This Easter has seen unprecedented British headline coverage about the opinions of some of our unelected leaders – the clergy.

Moral Interventions Over Easter

The Archbishop of Canterbury warned against international greed for oil, power and territory and he gave a doom-laden indication of the collapse of civilization.

The evangelical Bishop of Rochester plugged into the economic mood by attacking greedy bankers.

These two moralistic interventions paled into insignificance next to an unprecedented direct attack by the Catholic Church in Scotland on controversial embryo research legislation.

Blairite support for the Catholic Church has always been a function of its appeal to the rightwing Irish-origin Catholic English and Scots working class.

The link became obvious over the weekend as we saw what could only be interpreted as a pre-emptive strike by known Blairites in support of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

Rumours of a major Cabinet reshuffle designed to dispose of some troublesome Blair ‘leftovers’ made have had something to do with this but such mundane concerns would not have been uppermost in the Cardinal’s mind. 

His position, like that of his Anglican colleagues, was one of principle and it resulted in some very irritated scientists accusing Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of failing to understand the science of embryo research.

Trying to Reverse History

All this palaver shows a new confidence in the Churches.  They now operate within a political climate that encourages faith interventions because cultural issues have been re-introduced into wider discourse ahead of traditional economic interests. Tony Blair opened this door and they have stepped through.

This return of traditional culture to the debate could become a dead end. If anything, it might fuel the argument of the BNP that culture is the political issue. We could point to fringe Wodenist web sites that would add a fiery racial paganism to the national political mix (although the vast majority of English pagans are assiduously a-political).

But, even in the mainstream, there is ever-increasing nonsense coming from all sides in discussions of ‘Britishness’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘identity’. 

The proposed oath of allegiance to the Crown received a particularly negative reaction and not just from Republicans: it was seen as presumptuous that any true-born Briton should be asked to prove his inner duty with an oath.

Britons know where their allegiance lies in a rather blood-and-soil way that despises intellectual analysis.

We now have Government commitments to flag-flying, to soldiers wearing their uniform in the street (not a popular idea with some base commanders trying to keep their squaddies out of trouble on a Saturday night in Biggleswick-under-water), a 'Dad's Army' for national security and (today) a rather nice but odd tribute to the Bevin Boys.

The common theme in all this is a Government looking backwards to a mythic 1940s. It is giving up on the early Blair attempt to create a new and 'modern' national identity. It thinks, perhaps, that it can inspire us to wartime spirit over the fate of 'our boys' in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Government seems angered by a perceived lack of a patriotism. But loyalty to this Government is not comparable with the true Churchillian message of 1940. 

Churchill got loyalty from the people because his loyalty was to the people, Conservative and Labour alike, when the country needed to be unified against a real threat after the class struggles of the 1920s and 1930s.

This is important. In the 1940s, the Crown stayed in the country and did not scuttle. A Government of national unity united the classes. Churchill spoke for the country in the House of Commons in 1940 and mounted a national interest coup within his own Party.

The New Labour Government is, unfortunately, closer to the Chamberlain Government - in office but no longer in power and having misjudged both the international and the economic situation.

The Cynical View & The Golden Age

To be cynical, however, much of this nonsense, which is the butt of humour throughout the land, is also about the Labour pensioner vote in the run-up to the May local elections. 

By reminding over-65s of the values of the 1940s (even if they could have been no more than toddlers), the Government perhaps thinks that it will hold on to old Labour loyalties and just swing it for Labour if the disenchanted and bored younger generations decide to stay at home.

These interventions tell us that the traditional British identity that sustained the war effort in the 1940s, and which the much-despised Enoch Powell saw collapsing in the 1970s, is now terminally ill. This attempted resuscitation is of a corpse.

Whether used cynically as a last shot at the tag end of Labour's vote or as an honest attempt to recreate some mythic golden age - from the Dick Van Dyke school of British history - it is an attempt to plug into a tradition that has gone.

British 'pluck' would return quickly enough if jackboots really did threaten to land beneath the White Cliffs of Dover but the nearest jackboots are those of American lawyers extraditing British businessmen and European policemen (soon) chasing some Kosovar gangster.

As we saw in the last posting, no-one believes that the country is at risk from external forces - even terrorism has been downgraded to a level below that of a bad dose of the 'flu. 

The biggest threats to the well-being of any British citizen are probably petty criminals, blind economic forces, the weather and the government itself. We will probably need a Roosevelt, not an ersatz Churchill.

