disorder, (Oxford University Press) by Helen Thompson.

Perhaps, once it was indeed all over, Charlton allowed himself for moment to mind that, having taken England to the final with two goals in the semi-final against Portugal, the ultimate glory had gone to the West Ham boys, while he performed the defensive job Alf Ramsay had given him of marking Germany’s dazzling young star Franz Beckenbauer. Perhaps he was remembering his dead friend Duncan Edwards, who, for the rest of his career, Charlton would insist was the best player he had ever been with on a pitch. Perhaps, without Munich, the honour of leading England to World Cup success would have belonged to “young Duncan”, as Charlton always called him, not Moore. If football is about glory, it is a still painfully human kind of wonder.

Charlton represented what English football was supposed to be. In reality, there was an overt stench around it as he left the game, whether that was the dirty cynicism of the 1973-74 title-winning Leeds team, or the growing violence and racism on the terraces. Results-wise, the national team had fallen into disarray, humiliated by an awful moment of casualness from an ageing Moore in a World Cup qualifier in Chorzów, the heroics of a Polish goalkeeper in the return game at Wembley, and then Don Revie running off to Dubai to take a plush contract from the United Arab Emirates when he was supposed to be managing England for a game against Brazil. Just as I was falling in love with the game, something that had flourished in the Sixties was disappearing, and it was symbolised most potently by Bobby Charlton’s retirement.

Of course, Charlton was an astonishing individual footballer. When he struck the ball on the run, with his head high, he hit it with a visceral straight power, as if each time he sought, once again, to bolt away his grief and guilt into the bulge of the net. But Charlton was also with Dennis Law and George Best, one of an extraordinary integrated trio who led the Manchester United team that won the First Division in 1965 and 1967 as well as the European Cup in 1968.

What completed Charlton’s turn into an ideal of English football was not that he was the only English man in the threesome, but that he had a code. He always showed up, he subordinated his individual talent to the team, and he eschewed excess off the field. Wingers were an essential part of the way Busby wanted Manchester United to play football from the team that was destroyed on the snow-laden runway in Bavaria to the night of European redemption in 1968 at Wembley. For those first seasons after Munich, he did not have them. In 1960, he asked Charlton, an inside forward in the lingo of the Sixties game and already an England international, to move to the left. Charlton spent four seasons playing left wing. Afterwards, looking back on those years, he said: “I hated it but I never really questioned it. If that was what The Boss wanted I did it.”

Best did not have Charlton’s code and off the pitch Charlton could not disguise his disapproval or frustration. Best was absurdly talented, mercurial, petulant, and hedonistic. After England’s World Cup win, English league football became more glamorous, and it was Best who became its prime star. He played not with Charlton’s grace and elegance but with swagger. He could not have sacrificed himself in a World Cup Final. He thought that Ramsay’s tactically-disciplined England marked the end of freedom: “after 1966 the game stopped being a pleasure, the fun went out of it,” he said. But the following season, Charlton, Law, and Best played some of the most-free flowing football ever seen in England. The night Manchester United secured the league they won 6-1 away at Upton Park, with Law scoring twice and Charlton and Best one each against a West Ham team that included all three of the club’s World Cup winners.

Thirty-eight years later, Charlton was back at Upton Park, bearing his sadness, performing a duty. It was the first game Manchester United played after Best’s death from a lifetime of abusing alcohol. The act of commemoration before the game was led by Charlton and the former West Ham player and England international, Trevor Brooking. Afterwards, the Manchester United manager, Alex Ferguson, who, unlike Busby had twice lost the league title in matches at Upton Park and fumed over it, on this occasion heaped praise on West Ham. The applause for Best, he said, “epitomised the sporting love between two great football clubs”. But standing inside Upton Park, I knew it was the presence of Charlton and Brooking that was summoning forth the better angels in West Ham fans to sing Best’s name.

I did not get to see Charlton play in the flesh. But I saw him that late autumn afternoon in 2005, his code intact to honour his brilliant, wayward teammate. It is the only match West Ham have lost in the five decades I have supported the club that I can look back upon with almost complete fondness.

Opec Plus was formed in rather different geopolitical circumstances. In late 2016, the cartel constituted a rapprochement between the two large, and hitherto generally antagonistic, Eurasian oil producers as they were adjusting to the shock of the United States’ re-emergence as a top-tier oil producer. Forging an association between Opec and Moscow was an act of Saudi desperation. For the previous two years, Riyadh had sought to bankrupt the American shale sector by allowing prices to slump, but largely succeeded only in emptying its own foreign exchange reserves. When they finally reversed course in September 2016, the Saudis found that, having alienated most other Opec members with their recklessness, they could no longer control prices. Two months later, Russia and 10 other states agreed to support a second Opec oil output cut, and Opec Plus was born.

Undoubtedly, some broader geopolitical convergence between Riyadh and Moscow against Washington followed over the next three years. When King Salman visited Putin in October 2017 — the first ever state visit of a Saudi monarch to Moscow — the two leaders discussed military co-operation and the possibility of the Saudis purchasing Russian arms. But however much the threat of American shale united Opec Plus, a large geopolitical fault line ran through the new producer alliance: while Russia had been moving closer to Iran since Moscow’s intervention in Syria in September 2015, Saudi Arabia had been engaged in a proxy war with Iran in Yemen since 2014.

When, in September 2019, Iran — either alone or acting with its Houthi allies in Yemen — destroyed the large Saudi oil processing facility at Abqaiq with drones and cruise missiles, that chasm was laid bare. While the Saudis were crushed by the failure of their Patriot missile defence system, bought at great expense from the Americans, Putin appeared with the Iranian president and mock-solemnly pronounced that Moscow could sell Riyadh protection that would actually work. Denying even that Tehran was responsible for the ambush, Putin said that Russia was “supportive of Iran, wholeheartedly”.

Only four months later, Opec Plus had to deal with its first serious oil market crisis, as China’s demand plummeted at the start of the pandemic. The Russian-Saudi compact splintered. Unable to agree with Putin on how much production to cut,  MBS sped off in the opposite direction, flooding the market in another bid to grab market share. In sending future prices into negative territory, MBS left it to Donald Trump, of all people, to patch Opec Plus together again — by threatening to withdraw American military support for Riyadh unless the Saudis and Russians agreed to slash output.

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The Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, which saw the UAE and Bahrain normalise relations with Israel in September 2020, compounded the cartel’s lack of internal coherence on Middle Eastern matters. In oil terms, the Accords also appeared strategic: the UAE is the only member of Opec Plus other than Saudi Arabia with clear spare capacity, and Bahrain has been sitting on a known large offshore shale oil formation since 2018.

But for the past three years, events have conspired decidedly to strengthen Opec Plus. With the new Democratic administration in Washington unable to bring Iran into another nuclear deal in 2021, and post-pandemic growth in the shale sector nearly entirely concentrated in the Permian Basin, Biden, just eight months into office, had to ask Opec Plus to increase production. His trip to Riyadh the following summer for the same purpose yielded little. Indeed, in the months after Biden’s visit, Opec Plus appeared to toy with the American president, announcing a major production cut just weeks before the mid-term elections. Unable at any time during his presidency to influence the cartel, Biden has had to release so much reserve US oil that in March 2023 the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contained only 58% of what it did three years previously.

Russia’s war has only amplified the autonomy of the Arab members of Opec Plus, paradoxically by recasting China’s role in the oil market. From at least the time of the cartel’s inception, the Chinese leadership has wished to deepen its relations with all the major Middle Eastern oil producers. Most ambitiously, it reached an agreement with Iran in 2019 — formalised in 2021 — on a 25-year co-operation programme, which will see China make large investments in Iran’s oil and gas sector.

But prior to February 2022, China was also willing to act with other large consumer countries to counter Opec Plus’s influence on oil markets. Notably, when prices were rising in the second half of 2021, China agreed to co-ordinate withdrawals from its reserves with those Washington was then making. Now, Moscow’s war against Ukraine appears to have ended any structural rationale for Sino-American co-operation on oil. As China can benefit from discounted Russian crude, it does not share the American interest in forcing Opec Plus collectively to supply more oil to bring down Middle Eastern prices. Moreover, oil and gas security for China lies only in maintaining diversity of supply, and hence avoiding over-dependence on Russia. Therefore Beijing’s interest lies in preventing a bifurcation of the Opec Plus market between Asia and Europe, as well as reducing the vulnerability of passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz to Saudi-Iranian friction.

These changes have restructured Saudi choices in a world in which Washington expects its allies to take its side in the Sino-American conflict. In the tech war at least, Saudi Arabia has chosen to align with China. This reality was made very clear in December 2022, when MBS hosted Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in Riyadh for two China-Gulf summits. In finalising a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement, first mooted in 2019, the two states promised “firmly [to] support each other’s core interests”. Meanwhile Huawei struck a number of investment partnerships with Saudi firms. This year, Saudi Arabia appears to have begun applying this binary geopolitical logic to relations with its long-term regional antagonist Iran, allowing China to broker a rapprochement that has restored diplomatic ties between the two states after a seven-year break.

The Saudi shift has been replicated by other Arab members of Opec Plus, not least the two Abraham Accord states. In February 2022, the UAE agreed to buy fighter jets from China. Two months earlier, it had pulled out of a prior agreement to buy American F35s, struck as a side deal to the Abraham Accords, because it would not meet Washington’s demands over cutting out Huawei from its 5G infrastructure. Most strikingly, Bahrain has, under the umbrella of the Chinese-sponsored Saudi-Iran rapprochement, moved towards normalising relations with Iran — despite the fact that Iran has long had a territorially revisionist approach to the archipelago kingdom and backs the country’s opposition groups.

In the UAE’s case, closer relations with Tehran and Beijing are matched by deepening ties with Russia: in January this year, the US State Department sanctioned individuals and firms in the UAE with links to the Wagner Group, and Russian money has moved to the UAE to escape Western financial measures against Moscow. This Arab version of Obama’s attempted Pivot to Asia cannot but have at least some military ramifications in the Persian Gulf, given that Bahrain is host to the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy and US Naval Forces Central Command. Last May, the UAE withdrew from the US-led Combined Maritime Forces. A month later, reports surfaced in the Qatari press that China was co-ordinating naval collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, and Oman in the Persian Gulf.

Yet where this Saudi-led tilt to China leads geopolitically is still open to contest. The strength of the emerging anti-US Eurasian bloc can easily be overstated. There is no evidence that Washington intends to concede it naval dominance in the Persian Gulf or that China has the maritime power capacity to replace it. All the challenger-powers, including Saudi Arabia, are vulnerable to serious domestic political disorder. The scale of Saudi’s present additional oil capacity is far from clear. Indeed, the collective output of Opec Plus has been largely stagnant for the best part of two decades.

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Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is not taking China’s side on finance. Although Beijing may be pushing for the Saudis and other Opec Plus members to accept the renminbi as payment for oil and gas, there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia is moving to purchase their financial assets. By sharp contrast, when the United States moved towards a privileged relationship with Riyadh in the Seventies, to enhance its oil security, the Saudis did rapidly increase their dollar assets. Indeed, it is precisely the legacy of that financial turn to the United States, including the peg between the Saudi currency and the dollar, that constrains Saudi options in the financial and monetary space now.

Nonetheless, the Biden administration’s bet that the energy transition over the next two decades will reduce American oil demand enough to allow Saudi Arabia at least partially to drift is likely to be sorely tested. While the International Energy Agency judges that the most significant extra output over the next five years will come from outside Opec Plus, it also predicts that the Middle Eastern members of the cartel will dominate medium- to long-term oil production as the shale fields are depleted. Even if electric vehicle usage soars, any sizeable reduction in oil consumption in the medium term requires substitutes for petrochemicals.

In this scenario, Saudi Arabia has a resource that will probably be more important to the United States in the 2030s than it is now. Consequently, the largest Gulf producer and its Arab allies may have options in navigating between the respective pulls of the United States and China that other states, without a crucial commodity to export, do not possess. But the degree of energy unknowns in play, and the resilience of American financial power, mean that hedging between economic gain and security alliances is still a high-risk strategy. In this turbulent geopolitical world, this Saudi dilemma can only make the Persian Gulf a direct site of the rapidly-spreading Sino-American competition.

Certainly, there are imperial subtexts to Great Expectations. An English man writing in the middle third of the 19th century, obviously Dickens carried a set of attitudes towards the Empire and its relationship to the Condition of England. As his satire of Scrooge’s obsession with decreasing the “surplus population” by letting people die showed in A Christmas Carol, Dickens hated Malthusianism. But his alternative to addressing the consequences of population growth during industrialisation was imperial emigration.

The actual expression of Dickens’s own worldview clearly does not though interest Knight. In his telling, Pip equates becoming a successful gentleman with getting rich in the colonies, while Dickens packed off characters to the colonies who could not succeed materially or morally in England. They either went voluntarily, like Micawber in David Copperfield, or as prisoners, like Magwitch in Great Expectations and the sadistic Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. In Great Expectations, Pip’s friend Herbert moves to Cairo to practise merchant shipping because he gets nowhere in business in London, and an indebted Pip joins him when he realises even a life in Kent is no longer possible for him. Indeed, Dickens sent five of his seven sons, whom he deemed likely failures, to imperial life: one to the East India Company, one to the Bengal Mounted Police, two to Australia, and another to the Navy. (Walter Dickens died aged 22 trying to get back home from India and is buried in Calcutta.) Only Dickens’s eldest son, Charles junior, and the one successful son, Henry, were allowed to stay in England.

Great Expectations is also concerned with ignorance about the source of inherited wealth. Magwitch’s return to England, after he made a fortune farming in the penal colony of Australia, is a brutal revelation for Pip, whose whole view of his London life rests on him mistaking the surface of things for reality. As Pip assumes wealth breeds wealth, Magwitch’s lower-class toils initially incite “abhorrence”. His first instinct is to hide the truth and exile Magwitch, so that he can resume his gentlemanly ways. But Pip has to learn to see Magwitch as a flesh and blood human being to whom he owes gratitude. For Dickens, the Magwitch story has a symbolic purpose: the return of unbearable knowledge about the price another has paid abroad. While he does not make clear that farming in Australia means farming appropriated land, the point is there to be made.

By contrast, Knight’s telling traduces the literal Magwitch-Pip story and robs it of its human and thematic heart. Knight’s miss on the Pip-Magwitch relationship is part of his whole approach to Pip. Dickens’s novels are populated by memorable, strange characters and Pip is one of them. Pip’s entire consciousness arises from a moment on a “raw afternoon towards evening” when he fearfully learns “the identity of things”: that he is in a churchyard, that he is an orphan, that the surrounding “wilderness” is the marshes, that the beyond is the river, that the wind comes from the “savage lair” of the sea, and that “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, [i]s Pip”. Just as he has articulated this litany to himself, Magwitch arrives from behind his parents and siblings’ graves, crying “keep still you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat”. Rather than possessing any childhood faculty of wonder, Pip has a darkened and guilt-ridden Gothic imagination. After an acquaintance of Magwitch turns up one night at the village pub to give Pip money, he conjures images of the man shooting him with an “invisible gun”. Fighting Herbert, he feels like “a species of savage young wolf”. By his adolescence, he reprehends himself for things he has not even done.

In starting Pip’s story with him reciting Malvolio’s lines on greatness from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Knight offers a more familiar, and less striking character: the intelligent boy from the provinces knowingly superior to those around him and desperate to leave what is beneath him behind. This Pip neither needs nor has a dark alter-ego whereas in the novel the journeyman at the forge, Orlick, expresses in action what lurks in Pip’s inner consciousness.

