In 1939-40, Neville Chamberlain, hailed here as "The Pilgrim of Peace", represented a profoundly compromised British ruling class. Even after the war with Germany had begun, there were many aristocratic Englishmen who favoured a negotiated peace with Hitler. In the face of the present economic crisis, ruling classes around the world are similarly divided on how best to defend their interests.I’M glad the Prime Minister and his senior colleagues are keeping the intensifying economic crisis uppermost in their minds.
Ever since the global economic situation became critical in October of last year, I have been unable to shake the impression that New Zealand has been living through a "Phoney War" period in relation to the turmoil beyond its shores.
The metaphor is apt in many ways.
The Phoney War was the name given to the seven month period between the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 and the invasion of France in May 1940. It earned this title because, in spite of the fact that all the major Western European powers were at war, nothing much seemed to be happening.
Although we still don’t like to talk about it, there was a very good reason for this singular lack of serious bellicosity. It was because, at the highest levels of the British, French and German governments there was a deep reluctance to take the final step into full-scale war.
Hitler didn’t believe that his British and French opponents’ hearts were in the conflict, and with the rapid defeat and occupation of Poland, he simply couldn’t understand why they repeatedly refused his offer to make peace.
Because there were many in the upper echelons of British and French society who were eager to accept Hitler’s offer. At the very highest levels of the British aristocracy, in particular, there was a deeply ingrained view that the Western nations must stand together against the threat posed to their way of life by Soviet communism.
Others (including George, Duke of Kent) were fearful that the prosecution of "total war" against Germany would fatally weaken the British Empire and usher in a period of American hegemony.
Interestingly, Hitler agreed with them.
And certainly there were many in the upper classes of France who feared their own, home-grown socialists and communists much more than they feared Hitler’s Nazis.
The Phoney War may, therefore, be understood as a period of intense political struggle within the ruling classes of France and Britain: a struggle between those who favoured a negotiated peace with Hitler’s Germany, and those who recognised in the Nazi regime a qualitatively different form of authoritarian government – one which posed an existential threat to the whole of Western civilisation.
Only with the final victory of this latter faction, led by the redoubtable Winston Churchill, on 10 May 1940, did Hitler feel constrained to unleash "Plan Yellow" (Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries and France) – thereby bringing the Phoney War to an end.
A similar internal struggle is currently being played out with the ruling classes of the capitalist countries in relation to the global economic crisis.
On the one hand we have those who characterise the current difficulties as a simple (if brutal) market correction. Let it play itself out, they advise, and the system will swiftly regain its equilibrium.
On the other side of the argument stand those who see in the unfolding crisis an existential threat to the global economic order as deadly as that posed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
These two factions are well represented within the National-led Government and the civil service. Which is why I’d love to have been a fly on the wall of the Prime Minister’s office on 15 January as he and his senior ministers examined the various options for dealing with the crisis.
We must hope that in this fight the Prime Minister takes historical inspiration from Winston Churchill and not Neville Chamberlain.
Because with every passing week it becomes clearer that, if the people of the world are to come through this economic crisis without enduring enormous hardship and suffering, then political leadership of truly Churchillian courage and determination will be required.
What the Prime Minister must not do is seek to appease the greed of those who financially backed his party’s election victory. Any attempt to shift the whole burden of New Zealand’s economic recovery on to the backs of its long-suffering citizens will merely guarantee that John Key leads his one-term National-ACT-Maori Party Government to electoral oblivion.
But, if the Prime Minister ends this Phoney War against the recession by requiring genuine equality of sacrifice from all New Zealanders, then they will readily dedicate their "blood, toil, tears and sweat" to its defeat.
This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on 16 January 2009.