Faith Leaders Fill the Vacuum

The new interest in unelected faith leaders and in the forms and principles of politics rather than its content seems to be intensifying just before that moment in history when (to adapt Brecht) morals will once again be replaced by the demand for bread.

The World Food Programme has already launched an ‘extraordinary emergency appeal’ for $500m to avoid rationing food aid because of spiraling costs. 

The newspapers are full of what would have been accepted as the partial collapse of capitalism in the 1930s but for which there is no longer any public language now that Marxism has been discredited.

The seriousness of the economic situation is only just beginning to sink in. If we wipe away the hysteria, it is probably just a correction in global capitalism, one that is shifting resources from the West to the emerging world. Capitalism is far from dead.

But what do the victims do? The impotence of an earlier generation of victims - in the 1930s for example - could be channelled into collective revolt centred on secular ideologies. 

We had communism and fascism but also the Popular Front, the New Deal and the re-organisation of the British centre-left that led to the welfare state (and was endorsed by a generation of conservatives after the event).

This time around it is different. The parties of the centre-left have colluded in the system that has broken down. Nor is it just a case of a struggle for power within the dominant part of the global system. 

The victims, if the crisis goes too far, could be watching an increase in Arab, Chinese and Russian wealth as they are scrabbling over scraps. There is no precedent for this unless it be the collapse of Arab, Mughal and Chinese dominance before superior Western technology.

What may be dying is not so much capitalism but the asumption of Western dominance within the capitalist model. The belief of social democrats and neo-conservatives alike that a working capitalism requires a ‘pale pink’ liberal democracy to work adequately may be tested and found wanting.

And if the assumption that liberal mass activism in the West on behalf of (say) Sudanese, Tibetan or Burmese victims of state capitalism proves (as we believe will be the case) to be futile, then the bitterness of defeat may have domestic effects of which we can, as yet, know nothing.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

With no domestic secularist redistributionist political strategy of any credibility left within the West, any anger at failures in government is becoming sullen and disengaged - or it is turning ‘spiritual’ which is like saying that it is living in cloud-cuckoo land when it comes to restraining the rapacity of the rich and powerful.

Non-democratic restraint of the powerful is only possible through the sorts of authoritarian cultural intervention that, of course, only make the most rich and powerful more so.

The Dalai Lama's strategy of spiritual persuasion may preserve Tibetan culture and perhaps create the conditions for an accomodation with Communist China - he and his successors can simply out-sit the Central Committee in theory - but it is a strategy that still requires a strong China or its complete collapse from extraneous pressures.

What it is not is a liberation strategy and the major pro-Western religions have developed strongly passive and conservative strategies for protecting their own people, waiting on change (such as the Vatican exploitation of weakness in the Soviet system) rather than developing forward strategies.

The Vatican, for example, moved out of this space in Latin America in its effective condemnation of liberation theology and preference for developmentalist Opus Dei models - both Protestant evangelism (spiritual) and Bolivarism (political-material) filled the space.

Now, it is probable that impatient Tibetan nationalists are making their own history. 'Spiritual' leaders either have to discipline their own radicals or go with their flow. In every such case, a failure of 'auctoritas', the mentality of Augustine or the Inquisition, must lead to schism.

Once secular democracy ceases to constrain within liberal boundaries, spiritual leaders become 'tainted' either by the need to draw blood for their people or adopt a strategy of accommodation with power. The worst case is when secular power is used to destroy the schismatics - a common Catholic trick but not one likely to appeal to the Dalai Lama.

This is the new world that seems to be emerging in the wake of weakening hold of Western liberal democracy over its peoples. Men of faith are having to assert their values because they fear the vacuum created by liberal failures of will and policy.

Faith and Power

There is a political version of natural selection. Faith can combine with secular power and secular power can appropriate faith in this struggle. Faith associated with secular power can soon gain predatory dominance over multi-faith and decentralised democratic or localist alternatives.

The price of Catholic domination of Western culture was an accomodation with that rather dark character (read his life story) the Emperor Constantine, while cuddly old Anglicanism required Henry VIII to exist at all. Luther famously allied himself with the magistrates against Church and peasants.

Faith-based auctoritas is all about reining and destroying competitors for power and not about material redistribution of either economic or political resources.

The secular pitch implicit in auctoritas, as in Augustus the greatest of such figures, is that order does not redistribute power or wealth but it increases, through its stability, total wealth.