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This set-up lessens the shame that comes upon Pip arriving home from Satis House, and it misses entirely what a strange kind of snob Pip becomes. Pip’s whole conception of the superior life he wants to live is shaped not by visions of grandeur, but the decay of a world a touch of natural light away from turning to dust. Pip knows that the attempt to rewrite the laws of Creation at Satis House is disturbing his mind. On his first trip, he momentarily sees Miss Havisham as a terrifying spectre calling to him, yet afterwards “Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appear to have something to do with everything that was picturesque”. On one beautiful summer day, as afternoon turns to evening — the same hour of the day in winter he meets Magwitch — ­he walks with Biddy, the woman who he knows he should love, along the river. He begins to wonder if he “was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella”. But, as he says of such moments, the “confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon [him] like a destructive missile, and scatter [his] wits”.

Dickens’s Pip fails to succeed at making money in the capital city because his mind is so distorted that he can see little clearly beyond the reality of Estella’s character. Even after Magwitch reveals his secret, Pip imagines that the wind and the rain had for weeks been carrying “mysterious warnings” from the “wicked spirit” of Magwitch because this is the kind of Gothic script that runs in his mind.

Although it is too late for him to lead the life he could have led if his imagination had not been warped, Pip’s arc is his return to the world of natural light, where he finds forgiveness. In his final confrontation with his alter-ego in the pitch blackness of a sluice-house on the marshes, Pip feels on the brink of death, until a “gleam of light” comes in through the door. After he begins to recover from his illness, he realises spring has emerged from the death of winter and he can see the physical beauty of the marshes. By contrast, Miss Havisham, while forgiven by Pip, dies in the darkness of fire, reflecting “her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like … other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world”.

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Pip’s journey back to the realm of light cannot be told in Knight’s series because as well as making Pip’s ambition so conventional, he sanitises Satis House and its occupants. Olivia Coleman’s Miss Havisham is not a quasi-mythical character enveloped in decay, in the grip of the notion that her suffering demands the entire passage of time with its rotation of light and darkness stop. Instead, she is a relatively energetic woman in her wedding dress surrounded by obvious wealth in a house where there are more than a few glimpses of daylight. Far from darkening her, her opium-taking brightens her.

Dickens was in good part a Christian storyteller writing stories of redemption. That is a part of why he was so popular and why he endures. It matters that as he moves towards the light Pip learns to love Magwitch, and in freeing himself from his self-corruption can love Joe again. There is nothing at all wrong with any adaptor of Dickens looking at what politically underpins Dickens’s literal story to draw out more of the historical world underneath this tale. Dickens was a realist writer, too, who very much worked out his religious stories in the concrete setting of England. But to rewrite Great Expectations as a vehicle for a historically driven story to which Pip’s pilgrimage is incidental is to violate the whole hope Dickens invested in storytelling.

Cheney’s involvement appeared to repeat a familiar story about the American military-industrial complex. Four decades earlier, a Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root, made large donations to President Lyndon Johnson before securing contracts on a naval construction programme in South Vietnam. Ironically, one of Brown & Root’s critics was a young Donald Rumsfeld, then a Republican Congressman, but in 2003 Bush’s defence secretary and a vocal cheerleader for the war.

Knowing that the oil charge coming from across the Atlantic made it harder for him to win the battle of public opinion in Britain, Tony Blair directly tried to defuse it in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman:

“Let me just deal with the oil thing because… the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue — it is the weapons, which is why the UN resolutions have gone over 12 years in relation to the weapons and why we’ve actually allowed Iraq to export oil.”

Yet the Halliburton allegations were a distraction from the actual reasons why Iraq was an oil war — not that Bush and Blair dared present it as such. After post-invasion Iraq descended into civil war, Bush came close to spelling out those motivations when, in his 2006 State of the Union address, he said: “we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world”. In that moment, Bush might have been mistaken for Jimmy Carter. Indeed, since the origins of the oil problem that the Iraq War was conceived to address lie in the Seventies, he was necessarily Carter’s energy heir. Then, the United States became the world’s largest oil importer after decades of near self-sufficiency. Unfortunately from its perspective, it acquired a direct interest in supply from the Middle East just as British imperial power crumbled in the region and post-colonial energy nationalism took hold.

Iraq was always tangled up in Washington’s ensuing geopolitical problems. The Ba’athist government ­— on this issue directed by Saddam Hussein — had nationalised all the foreign oil companies. During the Seventies, Iraq was also an ally of Moscow. Wanting to guard against Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf, but not wanting militarily to replace Britain, the Nixon administration made Saudi Arabia and Iran the guarantors of American energy security in the region. But the Iranian revolution in February 1979, followed by first the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and then the Iran-Iraq War, overwhelmed this strategy while sending oil prices soaring until new output from Alaska and the North Sea appeared. In this maelstrom, Jimmy Carter made a major strategic change in American foreign policy that has never yet been reversed. Under the Carter Doctrine, the United States became publicly committed to using military force in response to “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf”.

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This did not mean that American presidents would necessarily embrace a military approach to American foreign oil dependency in the Middle East. To the contrary, they still much preferred sanctions against hostile regimes and the use of regional proxies, rendering Bush’s 2003 war a radical departure in method. In the Eighties, Iraq became one of those surrogates when the Reagan administration provided support to Saddam’s regime to defeat Iran. But after its territorial ambitions in Iran were vanquished, Iraq again became a problem, even as the Cold War with the Soviet Union ended. In responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with war, George Bush senior acted on the Carter doctrine. But in deciding to stop in January 1991 at pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, and relying on sanctions on Iraq’s oil exports — policed by the US air force patrolling the Gulf — to contain a Saddam-led Iraq, he bequeathed his successors a strategic contradiction around that doctrine.

Sanctions on Iraq — on top of those in place on Iran and Libya — constrained the supply of oil out of the Persian Gulf, the defence of which was the Carter Doctrine’s whole raison d’etre. While this tension caused few problems in the Nineties, when oil supply was abundant and prices low, in the early 21st century it became an altogether different proposition. Now, output from Alaska and the North Sea was declining, while fears about the rate of depletion at the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, were mounting. Meanwhile, China’s accelerating consumption, on the back of much higher growth after Beijing’s accession to the World Trade Organization, constituted a concurrent demand shock.

Undoubtedly, the George W. Bush administration was well versed in oil matters. In his second week in office, Bush set up an Energy Task Force headed by Cheney. The subsequent Cheney Report declared that the United States faced an “energy crisis” arising from the “fundamental imbalance” between the supply and demand for oil. The report concluded by recommending that the administration review the sanction regimes and make moves to reopen the Middle East to foreign energy investment.

Seen in these terms, the Iraq War did possess a strategic logic. Iraq had large, under-utilised oil reserves. Since all Iraq’s major fields are onshore, its production and capital costs are lower than anywhere other than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; while compared with Venezuela, another historical under-producer, Iraq’s crude is easy to refine. Releasing that potential supply meant both regime change and attracting the international oil majors back into the country. Contrary to Blair’s deflection, there was no prospect of Iraq becoming a top-tier oil producer without technologically modernising the Iraqi oil industry. In the entire period since nationalisation began, Iraq had only once managed a yearly average of more than 3 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude output, while the years of war and sanctions had left the sector’s infrastructure dilapidated. By contrast, Russia’s output in 2003 was 8.5 million bpd and Saudi Arabia’s 10 million.

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The oil rationale for the war appears to have been deemed publicly inadmissible, even as the Cheney Report implicitly had made it clear. In his memoirs, the former chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil.” After facing criticism, he backtracked, claiming that it was a personal remark about why, as a central banker worried about oil prices, he had advocated for military action within decision-making circles. Absent was the brutal language about the gap between public discourse and energy manoeuvrings abroad that ends Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. There, the covert-operations CIA character explains to the idealistic Robert Redford character why he saw no reason to ask voters whether they supported a plot to seize Middle Eastern oil fields:

“Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop… You want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.”

In Beijing, there were few doubts that the war was oil-motivated. Almost immediately after Saddam fell, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, signed an agreement with Putin to build China’s first oil pipeline with Russia. For the Chinese leadership, a world in which the United States was willing to wage war for an oil objective was one in which it needed to reassess Chinese oil security a decade after it became an oil importer. This fear crystallised in what Hu identified as the Malacca Dilemma: China’s vulnerability to an American naval blockade in the narrow Malacca Straits, through which all China’s oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa pass. If Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is a hedge against the Malacca Dilemma, its strategic intent lies in the conclusions an earlier Chinese leader drew about Washington’s response to its own post-self-sufficiency oil predicament.

Yet as an attempt to militarise Washington’s Middle-Eastern oil problem, the Iraq War was also largely a failure. Iraq’s oil production in 2005 was around 20% lower than in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency. Indeed, it did not surpass that 2001 total until 2010. Although the Iraqi government then boasted that the sector could raise production to 12 million bpd within six to seven years, it has never yet been higher than 4.8 million bpd. As for the return of the Western majors, the Iraqi government took until 2007 to draft a hydrocarbon bill setting out a legal framework for foreign investment, and then could not get the Iraqi parliament to pass the legislation. When, in 2010, it did finally award contracts, it gave access to non-Western firms as well as the majors. Notably, on Iraq’s largest field, Rumaila, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation became an equal partner with BP.

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The country’s post-2003 political instability, at times fuelled by anger at the return of the international oil companies, has been nearly entirely un-conducive to those firms trying to transform Iraq’s oil industry. Forced by the Iraqi government to choose between its contracts with the Kurdistan regional government and its operations in southern Iraq, ExxonMobil was left to join forces with the publicly listed arm of China National Petroleum Corporation, PetroChina, on one of the two large West Qurna fields. After Isis seized control of part of Iraq in 2014, attacks on oil infrastructure became common. Even after the American military return to Iraq in 2014 allowed Baghdad to re-establish full territorial control by the end of 2017, Iran’s influence has grown.

In a near-perfect absurdity, considering the Iraq War’s purposes, most of the Western oil companies have, in recent years, either left or reduced their operations, while the Iranian Oil Ministry has set up an office in downtown Baghdad and Chinese firms are ascendant. Indeed, it was in part because PetroChina prevailed over ExxonMobil in their West Qurna partnership that the American major has sold its stake. Eventually, it fell to the American shale boom to make economic restitution for the Iraq War’s failure. Through the 2010s, the world economy relied not so much on oil from the international oil companies in southern Iraq, but that pumped by independent firms in Dakota and Texas: by 2019, US crude production was two-and-a-half times Iraq’s.

But the oil legacy of the Iraq debacle has not gone away. American shale output can no longer grow quickly enough to compensate for the stagnation in production elsewhere. When Joe Biden travelled to Riyadh last summer to meet Mohammed Bin Salman, he was in part asking the Saudi Crown Prince to allow Iraq to supply more oil in an attempt to bring prices down, even as, post-pandemic, Iraq has still not matched its output in August 2019 and the Iraqi government had said it wants oil to cost above $100 per barrel.

For now, Washington is offsetting the affordable supply problem by selling large volumes of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But it cannot do so indefinitely. When it stops, it will again have to address the world’s oil problem without the illusion that it can remake the Middle East by war.

Elizabeth II’s incumbency was so enduring that any number of people lived lives here without such an experience. Now, her passing risks bequeathing something more akin to a shipwreck than a pre-ordained and pre-planned moment in time, the passage of which should bring, as well as grief, the solace of continuity. Britain has become a country in which we are part strangers. Precisely because the Queen prolonged a particular past, this week has been a temporal rupture.

In her spirit still lived her father and grandfather, the kings who, because of the two world wars, reigned over what was probably for the first time an overtly British nation-state, rather than a tenser union of once separate kingdoms. To mourn Elizabeth II is to mourn that 20th-century Britain. In reality, it was a short era. By the Seventies, something that fighting the two wars had created was already dissolving. But the last genuinely optimistic decade of 20th-century Britain tied the Queen to two iconic imaginative forces that still, in rather different ways, exercise their pull.

In the first, Bobby Moore, born in the East End during the Blitz, climbed the steps at Wembley, and, not wanting to dirty the Queen’s white gloves, wiped his hands, before she handed him the Jules Rimet Trophy. For English football, that summer afternoon has constituted an ideal of greatness against which everything since has fallen short, even as there are any number of ways in which football in Britain is more inclusive than it was on 30 July 1966. If the 56 years of hurt were to end in Qatar this winter, there would be no fusion of the club rituals of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday with the national team’s victory, no way of avoiding the question of what the World Cup was doing being played in the middle of European domestic seasons in Qatar, and there would be English not Union flags flown in celebration. Much more likely, there will be more years to add to a song written for an occasion where attaining that ideal in the Queen’s presence seemed in touching distance.

The Beatles are the second vehicle of collective emotion, running from war to the Sixties, to which the Queen was connected. John Lennon was born during the Liverpool blitz and Paul McCartney’s parents met in an air raid shelter. They played as children on bombsites. Then, like the Queen in the Fifties, the Beatles became in the Sixties the new outward face of post-war Britain, even as the shadows of the older Britain ran through some of their best songs from A day in the life to Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that growing up, the Queen seemed akin to a film star: someone it would be impossible for a working-class boy like him to meet. But he did. He’s now a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. As the Beatles were falling apart in 1968, McCartney, always at home in pre-rock and roll British musical culture, wrote a music-hall style ditty, “almost”, he said, “like a love song”, about the Queen. On Abbey Road, after he finishes singing “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”, there is a gap. Then the 23-second Her Majesty begins: the last sound on the last album the Beatles made.

The age of Queen Elizabeth II could not stop in the Sixties. Through the increasing political and economic fragmentation of the United Kingdom from the Seventies, the Queen served as an exemplary constitutional monarch. She might even be said to have practised denial in the face of what was changing: order being necessary, she knew that a public show of it is required from the person who bears witness to the underlying tumult.

Nothing symbolises the United Kingdom Union, not even the armed forces, as much as the monarchy. The monarch must represent the whole of the Union and be sensitive to its constituent parts. This is much easier said than done. The Queen in part succeeded because deep in her character ran an unwillingness to perform angst against some abstract standard of the way things are supposed to be. The Union is not helped by gimmicks and cannot withstand a lot of tortured contemplation. It just has to be lived as though it were self-evident that it and the tapestry that constitutes it matter. In appointing her last Prime Minister and meeting her end at Balmoral, she may have, at the last, still served the Union well. By appearing while dying with a smile on her face to meet Liz Truss, she has also given what seems like an accidental premiership unfolding in a national emergency a dignity in its beginning that it would not otherwise have.

Without her, though, the monarchy itself is less secure. There will be less of the already severely strained charity bestowed towards those inside it who let it down. Meanwhile, the Queen appears to have been the last tie binding the Sussexes to the Royal Family. If the attacks hit and wounded her anyway, the grief writ across Prince Harry’s face as he arrived at Balmoral tells its own story. Unless the emotions of his dash to Scotland brings reconciliation, the burden of protecting the monarchy from filial and fraternal score-settling now uncomfortably passes to its targets.

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Britain has lived through a not insignificant number of kings and queens who did more to jeopardise the monarchy than to preserve it. By contrast, the Queen made it an institution that attracted admiration, perhaps even abroad some envy. At the very point when there might have appeared every reason to doubt the purpose of a constitutional monarchy so overtly laden with pomp and pageantry, she gave it an almost transcendent purpose.

