On Britain's "Isolation"

Recently a well-known journalist friend, lamenting Britain's "isolation," commented that the "best quote" to come out of the unfortunate meeting of European leaders regarding the EU crisis was from an unnamed French diplomat, that "Britain is like a man who wants to go to a wife swapping party but refuses to bring his wife."

Given that my friend is a woman I was surprised that she was so amused that a French diplomat would make a joke about women as chattel to be used as a bargaining chip.

In any case, as to the matter of isolation, I would say that Britain is isolated in the way was the man who stood on the dock as the Titanic pulled away. The French diplomat's line is funny but rather than offering bon mots shouldn't he have been addressing the issue of French bank's low capital ratios? It was actually on just such a point that British Prime Minister David Cameron made his stand. The Eurozone is in a debt crisis, and behind that in a growth crisis, particularly along its southern rim. That a European diplomat would, at that moment, tell jokes at the expense of another EU country seems a sign of dangerous denial and that Europe has a leadership crisis.

In the conversation cited above that same journalist friend compared this moment, with Britain's perceived isolation, to 1936. Let me get this straight. We're to believe that Britain's declining to enter fiscal union with an EU dominated by Germany is akin to Britain's pre-WWII aversion to confront Germany's increasing militarism and to PM Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler? Something is wrong with that figuration but it does remind me of a recent column by NYT Op-Ed writer Roger Cohen, "The British Euro Farce," in which he similarly laments the UK's demurral from fiscal conjoining. Cohen offers no analysis of the economic issues involved, doesn't elaborate Cameron's negotiating red-line concerning controls on banks' capital ratios, but he does offer up as indicative of the tenor of the times in the UK that a British MP attended a holiday party in France during which one of his friends dressed as a Nazi, infuriating (quite rightly) some locals.

Generally, I don't like overdrawn comparisons of contemporary politicians to Nazis or fascists, but since Cohen has just made one, I ask you to consider which of these is an indication of creeping fascism / totalitarianism: 1) a single drunken idiot dressing up at a private holiday party in an exceedingly creepy uniform from seventy years ago, or 2) an op-ed demonizing policy differences and offering overdrawn and demagogic arguments rather than any examination of substance, this at a time of impending crisis.

Roger Cohen has returned to live in Britain after thirty years away. He seems to have brought with him an outmoded anti-Thatcherite rhetoric dated from the period when he left, and one inappropriate for characterizing the present leadership and for grappling with the complex issues this coalition government faces.

In the meantime, it's worth noting that in regards to the incident with the Nazi uniform, Cohen's NYT fact-checkers have failed him. There were not, as Cohen writes, "a bunch of mates dressed up in Nazi SS uniforms," but only one. I suggest that the NYT examine newspaper reporting of that incident more closely and offer a correction. Update: the British MP referred to above has been suspended from his position by the Conservative Party.