2016.06.23 英国脱欧。乔治-奥威尔会怎么做？

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Brexit: What Would George Orwell Do?
The British writer cited his country’s “different air,” but he also supported a United States of Europe. Were those views mutually exclusive?

By Krishnadev Calamur

Toby Melville / Reuters
JUNE 23, 2016
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Much has been made about the historic Euroskepticism of the British Isles. The sentiment has been traced back to Queen Boudicca, the Celtic warrior who fought the Roman Empire in the first century; to Henry VIII, who broke with the Roman Catholic Church over his desire to annul his first marriage; and, more recently (albeit incorrectly), to Winston Churchill’s reported belief that “If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.” But as Britons vote in a referendum on whether to remain a part of the European Union, polls show a statistical dead heat—an indication, perhaps, that British views of the EU are more conflicted than uniformly skeptical.

And it’s a different historical Brit whose words perhaps best capture this conflicted view, a man the writer V.S. Pritchett once labeled the “wintry conscience of his generation”: George Orwell.

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In 1941, as the Luftwaffe rained bombs on London, the former Eric Blair reminisced in the essay “England Your England” about the period after World War I, when the returning English working classes “brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired.” (Great Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales; these, together with Northern Ireland, form the United Kingdom, the sovereign state that is deciding whether or not to leave the EU on Thursday. Orwell tended to use “England” as his catchall for the United Kingdom.)

“In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine,” Orwell wrote. “The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.”

“But,” he continued, “it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader.”

The same kind of mystique has been fully on view in the often-angry, sometimes-entertaining debate over Thursday’s referendum. British politicians who favor leaving the bloc have invoked Hitler, and the U.K.’s tabloids, long skeptical of the political bloc based in Brussels, have been typically vocal: “Who will speak for England?” the Daily Mail blared; “BeLeave in Britain,” said the Sun, which even reported the “Queen Backs Brexit,” a headline Britain’s Independent Press Standards Organization ruled as “significantly misleading” given that the queen has stayed publicly neutral on the matter.

What about Orwell? He had spent time in Europe outside the U.K.: He fought in the Spanish Civil War, and lived in penury in Paris—experiences he immortalized in Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London. But England, he wrote, was distinct.

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. …

But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.

Boris Johnson, the former London mayor and leading Brexit campaigner, could just as well have been channeling Orwell when pointed out there is “simply no common political culture in Europe; no common media, no common sense of humor or satire” or even an awareness of each other’s politics. “It is we who are speaking up for the people, and it is they,” Johnson said, “who are defending an obscurantist and universalist system of government that is now well past its sell by date and which is ever more remote from ordinary voters.”

And yet “remain” campaigners could also call on Orwell’s “wintry conscience” in making their case. Although his best-known works, Animal Farm and 1984, warn against Soviet-style totalitarianism, he was also a passionate advocate for a United States of Europe based on democratic socialism, which one could argue is something EU member states, with their relatively generous welfare systems, free education, and health care, have achieved to a point. In his 1947 essay “Toward European Unity,” Orwell suggested that a united Europe was the only way through which war, which had wracked and wrecked Europe and the world at intervals for nearly half a century prior, could be avoided.

“The only way of avoiding [the dangers of war] … that I can imagine is to present somewhere or other, on a large scale, the spectacle of a community where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power,” he wrote in the essay, which was published in the Partisan Review in New York. “In other words, democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area. But the only area in which it could conceivably be made to work, in any near future, is Western Europe.”

“The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron has frequently employed similar arguments for why the U.K. should vote to remain. “If I had to sum up this entire campaign in a word, it would be that word ‘together,’” Cameron said Wednesday. “I think together we are better able to face the challenges from terrorism and climate change, we are better able to grow our economies, better able to drive good trade deals ... and I want us to get the good deals so we give better chances to everyone in our country.”


Orwell’s United States of Europe would include those countries where he believed democratic Socialism existed: the nations in Scandinavia, as well as Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia (the communists would not fully seize power there until a year after Orwell was writing), Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Britain, Spain, and Italy. And while this might suggest Orwell did not view eastern European countries as potential members, he lived in a world where many of those nations that are now at the center of the debate over Brexit (because of immigration from there to the U.K.) were either part of the Soviet Union or its vassals. Orwell viewed a united Europe as a counterweight to the Soviets and to the U.S. And, he said:

If the United States of Europe is to be self-sufficient and able to hold its own against Russia and America, it must include Africa and the Middle East. But that means that the position of the indigenous peoples in those countries must be changed out of recognition — that Morocco or Nigeria or Abyssiania [modern-day Ethiopia] must cease to be colonies or semi-colonies and become autonomous republics on a complete equality with the European peoples.

This would mean many of the people from parts of the world that currently send large numbers of migrants to Europe—a trend decried by Brexit campaigners who want more control over immigration—would have been part of Orwell’s Europe.




