Photo by Kelly Sikkema
At the end of 1866, the writer and philosopher GH Lewes wrote an article listing what the press of his day regarded as the most important events of the year. Lewes is best known today as the partner of the novelist George Eliot, whom he could not marry because he was unable to get a divorce, though his wife was living with somebody else. His melodramatic personal life and Eliot’s fame overshadowed his reputation, but Lewes was a highly perceptive observer of his times.
He wrote in the Fortnightly Review, which he edited, about “the great topics of this year of noises. They have been the cattle-plague, the [financial] panic, the disclosures of railway mismanagement, the agitation for Reform, the Fenians, the conflict of the President with Congress, the Seven Days’ War, ending in the expulsion of Austria from Germany, and the freedom of Italy from a foreign yoke.”
The world turns slowly, and much that looks new and shocking to us today was happening 150 years ago, though often in a different guise. Many problems that bedevilled the lives of our Victorian ancestors are still alive and kicking and far from solution. I do not mean anything along the lines of the tired old quote from Karl Marx about history repeating itself “first time tragedy, second time farce” (in reality history has a nasty habit of serving up tragedy twice over). It is rather that serious confrontations and crises are often so deep-rooted that they go on recurring down the centuries.
Railway mismanagement
Many of the topics mentioned by Lewes have almost exact contemporary parallels. It is bird flu rather than cattle plague, also known as rinderpest, a virulent virus fatally infecting cattle, that has been a constant news item this year. Financial crises struck in both 1866 and 2022, a big difference between the two being that the crisis provoked by the mini-Budget on 23 September was self-inflicted, brought on by foolishly exaggerating Britain’s financial strength in the world.
Railway mismanagement was a hot issue a century and a half ago just as it is today. Political reform – in the sense of increasing the number of voters – is not the issue it once was, though it might be resurrected by the requirement that voters must produce photo IDs.
The Fenians were the forerunners of the IRA at the physical force end of Irish nationalism. Then, as now, “the Irish question” was springing nasty surprises on British politicians, but without any learning curve in between. The proponents of Brexit, proudly ignorant of British history beyond boosterism and jingoistic slogans, never even considered the impact their project would have on Britain’s only land border with the EU. Showing their usual irresponsibility, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and others upset the delicate ethnic-sectarian balance of power in Northern Ireland by trying to play “the Orange card” to their own advantage.
One of the big crises of the year
Lewes singles out the conflict between “President and Congress”, a year after the American Civil War had ended, as one of the big crises of the year. Once again, there is a sense of the past overwhelming the present in the shape of Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party (they were on the other side back then). Political, racial and cultural hatreds and divisions in America – of which the Civil War is only the most violent expression – are deeper than Europeans imagine.
But it was the final items on Lewes’s list – the defeat of Austria in Germany and Italy – that made me realise that the most important feature that 1866 and 2022 have in common is that both years marked turning points in European history. Few now have much idea about the Austro-Prussian War, the beginning of Germany’s bid for European hegemony, but it decisively redrew the political map of Europe just as the Ukraine war is doing now. Russia is now playing the role of the Habsburg Empire in its declining years as President Vladimir Putin tries and fails to reconquer Ukraine in an attempt to restore Russia’s status as a superpower.
Lewes goes on to say that he thinks the magazines and newspapers have got it wrong about the most important event of the year, which he says was the establishment of the International Working Men’s Association at a meeting in Geneva. “Lewes prophesied the importance of trade unions in the future,” writes his biographer Rosemary Ashton.
“The formation of trade unions had been momentous,” Lewes wrote. He was impressed by a plan, which he attributes to English trade unionists, of holding a general strike, and one by the French to nationalise industry.
Broken Britain
Twenty years ago at the height of neoliberal globalisation, strikes, trade unions and nationalisation might have seemed like ancient history. Over the past year, however, they have once again topped the news agenda. Nationalisation is back as a respectable option for the railways, water, electricity and gas suppliers as the failings of privatisation become more blatant and disruptive.
Yet despair about “Broken Britain” is misleading and counterproductive because it is generally exaggerated and often hysterical. The state of Britain today is not that much worse than it was in 1866 and jeremiads about the state of things divert attention away from specific mistakes made by individuals, parties and governments responsible for failure.
Britain is not yet in the same league as the Habsburg Empire in the 19th century or Russia today, though its efforts to reverse decline, notably Brexit, compared to other countries have only speeded up the process.
No end in sight
The mood is darker than 150 years ago because people no longer believe the Government can cope – and with good reason. Neoliberal free-market solutions designed in an economic superpower like the US produce disaster in a smaller and weaker state like Britain, as was instantly demonstrated by Liz Truss’s lethal experiment.
Yet blaming everything that has gone wrong on Truss, Johnson and the Brexit wrecking crew is short-sighted since the rot in British leadership set in a lot earlier than that. The downside of demonising the latest batch of politicians is that it lets their equally disaster-prone predecessors like David Cameron and George Osborne off the hook.
This might matter less in more placid times, but 2022 is genuinely a turning point in history. It is the year that military and economic war returned to Europe with no end in sight.
The wars that Lewes mentions were short, even if they were the seedbeds for more devastating conflicts. Ukraine could well turn into one of those interminable wars that have ravaged so much of the Middle East and North Africa in recent decades.
Whatever the reason, Britain no longer produces leaders who can cope with crises.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.
Patrick Cockburn | Radio Free (2022-12-19T07:00:36+00:00) Why 2022 was a Crucial Turning Point in European History. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/19/why-2022-was-a-crucial-turning-point-in-european-history/
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