Kemper Lectures
Sir John H. Plumb , F.B.A. , May 8, 1983 - Continued
Mr. President:
My theme today is ‘The Dominion of History’ – an appropriate title, I think, for a series in honor of Sir Winston Churchill, who, after all was, if anyone, the master general of that dominion.
The British reaction to the Falklands crisis astonished many Americans, astonished all Germans, and indeed most all Europeans, except the French whose historical experience is also concerned with the struggle for liberty. Many feared that Mrs. Thatcher’s furious belligerence would be inflamed in the future by similar threats to Hong Kong or Gibraltar. Such reactions betrayed a lack of historical judgment and complete ignorance of the role that history has played in Britain’s sense of itself. A similar lack of historical empathy has bedevilled understanding of the French by an American president since the war. None of them could respond with warmth to de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estang and now Mitterand: The French, like the British, are gripped by their past. Churchill, of course, would have understood instinctively why the overwhelming majority, left or right, supported Mrs. Thatcher, just as he found it easy to understand why French men and women acclaimed de Gaulle: even though he, himself, found him unbearable. Or why so much of Mitterand’s policy has his nation’s, as well as his party’s support.
The reason, of course, lies in the dominion history. The British people are still entangled in their past, far less may be than they were, but still very deeply. And so are the French. Memories of their greatness still influence Mitterand just as they did de Gaulle: hence their common attitude both to NATO and the independent nuclear deterrent. Any past, however, is multifaceted: at times liberating, at times dangerous. In Ireland, William III and Oliver Cromwell are real presences, bloodying the present in the most tragic and desperate way. And, even in the Falklands crisis, the legality of the past was endlessly and uselessly argued about. Whether John Smith first sighted the islands seemed to matter to some English intellectuals far more than the fact that an entirely British community had lived there for generations, displacing no one. That history should matter, comes as no surprise to most Britons, nor it would seem to most Argentineans, although the majority of the world’s governments were bewildered. No historian, however, commented with much sense on the historical dimension of the Falkland crisis. Those who did largely confined themselves to a legalistic investigation of the nature of territorial sovereignty. Mrs. Thatcher had a much firmer grasp – and history told her that the British stood for the liberty of the free Britons and the rule of law. For her, as for Churchill, that was what British history had been about, especially English history, from Magna Carta to the defeat of Hitler. In this crisis of the Falklands the latter mattered more than the former, particularly to anyone over 50. But undoubtedly there was a very real sense of the past, which Mrs. Thatcher rightly sensed and used.