This achievement was not at all obvious in the first half of her reign. Probably she had not yet accomplished it. There was no war where she could demonstrate her fortitude as George VI did. While she was not born to be Queen and came to the throne at a young age, her accession did not have quite the air of tragedy that gave such meaning to her father’s life as king. She had to become through service the Queen she became, including the Queen who could so delightfully take tea with Paddington. Perhaps the Crown though instant in acquisition must be borne as a pilgrimage. Perhaps his utter inadequacy to the trek was why Edward VIII opted to dump it on his brother and niece. Perhaps it was a simple willingness to meet the longevity of the journey that took her so far. She appeared to find truth in an Aboriginal proverb she quoted in a speech in Australia in 2011: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”

More prosaically, the Queen possessed a seemingly innate capacity to practise self-discipline and humility. Her predictability on such matters is why many self-proclaimed republicans could respect her. Could anyone have doubted that she unhesitatingly would have thought that the Covid rules about funerals applied to the Duke of Edinburgh’s?

Nobody from the outside can know how much over seven decades the Queen sacrificed and where, for better or worse, she reached her limits. Over the past year, what she did not have the physical strength left to do, from the Cenotaph to the State Opening of Parliament, made the nearness of the end apparent. What was left though in the Jubilee was a chance for what is still, for now anyway, the United Kingdom to say thank you while the Queen was alive to receive the gratitude. On the last day, she left Windsor and came to London again to play her part. Now, with the help of the rituals she would have recognised, those of us who want the monarchy to endure through the parting must too try to rise to the change.

***

This article was first published on 10 September 2022.

The Western way of life that flowed out of Texas came to take oil for granted. At any time when supply was abundant, few stopped to think about its production. For consumers, oil life was a practically easy life. It was as if, as the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote in his short story ‘The Petrol Pump’, energy was “unconditionally and endlessly at your service”. But that notion rested on a colossal illusion given that producing oil took place in a world of destructive chaos. It was no easy thing to extract the sun’s energy from finite organic matter trapped on the seabed for millions of years before there was any form of human life.

Wildcatters like Higgins understood this reality. For them, oil invoked dreads far removed from the chimerical promise of modernity. Since it bent cosmic time, oil could not be trusted. As one witness to a later gusher mused: “Whenever you punch a hole so deep into the ground that oil pops out, Hades come with it. And the more oil, the more Hades.” This equation of oil with Hades contained multiple meanings. At its simplest, it mythically rendered the origins of oil in the underworld of the dead. In blowing away the river that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, oil accelerated the temporal vanity of all mortal aspiration.

In Pennsylvania and Texas, long-standing rural settlements became fleetingly rich oil towns and then, when the oil fields were depleted, wastelands. Oil encouraged the wildcatters to speculate with borrowed capital against the arbitrary whims of geology and the market power of Standard Oil, inevitably risking their own financial and moral ruin. Since oil wells were highly combustible, drilling for oil also summoned Hades conceived as the Christian inferno of Hell. For many of the wildcatters, to bring Hades into play was to invite the End Times both as the Day of Judgement and the final consummation of the world in fire. To take a verse from Proverbs 27, it constituted a world where: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes are men are never satisfied.”

The wildcatters’ treks westward with this kind of consciousness became part of a potent cultural American imaginary around the temporal instability of oil and its elemental power to poison the earth and corrupt human beings. Three stories told over the course of 20th-century America are particularly revealing: Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, the 1956 film Giant, and CBS’s original Dallas show which began in 1978. Each mediates on oil’s demonic power. Linked as they are by the initials JR for a protagonist, they build on each other to form a saga about the afterlife of Spindletop.

The never-ending search for oil and the risk of fire when it is found constantly always encroaches on the sanctity of the land. In Oil!, wildcatter J. Arnold Ross lies to acquire a goat-ranch on which to drill for oil in a place called Paradise in California. He wants to pass on the oil empire he builds to his son Bunny; at the novel’s end the Paradise wells have gone up in flames. In Giant, the old-moneyed Bick Benedict initially renounces the wealth drilling on his ranch would bring. After he surrenders, he insists, that “all this oil around here hasn’t made a lot of difference. We live pretty much the way we always have.” But he speaks lounging in a new swimming pool and behind him the once pristine terrain has been transformed by hundreds of oil derricks. Dallas, meanwhile, persistently returns to the tension between Ewing Oil, the family business, and Southfork, the cattle ranch where the warring Ewings live. The patriarch, Jock Ewing, owns Ewing Oil. His wife, Miss Ellie, owns Southfork. In one of the show’s finest episodes, a heartbroken Miss Ellie chooses to end her father’s prohibition on drilling for oil on Southfork in order to save Ewing Oil from bankruptcy.

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By Helen Thompson

For individuals to touch oil in these stories is to live in spiritual danger. In Oil! those ranchers offered leases for drilling on their lands find “their frail human nature … subjected to a strain greater than it was made for”. J. Arnold Ross dies in exile in Europe when the real-world Teapot dome scandal — in which President Warren Harding’s Interior Secretary handed out leases on land that had been naval oil reserves to two oil companies for bribes — catches up with him.

In Giant, wildcatter Jett Rink is played by James Dean over the last months of his life with a doomed, unearthly beauty. An oil-saturated Jett declaims after his gusher goes up: “You all thought old Spindletop… was all the oil there was didn’t you. But I’m here to tell you it ain’t. … I’m a rich un.” He becomes the richest man in Texas. But he is last seen fallen to the ground drunk in an empty hall where there was supposed to be a banquet to celebrate the dedication of the Jett Rink airport.

Under the guise of a soap opera, Dallas created the darkest mythology about oil’s ruinous power. All the principal characters live with the demon of Ewing Oil and one way or another they are all destroyed by it. On the surface, there is a duality between two brothers, the elder — JR — who is evil, and the younger — Bobby — who is good. But while Bobby is a much better family man than JR, the closer Bobby gets to oil the more the fraternal polarity falls away. In what was Dallas’s best season, the competition between the brothers for control of the company after Jock’s death simultaneously corrupts Bobby’s character and reveals the ambition behind his righteousness, costing him his marriage.

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Oil ultimately destroys the Ewings as a family and eventually it consumes Ewing Oil itself. The Ewing men go to the brink and pull back only for the cycle to start again more hopelessly. The oil past always has more pull for the Ewings than the oil present. As the show constantly reminds the viewer, Jock Ewing founded Ewing Oil as a wildcatter in the Thirties. When the show starts, Jock is newly retired, and JR is running the company after, as JR once puts it, “the sudden devaluation of the Ewing dollar”: the world where the US must import huge quantities of oil. Jock is glorified as a symbol of a lost past, “the kind of man who made Texas great”. JR is a charismatic anti-hero, constantly improvising as much abroad as at home. JR’s eyes always want more. His ways court disaster for Ewing Oil. But for a while they just as regularly rescue it.

The tide decisively turns against the Ewings in the tenth season, set against the backdrop of the 1986 oil price crash, which devastated the Texas oil industry. JR manoeuvres to blow up Saudi fields to force up prices. When the blowback endangers all the Ewings, Miss Ellie tells her sons that Ewing Oil should have died with their father. Not for the first time, Bobby tries to get out. His wife Pam is proud he has put his “whole house in order”. But oil time has accelerated well beyond Bobby’s belated moral epiphanies. Before Bobby can sell his Ewing Oil shares, the Justice Department announces an investigation into JR’s Middle Eastern ventures. In the ‘Fall of the House of Ewing’, the Justice Department closes down Ewing Oil, and the assets of the once wildcatting company are bought by the show’s fictional oil major, whose CEO has long plotted to bring the Ewings to heel.

This storyline should have served as an endpoint (late Dallas became an unwatchable mess). In symbolic terms, Dallas turned the legacy of Spindletop to dust at the hands of hubris, power, and contingent circumstances in a style recognisable from any Greek tragedy. The fact it was an oil story made for a global audience of energy-unaware oil consumers who scarcely noticed the undercurrents to what they were watching is perhaps its own commentary on western consumers’ relationship to the material basis of their way of life.

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But whatever the force of destruction at work, there is no suggestion in any of these stories of 20th-century Americana that oil can simply be renounced. In Oil! the idealistic Bunny never repudiates his father nor doubts that “this is an oil age”. The novel ends in a cemetery in Paradise. Sinclair allows himself the hope that “men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon” that “roams the earth”, but he has just described the new derricks that are being built to replace the burnt-out ones.

Dallas goes further, suggesting that JR’s ways are a necessary evil for the age of affluence it portrays. In the show’s final episode, a drunken JR wanders around an empty Southfork. An It’s-a-Wonderful-Life-style figure appears to show him a world where he was not born: Ewing Oil has collapsed a few years after Jock’s retirement, leading Jock to suicide and then Miss Ellie to her grave. Yet this does not redeem JR: in the show’s last scene, JR appears to have turned Jock’s old gun on himself, rendering him the final casualty of all the grief Ewing Oil has caused.

Westerners living lives far removed from the realities of the oil industry are now much more used to the idea of the commodity as a destructive force than those watching Dallas in its prime. Today, climate change and the last decades of geopolitical turbulence around energy have given an urgent charge to the idea that oil is a force from Hades threatening the End Times. Yet Sinclair’s vision of resealing the boundary between Earth and Hades by bringing oil to heel requires sacrifices that many of us living the life oil allows don’t want to contemplate. Indeed, to wish Spindletop away as a wrong turn would be to wish ourselves away: it is the rise of oil as an energy source that has made it possible for there to be so many of us alive in the world today.

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These paradoxes are at work in the American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s work. In his masterpiece Blood Meridian — published in 1985 — McCarthy told a story about scalp hunting across the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-19th century, making Texas a site of cyclical cosmic time. The first wildcatters easily fit into McCarthy’s mythology. Indeed, one could perhaps read the novel’s epilogue, where a man is “progressing over the plains” making holes in the ground “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there”, as the start of a wildcatting quest.

But in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road­ — published in 2006 — cyclical time has ended: everything is sinking into oblivion. The cause of the ecological cataclysm is unspecified. But a story of oil in its last twilight is palpable. In the opening, a father awakens from a dream where he and his son have been lost in the depths of a cave until they reach “a black and ancient lake”. On their journey south, the man and the boy use an “oil company roadmap” as a guide. The man has them search for gasoline to light their lamp. At one early stop, they first find “the odour of gas only a rumour” and then, desperate, return to decanter dregs from plastic oil bottles. Later, what they find is “years old. But it was gasoline and it would burn”. It is their oil-lit lamp that allows them to discover the largest store of food they encounter.

In The Road, it is as if all oil time is compressed from oil’s origins to its first use to its necessity to its reconstruction of the American landscape to its depletion and ecological hazard. Before his demise, the man sees the boy “looking back at him from some unimaginable future”. That place appears to be an oilless world. During the man’s last night, the light comes not from the lamp but a candle borne by the boy. To the man, “old dreams encroached upon the waking world”. With his death, oil and its stories might be said to pass into the silence “of things ceasing to be”.

In the last paragraph, the authorial voice changes. We are transported to an organically alive world. Here, the maps are the “patterns” on the back of trout swimming in mountain streams, and they are “maps of the world in its becoming”. But something old still has its purchase. The patterns are also “Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again”. It’s an ending that appears unwilling to privilege either optimism or pessimism: an ending perhaps from a place where the cosmic stakes of the age of oil can’t quite be contemplated.

Elizabeth II’s incumbency was so enduring that any number of people lived lives here without such an experience. Now, her passing risks bequeathing something more akin to a shipwreck than a pre-ordained and pre-planned moment in time, the passage of which should bring, as well as grief, the solace of continuity. Britain has become a country in which we are part strangers. Precisely because the Queen prolonged a particular past, this week has been a temporal rupture.

In her spirit still lived her father and grandfather, the kings who, because of the two world wars, reigned over what was probably for the first time an overtly British nation-state, rather than a tenser union of once separate kingdoms. To mourn Elizabeth II is to mourn that 20^th-century Britain. In reality, it was a short era. By the Seventies, something that fighting the two wars had created was already dissolving. But the last genuinely optimistic decade of 20th-century Britain tied the Queen to two iconic imaginative forces that still, in rather different ways, exercise their pull.

In the first, Bobby Moore, born in the East End during the Blitz, climbed the steps at Wembley, and, not wanting to dirty the Queen’s white gloves, wiped his hands, before she handed him the Jules Rimet Trophy. For English football, that summer afternoon has constituted an ideal of greatness against which everything since has fallen short, even as there are any number of ways in which football in Britain is more inclusive than it was on 30 July 1966. If the 56 years of hurt were to end in Qatar this winter, there would be no fusion of the club rituals of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday with the national team’s victory, no way of avoiding the question of what the World Cup was doing being played in the middle of European domestic seasons in Qatar, and there would be English not Union flags flown in celebration. Much more likely, there will be more years to add to a song written for an occasion where attaining that ideal in the Queen’s presence seemed in touching distance.

The Beatles are the second vehicle of collective emotion, running from war to the Sixties, to which the Queen was connected. John Lennon was born during the Liverpool blitz and Paul McCartney’s parents met in an air raid shelter. They played as children on bombsites. Then, like the Queen in the Fifties, the Beatles became in the Sixties the new outward face of post-war Britain, even as the shadows of the older Britain ran through some of their best songs from A day in the life to Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that growing up, the Queen seemed akin to a film star: someone it would be impossible for a working-class boy like him to meet. But he did. He’s now a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. As the Beatles were falling apart in 1968, McCartney, always at home in pre-rock and roll British musical culture, wrote a music-hall style ditty, “almost”, he said, “like a love song”, about the Queen. On Abbey Road, after he finishes singing “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”, there is a gap. Then the 23-second Her Majesty begins: the last sound on the last album the Beatles made.

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The age of Queen Elizabeth II could not stop in the Sixties. Through the increasing political and economic fragmentation of the United Kingdom from the Seventies, the Queen served as an exemplary constitutional monarch. She might even be said to have practised denial in the face of what was changing: order being necessary, she knew that a public show of it is required from the person who bears witness to the underlying tumult.

Nothing symbolises the United Kingdom Union, not even the armed forces, as much as the monarchy. The monarch must represent the whole of the Union and be sensitive to its constituent parts. This is much easier said than done. The Queen in part succeeded because deep in her character ran an unwillingness to perform angst against some abstract standard of the way things are supposed to be. The Union is not helped by gimmicks and cannot withstand a lot of tortured contemplation. It just has to be lived as though it were self-evident that it and the tapestry that constitutes it matter. In appointing her last Prime Minister and meeting her end at Balmoral, she may have, at the last, still served the Union well. By appearing while dying with a smile on her face to meet Liz Truss, she has also given what seems like an accidental premiership unfolding in a national emergency a dignity in its beginning that it would not otherwise have.

Without her, though, the monarchy itself is less secure. There will be less of the already severely strained charity bestowed towards those inside it who let it down. Meanwhile, the Queen appears to have been the last tie binding the Sussexes to the Royal Family. If the attacks hit and wounded her anyway, the grief writ across Prince Harry’s face as he arrived at Balmoral tells its own story. Unless the emotions of his dash to Scotland brings reconciliation, the burden of protecting the monarchy from filial and fraternal score-settling now uncomfortably passes to its targets.

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Britain has lived through a not insignificant number of kings and queens who did more to jeopardise the monarchy than to preserve it. By contrast, the Queen made it an institution that attracted admiration, perhaps even abroad some envy. At the very point when there might have appeared every reason to doubt the purpose of a constitutional monarchy so overtly laden with pomp and pageantry, she gave it an almost transcendent purpose.

This achievement was not at all obvious in the first half of her reign. Probably she had not yet accomplished it. There was no war where she could demonstrate her fortitude as George VI did. While she was not born to be Queen and came to the throne at a young age, her accession did not have quite the air of tragedy that gave such meaning to her father’s life as king. She had to become through service the Queen she became, including the Queen who could so delightfully take tea with Paddington. Perhaps the Crown though instant in acquisition must be borne as a pilgrimage. Perhaps his utter inadequacy to the trek was why Edward VIII opted to dump it on his brother and niece. Perhaps it was a simple willingness to meet the longevity of the journey that took her so far. She appeared to find truth in an Aboriginal proverb she quoted in a speech in Australia in 2011: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”

More prosaically, the Queen possessed a seemingly innate capacity to practise self-discipline and humility. Her predictability on such matters is why many self-proclaimed republicans could respect her. Could anyone have doubted that she unhesitatingly would have thought that the Covid rules about funerals applied to the Duke of Edinburgh’s?