'Spirituality' often craves such order precisely because its mission is not material - at the most it wants to open up the space for charity, the free spirit of giving.

Stability means authority. Faith leaders are unelected and are authorities. The tendency towards the politically authoritarian in faith cultures is unmistakable.

But just as Emperors used the language of the Republic and Communists used the language of Democracy, so our frightened authoritarian faith-orientated betters are using the language of Liberalism when they mean something very different. 

Communitarianism and Authoritarianism

Gordon Brown has been bitten hard in his political ankle by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor. He speaks of his faith (as his predecessor did) and the Cardinal has called his bluff - or rather contrasted one faith (Scots Catholic) with another (Scots Protestant).

Once Blair and Brown had introduced the language of rights and duties and of communitarianism, they were on a slippy slope towards accepting 'auctoritas' as a legitimate basis for politics in opposition to the 'demos'. 

Duties imply something external or essential to the individual. This, in turn, philosophically, implies that essentialism must have an interpreter beyond the relative and the contingent - an authority who one accepts on the basis of faith.

The recent proposal for compulsory voting is typical of the new stealth authoritarianism from an anxious elite. Instead of changing political forms to engage the public in the system by transforming it, the public are to be forced into a duty of engagement. 

This too is a culture of faith where 'oughts' are to govern what is. We ought to owe allegiance to the State or vote and so we must be made to demonstrate that we have fulfilled our duty.

This mentality has not existed in British politics since working people managed to shake off the squire and the parson over a hundred years ago.

The British public has walked away from politics for some very good reasons (including the preachiness of its current leadership) but, like Hitler in the Bunker in 1945, the politicians are blaming the people instead of themselves.

They are now arranging 'reforms' to buttress a busted system rather than thinking through why people are walking away and whether sovereignty truly resides in the people or in the machine.

The universal answer to this within the British elite remains that sovereignty resides in the Crown, but of course this no longer means our attenuated and basically decent Monarchy. 

It means a somewhat busted political class in Parliament, created out of central party lists, whose sole purpose is to supports competing Executives on the orders of their respective Party Whips.

The next stage is that traditional party allegiances themselves will collapse. 

The Tories have already tried to confuse matters by calling on trades unionists to reconsider their allegiance to New Labour, part of a strategy to remind Leftists just how disillusioned they are with a right-wing Labour Party.

This is so much nonsense too. The best that will happen from such tactics is the sullen withdrawal of natural supporters of all three traditional parties until the political class tries to hold back the dam of resentment, not only with 'fixes' like compulsory voting but transfers of funds into their own coffers through state funding.

In the end, voters will be legally bound into forms of behaviour they despise and resent as their taxes subsidise second rate professionals who act as mere liaison officers with the Executive, the real winner from such trickery.

Churches and Liberal Extremists Fill the Gap

Given that some of the more illusory aspects of British democracy have become ever clearer since the mass march of 2003 over Iraq, it is understandable that the Churches can seem no less legitimate than the policians and that they have an opportunity to meet the deficit.

The logic is for political factions to seek alliances with faith leaders. These may jointly demand a more intensive implementation of the new morality of rights and duties that seem to impinge more on the victims than on the creators of the almighty mess that most citizens see looming ahead.

I am not being fair to the Archbishop of Canterbury, I know this, and certainly not to liberal Anglicanism but leaders of other faiths, Jewish, Muslim and Catholic, are now in danger of setting the agenda because of the collapse in trust in secular democratic leadership.

Faith-based politics, and its offshoot which is an aggressive anti-faith politics, are becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

The Dutch are now preparing for the back-lash expected in the Muslim world as right-wing liberal extremist Geert Wilders releases his assertively anti-Islamic film in a direct challenge to implicit Muslim censorship of Western freedoms. This anti-faith intervention is a back-handed compliment to the rise of faith-based politics.

The Dutch Government and others have asked Wilders to desist but he seems adamant that the film will be released, probably on the internet, before the end of March. No-one knows (other than himself) what exactly it contains.

What we do know is that it will accuse Islam and the Koran of representing a fascist ideology. We have to oppose the release of this film simply because we consider it provocative bad manners but we consider both sides – banners and promoters – to be as bad as each other.

Most of the pragmatic establishment on both sides of the fence is rallying around pre-emptive diplomacy to miminise the effects of an 'irresponsible' internet release of a film that is expected to result in at least some deaths – whether of rioters or Dutch troops in Afghanistan.