Orwell’s views about England’s distinctness and his support for a united Europe may not have been contradictory. And it could well be that Orwell might have viewed the EU’s evolution, from Europe’s greatest post-war experiment to a transnational bloc that exists mainly to facilitate trade among its member states, with disdain—not to mention that many of the EU’s regulations and its byzantine bureaucracy have on more than one occasion been described “Orwellian,” in the sense of the totalitarian dystopia envisioned in works like Animal Farm and 1984. While in 1947 Orwell wrote that a European superstate was the only way to prevent war, a year later, in 1984, he described a dystopian superstate that includes Britain (Air Strip One) and North America in a state of perpetual war against Eurasia, another superstate.

Did his views evolve in the period between 1941 and 1948? Or were they perhaps about where the British electorate seems to be right now—just about split on the costs versus the benefits of the U.K.’s relationship with Europe? Orwell isn’t around to tell us, and today’s Britain would, on the face of it, seem to have little in common with the era that Orwell was describing. And yet there are unmistakable echoes. “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840?” Orwell asked in “England Your England.” “But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

Krishnadev Calamur is a former senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of Murder in Mumbai.



英国脱欧。乔治-奥威尔会怎么做？
这位英国作家提到了他的国家的 "不同空气"，但他也支持一个欧洲合众国。这些观点是否相互排斥？

克里希纳德夫-卡拉穆尔报道

托比-梅尔维尔/路透社
2016年6月23日
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关于英伦三岛历史上的疑欧主义，人们已经做了很多。这种情绪可以追溯到布迪卡女王，这位凯尔特战士在一世纪与罗马帝国作战；也可以追溯到亨利八世，他因为想要取消第一次婚姻而与罗马天主教会决裂；以及最近（尽管是错误的），温斯顿-丘吉尔据说认为 "如果英国必须在欧洲和公海之间做出选择，她必须永远选择公海"。但是，在英国人就是否继续作为欧盟的一部分进行公投时，民调显示出统计学上的僵局--这或许表明，英国人对欧盟的看法更多的是冲突而不是一致的怀疑。

一个不同历史时期的英国人的话语也许最能体现这种矛盾的观点，这个人曾被作家V.S. Pritchett称为 "他那一代人的风雪良知"。乔治-奥威尔。

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1941年，当德国空军向伦敦投下炸弹的时候，前任埃里克-布莱尔在《英格兰你的英格兰》一文中回忆了第一次世界大战后的那段时期，当时回国的英国工人阶级 "带回了对所有欧洲人的仇恨，除了德国人，他们钦佩德国人的勇气。" (大不列颠由英格兰、苏格兰和威尔士组成；它们与北爱尔兰一起构成了联合王国，这个主权国家正在决定是否在周四离开欧盟）。奥威尔倾向于使用 "英格兰 "作为他对英国的统称）。

"奥威尔写道："在法国土地上的四年里，他们甚至没有获得对葡萄酒的喜好。"英国人的孤僻，他们拒绝认真对待外国人，这是一种愚蠢的行为，必须不时地付出非常大的代价。"

"但是，"他继续说，"它在英国人的神秘感中扮演着自己的角色，而那些试图打破它的知识分子通常是弊大于利。归根结底，这是英国人性格中的相同品质，它击退了游客，将入侵者拒之门外。"

同样的神秘感在关于周四公投的辩论中得到了充分的体现，这些辩论往往很激烈，有时也很有趣。赞成离开集团的英国政治家们引用了希特勒的名字，而英国的小报，长期以来对设在布鲁塞尔的政治集团持怀疑态度，一直是典型的发声。每日邮报》大声疾呼："谁来为英国说话？"《太阳报》说："英国要脱欧"，该报甚至报道了 "女王支持脱欧"，鉴于女王在此事上公开保持中立，这一标题被英国独立新闻标准组织裁定为 "明显误导"。

那奥威尔呢？他曾在英国以外的欧洲呆过：他参加了西班牙内战，并在巴黎过着贫穷的生活--他在《向加泰罗尼亚致敬》和《在巴黎和伦敦的沉沦》中不朽的经历。但是，他写道，英国是与众不同的。

当你从任何一个外国回到英国，你会立即有一种呼吸不同空气的感觉。甚至在最初的几分钟里，就有几十件小事串通起来给你这种感觉。啤酒更苦了，硬币更重了，草更绿了，广告更明显了。大镇上的人群，他们有温和的节制的脸，他们的坏牙和温和的举止，与欧洲的人群不同。然后，英国的辽阔将你吞没，你暂时失去了整个国家具有单一可识别特征的感觉。...

