WASHINGTON, May 31 (UPI) -- Every movement needs its poets-laureate and praise-singers. British Imperialism had Rudyard Kipling. Now Euro-Lepenism, the movement to create a European superstate using resentment of America as its principal binding sentiment, has acquired its own pet theorist, British journalist Will Hutton.
Hutton has recently published "The World We're In," a book so filled with vicious stereotypes, malign half-truths, exaggerations and skewed statistics, as well as sheer anti-American venom, that one can't help but think it would be classified as hate speech if it were aimed at any other identifiable group of people.
At heart, Hutton's book contrasts an evil, exploitative, anti-egalitarian, dysfunctional and soon-to-be-doomed America and a virtuous, socially just, egalitarian, efficient and soon-to-overtake-America unifying Europe. In fact, the New Europe is so wonderful that the only fly in the Euro-ointment is the (to him) embarrassing tendency of the less enlightened of his fellow-countrymen to look to America rather than Europe for ideas on social policy and economic structure.
Of course, it's not really their fault. Nothing is anybody's fault in Hutton's universe, except America's. Hutton believes in a great conspiracy of American political and corporate interests to foist Americanism on Britain. Never mind the fact that American corporations in Europe have in general supported European unification enthusiastically for decades, and in particular have supported further British integration into Europe.
Never mind that the State Department and other organs of the U.S. executive branch, some of them clandestine, have for decades been pushing Britain into Europe. Never mind that the American foreign policy intellectual establishment and think-tank world has for decades been enthusiastically Europhile.
This column does not provide space to go into any great detail about the absurdity of Hutton's economic claims, or the misuse of statistics in his analysis of the American versus European economic approach. I hope to discuss this at greater length in another space. Irwin Stelzer has done a good job of illustrating some of these problems in his recent, and excellent, book review in The Spectator.
Hutton's work bears bore than a passing resemblance to the sort of enthusiastic books published in the 1980s about the coming triumph of "Asian values" over the lazy and selfish United States, except he believes in the coming triumph of "European values" over the insufficiently lazy, but still selfish, Americans. Given the unresolved structural problems and demographic crises overhanging Continental Europe, it is far more likely that they too are about to experience their own version of the Japanese 1990s.
Rather, it's worth looking at one detail of Hutton's analysis, from the part where he desperately tries to prove that Brits are really more European than American. In the list of qualities that set his countrymen firmly in the Napoleonic camp, he includes their love for "social housing," in contrast to America's aversion to the same. What is "social housing," one may ask? Perhaps an apartment building where the inhabitants are constantly asking each other to tea?
No, Hutton is talking about government-run housing... better known as "the projects" in America. Now, this is incredible! True, the Labor government after World War II built substantial amounts of "council houses" in an attempt to alleviate serious housing shortages and substandard conditions in existing housing. Long before the 1980s, however, much of this housing was experiencing all of the problems of large-scale, long-term government-run provision of ordinary goods and services.
When Margaret Thatcher took office, one of the most popular moves she made was to sell off the greater part of this housing to its inhabitants. Although the left-wing intelligentsia whined as usual, the British people in general took to private ownership like ducks to water. Of course, private house development had never ceased, and in fact the privatized council housing blended into a great wave of home ownership, both new construction and renovation of old structures.
As a result of these moves, and the increasing prosperity of Britain in general, the island now enjoys booming do-it-yourself stores (so reminiscent of American ones, no doubt to Hutton's disgust) and popular television programs such as "Changing Rooms" (whose American knockoff, "Trading Spaces," is also popular on the other side of the Atlantic.)
The most interesting thing about "Changing Rooms" is the 500-pound limit on expenditure for the domestic makeover. This is not some Martha Stewart upper-middle-class consumption extravaganza. Rather, it is the application of ingenuity to ordinary people's spaces, and conveys the message of what can be done by individual homeowners to bring delight to their own property.
Undoubtedly Hutton would rather they spend their time petitioning the local council to repair the window, as they used to. This would end their socio-politico isolation and selfish indulgence, so un-European. In Hutton's mind, it seems, private housing is only one step from private car ownership, private gun ownership, and Columbine massacres.
What Hutton is actually observing, of course, is not the Americanization of Britain, but what I have called Anglosphere convergence. Hutton ignores work such as Alan Macfarlane's, which indicates that individualistic lifestyles, measured by such indicators as predominance of nuclear families, market relationships to land ownership, and geographic mobility, have characterized English social life from as far back as records exist, far predating the Industrial Revolution that supposedly spawned such individualism. He ignores work such as that of David Hackett Fischer, who indicates the cultural characteristics of the United States, including its individualism, were inherited from the British Isles and have been remarkably persistent over the centuries.
It is rather the divergences between Britain and America that have been relatively recent by historical standards, and that have been steadily diminishing under the influence of improved communications, freer trade, and increased personal movement across the Atlantic. This convergence has been two-way, not just a case of American influence in Britain, but it is the case that much of America's openness and dynamism has contributed to the eradication of the sharp gap between the classes in Britain, and the emergence of an American-style middle class there.
Hutton concludes with a plea for the immersion of Britain into a united Europe in order to halt what he sees as runaway Americanization. This is futile, fortunately for Britain. Further integration into Europe is more likely to be the equivalent of booking a cabin on the Titanic. Rather, further Anglosphere convergence is likely, and if it means the adoption of things like traditional American ideas about welcoming and assimilating immigrants, it will be all to Britain's good. If it means rescuing Britain economically from Europe's coming "Japan decade," it will be even more welcome.
Meanwhile, if the "Changing Rooms" team can let more light into a cramped, dark room on a 500-pound budget, more power to them. Perhaps someone can offer them 500 quid to let more light into Hutton's brain.
Now, that would be a real challenge.
