“Throughout his political career,” Corthorn notes, “Powell grappled with what is arguably still the central issue in British foreign policy: the precise nature of the UK’s role in the world.” Yet, as a result of what Corthorn characterises as “a deeply polarized, and politicized, historiography”, Powell’s potential contribution to today’s debate has been minimised, a failing his excellent new book seeks to rectify, recentring Powell’s turbulent career as “part of a long-running and wide-ranging public debate over the ‘decline’ of the British nation”. [...]
The loss of India and Britain’s consequent diminished place in the world became the central pole of Powell’s worldview; the bloodshed of Partition fuelled his later fears both of mass immigration and of civil war in Northern Ireland, convincing him that “communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible”. His entire political career after 1947 would be devoted to defining, with an obsessive clarity not far from madness, the nature of British sovereignty in this new post-imperial world. [...]
Praising de Gaulle for pulling France out of NATO, Powell foreshadowed the French strongman’s modern heir Macron in eyeing Russia as the counterweight to preserve his own nation’s strategic autonomy, asserting that “historically the existence of Russia has been the ultimate guarantee of the survival of Britain as an independent nation… When in the last decades of the twentieth century necessity restores an understanding between Britain and Russia, the entente will not be cordiale; but entente it will still be…” As Corthorn notes laconically, at the height of the Cold War, “Powell’s argument for an alliance with the Soviet Union was a radical one to make. [...]
As for Brexit, Powell’s eventual, fierce opposition to the European Union would please many of the Conservative Party’s Brexiteers, yet his ridiculing of the Global Britain “delusions and deceits of a vanished Empire and Commonwealth” and his total and absolute hatred of the United States would have few takers in the modern Tory party. Perhaps it is here, as a foreign policy realist, that Powell’s uncompromising vision speaks most clearly to modern concerns.
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