I’M looking forward to the publication, in a couple of weeks, of Europe in Winter, the third instalment of Dave Hutchinson’s excellent “Fractured Europe” sequence. Hutchinson’s books, a combination of science fiction and Cold War thriller, are set in several alternative Europes, comprising hundreds of micronations with complex border arrangements, a Kafkaesque totalitarian university, and a sort of 1950s Home Counties England spread across the continent.
You can only say Hutchinson has been fantastically lucky, or prescient, with his timing (the first novel came out in 2014). Though he poses lots of interesting questions about national and European identities, one of the most appealing aspects is the Len Deighton-style espionage atmosphere.
Any politics of national (or supra-national) identity almost inevitably invites two charges: nostalgia and utopianism, occasionally simultaneously. Some Brexiters yearn for a United Kingdom that is more a product of their imagination than their memories; a surprising number of Remainers seem to have shifted from the view that the EU was marginally better than the alternative, to a misty-eyed vision of it as Elysium.
Similarly, claims that the UK will be better off out of the EU (or Scotland out of the UK), or that the EU’s many failings could have been reformed if only we’d stayed in, can only be tested by holding your nose and jumping one way or the other. Unlike Hutchinson’s alternate worlds, there’s no way we can have a peek at how things are getting along in the universe where we made different decisions.
And that was precisely what the Cold War thriller offered. In John le Carré, moral ambiguity, difficult decisions, betrayal, deceit and murder are common to both sides. But there is at least the familiarity of the territory, in that there were two sides. The persistent appeal of this view is responsible for a great many outdated notions. It’s why the hallmark of the hard Left is not adherence to Marx but a knee-jerk opposition to the West.
Similarly, the isolationist Right sees free movement and migration as the EU’s main problem (it was one of its few good points). It also thinks of the 1950s as a golden age for the UK though our governments’ overt policy then was to “manage decline”.
Globalization has made obvious sides harder to identify, even if your sides are the banks (or corporations, or the NSA, or Sir Philip Green) versus the rest of us. Both Poujadism and Sparticist-class-spite are tricky in an unfamiliar landscape.
Apparently, we can’t even decide what kind of country Russia is. It’s certainly not an empire like the USSR but we hover between treating it as a democracy and freezing the assets of its propaganda-spouting TV station.
Fiction is one way of avoiding a world that no longer has geopolitical fixed points; but not an infallible one. During the 1960s, Lawrence Block produced a series of deliberately far-fetched thrillers featuring Evan Tanner, a man addicted to preposterous lost causes. They included things like the independence of Macedonia, Serbia and the Baltic States. I can’t remember whether he was a Scottish Nationalist, but I’m pretty sure he was a Jacobite.
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