但与此同时，绝大多数人都觉得自己是一个单一的民族，并且意识到彼此之间的相似性比他们与外国人的相似性更强。爱国主义通常比阶级仇恨更强烈，而且总是比任何形式的国际主义更强烈。

前伦敦市长、英国脱欧运动领袖鲍里斯-约翰逊(Boris Johnson)在指出 "欧洲根本没有共同的政治文化；没有共同的媒体，没有共同的幽默感或讽刺"，甚至没有对彼此政治的认识时，也可以说是在引导奥威尔。"约翰逊说："是我们在为人民说话，是他们在为一个蒙昧主义和普遍主义的政府系统辩护，这个系统现在已经过了它的销售日期，而且与普通选民的关系越来越远。"

然而，"留欧 "运动者也可以援引奥威尔的 "风雪良知 "来说明他们的情况。虽然他最知名的作品《动物农场》和《1984》对苏联式的极权主义提出了警告，但他也是一个基于民主社会主义的欧洲合众国的热情倡导者，人们可以说这是欧盟成员国的东西，它们拥有相对慷慨的福利制度、免费教育和医疗保健，在一定程度上已经实现。在他1947年的文章《走向欧洲统一》中，奥威尔提出，一个统一的欧洲是避免战争的唯一途径，在此前的近半个世纪里，战争一直在欧洲和世界上时不时地肆虐着。

"避免[战争危险]的唯一方法......我能想象的是在某个地方或其他地方大规模地展示一个社会的景象，在那里人们相对自由和快乐，生活的主要动机不是追求金钱或权力，"他在文章中写道，这篇文章发表在纽约的《党派评论》上。"换句话说，必须使民主社会主义在某个大的地区发挥作用。但可以想象，在不久的将来，唯一可以让它发挥作用的地区是西欧。"

"英国人的孤僻，他们拒绝认真对待外国人，这是一种愚蠢，必须不时地付出非常大的代价。"
英国首相戴维-卡梅伦经常采用类似的论点来说明为什么英国应该投票保留。"如果我必须用一个词来总结整个竞选活动，那就是'一起'这个词，"卡梅伦周三说。"我认为，我们一起能够更好地面对来自恐怖主义和气候变化的挑战，我们能够更好地发展我们的经济，能够更好地推动良好的贸易交易......我希望我们能够获得良好的交易，这样我们就能给我们国家的每个人更好的机会。"


奥威尔的欧洲合众国将包括那些他认为存在民主社会主义的国家：斯堪的纳维亚半岛的国家，以及德国、奥地利、捷克斯洛伐克（共产党人直到奥威尔写作后一年才在那里完全夺取政权）、瑞士、荷兰、比利时、法国、英国、西班牙和意大利。虽然这可能表明奥威尔不认为东欧国家是潜在的成员，但在他生活的世界里，许多现在处于英国脱欧辩论中心的国家（因为从那里移民到英国）要么是苏联的一部分，要么是苏联的附庸。奥威尔认为一个统一的欧洲是对苏联和美国的一种制衡，而且，他说。

如果欧洲合众国要想自给自足，能够对抗俄罗斯和美国，就必须包括非洲和中东地区。但这意味着必须改变这些国家原住民的地位，使其得到承认--摩洛哥或尼日利亚或阿比西亚[今埃塞俄比亚]必须不再是殖民地或半殖民地，成为与欧洲人民完全平等的自治共和国。

这将意味着目前向欧洲输送大量移民的世界部分地区的许多人--被希望对移民进行更多控制的英国脱欧运动者所谴责的趋势--本来是奥威尔的欧洲的一部分。




奥威尔对英国的独特性的看法和他对统一的欧洲的支持可能并不矛盾。而且，奥威尔很可能对欧盟的演变--从欧洲战后最伟大的实验到主要为促进成员国之间的贸易而存在的跨国集团--不屑一顾--更不用说欧盟的许多法规及其繁琐的官僚机构不止一次被描述为 "奥威尔式"，即《动物农场》和《1984》等作品中设想的极权主义的乌托邦。1947年，奥威尔写道，欧洲超级国家是防止战争的唯一途径，而一年后，在《1984》中，他描述了一个歇斯底里的超级国家，包括英国（飞机跑道一号）和北美，与另一个超级国家欧亚大陆处于永久的战争状态。

他的观点是在1941年至1948年这段时间内演变而来的吗？或者说，他的观点可能与英国选民现在的情况差不多--在英国与欧洲关系的成本与收益问题上存在分歧？奥威尔没有告诉我们，今天的英国从表面上看，似乎与奥威尔描述的时代没有什么共同之处。然而，这其中有明确无误的呼应。"1940年的英国与1840年的英国能有什么共同之处？" 奥威尔在 "英格兰你的英格兰 "中问道。"但是，你和你母亲放在壁炉架上的五岁孩子的照片有什么共同之处？没有，除了你们碰巧是同一个人"。

克里希纳德夫-卡拉穆尔是《大西洋》杂志的前高级编辑。他是《孟买谋杀案》的作者。