Francophobia, Russophobia, And Imaginary Enemies

Daniel Larison writes:

"Despite the fact that the threat of Russia to British interests was minimal, and trade and diplomatic relations between the two countries were not bad at all in the years leading up to the Crimean War, Russophobia (even more than Francophobia) was arguably the most important element in Britain’s outlook on the world abroad. Throughout Europe, attitudes to Russia were mostly formed by fears and fantasies, and Britain in this sense was no exception to the rule….In the early nineteenth century there was a frenzy of European publications–pamphlets, travelogues and political treatises–on ‘the Russian menace’ to the Continent. They had as much to do with the imagination of an Asiatic ‘other’ threatening the liberties and civilization of Europe as with any perceived or real threat [bold mine-DL]. The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infilitrate societies." ~Orlando Figes, The Crimean War (p. 70)

Figes notes that the 19th-century stereotype of Russia shaped the way Westerners later viewed the USSR during the Cold War, and there are some obvious similarities with the way that many Westerners still view Russia today, but what I find interesting about this description is that it is the way that hard-liners and hawks always perceive other nations that they view as competitors or threats. It does not seem to matter that they are almost always wrong in their estimations of the threat from the other nation. It is certainly not unique to American hawks or Americans in general, but Americans do seem to prefer treating potential and real enemies as if they were incredibly powerful and inherently aggressive and irrational. Logevall and Osgood quoted George Kennan’s observation on this habit:

"We Americans like our adversaries wholly inhuman; all powerful, omniscient, monstrously efficient, unhampered by any serious problems of their own, and bent only on schemes for our destruction. Whatever their real nature, we always persist in seeing them this way. It is the reflection of a philosophic weakness—of an inability to recognize any relativity in matters of friendship and enmity.

One might think that this would lessen as we move away from the major, total wars of the last century that reinforced the habit, but this is not what has happened. If anything the vast disparity of power between the U.S. and our actual enemies not only encourages hawks to exaggerate threats, but it also pushes them to seek confrontation with other major powers by finding reasons for hostility. If a major power is seeking normal influence in its own region, it has to be treated as an aggressor and a “revisionist” power bent on expansion. If its external behavior doesn’t directly threaten our country, it is then necessary to align ourselves with those in the region hostile to that power for the sake of our “values.” If that fails to wreck relations, it becomes useful to find fault with the major power’s internal regime on the grounds that its political constitution proves that it will eventually become aggressive and dangerous."

Serving in the Aberdeen government, Palmerston’s agitation for war with Russia exhibited elements of all three of these. Figes describes Palmerston’s foreign policy:

"Palmerston was the first really modern politician in this sense. He understood the need to cultivate the press and appeal in simple terms in order to create a mass-based political constituency. The issue that allowed him to achieve this was the war against Russia. His foreign policy captured the imagination of the British public as the embodiment of their own national character and popular ideals: it was Protestant and freedom-loving, energetic and adventurous, confident and bold, belligerent in its defence of the little man, proudly British, and contemptuous of foreigners, particularly those of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox religion, whom Palmerston associated with the worst vices and excesses of the Continent. The public loved his verbal commitment to liberal interventionism abroad: it reinforced their John Bull view that Britain was the greatest country in the world and that the task of government should be to export its way of life to those less fortunate who lived beyond its shores." (p.148-149)

Change out some of the religious categories and replace them with political ones, and the description is a very familiar one of modern American interventionist attitudes. The British public’s enthusiasm for Palmerston’s confrontational policy with Russia relied on the belief that “the struggle against Russia involved ‘British principles’–the defence of liberty, civilization and free trade.” (p. 149) According to Figes, just as the Russians were vilified, so the Ottomans were transformed into virtuous victims in the public imagination, and it would be the British government riding this wave of popular sentiment that would be the one to push hardest for war with Russia. Lost in all of this was the reality that there was no reason for Britain and Russia to fight one another at all. Consequently, as Figes explains, “the allied expedition to the East began with no one really knowing what it was about.” (p. 158) Then again, it is extremely difficult to understand the purpose of a war when the government enters into it for emotional and ideological reasons alone.

Leading one IanH to comment:

I recall reading some British diplomat remaking after WWII that the West would triumph over the USSR because the West was “European and Christian” wheras the Soviets were “athiest and Asiatic.”

Looking at Europe today, it’s hard to believe anyone ever thought that.