It is not a case of Wilders being prepared to die for his beliefs but of his being prepared to have others' die for his beliefs - the true sign of the fanatic. The Grand Mufti of Syria (a moderate) has warned the European Parliament of ‘global consequences’ – 100 died in the Muhammed cartoons riots in 2006.

This genie will be let out of the bottle as a reaction to the faith explosion – a few extremists in one tradition will now provoke another tradition and inspire a counter-extremism that will soon bring 'chickens home to roost'.

Folk Memories & History Books

Faith is becoming a player again and faiths tend to have central figures who speak with authority - not Sunni Islam and Judaism perhaps, but certainly the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Iranian Grand Ayatollah and the Archbishop of Canterbury. None of these were voted into office - nor was the local priest, rabbi or imam.

As democracy falters and congeals, there is an unreported faith-based realignment of political forces in which the Vatican, many Western liberal secularists, Saudi conservatives and Jewish interests are tending to combine against any accommodation with Radical Islam and, implicitly, with the Shi’a and anti-Western Leftism/state nationalism.

The Bin Laden threats against the Papacy (in the context of the Muhammed cartoons), scarcely reported in the UK, are taken much more seriously in Europe, especially Italy, than in the UK. There is a logic to Al-Qaeda resentment of the Papacy. It may seem an absurd logic but it works from their assumptions. 

The Vatican is much concerned with the fate of its brother Christians (especially In Iraq), it has come, with some difficulty, to a final accomodation with the Jewish community after centuries of collusion with anti-semitism, it has a recent historical role in collaboration with the US in destroying the rival ideology of communism (and so may reasonably be considered collusive in any US war with Islam) and, now, the Vatican and the Saudi and Qatari authorities appear to have come to an 'understanding' on opening churches on their respective soils.

A faith in alliance with your secular enemies - to Al-Qaeda, the Vatican is a natural target.

This is a new and still only vaguely defined cold war between those defending settled faiths and those promoting new and expansive faiths, or newly radicalised versions of old faiths that appeal to the politically excluded and perhaps, one day, to the hungry.

The economic infrastructures underpinning these new tensions will become clearer over time but secular authorities are faced with a new difficulty that hungry peasants and workers will not be led by alien communists but by traditionalists. 

In the war on terror, just as you might fight fire with fire, so conservative traditionalists become assets, rise in influence and undermine liberal secularism by demanding equal say on 'moral issues' (which have a tendency to expand in scope with time).

Liberal social democrats are particularly ‘screwed’ by what is happening because liberalism is, for the first time in history, now being protected by traditional conservative interests against ‘fanatical’, as the liberals see things, redistributors of power and resources.

This link, of faith and revolt and of faith and authority, has not been important in the West since the Early Modern peasant revolts and, after these were suppressed, inconvenient tribal insurgencies.

So, the past is not dead at all. Understanding some of these developments in international affairs still comes down to folk memories and to what has been taught in history books for partisan reasons.

We may, for example, think that early sixteenth century resistance to the Ottoman Empire in the European East is irrelevant today, yet it has been a central factor in the forms and content of recent murder and mayhem in the Balkans.

Northern Ireland used to be our native object lesson in the burdens of history but, with the collapse of a two power Cold War system that was keeping histories buried and in check, out they come again – and, in many cases, so they should.

Strange Alliances

All sorts of strange alliances and political positions are now emerging, based less on what we think we want for ourselves (as with traditional interest politics) and more about defending ourselves against what we think others want from us.

Arabs have created a narrative, with some justification, of dispossession, based on the proven conduct of white settlers in the massive white migrations out of Europe in the nineteenth century.

The Russians are rediscovering their Orthodoxy and their role as the Third Rome. Latin Americans reject Marx for Bolivar. Americans seek to extend their constitutional arrangements extraterritorially. 

The list of adaptations of local history to international relations is endless - we are moving backwards in time to an international politics that would be more familiar to diplomats operating before the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 than after it.

Even within the UK, liberal Protestants tend to be much more sympathetic to the general thrust of Muslim sentiment than Jews and Hindus, while minority right-wing Anglicanism tends to have emerging country or radical evangelical aspects.

The struggles around Livingstone's Mayoral candidacy owe a great deal to the melt-down of his rainbow politics as representatives of opposing ethnic groups start tearing into each other.

