Americanisation or Globalisation?
David Ellwood argues that the attempts of British politicians to copy an American ‘role model’ are likely to fail.
Within the next five years the United Kingdom will almost certainly be obliged to decide whether or not to abandon the pound sterling and embrace the Euro. The closer this milestone approaches, the more intense becomes the debate on the meaning of Britain’s experience in the twentieth century, the factor more than any other which is likely to decide her fate in the twenty-first.
In February 2001, Timothy Garton Ash asked ‘Is Britain European?’ He argued that Britain had long since abandoned the national perspective of a self-satisfied little island at the heart of a great empire: ‘But it is not clear whether what has replaced it is Europeanisation, Americanisation or just globalisation.’ Quite so. A leading political philosopher, John Gray, has attacked Labour’s commitment to the United States as ‘the paradigmatic modern country, which Britain should take as a model’. In contrast Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian journalist, has written an entire volume dedicated to teaching Britons how to ‘live the American dream’, first by eliminating the monarchy and then by installing a republic based on the US Constitution.
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