To which I have responded:

IanH, what is the largest city in Europe where two persons of the same sex can legally marry each other? Not contract a civil union, which pointedly does not need to be consummated, and which therefore ought not to be restricted to unrelated same-sex couples? But contract a legal marriage, which presumably does have to be consummated, thus requiring, in order to receive some legal benefit or privilege, engagement in sexual relations other than those between one man and one woman in marriage according to the traditional definition upheld by, among other people, Barack Obama? I do not know which city it is. But I am prepared to guess that it is not the largest city in Europe, nor is it Europe’s showcase to the world.

John Laughland, occasionally of this parish, had a fascinating piece in last week’s London Spectator about how demographically militant Catholics probably now account for a third of the population of France and are still growing. They and the Muslims have six, eight, 10, even 12 children per couple. The heirs of Robespierre and Chaumette are doomed, there will very soon be no such heirs at all. Laughland locates this within French rebellion’s history of coming at least as much from the Right as from the Left. He importantly reminds us that there were no Communists in the French Resistance until the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The early Resistance was made up of Catholic, agrarian patriots.

The tendencies now expressing themselves as the popular, even if not the elite, bases of Gaullism, of the anti-Gaullist Right and of the anti-Marxist Left have their roots in Catholic, patriotic disaffection with the Jacobin Revolution of 1789 in the countryside and among the workers. That sense has still very far from gone away: France is still very far from fully reconciled to the Revolution’s claims of universal bourgeois liberalism, as much in economics as in anything else. If she had ever fully succumbed to the Revolution, then her economic arrangements would be the most “Anglo-Saxon” in the world.

René Rémond’s theory of the three French right wings correctly identifies Orléanism as bourgeois and economically liberal, as the Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the Bonapartists. But the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the Front National and its electorate is not the only continuation of Legitimism. Although intégristes and their fellow-travelers may have been attracted to the Front, the victory of Marine Le Pen should have put paid to what was always that dangerous delusion, as indeed is intégrisme itself. But where to go? Philippe de Villiers shows increasing tendencies towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and managed to be the only person in the entire EU elected to the European Parliament under the banner of Declan Ganley’s Libertas, with its cry of “An EU, but not this EU”, as if any other were available.

Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist roots, just as Boulangism did, yet the popular followings for either and both were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside. Especially there, the anti-Gaullist Right is not entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing. Not for nothing did Philippe de Villers withdraw from the Giscardien UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew first internally and then externally from the Gaullist RPR. And where does the popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from? Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted to be Louis XIV or Napoleon, but he certainly wanted to be one or the other. Deep down, at least, one or the other was what huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have won. When he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had endorsed him and who did so again.

There is no denying the striking trend in France towards defending both the French bulwark of Christian civilization and the bourgeois bulwark of French civilization by deliberately and systematically out-breeding both the Muslims and the semi-feral underclass. That latter exists in France to nothing like the extent that it does in the “Anglo-Saxon” economies, because the French do not deny the obvious point that if you believe, as you should, in the economic, social, cultural and political benefits of a large and thriving middle class, then you need to will the means in the form of direct and indirect central and local government action; the same is also true of agriculture, of rural communities, of a manufacturing base, of family life, of national sovereignty, of cultural distinctiveness, and of so many other things that true conservatives exist precisely in order to conserve. Such action also sustains a working class properly so called. But even what they have is enough to frighten them into both prevention and retaliation, not least demographically.

The Slavs in general, and Russia in particular, are the age-old gatekeepers of our Biblical-Classical civilization, whether against Islam, against Far Eastern domination, or now also against the pseudo-West of the neocons. Something similar is true of la France éternelle, the land of Charles Martel, in which his heirs are valiantly engaged in a demographic war, not only against the rise of a semi-feral underclass which is in any case nothing on that in the “Anglo-Saxon” countries, but also against the Islamic expansionism that dismembered France as recently as 1962, when she was mutilated by the loss, not of three colonies, but of three départements, integral parts of the French state and nation. Their large communities of Latin Catholics speaking a Romance language, than whom no one could have been more Western, were violently expelled, recalling the violent expulsions of large Christian populations further east in order to create two states especially favored by those now noisiest in professing to be defenders of the West.

That was the perspective from which, in and through a decorated veteran of the Algerian War, France opposed the greatest catastrophe since 1962 for what was originally Christendom on all three Mediterranean continents. For what remained of that, 1962 was the greatest catastrophe since 1948 (itself the greatest since 1923), and 2003 seems set to have been the greatest until a similar intervention in Syria. That will doubtless also be resisted, even if not by Sarkozy, then certainly by la France éternelle, the conscious, literal rebirth of which will have tremendous consequences in, for example, the United Nations Security Council, where they can expect the support of Russia and will also deserve that of the United Kingdom and the United States.