Not a lot of this is rationally considered - tribes associate or disassociate on 'faith' and the cultures involved are closer to those of football club supporters than reasoned debaters. Where is all this leading? Well, the first thing to say is that economic crises also bring out certain types of spiritual leader.

This will upset some people but Hitler was, for his people, briefly a spiritual leader and, post-war, a small esoteric clique represented by Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, and in a far more detached manner, Julius Evola, have sustained that 'spiritual' vision, despite the mainstream blanket ban on letting much wind of it come out into the open.

Communism’s eschatology and iconography were religious in its inspiration and Marxism has always been more powerful as a faith rather than a creature of analytical reason.

There is more of this to come. The radical religious elements in the resistance to colonialism and imperialism have now displaced the tendency towards accommodation and (relative) reasonableness of the first fifty years of struggle because accomodation and reasonableness delivered bugger-all.

Yasser Arafat and George Habash, even the ‘evil’ Saddam, appear ‘pale pink’ next to the ‘blood red’ of Shia and Sunni martyrdoms. If the Left Hand Path is triumphing, it is because the Right Hand Path failed to deliver justice.

Roosting Chickens

As the Reverend Wright said, ‘chickens are coming home to roost’. When the true instincts of the people are better expressed by Archbishops with a 2,000-year apostolic succession than by elected politicians, then there is something going very wrong with Western liberalism.

A recent Prime Minister who wore religion on his sleeve yet declared a bloody war and left office to take large sums from bankers is not the authentic product. We all sense it. A shallow man of straw. The new Prime Minister is a sincere 'son of the manse' but his ethic seems a world away from the sophisticated a-moral liberalism of his English subjects.

Perhaps this is why Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, John McCain are so interesting – for all their flaws, the public detects that both men have some moral core that is in tune with the Western tradition at its best and that has been sadly lacking in the fanatical egotistical and power-crazed networks of the small people who have ruled the West recently.

If so, the fashion for religious leadership within the West may well pass because it is merely there to fill a vacuum and, when that vacuum is filled with tough competent leaders who are more than 'spin', then we can all get down to secular business again.

But, without being too apocalyptic about the collapse of civilization (pace the Archbishop of Canterbury), it is probably wise to bet on a ‘time of troubles’ ahead while secular democracy gets its house in order.

www.tppr.co.uk

It is Eastertide in the Western Christian (and children's chocolate egg) tradition and so our next posting will be on 26 March as we celebrate at least the potential for peace on earth implicit in the holiday.

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In this season of peace and goodwill, we cannot resist sharing, following the announcement of the British Government's 'new' security policy , the words in the 'evidential' (effectively, explanatory) section of the Draft Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill , buried deep within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's web site. There are two gems to ponder.

Page 88 - The Government’s assessment of the short and medium term threat of armed invasion of the UK by another country is zero.

Page 90 - ... the only scenario where such compensation would be payable would be where the UK is the occupying power, which we consider unlikely in the current climate.

Consider what is being said here by Her Majesty's Government: "Let us be clear - the UK is under no military threat ['zero'] from another sovereign state power and we are not occupying any territory, certainly not Basra City, Helmand Province or (by proxy) Diego Garcia or any other military base outside our shores."

Whatever it is that we British do overseas, we never occupy anything, any more than the US, our ally. Nor it seems does any major Power, despite significant troop and police presences and effective control over the rule of law, whether of China in Tibet, the EU in Kosovo or Russia in the Chechen lands, where, in all these cases, it is a moot point that the presence is precisely legal or wanted.

The only occupations apparently recognised by HMG are those of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights by Israel.

Today, vast tracts of the world have soldiers criss-crossing the ground and yet the British Government recognises none of these lands as being 'occupied' by anyone. They are certainly not occupied by the normal residents since these are often forced to become refugees (4.5m internally displaced and overseas in the Iraq case alone) by such non-occupations.

Of course, I am being deliberately naive. Occupation is a technical term in international law and it only requires a puppet government or a sovereign government with no other choice to invite the alleged occupiers to remain for an occupation to cease to be an occupation.

It may cynically be said that the only reason that Gaza and the West Bank are still classed as occupied (the Golan being sui generis) is that there is no sovereign entity to be forced into accepting a 'legitimate' Israeli presence for 'shared' security reasons.

The diplomats will refer to 'international law' but international law can mean a massive concatenation of UN Conventions and 'fixes' in which the judge and jury tend to be the same thing.

There are few international judicial mechanisms independent of some sort of executive control of the agenda, executive authorities are legislators and there is minimal policing of the law except through those authorities.