Nobody from the outside can know how much over seven decades the Queen sacrificed and where, for better or worse, she reached her limits. Over the past year, what she did not have the physical strength left to do, from the Cenotaph to the State Opening of Parliament, made the nearness of the end apparent. What was left though in the Jubilee was a chance for what is still, for now anyway, the United Kingdom to say thank you while the Queen was alive to receive the gratitude. On the last day, she left Windsor and came to London again to play her part. Now, with the help of the rituals she would have recognised, those of us who want the monarchy to endure through the parting must too try to rise to the change.

But such is the nervousness that hangs over the monarchy’s future, in any rendition of the national anthem there is a palpable charge on the words, “long to reign over us, God save the Queen”. In that moment, one can sense a shivering fear that the Queen’s death may open the path to a troubling future where the forces stacked against the British monarchy, from outside and in, begin to overwhelm it — without there being any unifying idea about what could come next.

The Queen’s being was not always fused in this way with a near ideal form of British monarchy. The joyful festivities for the Silver Jubilee bank holiday in June 1977, for example, felt as much about a country needing to remind itself that one purpose of a monarchy is to create such a national occasion, as a celebration of the Queen herself.

Since Victoria’s reign established the idea that the monarchy’s legitimacy had, in part, to rest on public affection, the British have not continuously loved quietude in their monarchs. There was nothing austere about Edward VII: he ate excessively, smoked too much, gambled, and had a string of mistresses. Queen Victoria feared her son would bring down the monarchy. But after Edward VII died in May 1910, throngs of people waited through the night under a deluge of rain outside Westminster Hall to see the coffin of a man who appeared, at least, rather to enjoy being King. When it came to his funeral procession, the crowds were much larger than they were for his mother.

But the present Queen is a successful part of a continuous story about duty that began with the monarchy her grandfather George V established. She is the last of a family trio. Although Edward VII did as much for the modern monarchy as his parents, his reign belongs to another world, one in which the British monarch still had real political influence. During the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, Edward VII successfully demanded a general election before the Liberal government could pass its budget after its defeat in the House of Lords, and then another before it could expect to legislate to remove the Lords’ right of veto — although he did not live to see that vote.

In Europe, he sought to check German power, leaving the Kaiser convinced his uncle was “Satan”, standing between Germany and its world destiny. By visiting Paris in 1903, against the advice of British officials, and transforming in just four days French public opinion of him, he played his part in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Working his other nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, while influencing the appointments of the British ambassador in St Petersburg and the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James’, he was also instrumental in realising the 1907 Anglo Russian Entente.

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As the pre-1914 European world approached its dissolution, Edward VII, as elder statesman of a continent-wide royal family dominated by Victoria and Albert’s descendants, appeared a peacemaker. A popular song in 1909 proclaimed “as long as there’s a King like good King Edward there’ll be no war”. On the King’s sudden death, the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky declared: “We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy.” In France, Edward was mourned in the republican corridors of power in Paris and in provincial towns. When the moment of crisis arrived in August 1914, leaving the Kaiser to contemplate the terrible necessity for Germany to wage war against both Russia and France to achieve any of his ambitions, he complained bitterly that “the dead Edward was stronger than the living one”.

No European monarch could ever have such hope and dread projected onto them again. By the end of the First Word War, Edward VII’s second son had turned Prince Albert’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha into the Windsors, surrendered the use of all German titles, and refused asylum to the Tsar and Tsarina, both his first cousins, to protect the British monarchy from the sins of association. Instead of continental leadership, George V ­— who had become heir on the death of his older brother from the Russian flu — offered Britain the idea of a monarchy based on dutiful, quiet service and a largely domestic royal family.

Of course, the Windsor monarchy was still bound to the empire in the Twenties. George V wanted to be an imperial king replete with imperial ceremony; before the war, he had insisted on travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India. But, whatever its creator’s imperial emotions, the post-1914 monarchy had, in a world where European decline was inescapable, to be detachable from empire. A good part of the Queen’s achievement has been to facilitate that imaginative separation while, through the Commonwealth, preventing the monarchy falling into British parochialism detached from the wider world.

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Above all, the emotional rituals of the new Windsor monarchy were tied to the rituals of remembrance created by the losses of the First World War. These liturgies were reinvigorated by the Second World War both in its national mythos of virtuous sacrifice and the imperial mobilisation of the Indian Army as the largest volunteer force in history. On 11 November 1920, George V unveiled the Cenotaph as part of a procession to Westminster Abbey for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. On entering the Abbey two-and-a-half years later for her wedding to the future George VI, the then Duchess of York – the future Queen Mother – laid her bouquet on the tomb in honour of her brother who fell at the Battle of Loos, beginning a tradition for royal brides, upheld by the Queen and later the Duchess of Cambridge. At her own request, the Queen Mother’s funeral wreath was placed on the grave. The fusion of the seasons of monarchical life with the national remembrance of war is why the Queen’s absence from last year’s Cenotaph service was such a watershed moment. Nothing could state more potently that her reign is coming to an end.

In its post-1914 casting, the monarchy was far from constitutionally irrelevant. George V played his part in normalising Labour governments, and effectively demanded that Ramsay MacDonald form the National government when MacDonald came to the Palace to resign in August 1931. Until the Conservative party changed its leadership rules, the monarch had the formal discretion to choose a Conservative Prime Minister on the departure on an incumbent, a power the Queen exercised when she chose Harold Macmillan in January 1957 and Lord Douglas-Home in October 1963. But during George V’s reign, a great deal of constitutional service became passive: dealing with boxes without active responsibility for their content and performing the constitutional ceremony of the opening of Parliament.

In this requirement for quiescence lay a problem that would haunt George V and perhaps does the Queen. It is not only the monarch who must accept an inert role, but the heir after years of waiting for the Crown to be theirs. In George V’s case, his eldest son’s temperamental constitutional unsuitability was thoroughly compounded by his unwillingness to make a conventional marriage and have children.

But Edward VIII’s short reign paradoxically strengthened the Windsor monarchy. Once George VI acceded to the throne, he was helped by the very fecklessness of his older brother. What story could more demonstrate the idea of necessary duty than one where the stammering second son had to take the Crown from a once-idolised brother and remake himself as a public man? During the Second World War all aspects of the Windsor monarchy became one when that King and his Queen partook in the national experience of aerial assault by working in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and refusing ministerial advice to send the young princesses to Canada.

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The Queen’s inheritance of George V’s monarchy was complex. As was the case with her grandfather and father, the duties of the Crown should not have fallen upon her. But by the time she was born in 1926, her father had, given his brother’s attitude towards marriage, good reasons to suspect they eventually could; and her grandfather hoped, while she was too young really to comprehend what was happening around her, they would. If she shares with them an ability to accommodate duty foisted by circumstance, her temperamental dislike of excess has had to work, not in an age of war but amid rapidly rising consumerism and then a turn to performative public displays of grief. To heighten the dissociation, the appetite for communal expressions of emotion began in the days after Princess Diana’s death, when the Queen’s self-containment was the very opposite of the new aesthetic.

Given this divergence between the monarch and the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that the wholehearted affection felt for the Queen has only come in the second half of her life. This is in part the effect of the sheer duration of her endurance. But it is a function, too, of her character. She has absorbed change she had little reason to like, and so reinforced the story of duty to which the House of Windsor laid claim. Precisely because the country is significantly more secular than when she came to the throne, her Christianity is also an asset. Where the religious rituals of national life might appear hollow, she plays her part blessed by faith. Since some of the symbols are complex in a multi-national Union that was never a spiritual union, she also appears at ease in the ambiguity, seen at worship as she is at Sandringham in a church of which she is head and at Balmoral at Crathie Kirk, a church where she is not. As the United Kingdom has become more divided, she has simply carried on as head of state, as if as long as she performs her duty, the country will be more than it seems on the surface to be.

But the idea of the domestic royal family has been a greater burden for the Queen than it was even for her grandfather. If, on the other side of her reign, lies a great unknown, it is one she has played her part in bringing about. What she has given of her own qualities to the kingdom coexists with mishaps with her heirs. In marrying her third-cousin for love, she inserted the Windsors back into the part of Victoria and Albert’s continental diaspora that had made it back to Britain through the wreckage of the First World War and its aftermath. But no more European royal weddings would materialise. Instead, Prince Charles was left caught between the idea he could marry for love and the eventual necessity of a near arranged domestic aristocratic marriage he was ill-equipped to tolerate. Meanwhile, the Queen’s longevity means that there have been three generations of spares to pain and embarrass her. Like George V before her, the Queen will not to live to see where the story of her life as royal parent of Prince Andrew and grandparent of Prince Harry ends.

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For a moment, the future can wait, as it did for George V. His Silver Jubilee in May 1935, six months before his death, turned out to be an emotional occasion. After the crowds had lined the streets to see him and Queen Mary process to a service at St Paul’s, he took to the radio to declare: “I can only say to you, my very dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty — and may I say? — the love which this day and always you have surrounded us.” After driving through the East End, he said, “I’d no idea they felt like that about me.”

The problem he bequeathed the monarchy as a father had an unexpected resolution: Mrs Simpson was the strange grace note in the story, the contingency that spared the country a disastrous monarch during an attempted conquest. Since Andrew and Harry are not heirs who can be broken or redeemed by the Crown, there will be no resolution to the contrasting problems they cause; the Queen must pass them unabridged to Prince Charles.

Beyond his brother and youngest son, Charles will inherit a Crown that has reached a stasis by very virtue of the Queen’s remarkable success. She was sufficiently formed by the Second World War to be George V and George VI’s spiritual heir. But no child or grandchild of hers could ever have been like her, whatever kind of parent or grandparent she was. She must know the future monarchy, if it survives, will be one that has of necessity again been reinvented.

By giving unflinching service according to the Windsor character script and rituals she has emphatically answered the question of what purpose a constitutional monarchy still serves. There will not be such a sharp rejoinder to republicanism ever again. This will be Prince Charles’s burden. It will also belong to us all who are the Queen’s subjects. If we want the monarchy to continue, we will have tacitly to give our consent to leaving the Age of Elizabeth Windsor behind.

For Cameron, it was an important symbolic victory, showing that Britain had a “special status inside the EU”. For his fellow EU premiers, it was a bewildering demand, especially when the man making it had assured them that he was desperate for the UK to remain inside the EU. It proved to be more revealing than either side realised, for its logic pointed to Brexit. Yet five months later, when the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exit the EU, the idea that the UK could do such thing was treated as an outcome that those involved in the negotiations could scarcely have envisaged.

When Cameron began his round of travels to European capitals in the middle of 2015 to try to win friends prior to the renegotiations, he wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Perhaps, paying too much attention to British political punditry, his fellow EU leaders had not expected the Conservatives to win a parliamentary majority at the general election that May. Perhaps they had not noticed that Cameron had included in the Conservative manifesto an assurance that any government he headed would not enter another coalition without first securing a commitment to a referendum on EU membership. Or perhaps, since they wouldn’t have contemplated doing such a thing themselves, they did not take Cameron to mean what he said — that if the British people voted for Brexit, Brexit is what would then happen.

Most EU governments, not least the German one, were also preoccupied with other matters and would remain so throughout Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiations. By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. Only weeks after it failed — in part because Merkel made some small concessions to the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras — the German Chancellor threw Europe into tumult by upending the EU’s common asylum rules to cope with the numbers of refugees and migrants travelling from Turkey into southern Europe. By the time, in February 2016, Cameron sought to finalise his agreement, Merkel’s focus had shifted to procuring a definitive agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan to return migrants without strong asylum claims back to Turkey in exchange for reactivating accession talks for Ankara.

The fallout of these events seems to have blindsided Cameron. There could have scarcely been a less propitious time for any British government to have been demanding concessions from other EU states than a moment when opt-outs from the Euro, the EU’s asylum policy and Schengen – the borderless travel area that covers most of the EU – protected the UK from the crises with which most other member states were grappling.

But Cameron did not help himself. If he had acted like someone who really believed that the Eurozone crisis had so destabilised the UK’s membership of the EU that exit had to be a serious option, he might have secured his fellow leaders’ attention. Instead, he plunged into negotiations in Brussels according to a timetable in part constructed to help George Osborne become the next Conservative leader with a Remain campaign organisation already assembled and ready to go in London.

With no currency in the EU’s present-tense difficulties with which to bargain and unable to instil fear about the future, he all too predictably ended up with very little beyond the promise that the UK did not have to pretend it believed in the EU’s stated purpose. When he returned home, he had to ask British voters to Remain, having just put on an overt demonstration of how little influence the UK could exercise in a Union whose founding text he had disowned.

But the possibility that Cameron’s lack of guile and their inattention to British problems would lead to the UK leaving the EU eluded many in the EU too. (Whether it did Merkel must remain an open question.) In part, this complacency rendered the referendum result a psychic blow. If some teleological historical force is supposed to be the ultimate agent of ever-closer Union in Europe, then, the EU is not supposed to shrink, however “cold” — a word Merkel once used to describe Cameron’s view of the Union ­— the vision of passing leaders of individual member states.

Brexit would also prove a colossal practical distraction: as Emmanuel Macron later complained, it created “thousands of hours of work for European leaders”. Believing that there was a reasonable likelihood that those Remainers at Westminster who wanted to prevent Brexit would eventually prevail was easier than working out how the EU could reconstruct a different kind of relationship with the UK as a simultaneous competitor and partner.

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That Brexit would bequeath Ireland a serious problem, allied to the obvious difficulties Northern Ireland would pose to any government actually procuring parliamentary assent for a withdrawal treaty, only reinforced this impulse. Now that Brexit has occurred, Northern Ireland has become instead the most fraught component of the EU’s relations with the UK. This is in part because Northern Ireland remains the UK’s primary Brexit weakness. As a matter of legal principle, the Northern Ireland Protocol weakens the UK Union, and its practical operation destabilises Northern Irish politics. So long as Joe Biden is President, it is a serious complication to the UK’s Atlantic relations, too.

But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market,  in a situation where over the next decade or so there could be a border poll resulting in Northern Ireland becoming an inherent part of the EU’s legal order. Whether this is a prospect that EU governments can contemplate with any sanguineness remains to be seen.

Only the French government, after Macron came to power in May 2017, consequentially dissented from the effort to keep open the possibility of the UK staying in the EU, without which a different outcome in Northern Ireland might have materialised. Twice in 2019, Macron threatened to veto the extensions to the Article 50 deadline that first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to request. As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power. For him, Brexit didn’t have to be stopped; rather, it had to be self-evident that it has deleterious consequences for Britain.

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From the start, Macron also conceived the UK’s impending departure from the EU as an opportunity to reform the Eurozone by making it a debt-bearing Union, and delineating a more hierarchical EU with a Franco-German core and a ring of outer members retaining national monetary sovereignty. His opening bid, articulated in his big “Initiative for Europe” speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, met much more British-style resistance than he envisaged.

His subsequent success during the first months of the pandemic in persuading Merkel to accept some shared debt may well prove only a temporary victory; since NextGenerationEU is for the EU and not just the Eurozone, it has also only deepened the tangle between the EU’s legal order and the Eurozone. But the chances that last year’s agreement to issue EU sovereign debt would have been realised had the UK still been inside the EU are slim, as indeed they would have been if the 2019 British General Election had led to a second referendum.

