8 - The expansion of Englishness: the Books Commission, Europe, and the Commonwealth

Summary

ENGLISH INTERNATIONALISM

Reviewing works by A.J. Toynbee and E.H. Carr immediately after the Second World War, Barker was made painfully aware of the ever-widening generation gap between himself and younger scholars. He could not share their dark, melancholy view of the world, rooted as it was in an analysis of ‘the disease of nationalism’ which appeared to have left Western civilisation in a state of terminal decline. All too conscious of his advancing years and no doubt the remoteness of the Mazzinian influences of his youth, he inquired ‘[d]oes a disease of nationalism [i.e. German nationalism] prove that nationalism is itself a disease?’ The unspoken answer was evidently no, and the silent example which supported it was the English nation; at any rate, he had always maintained that the latter was generally free of nationalism's vices. Gone too, or so it seemed, was the hope which an older generation had derived from contemplating the ‘spiritual’ forces at work in history; they now appeared as ‘quenched stars, or even as baleful lights’, yielding to the realities of ‘power and economics’ in international affairs.

Yet despite the loss of face which both nationalism and internationalism suffered after the war in some quarters, Barker continued to sanction both ideals and to assert – in true Mazzinian style – the inextricable link between them. Predictably, he regarded England as particularly well placed to strengthen this tie in world affairs.