Even if the judicial system was given more power (as liberals in the West advocate), there is no democratic legitimacy underpinning the system and democratic states can be forced into conduct or policy by international conventions that may operate against their national interests.

If the UK was run like the international system, it would be positively medieval. The Crown (the US in the international system) would be primus inter pares and the major barons could decide to impose the King's Law over the population willy-nilly, with the only constraint being the need not to upset their own households and retainers (that's us) too much.

In our real history, common law operated as a check on executive power - an advantage sorely missed by Europeans with their Roman system. The international system is very, very Roman. There is no international common law as such unless you count the weak bonds of religion.

Such systems soon become debased, like the days of King John or in the peasant myth of the 'good Tsar', into whether the 'King' is a 'good' or a 'bad' King, either absolutely or relative to Baron Hussein or the bandit Bin Laden.

Of course, this goodness or badness is irrelevant except to traditionalist conservatives (like Mr. Blair) because the system is still feudal, still centralising and tends inevitably to 'roman' absolutism. The international system, c'est nous.

And so, major states [barons] do not 'occupy' because they are invited in for 'protection', they weasel a transfer of sovereign rights or they have 'occupied' the land for sufficient time in the hoary old right of conquest much beloved in medieval Europe - much as the Chinese invasion of Tibet demonstrated in the 1950s. Droit de Seigneur has nothing on Droite de Conquete.

We have no moral position on this. We just find it fascinating how po-faced moralising liberal legalism will claim only those universal principles that suit its chief proponents.

Just as in early modern states, there is still only one rule for the rich and one for the poor within international absolutism. The global system's legal framework still remains deeply flawed because of the historic domination of one part of the world over another.

This is one of the paradoxes of American hegemony - that a country built constitutionally on a resistance movement against royalism should reproduce royalism and feudalism in its management of the world outside its own boundaries.

Which brings us to a Great Britain, one of the King's Party, and one that has no (it's official) military enemies.

We think this is over-sanguine but only because in the long run of history, centuries not decades, there will come a time when European and British cultural conflicts may see blue uniforms with small stars tempted to wander through the Channel Tunnel - but, of course, that's just paranoia.

However, we can take it at face value that the Russians never were going to go past the Rhine unless provoked and will not need to go to war with us when they will probably be able to buy us out of petty cash within a few decades. Today, Chelsea Football Club, tomorrow the world. Let's hope we have something to sell by then.

The Europeans currently offer a simulacrum of eternal peace and harmony, the US is an 'ally' and no Arab or Persian state could mount an invasion of our shores even if some potty nouveau Caliph thought it was a good idea.

Nor need we need fear a resurgence of Viking nationalism from Norway, a forgotten claimant to the throne from the line Cnut, a Jacobite rising engineered from the Elysee, an armed and vengeful Ireland - or even a Scots Covenanter attempt to install a Bruce on the throne of England. So, let us take the Government's claim at face value.

Er, so what is the State for? The Crown (taking as read any criminal seizure of resources from weaker parties) was legitimated by one thing above all - the protection of its subjects. If subjects do not need protecting from invasion, it raises a serious question of what Government is for in its Crownly incarnation.

Of course, my question is as naive as my comments on occupation. In addition to its institutional instinct for self-preservation, the British State has moved on.

In its current quasi-democratic form, it maintains (or tries to maintain) its own stability, law and order, economic stability at worst and growth at best. In its more socialist iterations, not excluding the Tory Leader's discovery of 'social capital theory', the welfare of individuals and even the protection and enhancement of life opportunities for the relatively disadvantaged are on the agenda. Not even Americans have yet got that 'civilised'.

Bit by bit, the function of the State moves from protecting subjects as its economic assets from other predators ('better the predator you know') to being (in theory) the agent of the citizens themselves. So, again, if there is no threat of predation from outside by another sovereign state, why do we need our expensive military capability?

Why precisely a standing army, a navy and an air force - or even the scale of great power foreign policy apparatus that we maintain. This is the background to Gordon Brown's catch-all security statement.

Part an assessment of genuine threats, it is also a desperate attempt to sell to the British People (the more so as we head for serious economic turbulence) the belief that we actually need all this expensive paraphrenalia of statehood - like African states used to 'need' a loss-making state airline or a cement factory.

The threats are not all manufactured by any means but some of the hysteria about them is - and there is a determined attempt to talk up some scary issues and diminish others because a proper debate would be embarrassing.