Macron is the heir of a long line of Pan-Europeanists who have believed, for geopolitical reasons, that the UK can have no part in a European economic and political union. But, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi who founded the Paneuropean movement in the 1920s, Macron strongly believes that the UK needs to be absorbed into a well-defined European security system. For Macron, there has never been a reason why Brexit should disrupt the bilateral Franco-British military relationship entrenched in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Nor does he think that the EU’s own security architecture should constrain how the UK participates in collective European security matters, hence his push in 2018 to establish a structure for military action around the EU’s border in the European Intervention Initiative — which includes the UK.

As, in late 2019, it became clear that Johnson was likely to prevail over the parliamentary Remainers, Merkel joined Macron in calling for a post-Brexit European Security Council. But, emboldened by the Conservatives’ substantial parliamentary majority, Johnson has proved less pliable to Macron’s strategic ambitions than May. Contrary to the French President’s hopes, Johnson’s post-election government decided that foreign and security policy should not be any part of the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship.

More from this series

The fate of the 'Anywhere' people

By Robert Tombs

In the absence of any confederal European architecture to ground broad foreign policy co-ordination, there has been little to constrain the divergent paths the UK and the EU have taken towards China since the middle of last year. To some degree, the weight of the UK’s historical relationship with Hong Kong and the nature of Germany’s deep economic relationship with China has made this separation near inevitable. But the British and French governments have pretty similar objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It is the absence of something akin to a European Security Council that ensures there will be less internal European pressure on Berlin to lead an EU policy that extends beyond economic and climate matters, and begins to engage with the probable future pressure points on access in the South China Sea.

Whether it is China or Northern Ireland, Britain’s relationship with the EU is beset with uncertainty. On Northern Ireland, Macron insists that the UK must stick to what it negotiated. But the Johnson government won’t take responsibility for protecting the Single Market any more than the EU will treat the Democratic Unionists as their problem. The present impasse has arisen from a series of misjudgements in the UK and continental capitals about the likely outcomes arising from the political constraints at work, played out against a backdrop of a world being transformed by Sino-American strategic rivalry. This is a fracture in European geopolitics for which neither the UK government nor the EU prepared. Now it is all too evident, the question is whether there is the political space for a grand bargain to repair it.

Head east past the Tower and you can drink in the Artful Dodger; travel to Clerkenwell, following the course of the underground River Fleet, and you can take your refreshment in the Betsey Trotwood.

Climb up the stairs on the west side of London Bridge and you’re on Nancy’s Steps, where Nancy, knowing she invites her death in doing so, met young Oliver’s family, to allow the boy to be rescued. Look up in St George the Martyr’s Church on Borough High Street, and Little Dorrit is in the stained-glass window behind the altar.

Off Cornhill in the City, there is no visible homage to Scrooge. But when you have turned down St Michael’s Alley and entered Ball’s Court, you can’t imagine “the covetous old sinner” counting his money anywhere else. Walter Bagehot said that Dickens wrote about London “like a special correspondent for posterity”. But the city in time has also absorbed his artistry into its fabric.

One hundred and fifty years after the author’s death, there is perhaps no place in London where the ghost of the man himself can be felt as strongly as on Borough High Street. Dickens’s life was changed twice over on this street. When he was 12, his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison for debt. Left alone to paint pots in the riverside Blacking Warehouse, he pestered his parents to find him lodgings on Lant Street, which leads off the other side of the throughway so, each morning, he could breakfast with them in the prison.

Dickens’ shame of his knowledge of the Marshalsea, and the innocence he shed there, haunted him for the rest of his life. The place is rarely far from his novels. In Pickwick, it becomes the Fleet prison, in David Copperfield the King’s Bench. When it appears as itself in Little Dorrit, it becomes, at times, the whole of London. “The long bright rays” of the sun across the city are but “bars of the prison of this lower world”. Inside the Marshalsea, there is a freedom from the hurried anxiety the outer city breeds. Those Londoners inside its walls “have got to the bottom” and “can’t fall” any farther.

As he drew Little Dorrit to a close, Dickens went back to the grounds of the fallen Marshalsea, to “stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years”. If, by then, he was the most famous commoner in the country, that fame was born in a scene he set on Borough High Street, a little farther north in the White Hart Inn.

In that coaching inn, he introduced the world to young, street-wise Sam Weller, cleaning boots and sporting an old white hat. What had been the hitherto ramshackle Pickwick Papers, for which Dickens had initially been second-choice hired help to provide text for the illustrator Robert Seymour, became in June 1836, an astonishing publishing sensation. In the months after, people up and down the country bought Sam Weller and Samuel Pickwick paraphernalia and conjured verbal Wellerisms in imitation of Dickens’ cockney, wise-cracker.

Neither were the two ends of Borough High Street quite separate. Sam Weller was part Charles Dickens, with an “extensive and peculiar” knowledge of London, earned on the city’s streets where, neglected by his father, he had learned to ‘shift’ for himself.

Today, Dickens could still walk into the ruins of the Marshalsea. Indeed, turn down Angel Place – Angel Court as Dickens knew it – and you will find your feet not just where the Marshalsea stood as Dickens did in 1857, but on “paving-stones” that tell how Dickens trod the very path.

Look up and your eyes will see large metal mounts with text and pictures from Little Dorrit. Inside what is now a peaceful churchyard garden, where a London Plane tree reaches higher than the last remaining prison wall, the secret Dickens took to his grave is spelled out for all to read. There was so much other history to the Marshalsea. Wat Tyler set fire to the original jail during the Peasants’ Revolt. The playwright Ben Jonson was imprisoned there. But Dickens’s imagination made his family and his characters’ stories the only ones now memorialised.

Lant Street is still a residential street. When Dickens lodged there, it was part of an area known as the Mint, one of the most notorious slums in London with terrible sanitation. In Pickwick, Dickens wrote that a man wishing “to remove himself from temptation; to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, we should recommend him by all means to go to Lant Street”. Today, Lant Street offers a swanky wine merchants, and there is private car parking bay on the market for £40,000.

The White Hart Inn no longer stands. But the next-door George Inn does. It is the last galleried coaching inn left in the metropolis, a solitary reminder of Sam Weller and Pickwick’s mode of departure for their adventures.

As Pickwick made Dickens famous, the coaching inns were in decline. Indeed, the very year Pickwick began so did building work on London’s first railway, the London and Greenwich railway, with a terminus at the top of Borough High Street at London Bridge. Looming over the timbered George Inn today are the Shard’s enormous, hard, angular lines. Even if he never saw a building in London much more than a third of the size, Dickens could scarcely have been perplexed by the juxtaposition. As he wrote in the lines just before Sam Weller makes his first appearance, “in the Borough there still remain some half dozen old inns …. which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement, and the encroachment of private speculation.”

Indeed, the George and the Shard are not quite opposites, as in normal circumstances, the National-Trust-owned inn is as much part of the hospitality industry as the other businesses on the street. It is the vanished inns’ narrow alleys and battered arches that have eluded time. On Borough High Street, London is both a mercantile world city, its sky line financed by international capital, and a historical English city still attached to its origins.

A plaque marks where the White Hart Inn once received those who came into London via the Old Dover Road. Its inscription reads that the inn was “immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry VI and Dickens in Pickwick Papers’’. Undoubtedly, the company would have pleased Dickens immensely.

Dickens did not accidentally launch Sam Weller in an inn on Borough High Street. The street has had a good number of other names. It was Wellington Street to Dickens. It was also the Pilgrims’ Way from Southwark. In the Tabard, a little down from the White Hart, Chaucer’s narrator meets a company of pilgrims and decides to let them tell their stories. From the start, Dickens wanted to be remembered as integral to English literary history, and he could not conceive that achievement without place. He met his end at his home on Gads Hill, the place where Shakespeare had Falstaff, whom Dickens re-imagined as Wilkins Micawber, rob pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.

Dickens’ last years were torrid and unhappy. He judged his talent as deficient only against Shakespeare’s, but was well aware his genius was patronised and depreciated by his social betters. He had destroyed his family more surely than his father ever did in the Marshalsea, and, for all his appalling self-righteousness about his cruelty, he, almost certainly, deep-down knew it. As compensation, he craved his audience’s love on arduous readings tours, where he rendered intensely dramatic and emotional performances from his novels, including Nancy’s murder, that worsened his already failing health. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a death-wish hastened him to his end.

On occasion, during those valedictory years, his conscious mind protested a hatred for London. In his last competed novel, Our Mutual Friend, the city is a wasteland beyond collective regeneration.

But he could not keep away. Somewhere, there was still the Georgian city he had walked alone as a child-man during the Marshalsea days. On the last evening of his life, he finished dinner and said he wanted to take the train to London. He then had a fit and fell to the floor. Late the next afternoon, he died, his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, incomplete.

Edwin Drood is a story written by a man palpably drowning in mortality, one who has come back from London to the Kent of his childhood and, the circle of his life “very nearly traced”, finds that the “beginning and the end were drawing close together”. But London’s reality is part of the circle too. In the penultimate chapter, Dickens made his farewell to the city. The novel’s young characters take a boat up the Thames away from the city to an “everlastingly green garden”. But then came the return, and “all too soon, the great black city cast its shadows on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life” and what Dickens had long known was “unregainable and far away” is lost to them. What is left is “very gritty” London, where, as he might well have hoped, the stones themselves will remember him.

Whether it does survive, or whether it plunges into crisis, can turn on the unexpected — where what is supposed to be is overturned by death or marital disaster. There is no way of human-proofing it. Monarchy must contend generation to generation, with the vulnerabilities inherent to human life.

It absorbs life’s seasons from birth to death. Each reign begins after a death and ends in one. It is an ongoing journey through mortality, resting on an idea that something given to each monarch at a reign’s beginning can at its end be passed on to the future. As Hilary Mantel has Thomas Cromwell meditate about kings in The Mirror & the Light: “that burst of light” bestowed in the coronation “has to last him. That instant’s transformation of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life.” At times such as the crisis through which we are living — when, hour by hour, we know that in the midst of life we are in death and when we don’t know what’s coming for us — monarchy seasoned by death and rebirth has to be present. If it is not, it is pointless.

Last Sunday, in her four-minute broadcast from Windsor Castle, our 93-year-old Queen was unequivocally present. That is why her words and demeanour unleashed such deep emotion, even in life-long republicans like Alastair Campbell. In an unprecedented collective moment of worldwide fear and grief Queen Elizabeth II was present for the country and the Commonwealth, and present without performance or any overt display of emotion.

She made the past present too. Her life journey as monarch reaches deep into what Britain has chosen to remember about its past. When she invokes herself and her sister, Princess Margaret, broadcasting in October 1940 from Windsor on BBC’s Children’s Hour, and when she tells us “we will meet again”, she is summoning a story about the country’s endurance through a terrifying past trial.

Much could be remembered more accurately about all who fought for Britain during the Second World War, all who sacrificed, and at what human cost. Much has changed. The British empire is gone. The Union has seen rather better days. She has known much disappointment and sorrow, even in the last few months. But in reaching back to the past, she touched an ideal of collective purpose and individual stoicism that at times, it is too easy to suppose, is lost in its recesses. We would like to be who she remembers us to be, who she takes us to be, and perhaps because we listened to her, who we might find more compassion and inner strength to be.

Obviously the ‘we’ here is far from everybody. There are millions who did not watch on Sunday evening and who see no reason at all to care about what the Queen says. There are those who see the Queen not as a remarkable individual or a portal into a country’s collective memory. For them, she is a personification of unearned wealth and hierarchy, or an erroneous claim to British exceptionalism. There are those who do not see her at all. Some have scarcely ever been given a reason to feel or think that they belong to a collective realm she could symbolise.

Nonetheless, the ‘we’ of this monarchical moment is rather larger than those who voluntarily, knowingly, and happily would have signed up to any proposition about the monarchy’s usefulness a week ago. Under heightened conditions of life and death, there are bonds and attachments we discover we have to each other, to those who came before us, and to those who will come after us. Liberal ideas of the autonomous self and the conscious pursuit of self-realisation have always struggled with these wells of hidden, temporal emotion, sometimes with good reasons. But democratic politics need them and constitutional, powerless monarchy is as safe a vessel as there can be for them.

Further reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Monarchy, and this Queen in particular, are potent checks on a cavalier assumption that our lives are primarily made by our own choices. As she said in the year that marked the 40th anniversary of her accession, “it’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate”.  But her capacity to move us also goes beyond her character. Her longevity could not be willed. Listening to her also comes with the knowledge that the time is not so far away when the country will have to go on without her.

Her reign has never escaped the travails thrown up by contingency. The rules of monarchy did not render her father King and she his heir. The Crown was not supposed to be the Queen’s fate. The heredity principle should have made her Nazi-sympathising uncle the country’s wartime King. If Edward VIII had stuck to the script and fathered a legitimate child, she would not have been more than the supporting cast.

George V died in the winter of 1936  fearing the worse for the monarchy, knowing responsibility for it would fall on his oldest son  and that he was powerless to change anything about what happened next . “After I am dead,” he told the Prime Minster, Stanley Baldwin, “the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.” But the King held out hope that the monarchy would, nonetheless, survive.

During the last weeks of his life, he reportedly said: “I pray to God that my eldest won will never marry and that nothing will come between Bertie [George VI] and Lilibet (Queen Elizabeth) and the throne”. Of course, his eldest son did marry, but his chosen bride only precipitated the Queen’s future accession.

Further reading

Call yourself a Monarchist?

By James Kanagasooriam

Her grandfather, whom she appears to have adored, lies in rest in Windsor chapel close to where she made her broadcast. It is hard to think he would have felt anything but entirely vindicated in his hope for the future, if, 84 years after his fearful death, he could have witnessed his granddaughter meet the gravity of the occasion this Palm Sunday.

Fortune has also given the Queen a long life. She is now the fourth longest reigning monarch in history. If she lives for a little more than four years more, no one will ever have reigned for longer. As it came to pass that Edward VIII abandoned the throne, so it also came to pass that the teenager who spent the Blitz with her sister in Windsor Castle still has time before a new King must, at a time he will not choose, begin again.

In this time of deep misfortune, the Queen spoke to us because in who she is, and who she became, she reminds us that arbitrary fortune works benevolently too — as it did for those who came before us and as it will for those who come after.

In the early summer of 2016, the EU was trapped in a political stasis — primarily because of the ongoing fallout of the eurozone crisis. There may have been strong imperatives for a more politically unified Eurozone, but how could it resolve the tensions of having euro and non-euro members within a single legal and constitutional order? And how could it advance more integration when the Lisbon Treaty had shown the acute political difficulties of securing political consent to change?

The eurozone crisis appeared to demand significant constitutional change. Yet the two treaties that were agreed — the Fiscal Compact and the European Stability Mechanism treaty — were drawn up on an intergovernmental basis, outside the Union’s legal framework. And the massive changes that occurred to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) effective remit as a result, took place without any alteration of the existing treaties — ones that under any reasonable interpretation should have prohibited some of the ECB’s actions.

Suggested reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

Furthermore, the Commission’s weakness in non-Union treaties made enforcing their legal provisions difficult. Indeed, Jean-Claude Juncker noted in his State of the Union speech the autumn before the British referendum that more than four years after the Fiscal Compact’s ratification, no member state had implemented all of it.

The absence of a new EU treaty in good part reflected a set of issues around legitimacy that had bedevilled the EU since the Dutch and French referendums in 2005. These had led to the Constitutional treaty’s demise. Although the EU was able to replace the Constitutional treaty with the Lisbon treaty, the new agreement created more political problems. The French government had to proceed without a referendum, for fear of losing it — despite the clear resemblance between Lisbon and its predecessor — and the German Constitutional Court insisted, just a few months before the Greek crisis began, that there could only be more integration of any kind if there were clear democratic support for it in Germany.

The failure to move to a new EU treaty during the eurozone crisis also reflected the lack of any policy consensus about how to reform the currency. Juncker claimed in his 2015 State of the Union speech that the Five Presidents’ report on the euro was a “roadmap that should allow us to stabilise and consolidate the euro area by early 2017″ so that thereafter “on the basis of a renewed convergence of our economies” the Eurozone could “achieve more fundamental reform”.

Suggested reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

 But in the summer of 2016, the hard reality was that the German government had an effective veto on any substantial change to the way the euro worked — not least because of the legal constraints established by the German Constitutional Court. This separation of Germany from all other member states left the French government without an EU strategy, a problem compounded by President Hollande’s decision, when he first came to office in 2012, to side with the southern European states over Germany.

Germany’s structurally privileged position within the eurozone crisis allowed its government’s power to spread in other areas, as was dramatically shown during the refugee and migrant crisis. Angela Merkel shaped the EU’s response in the summer of 2015, when she discarded the Dublin convention on asylum rules to open Germany’s borders. She did so again, in 2016, when, with the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, she secured an EU deal with the Turkish government to stop the flow of refugees from Turkey that included a path to reopen Turkey accession negotiations.

While Merkel’s role in this caused consternation in some member-states, the eurozone crisis had, in practice, already shifted the EU to an ‘emergency’ mode of decision-making; formal rules had yielded to arbitrary power. Nonetheless, it was clear by June 2016 that the German Chancellor’s ability to exercise political discretion within the EU could not save her from the domestic problem she had caused by deploying German leverage to welcome one million refugees to her country.

Suggested reading

How irresponsible Merkel let populism thrive

By Peter Franklin

A win for Remain wouldn’t have made much difference to the EU’s internal stasis. But Brexit did provide, in principle, an opportunity to resolve the problem of how a singular legal and constitutional order can co-exist with a multi-currency Union. Juncker, President Macron, and Martin Schulz all set out their ideas for a way forward after the referendum. But they couldn’t even agree on the fundamental question of whether the EU should aim to become a union with a single currency for its members.

Britain had generated most of the immediate difficulties arising out of this structural tension of a multi-currency union, not least because of London’s position as the Eurozone’s offshore financial centre. And if Britain had remained inside the EU, the conflict between the Single Market’s universal rules and the French government’s and ECB’s desire to regulate euro activity in London may well have intensified.

Regardless of what Britain does, though, part of the problem remains. Brexit did mean that talks on the financial transactions tax were put on hold because the majority of the revenue from the tax would be collected in London. But these tax plans had already been pushed back several times before the referendum in good part because they involved fewer than half of the EU’s members using the enhanced co-operation procedure. Quite simply, the predicament of an incomprehensive monetary union runs deeper than Britain, and London’s position as the euro’s financial centre does not go away with Brexit.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Britain staying inside the EU would have intensified the problem of moving to any new treaty. In his Sorbonne speech, President Macron made the treaty difficulty primarily a matter of domestic French politics, describing the post Lisbon era as a “glacial period” when proposals were not made because France had made “treaty change taboo” from “dread” of having to ask voters their opinion.

But Britain was as much part of the treaty problem as France. Britain remaining would have reinforced this political stasis because of the referendum ‘lock’ legislation passed by the British parliament in 2011 whereby any new treaty required a referendum. This ensured that if David Cameron had not vetoed the Fiscal Compact as an EU treaty in December 2011, he would have caused more political problems for the EU than his veto did, as by using an intergovernmental treaty the other EU states could proceed without Britain.

Without Brexit, perhaps New Hanseatic League bloc wouldn’t have emerged; it is a group of northern European states, including euro and non-euro members, who have allied together on various issues including Eurozone reform, and whose incentive to form, at least for Denmark and Sweden, came from losing Britain as the largest north European non-euro member. Whether, though, the non-emergence of the New Hanseatic League would have made any decisive difference to Macron’s Eurozone reform agenda is dubious. Certainly, it has caused consternation in Paris. But in practice this new axis provided some political cover for Merkel to oppose Macron on debt-sharing and a sizeable Eurozone budget without her having to exercise a German veto purely in the sphere of the bilateral Franco-German relationship, as past German governments have done in the past with similar French ideas.

Suggested reading

Is Macron's Euro crusade doomed to fail?

By John Lichfield

Brexit has, more generally, complicated Germany’s power. It has, perhaps, contributed to weakening Merkel’s domestic position — it opened up another line of attack from those on her right flank claiming that she had privileged French concerns over keeping Britain inside the EU when they tend to think that Germany’s long-term political interests require checking French integrationist ambitions. It has also allowed Macron to present himself as the guardian of Europe against so-called populism.

Nonetheless, it is not clear how Germany’s position on any issue since the referendum would have been strengthened by having Britain’s support where it has not in practice been available. Moreover, a British government still led by Cameron trying to ensure that he could hand the Conservative party’s leadership to George Osborne — or another Remainer if Osborne had been too damaged by threatening an emergency budget in the event of Leave winning — would have looked for new fights in the EU.

All this, though is to reckon without the shock Trump’s election has delivered to Europe — and the fracturing this has exposed. Trump has hastened a long inevitable crisis for the EU about the Atlantic relationship and the paucity of the EU’s geopolitical power. At the centre of this problem lies Germany, which has the largest European economy, weak military capability, an electorate with strong anti-military tendencies, and a dependency on Russia for oil and gas imports. It is extremely difficult to see how, by staying inside the EU, Britain could have persuaded Germany to move more quickly to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence or to retreat on Nord Stream 2.

Suggested reading

What is Putin's pipeline plan?

By Michael Burleigh

Neither could we have expected Britain to side with France in pushing for what Macron called in his Sorbonne speech a ‘common strategic culture’ because the British government thinks that the response to the Trump shock should to rise to existing NATO commitments not find an alternative to it.

Nonetheless, on Iran, where President Trump has most dramatically ruptured what had been a common US-EU policy stance, Britain has thus far allied with the EU states and not the US, despite warnings from the Americans. Whether, however, this stance will endure if and when Britain leaves the EU is quite another matter, especially for any British government seeking a trade agreement with the United States.

But even here, the decisive causal factor may only be partly down to Brexit. If, Trump aside, the change in US policy towards Iran has ultimately been shaped by Russia’s military intervention in Syria, three months after the Iran nuclear deal was agreed, which guaranteed the survival of the Iranian-supported regime in Damascus, the British government sees Russia more as Washington does than any government in Berlin is likely to, given Germany’s energy interests. Whether we’re in or out of the EU won’t change that.

Indeed, take Brexit away and much about the EU’s internal stasis remains the same. It’s very constitutionalised order — which in theory is supposed to evolve towards ever closer union — has caused significant legitimation problems and meant the Union has struggled to adapt in the face of the eurozone crisis. Brexit was, in a number of ways, caused by those problems.

But Europe now has a large external issue to contend with — one that exposes the chasm between its position as a regulatory super-power and a geopolitical Lilliputian. The timing of the Trump shock made Britain’s Brexit choices more difficult by making them, in geopolitical terms, more binary. But an EU that included Britain would soon become even more divided, not least because there is no consensus between Germany and the two strategic European powers, Britain and France, regarding how to deal with the overriding issue of resurgent Russian power. With or without Britain, ever closer union doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

This piece was first published March 12, 2019

The EU is flunking its Brexit opportunity

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These developments, on the surface very different, are not entirely separate — though at the decade’s start, their connection would not have been visible. But in the crucial year of 2014, tumultuous events and dramatic decisions in the Middle East made monetary policy much more difficult worldwide. Each year since has felt the consequences, from which the future cannot recover.

In 2014, American power in the Middle East took a severe blow: President Obama’s hopes for regime change in Syria crashed into ISIS. The previous summer, he’d backed away from planned air strikes against Syria after the Ghouta chemical weapons attack. The anti-Assad military forces the US had supported then fell apart and ISIS seized the initiative. In 2014, ISIS forces captured large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, declaring itself a caliphate in June. The same month, with the Iraqi government having largely collapsed, Obama sent American forces back into Iraq, less than three years after they had completed their withdrawal. In September, he ordered air strikes against ISIS in Syria — but the American military intervention there did not rescue American power in the region.

Obama had started his presidency with the hope that he could withdraw the United States from its ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East without weakening American influence. During the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, he had gambled that the Syrian opposition, with some external support, could remove Bashar al-Assad from power and check Iran and Hezbollah’s position in the country. Instead, 2014 saw him lead the United States into another Middle Eastern war fighting not Assad but Assad’s enemies. Once there, the US-led Global Coalition to Counter ISIS could not make its overwhelming air power decisive. Rather than the interjection of American military force weakening others, the United States appeared a bystander to Syria’s fate and Iran’s ongoing rise.

Crucially, the ineffectualness of American policy in Syria in 2014 allowed Russia to enter the Syrian war in 2015. Since then, Russia has improved its relations with regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Turkey, Israel and Egypt. Concurrently, the pretence of American power in the Middle East has become hollow.

Suggested reading

The 'green crap' lessons of 2013

By James Kirkup

The repercussions will be felt throughout the decade that’s about to dawn. Indeed, the ebb of American influence in the Middle East has already made front pages: when, claiming a belated victory against ISIS, President Trump decided in late September to withdraw American troops from northern Syria, he effectively allowed Turkey to attack the YPG — the Kurdish militia that Ankara deems a terrorist organisation — even as he futilely urged President Erdogan to practice restraint.

The American withdrawal from Syria is refuelling the geopolitical disruption that spread out from events in the Middle East in 2014. So incensed was President Macron at Trump’s unilateral decision that ISIS had been defeated — and the opportunity the American commander-in-chief presented to Turkey — that the French leader recently raged that NATO is experiencing a “brain death” and insisted that the European Union must, consequently, develop a strategic military capability.

There can be no path back to western or European unity when NATO members divide over the Middle East; eastern European countries inside the EU depend on NATO to protect them from Russia and are not at all inclined to accept a solely European substitute.

The oil-rich Middle East also played its part in making 2014 a watershed in terms of monetary policy. The experiment of QE and zero interest rates that central banks embarked on after the 2008 crash were supposed to be emergency measures. Going into 2014, the Fed was determined that the time had finally arrived to normalise monetary policy (by definitively concluding QE and raising interest rates).

Suggested reading

Why Boris should be more 2012

By Polly MacKenzie

But wage stagnation and stable oil prices through early 2014 ensured there was little chance of inflation rising to the Fed’s 2% target. Then, in June 2014, oil prices began a precipitous slide that only bottomed out in early 2016. The first part of this fall went hand-in-hand with a sharp rise in the dollar. This appreciation arose in good part because, as the Fed was trying to find a way back to monetary normality, the European Central Bank was moving in the opposite direction and preparing to turn to QE.

If the euro’s woes were not enough to thwart the Fed’s bid for a monetary reset in 2014, OPEC intervened to make matters much worse. That November, the Saudi government insisted that OPEC should maintain production levels even as oil prices were falling. The accelerating decrease in prices pushed American inflation towards zero.

It also wreaked havoc in a number of oil-producing emerging market economies with knock-on effects on China, slowing American growth and causing turbulence in foreign exchange markets. The Fed’s planned monetary tightening was thwarted; it took it until December 2015 to make a single increase in interest rates of 0.25%. Four years later, American rates stand at a mere 1.75% and the last three moves have been down.

Extremely cheap credit is, for the foreseeable future, the permanent monetary backdrop of all politics in the United States and Europe. For states with their own currencies, this monetary environment makes fiscally populist politics possible. It is also creating a generation of angry savers and a volley of investor cash desperately searching the world for some venture, however intrinsically far-fetched, that will offer a return.

Suggested reading

In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

OPEC’s November 2014 decision escalated the geopolitical disruption in the Middle East. In seeking to improve market share rather than stabilise prices, the Saudis effectively declared war on the American shale oil industry. This move strained the US-Saudi relationship during Obama’s last years; it also proved self-defeating. The principal casualty of OPEC’s decision to let prices tumble were not producers in the North Dakota Bakken or the Texas Permian Basin but OPEC countries, including Saudi Arabia.

By September 2016, the Saudi government was forced to co-operate with Russia to push prices back up, despite having been oil rivals for decades and on opposite sides over Syria. This combination of shared oil interests and the deterioration in US-Saudi relations has propelled Russia and Saudi Arabia closer together than they have ever been, to the point where in 2017 a Saudi King went on an official visit to Moscow for the first time.

Such interconnected disruption has been a distinguishing feature of this decade. Indeed, the Trump and Brexit shocks are after-effects from the 2014 story. Without American forces in Syria and Iraq, Trump could not so easily have campaigned against ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East. Without Angela Merkel’s handling of the 2015 refugee crisis generated by the deteriorating situation in Syria, David Cameron might have been able to lead Remain to a referendum victory. Without the near complete collapse of risk in financial markets — brought about by the assumption that central bankers, at the first sniff of difficulty, will always ease monetary policy however low interest rates have to go — the British Parliament could have not have spent so much time keeping Brexit in stasis.

Western democracies are riddled with internal conflict separate from the events of 2014. But even turbulence apparently far removed from the Middle East or monetary policy is still a result the geopolitical and economic world that took shape that year.

I spent the sixth form in what was then a self-consciously radical comprehensive school in Milton Keynes. Stantonbury’s purported aim was to treat us like adults and to encourage us to believe we were part of an educational collective. The school was built, the teachers declaimed, on three Cs: Christian names, our own clothes, and carpets in every classroom. Once a month, on what was called Day 10, lessons were off and we did other activities, which we were supposed to initiate ourselves. Lower down the school, students – and we were all students not pupils – had hours each week of ‘Shared Time’, which was a strange hodgepodge of activities, with quite strong political undertones.

On my first day, I found my way to what a list on the wall said was my form class, only to be told that I wasn’t supposed to be there, because there was someone well established at the school who shared my name, and it was her class not mine. No-one, it seemed, knew I was starting, even though I had visited a few days before to meet the head of sixth form. By the afternoon, the form teacher had reluctantly accepted that she might have to accept me.

But then I discovered that one of the economics classes had been timetabled at the same time as subjects we had been informed, in the morning, that we could take alongside economics – because the economics teacher only wished to teach three lessons a week rather than the four offered for every other subject. What was supposed to be 12 teaching sessions a week was down to 10.

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That day was, I think, the first time in my life that I acquired a palpable sense of what competence means. There was knowledge about how to organise practical things – at my old school in Nottingham, for instance – and there was an absence of it – embodied by Stantonbury. What I learned over the next two years was just what consequences could follow from this distinction that now loomed in my mind.

My friend’s geography class was entered for one exam board but taught another board’s very different syllabus. She worked harder than anyone I knew. She was the only person in the class who passed and her grade cost her a place at her first and reserve choice universities.

One history teacher regularly turned up seriously late, and then, when he finally arrived, set about dictating to us from a textbook we had all been given at the start of the year.

When the economics teacher left during the first term of the upper sixth, we had not started macro-economics, which was half the syllabus. The school could not find anyone inside the school willing to replace her, even though there was a teacher who could, and said the class wasn’t big enough to make it worth appointing a new teacher. Eventually, after weeks of being left largely to our own devices, they sent someone to our classes who we called our babysitter. By this time my friend Joe and I had bought a macro-economics textbook and were teaching ourselves.

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Attempts to complain about these problems were met with at best indifference and at worst resentment. We were supposed to consider ourselves fortunate that we attended Stantonbury. To expect the school to be competent about timetabling, exam boards, or even teaching us at all when there was Shared Time to worry about, was implicitly deemed unreasonable and reactionary.