An entire infrastructure of institutional power has been built up on assumptions that may not hold water. A lot of people have built budgets and careers from a world in which massed tank battles across the North German European Plain may not have been very likely but were credibly possible and reasonable to plan for on the precautionary principle.

A debate on fundamentals is not 'politically', given the closed nature of the British political class, 'wise'. It is like the Rev. Wright saying 9/11 attacks were like "chickens coming home to roost". It happens to be true but no politician would dare agree in public with such an 'inconvenient truth' and still expect to be accepted as 'one of us'.

The panic in the House Of Commons Defence Select Committee this week that a failure by Europeans to invest in NATO would result in the Americans losing interest in Europe is as much about this political elite losing its justification for its institutional presence as the nation's rulers by divine right (the Crown displaced by Parliament) as it is about any real strategic threat.

We now have conservative institutions like NATO resisting serious debate about their use-value in a modern liberal state and we have progressive politicians desperately running around seeking new things for these institutions to do, uncovering new and old threats to justify continued engagement. This is combustible material in terms of peace on earth.

The circle is squared, of course, with the British liberal-progressive love affair with three multilateral institutions - the United Nations (because it creates a framework of a largely Western-inspired rule of law), the European Union (because it means that regional defence can deter some threats before they become threats to the Atlantic Islands) and NATO (which really has no purpose at all other than to keep the Americans in Europe).

There is a rational (if weaker than we like to think) national interest in British engagement with the UN and the EU, even if both seem to give cover for British participation in unnecessary foreign adventures that increase rather than diminish threats to British subjects on British soil.

But there needs to be more of a debate about NATO. The 'fix' to hold it together as a Cold War relic will take place in Bucharest next month, but it is a broken tool because it is riddled with contradictory purposes, meeting different needs for very different participants.

For some it is a ticket to joining the Western Club, to others it keeps the Americans from going isolationist, to others still it is a way station towards a European Defence Force.

Is it still, covertly, a deterrent to the Russian Empire? Is it (as some Americans want) a forward agent for the containment of Russia? Is it an instrument for dealing with insurgency? or for dealing with global (aka Western) energy security? Is its purpose to spread Western liberal ideas into a benighted emerging world and to police failed states?

Which of these are really required by the British national (that is, the British people's) interest and at what cost? And why are Atlanticists so nervous of an independent European military capability? And who do the Americans really protect by being based in Europe?

These are serious questions for the general public to consider, because the fearful result may be a realisation that the American and British national interest lies in returning Europe to the Europeans and letting the US get on with its global mission with new partners.

From a national interest perspective, this comes down to something far more basic than the Atlantic connection per se. Is NATO a collaborative instrument for meeting the primary duty of the Crown which is the Defence of the Realm?

Or is it an instrument for defence for expansion with British participation in an attempt to extend Western values to the limits of their potential?

Is it really in the national interest to encourage a process that risks clashes in the European and Western borderlands, clashes that may lead, like Sarajevo in 1914 or Danzig in 1939, to a serious inter-state clash over resources or culture within the coming century?

If it is an issue of simple Defence of the Realm, then perhaps it is time for the British to bite the bullet and accept that the two most obvious and nearest threats to its existence and stability are an over-ambitious Europe and an over-ambitious West.

And if it is to claim a stake in a European capability then the national (aka the people's) interest is in one under popular democratic control and constitutionally limited to the defence of clear and defined borders.

The corollary of this is that the effective defence of Europe does not require an obsession with sea routes (though these are important) so much as an accommodation with the Arab community and with Russia. What the national interest certainly does not require is Cold War style confrontation with anyone.

Perhaps we also need a rethinking of international law in relation to both energy security and counter-insurgency (including organised crime), one that is centred on avoiding provocations in a complex world. In this respect, as we look to peace on earth and goodwill to all men this season, we have to be pessimistic.

There are too many institutional interests in the United Kingdom concerned with what our French friends call 'gloire', with the survival of systems beyond their sell-by date, with the jobs and flows of cash associated with particular historic models of national defence and with the emotional belief that guns are useful tools in settling the mess created by the West in its imperial phase.

In some cases, the old guard are just that - old, sclerotic, incapable of envisioning another world in which you may invest in big sticks but you ensure that you never have to provoke someone and use it.