Yet Stantonbury’s idealism was not all hollow. My English teachers were brilliant. The two Pauls were the school’s ideals in action, and there were others like them. Without courting a cult of personality, they gave passionately of themselves in imparting their knowledge, and cultivated in us a desire and ability to think for ourselves. They taught us about the set novels, then expected us to go away and read the rest of the major work by those authors so we could come back with thoughts to discuss as their equals. Their classes were the most intellectually exhilarating educational experience I ever had.

When I left in the summer of 1985, I was more angered by the results carnage around me than grateful for what I had learned. I could in retrospect say that concentrating on what had gone wrong for others paradoxically represented an idealism that Stantonbury had, if not inculcated, probably sharpened. But it seemed more a simple matter of daily observation.

I knew my comprehensive school in Nottingham, for all its faults and with no ideological pretension about what it was doing, gave more to more children across the class spectrum than Stantonbury did or could. I also knew that where I lived many parents, for well-intentioned reasons, did not want to see how bad the worst of Stantonbury actually was. They wanted to believe, and I did not want my success to be another rationalisation for them, averting their eyes.

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During the 1990s, Stantonbury turned away from its radicalism, although for a long time there was still no uniform and I presume the carpets remained in place. In large part, I thought the changes were the inevitable consequence of realities from which the school had run. I hoped it would let fewer people down.

Some part of me now looks back with sadness. I was better equipped for university education than the great majority of the students I now teach, because I had both been taught to think for myself and been forced to take responsibility for spending a lot of time learning by myself. A few years ago, I asked one of my first years – who I knew was struggling in ways I have come to recognise as common – whether “school felt a million miles away”. “No,” he instantly responded, “much farther than that.”

Yet I also cannot see the contrast as a vindication of the Stantonbury way. My student’s time at university eventually turned out well. Stantonbury, by contrast, would not have served him in the slightest. I have come to realise and accept that I am indebted both to the school’s ideals and the failures that dwarfed them. But I was fortunate; many of my schoolmates were not. And educational ideals should not yield such haphazard outcomes.

For its part China has escalated its own tariffs, and is threatening to impose an export ban on rare earths used in many hi-tech goods as well as some military equipment. Such a rupture was not one either side appeared to have contemplated over the past five months of high-level trade negotiations. Trump apparently had expected a deal he could portray as resetting the US-China trade relationship to American advantage while the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, simply cannot want the US to declare economic war when the Chinese economy is as vulnerable as it presently is to financial shocks.

The US-China relationship is in crisis because the United States has under Donald Trump reversed strategic course, and most of the American political class across both the Republican and Democratic parties back him. Although Bill Clinton came to office attacking his predecessor as too accommodative of China, he ended up pursuing a strategy of integrating China into the international trading and financial order through China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.

Many large American companies responded to this strategic environment by investing in China, selling into Chinese markets, and setting up manufacturing and supply chains that run through China. Apple, for example, has today more suppliers in China and Hong Kong than it does in the United States. Meanwhile China was able to make the United States the centre of its drive for export-led growth and accumulated a massive portfolio of dollar assets that allowed it to manage its currency. This apparent co-dependency was named ‘Chimerica’ by Niall Ferguson, and it drove much of the growth in the world economy between the late 1990s and the 2008 crash.

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Some of its problems have been long apparent. By the middle of the last decade, China’s rising trade surplus produced plenty of discontent in the US Congress. The Bush administration eventually responded by pushing China into a moderate revaluation of its currency. When China lost confidence in its holdings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debt, it forced the US authorities to make the two mortgage corporations’ massive liabilities the responsibility of the federal government. Under the guise of a ‘‘Pivot to Asia” in 2011 the Obama administration sought to encircle China from the Pacific. It pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a Pacific trade bloc that excluded China. It also declared that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea to be an American national interest, and developed an operational doctrine for a possible military confrontation with China.

But crucially the Obama administration sought to contain China without disrupting the international trade order, including the supply chains that run through China. It grumbled about China’s behaviour on intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and cyber spying, but eschewed any fractious face-off. In pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership as another trade agreement it also ignored the escalating domestic protectionist pressures. While some in the Democratic party, such as New York Senator Chuck Schumer, had long railed against the outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs to China, the Obama administration appeared sanguine and presented the dislocation as the inevitable consequence of economic success.

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The cultivation of Chimerica is now seen in much of Washington as a mistake and Obama’s attempt to shift to containment without disrupting it as a failure. Trump made these issues, and the relationship between Chimerica and the donor class around the Washington establishment, central to his campaign in 2016. But in this regard he has been a catalyst for change with causes that extend far beyond him. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership China responded to Obama’s Pacific containment strategy first with the One Belt, One Road initiative – which seeks to make Eurasia the primary external environment for the next stage of China’s economic development – and then a “Made in China 2025” strategic plan under which China will become a hi-tech manufacturing power with core materials made in China. If China wants direct economic competition with the United States then, most American politicians have concluded, the terms of Chimerica must be changed.

Europe is exposed by the American turn to confrontation. There would appear a strong geopolitical logic for the United States to use the European Union as a balancing force in Eurasia, especially when China itself is picking off EU states, such as Italy, to join One Belt, One Road. The EU also shares certain economic interests with the United States in regard to China. In principle the United States could have worked with the EU. For example, in June 2018 EU filed a legal case at the WTO against China on intellectual property issues and forced technology transfer.

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But Trump has opted to act alone. For the Trump administration the WTO is a sideshow. Although the US did start action against China at the WTO in April last year, Trump has since said that the WTO is soft on China and has blocked the appointment of judges in WTO cases, making the WTO’s overall operations more difficult. Moreover, when it comes to the US trade deficit the EU is for Trump more like China than not. Indeed, when President Macron visited the White House last year and suggested that the US and EU should work together on China, Trump insisted that the EU was worse on trade than China. The Trump administration is also taking a tough line with Europe on Huawei, with the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, recently chastised Theresa May by pronouncing that Mrs Thatcher would never have tolerated appeasing China on security matters.

Germany faces particular difficulties from the threat to Chimerica since the United States is its biggest single export market and it imports more from China than any other national economy. German firms and politicians have had their own illusions about China and Chimerica shattered. German manufacturing firms have supply chains involving China that are central to German export strength. German car makers are also dependent on China’s large consumer base, not least from their US production sites where exports are now subject to China’s tariffs. Made in China 2025 was as much a blow to Germany as to the United States.

Last autumn the Federation of German Industries described China as a ‘strategic competitor’ looking for technological dominance, and warned firms to reduce their dependency on China from supply chains to markets. The problem for Germany is that what happens in China will hurt its export-based economy more than it does the consumption-oriented US economy, as the Germany’s economy woes in the second half of last year demonstrated. Germany has also made the Eurozone much more dependent on external trade than it was. Prior to the Eurozone crisis the Eurozone for most of its existence had a current account deficit with the rest of the world. Now it has a significant surplus, making it more vulnerable to a downturn in international trade.

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Germany may in part want EU solutions. For example, the Federation of German Industries last year recommended creating European industrial champions. But any conflict about external trade also exposes disagreements within the EU, not least between Germany and France. While Germany pushed last July to offer EU-US trade talks as a way of holding off Trump moving to tariffs on European car imports, France was never keen on them and last month voted against the Commission’s negotiating mandate for the talks, with Macron declaring that the EU should not negotiate with states that aren’t party to the Paris climate agreement. Germany also has simultaneously to fight another battle with the United States over Nord Stream 2 – the second gas pipeline under construction from Russia to Germany – with Trump edging towards sanctions.

What has changed since the boom years of Chimerica is not just the strategic judgement in Washington about China but the United States’ geopolitical power. The United States is quite simply in a significantly stronger position in relation to Europe than it was before the 2008 crash when that same year the Bush administration had to accept Germany and France’s veto of Georgia and Ukraine joining Nato. Shale energy production, the dependency of still struggling European banks on dollar funding, the ascendancy of the US digital and high-technology sector, and the Eurozone’s ongoing structural weaknesses have given the US the leverage to demand more from Europe and to ignore it as a strategic constraint.

Whether the United States has, however, sufficiently recast its geopolitical position to prevail over China is another matter. Trump appeared to believe that the battle could be won without too much risk to inflation, share markets and oil prices and by offering some financial compensation to American farmers who have seen their Chinese soybean market collapse under Chinese tariffs. But share markets reacted badly to the breakdown of the trade talks, Saudi Arabia and its allies may well not be able to supply more oil at the prices Iran has been doing, and farmers in the mid-West, already stung by flooding this year, are becoming very vocal about the sacrifices expected of them. There may well be an incentive for Trump to try to patch the talks back together. The risk is, though, that there is now no way back, and that under a temporary pretence that there is, Trump will sharpen his fire on Europe.

In the early summer of 2016, the EU was trapped in a political stasis – primarily because of the ongoing fallout of the eurozone crisis. There may have been strong imperatives for a more politically unified Eurozone, but how could it resolve the tensions of having euro and non-euro members within a single legal and constitutional order? And how could it advance more integration when the Lisbon Treaty had shown the acute political difficulties of securing political consent to change?

The eurozone crisis appeared to demand significant constitutional change. Yet the two treaties that were agreed – the Fiscal Compact and the European Stability Mechanism treaty – were drawn up on an intergovernmental basis, outside the Union’s legal framework. And the massive changes that occurred to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) effective remit as a result, took place without any alteration of the existing treaties – ones that under any reasonable interpretation should have prohibited some of the ECB’s actions.

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Furthermore, the Commission’s weakness in non-Union treaties made enforcing their legal provisions difficult. Indeed, Jean-Claude Juncker noted in his State of the Union speech the autumn before the British referendum that more than four years after the Fiscal Compact’s ratification, no member state had implemented all of it.

The absence of a new EU treaty in good part reflected a set of issues around legitimacy that had bedevilled the EU since the Dutch and French referendums in 2005. These had led to the Constitutional treaty’s demise. Although the EU was able to replace the Constitutional treaty with the Lisbon treaty, the new agreement created more political problems. The French government had to proceed without a referendum, for fear of losing it – despite the clear resemblance between Lisbon and and its predecessor – and the German Constitutional Court insisted, just a few months before the Greek crisis began, that there could only be more integration of any kind if there were clear democratic support for it in Germany.

The failure to move to a new EU treaty during the eurozone crisis also reflected the lack of any policy consensus about how to reform the currency. Juncker claimed in his 2015 State of the Union speech that the Five Presidents’ report on the euro was a “roadmap that should allow us to stabilise and consolidate the euro area by early 2017″ so that thereafter “on the basis of a renewed convergence of our economies” the Eurozone could “achieve more fundamental reform”.

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 But in the summer of 2016, the hard reality was that the German government had an effective veto on any substantial change to the way the euro worked – not least because of the legal constraints established by the German Constitutional Court. This separation of Germany from all other member states left the French government without an EU strategy, a problem compounded by President Hollande’s decision, when he first came to office in 2012, to side with the southern European states over Germany.

Germany’s structurally privileged position within the eurozone crisis allowed its government’s power to spread in other areas, as was dramatically shown during the refugee and migrant crisis. Angela Merkel shaped the EU’s response in the summer of 2015, when she discarded the Dublin convention on asylum rules to open Germany’s borders. She did so again, in 2016, when, with the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte,she secured an EU deal with the Turkish government to stop the flow of refugees from Turkey that included a path to reopen Turkey accession negotiations.

While Merkel’s role in this caused consternation in some member-states, the eurozone crisis had, in practice, already shifted the EU to an ‘emergency’ mode of decision-making; formal rules had yielded to arbitrary power. Nonetheless, it was clear by June 2016 that the German Chancellor’s ability to exercise political discretion within the EU could not save her from the domestic problem she had caused by deploying German leverage to welcome one million refugees to her country.

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A win for Remain wouldn’t have made much difference to the EU’s internal stasis. But Brexit did provide, in principle, an opportunity to resolve the problem of how a singular legal and constitutional order can co-exist with a multi-currency Union. Juncker, President Macron, and Martin Schulz all set out their ideas for a way forward after the referendum. But they couldn’t even agree on the fundamental question of whether the EU should aim to become a union with a single currency for its members.

Britain had generated most of the immediate difficulties arising out of this structural tension of a multi-currency union, not least because of London’s position as the Eurozone’s offshore financial centre. And if Britain had remained inside the EU, the conflict between the Single Market’s universal rules and the French government’s and ECB’s desire to regulate euro activity in London may well have intensified.

Regardless of what Britain does, though, part of the problem remains. Brexit did mean that talks on the financial transactions tax were put on hold because the majority of the revenue from the tax would be collected in London. But these tax plans had already been pushed back several times before the referendum in good part because they involved fewer than half of the EU’s members using the enhanced co-operation procedure. Quite simply, the predicament of an incomprehensive monetary union runs deeper than Britain, and London’s position as the euro’s financial centre does not go away with Brexit.

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Britain staying inside the EU would have intensified the problem of moving to any new treaty. In his Sorbonne speech, President Macron made the treaty difficulty primarily a matter of domestic French politics, describing the post Lisbon era as a “glacial period” when proposals were not made because France had made “treaty change taboo” from “dread” of having to ask voters their opinion.

But Britain was as much part of the treaty problem as France. Britain remaining would have reinforced this political stasis because of the referendum ‘lock’ legislation passed by the British parliament in 2011 whereby any new treaty required a referendum. This ensured that if David Cameron had not vetoed the Fiscal Compact as an EU treaty in December 2011, he would have caused more political problems for the EU than his veto did, as by using an intergovernmental treaty the other EU states could proceed without Britain.

Without Brexit, perhaps New Hanseatic League bloc wouldn’t have emerged; it is a group of northern European states, including euro and non-euro members, who have allied together on various issues including Eurozone reform, and whose incentive to form, at least for Denmark and Sweden, came from losing Britain as the largest north European non-euro member. Whether, though, the non-emergence of the New Hanseatic League would have made any decisive difference to Macron’s Eurozone reform agenda is dubious. Certainly, it has caused consternation in Paris. But in practice this new axis provided some political cover for Merkel to oppose Macron on debt-sharing and a sizeable Eurozone budget without her having to exercise a German veto purely in the sphere of the bilateral Franco-German relationship, as past German governments have done in the past with similar French ideas.

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Brexit has, more generally, complicated Germany’s power. It has, perhaps, contributed to weakening Merkel’s domestic position – it opened up another line of attack from those on her right flank claiming that she had privileged French concerns over keeping Britain inside the EU when they tend to think that Germany’s long-term political interests require checking French integrationist ambitions. It has also allowed Macron to present himself as the guardian of Europe against so-called populism.

Nonetheless, it is not clear how Germany’s position on any issue since the referendum would have been strengthened by having Britain’s support where it has not in practice been available. Moreover, a British government still led by Cameron trying to ensure that he could hand the Conservative party’s leadership to George Osborne – or another Remainer if Osborne had been too damaged by threatening an emergency budget in the event of Leave winning – would have looked for new fights in the EU.

All this, though is to reckon without the shock Trump’s election has delivered to Europe – and the fracturing this has exposed. Trump has hastened a long inevitable crisis for the EU about the Atlantic relationship and the paucity of the EU’s geopolitical power. At the centre of this problem lies Germany, which has the largest European economy, weak military capability, an electorate with strong anti-military tendencies, and a dependency on Russia for oil and gas imports. It is extremely difficult to see how, by staying inside the EU, Britain could have persuaded Germany to move more quickly to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence or to retreat on Nord Stream 2.

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Neither could we have expected Britain to side with France in pushing for what Macron called in his Sorbonne speecha ‘common strategic culture’ because the British government thinks that the response to the Trump shock should to rise to existing NATO commitments not find an alternative to it.

Nonetheless, on Iran, where President Trump has most dramatically ruptured what had been a common US-EU policy stance, Britain has thus far allied with the EU states and not the US, despite warnings from the Americans. Whether, however, this stance will endure if and when Britain leaves the EU is quite another matter, especially for any British government seeking a trade agreement with the United States.

But even here, the decisive causal factor may only be partly down to Brexit. If, Trump aside, the change in US policy towards Iran has ultimately been shaped by Russia’s military intervention in Syria, three months after the Iran nuclear deal was agreed, which guaranteed the survival of the Iranian-supported regime in Damascus, the British government sees Russia more as Washington does than any government in Berlin is likely to, given Germany’s energy interests. Whether we’re in or out of the EU won’t change that.

Indeed, take Brexit away and much about the EU’s internal stasis remains the same. It’s very constitutionalised order – which in theory is supposed to evolve towards ever closer union – has caused significant legitimation problems and meant the Union has struggled to adapt in the face of the eurozone crisis. Brexit was, in a number of ways, caused by those problems.

But Europe now has a large external issue to contend with – one that exposes the chasm between its position as a regulatory super-power and a geopolitical Lilliputian. The timing of the Trump shock made Britain’s Brexit choices more difficult by making them, in geopolitical terms, more binary. But an EU that included Britain would soon become even more divided, not least because there is no consensus between Germany and the two strategic European powers, Britain and France, regarding how to deal with the overriding issue of resurgent Russian power. With or without Britain, ever closer union doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

Right now, the EU confronts an awkward trilemma. It must decide whether to risk the economic shock of Brexit without a transition, and it must do so while the spectre of recession hangs over the Eurozone’s three largest economies, and as the French and German governments seek to maintain a united front with Britain to combat US sanctions on Iran.

In all probability, the EU cannot preserve every detail of its Brexit stance, minimise the risk of a Eurozone recession, and maintain the British Government’s commitment to side with the EU over the United States on Iran. Meanwhile, the EU has no guarantee that concessions made to the British Government over the Irish backstop will be sufficient to allow the Withdrawal Agreement and the Political Declaration to pass through the British Parliament and eliminate the economic risk of a no-deal Brexit.

The economic side of this trilemma arises in part from the Eurozone’s structural dysfunctionalities. The Eurozone crisis never went away, it only abated in immediate ferocity. Now Italy’s woes have visibly resurfaced. In the fourth quarter of last year, the Italian economy returned to recession for the third time in a decade (it only avoided a fourth recession in late 2013 going into 2014 because the economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2014).

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After the European Commission rejected the first budget submitted by the Lega–5 Star coalition government last October, Italian bond yields reached their highest level since 2014. Bond rates fell again after Italy agreed a compromise budget with the Commission in December. But when non-Italian European banks have more than €400B worth of exposure to Italian debt, more than half of which is French, other Eurozone states need Italy to retain investors’ confidence as much as Italy does.

The need to rollover Italy’s gargantuan debt will require its government to sell around €400 billion of debt this year without the support of the European Central Bank, which has wound down its Quantitative Easing programme. Italy has got off to a good start with large demand for a new 30-year bond issue this month. But sentiment in the bond markets moves rapidly, sometimes for no obvious reason. As credit analyst Matt King at Citi commented last October: “The market is schizophrenic about ‘Italy matters, Italy doesn’t matter. Italy matters, Italy doesn’t matter’.”

Under these frenzied market conditions, it would not take much to push Italy to the point where rising borrowing costs cause the Italian government to demand the resumption of ECB asset purchases, a position that is unlikely to be greeted with any enthusiasm in Berlin or a number of other European capitals. There is already a reasonable likelihood that the Eurozone will begin the next recession, when it comes, with zero interest rates. If the Eurozone enters that recession with the ECB also deploying Quantitative Easing, it will be in near mind-bogglingly unprecedented territory.

The economic risks originating in Italy are magnified by the recessionary pressure emanating from Germany. Since the autumn, the German economy has struggled. Having chalked up falling output in the third quarter of last year, Germany has seen a set of poor economic data at the beginning of this year, including falling industrial production for what is now four months in a row.

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Significantly, this weakness does not spring from within the Eurozone itself. Factory orders from other Eurozone economies rose in December 2018 by 3.2%, but foreign orders plunged by 5.5%. Germany’s economy has become acutely dependent on China both in terms of exports and supply chains in several German industries, and China’s economy is slowing down under the weight of the US-China trade war as well as China’s monetary and credit tightening in the first half of last year.

To make matters worse, China’s ongoing economic rise is acting as significant disruptive force on the German economy. Chinese companies are increasingly in direct competition with German industrial producers, including the automotive sector, as they move higher up the economic value chain as part of Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 strategy. German car companies are also caught by the tit-for-tat tariffs between the US and China, since BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz in part export to China from their American factories.

This ‘China shock’ to the German manufacturing economy will not be shared with other Eurozone economies, since Germany exports much more to China than other European countries, and other economies compete much less in the top-end manufacturing markets China hopes to capture. Consequently, while Italy’s burdens could be lightened by the ECB’s monetary stance, Germany’s predicaments cannot be. This creates little incentive for the German government to acquiesce to more QE, and leaves Germany with a problem to address for which the US-China relationship is more consequential than what happens to its Eurozone partners.

These economic blows are also political shocks to the EU. Each episode of the Eurozone crisis has exposed the gulf between the idea that the European Union is a rules-based order and the realities of its hierarchies. Some states do get to break the rules. The Italian government might have backed down in December about the size of its budget deficit but so too did the Commission, which is now accepting a deficit which rises next year instead of falling, and is far above Italy’s previous commitments. The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, complained in an interview at this year’s Davos that the Commission’s indulgence of Italy’s rule-breaking causes citizens in other member-states to mistrust the EU’s authority.

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For its part, the Italian government did not hide its anger when the Commission accepted that the French budget deficit for 2019 would rise over the 3% limit because of the concessions made by President Macron to try to end the gilet jaunes protests. France will have managed to keep within the 3% rule now only twice in ten years, but it is Italy’s willingness to stick to the fiscal rules on which the New Hanseatic League of north European and Baltic states will concentrate in their demands for fiscal discipline.

In part, this distinction between member-states’ rule breaking reflects the fact that Italy’s debt burden is significantly higher than France’s and investors are much warier of the risks. But it also arises because the European Union works through an internal hierarchy in which – as Jean-Claude Junker blurted out in 2016 when explaining why France was being given yet more leeway over its budget deficit – France is France.

Nonetheless, whatever French fiscal privileges persist, the Eurozone crisis is disrupting that hierarchy. The New Hanseatic League states acted vigorously in opposing Macron’s plans for a substantial Eurozone budget and a Eurozone finance minister. Bruno Le Maire, the French Finance Minister, became so angry after dinner with his Dutch opposite number, that he accused the New Hanseatic League of acting as a ‘closed club’ to divide the EU.

The Eurosceptic government in Rome is itself a product of the Eurozone crisis and, in particular, the fallout in Italy from Berlusconi’s exit from power at the behest of the ECB, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Now Matteo Salvini, the most powerful man in the Lega-5-Star coalition, is openly contemptuous towards Macron and appears to revel in the French President’s difficulties with the gilet jaunes.

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Salvini last month travelled to Warsaw and promised to ‘counter the Franco-German axis with the Italo-Polish axis’.  The Italian government has also shown, in its vetoing EU recognition of Juan Guaido as Venezuelan President, that even acting alone it has disruptive power.

Rather like the Roman Catholic church, the European Union has long worked by fiercely defending the authority of the centre of the Union. Any number of hypocrisies and outright sins are tolerated there while agitation in the periphery is quickly rendered heresy. This structural hierarchy is what always doomed David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership, and it is why in the event of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, Ireland is likely to have to accept the EU’s rules on a border with Northern Ireland.

Nonetheless, the Franco-German relationship that has underpinned this hierarchy is insecure. For Macron, getting the French budget deficit below 3% was the primary means to repair the damage to the Franco-German relationship done during François Hollande’s Presidency and to force concessions from Germany on the Eurozone. When he did, the German government still rejected his reform plans. Now, in his concessions to the gilet jaunes, Macron has palpably sacrificed what remained of his European ambitions to his domestic problems.

Germany’s interests are, in part, now well served by the willingness of other north European states to resist France on Eurozone matters. By contrast, Germany’s China problems belong to it and it alone, and the China-driven difficulties for the auto sector, in particular, ensure that the German government simply cannot be cavalier about the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. Of course, Merkel may choose to privilege maintaining the EU’s authority over the economic and geopolitical costs of a no-transition Brexit, but the economic and geopolitical differences between France and Germany are now politically inescapable.

This divergence is not in itself new territory for the EU. Indeed, if Germany had not experienced the singular economic and political shock of reunification in 1990, the Eurozone would quite probably have been a rather different kind of beast. A less-fiscally constrained Germany would have been in a position to insist on strict compliance to the Maastricht convergence criteria in deciding who could participate in the Euro. But EU rules are irrelevant to the unique economic difficulties for Germany that arise from China’s ongoing disruption of the international order. In the face of such a problem, the European Union’s inability to directly confront political questions will be more exposed than ever.

The first, is a story framed around democratic values and the electoral rise of parties that appear to threaten those values because they repudiate the democratic ideal of equality between citizens. In practice, of course, democracies never realise such an ideal even in regard to voting, since they invariably restrict the franchise by age and for prisoners. But as this ideal has come to dominate much of the discourse of democracy, democrats can no longer make arguments for other exclusions to the franchise, or to anyone’s legally protected rights.

Neither can they overtly deny the equality of citizens by privileging the historical, cultural or ethnic identity of any group of them over any others. Consequently, parties that explicitly and unreservedly reject multiculturalism – such as Lega in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands –make themselves parties in conflict with democratic values. (In this story, multiculturalism has become essential to liberalism, which is essential to democracy.)

The strongest manifestation of such an attack on democratic values is the Fidesz government in Hungary led by Viktor Orbán, which having now been in power for eight years has systematically deployed anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric as a central electoral strategy, and acted against any manifestations of multiculturalism in practice.

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Orbán’s government also appears to threaten the conditions of a liberal democracy by running roughshod over freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, the separation of government and the party in campaign expenditure, as well as by effectively ending the existence of the Central European University in Budapest. In doing so, Orbán appears to treat democracy as a means, through its majoritarian features, to other ends, not least the consolidation of personal power.

Seen from Orbán’s vantage point, however, his disruption is not to democracy, but to liberalism. For Orbán, he is a democrat, and the difference between him and his critics elsewhere in Europe is they are liberal democrats and he is a Christian democrat. His idea of democracy rests not on equality but the representation of the people in government and the assumption that the people can be equated with the cultural and religious majority. He wants to claim the heritage of Christianity and he is unashamed in repudiating the ideals of liberalism that he presents as unable to accommodate the realities of human experience around faith, tradition and family.

However much Orbán’s speeches on the subject of democracy are self-serving, including of his own material interests, they also pose awkward political questions for the future of democracies. In this case, the question of where liberal democracy constituted by a set of values can sit in relation to the traditions of Christianity in Europe is far from clear. If liberalism and democracy must indeed go together, then democracy and Christianity can certainly become uneasy bedfellows, as evidenced in the historical clash in Europe between liberalism and the Roman Catholic church (even as in a number of ways liberalism was parasitic on ideas within Christianity about the dignity of the individual).

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Yet the clash is far from inevitable. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote one of the most powerful statements that democracy was ultimately a value claim about the equality of citizens, was a Catholic who believed that democracy was the working of Providence and that to try to halt it was a futile endeavour to fight God.

After the Second World War, the Christian Democrats, who became the primary party of the centre-right in a number of  countries where Catholicism was historically strong, reconciled Christianity to democracy by stressing the importance of both the individual and European historical communities and the ability of the state to protect both. Indeed, this is the political lineage that Orbán, although Protestant, in part wants to claim. It is also one of the reasons why Fidesz has been able to maintain its presence in the European People’s Party, which was formed largely by Christian Democratic parties in the 1970s, despite Orbán’s violations of liberal values.

The second story that has emerged about the vulnerability of democracy in Europe is primarily about the way in which the European Union, and the Eurozone in particular, negates representative democracy as a form of government because of an unresponsiveness to elections.

In part, this is a matter of who takes authoritative decisions about economic policy. In recent years, the European Central Bank (ECB) has not only decided monetary policy, it has also decided which states’ debt to support with asset purchases under first the Securities and Market Programme and then Quantitative Easing.

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The ECB’s unwillingness, in the autumn of 2011, to continue buying Italian bonds after the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, reneged on delivering the legislation that the outgoing and ingoing ECB Presidents, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, had ordered him to pass, led to the end of Berlusconi’s premiership and the appointment of a technocratic cabinet. Less dramatically, but no less significantly in terms of democratic politics, Trichet and Draghi also gave a deadline to a lame-duck Spanish government to pass legislation for which it had already failed to win parliamentary support.

In a state like Italy, which depends on the ECB to support its borrowing in financial markets, having elected politicians in leading positions in the executive has become a risk. Italy has not had an elected finance minister since the demise of the Berlusconi government and now, even with a government formed by a coalition of the two insurgent parties, the Five-Star movement and Lega, it has a law professor as Prime Minister.

Whether the Italian government can prevail over the Commission in the stand-off over the size of Italy’s planned budget deficit will depend as much as anything else on how the financial markets assess the willingness of the ECB to find ways to support Italy’s debt when it ends QE purchases from December.

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The democratic problem that arises from the Euro is compounded by the place of treaties in the political order of the EU. The treaties work as the constitution of the EU but they contain more than a set of constitutional rules about how power is to be distributed and decisions taken. They stipulate rules about substantive matters from the macro-economic commitments that Eurozone states must uphold to border controls and access to labour markets within the EU.

These were issues that once could be contested within democratic politics and now cannot be. The constitutional rules around them are also extraordinarily difficult to change, given that every member state has to consent to a treaty revision. From the time of Maastricht, treaty ratification became increasingly subject to a national referendum in a number of member-states, reflecting a recognition that significant constitutional change risks being disruptive without clear democratic legitimation. But, paradoxically, the growing use of referendums on these treaties only ultimately served to make treaty change more difficult because governments failed on a number of occasions to win support for ratification.

The historical relationship between the political idea of nationhood and democracy in Europe runs through both of these pessimistic stories about the state of democracy. Representative democracies emerged in Europe around nation-states where the authority of the state was legitimated by the idea that it was the representative of the imaginative political community of the nation.

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Under present political conditions, nationhood has become, however, a problem for democracy because to some observers it appears to negate the value of equality in multi-cultural societies, even though there is no necessary reason why a political claim to shared nationhood cannot accommodate significant cultural differences. Yet, despite this attack on the language of nationhood, no political substitute for delineating the people who choose representatives in a democracy has been established. Nor has there materialised a politically serviceable conception of a European people – who have never been asked in any collective capacity to elect representatives.

Democracy is much more difficult in practice than is often supposed. If it is not to risk being tyrannical, then it needs to be checked by some liberalism either in its institutional configuration or its citizens’ values, even as liberalism is a contested and historically contingent set of commitments.

If it is not to be simply a rhetoric by which an elite, formed by technocratic accreditation or wealth, justify their power, then elections need to allow the possibility of some meaningful political change. And if it is going to exist at all, there needs to be sufficient commonality of political identity among citizens to accept that they should choose representatives collectively and can be on the losing side of elections without recourse to rebellion. The difficulty for democracy in Europe is there are reasons to worry that there are too many places, including the European Union itself, where at least one of these political conditions is not in evidence.