This other world is one where you guard your own house well and pay taxes for policemen, but do not go lumbering around to neighbours and bursting into their houses to check that they are conducting themselves properly. The world has probably had enough of busy-body amateur social workers with theories out of a book ...

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The Danish cartoons controversy is raising its ugly head again, with some Northern European liberals deliberately tweaking the Prophet’s beard.

TPPR shares with Voltaire the belief that, in principle, freedom of expression is an absolute right (otherwise we would have been locked up years ago), but there does seem to be a difference between stating an opinion, no matter how wrong-headed, and asserting it as an offensive act in a cultural war.

Such a cultural war is now being played out, over most reasonable persons' heads, through a vicious cycle of symbolic acts, involving teddy bears in Sudan, valentines cards in Saudi Arabia, 'thought crimes' in London and, of course, these unfunny cartoons. 

The ignorance and arrogance on both sides is much as we have come to expect from solipsistic Western intellectuals and those people of faith whose identity is wrapped up in the outer forms rather than the inner reality of their beliefs.

One side will adopt the counter-terror ethic of banning all reference to Caliphate theory much as it silences national socialist 'theory', while the other will wrongly associate liberal values with a highly charged distaste for religion, especially Islam.

Meanwhile, in a race against time, the Turkish Diyanet (the State body for religious affairs) is coming to the conclusion of its programme of liberal and revisionist reform of the Sayings of the Prophet, while the Pakistan Government, with every public order justification, almost closes down the internet in a desperate attempt to keep the cartoons off YouTube within its territory.

This cultural war - in which the real victims are always the 'little people', from the Copts in Egypt to the migrants in Flemish towns - is fuelled by a sensationalist media and political interests on both sides.

The radical liberals have forgotten that expressing oneself is only part of freedom. The second part is to do it responsibly, with an eye to respect for those who disagree with you and to the consequences. 

It is one thing to stand up heroically, aware of the consequences, within a tyranny and existentially take the risk of demanding the freedom to speak out (as many bravely do in authoritarian regimes).

It is another to do so in a free society and expect public policy to bend itself entirely to your opinion without taking account of the effects on others. The heroes of liberal thought are degraded by the bullies who appropriate them.

As expected, there have been sharp reactions across the Muslim world, notably in Sudan and Pakistan, to the latest promotion of the Danish cartoons. Boycotts of Danish products are increasing, notably in stricter wahhabi and mahdist communities (officially so in Sudan) and there have been demonstrations and actions in Yemen, Jordan, Gaza, Syria and Egypt.

Here is just a selection of recent news reports ...

• Sudan
• Pakistan
• Egypt
• Yemen
• Qatar

In Denmark itself, Hizb ut Tahrir [the Caliphate group demonised by the liberal Right] demonstrated peacefully the streets of Copenhagen on February 15th, with the authorisation of the Danish government.

However, Villy Sovndal, President of the Popular Socialist Party declared that if the Muslims of Denmark wanted to set up a caliphate, they should go and live in a Middle Eastern dictatorship. 

This is a bit like those Alf Garnetts of yesteryear telling Lefties that "if you like the Soviet Union so much, why don't you bleeding well go and live there." Not exactly an intellectually sophisticated response.

The Danish Prime Minister labelled Hizb ut-Tahrir, probably quite rightly, as "anti-democratic" and then congratulated Sovndal stating that "the debate on (our) values was on the right track" (Le Monde 25 February). 

Hmmmmm! So debate on values is only legitimate if it presupposes liberal democracy - that's on some philosophically dodgy ground to say the least but is clearly the trend in Western thinking. 

There are many, many arguments against Caliphate thinking and its relevance to modern Europe but we have to do better than this - certainly, throwing insults at the enemy's deepest and most cherished beliefs is no substitute for thinking and engagement.

None of this is of great significance in London at this time, but there is nervousness of infection from both sides – Caliphate ‘nutters’ and hard-line dim-witted extreme liberals.

Both sides are way out of line, with the Caliphatics being a tiny minority of Muslims in Europe and the extreme liberals mostly making intellectual points for the drawing room and for domestic political reasons.

In many ways, the Muslim-Liberal cultural war in Europe (similar to the neo-con/Zionist-Muslim war in the US) is just another manifestation of Western cultural fragmentation.

Instead of embracing that fragmentation as a creative competitive advantage as we do in London, New York and Los Angeles, European extremists seem to want to create the security blanket of a republican virtue that has never existed except as disguised oppression of 'difference'. Of course, I write with the typically British suspicion of Jacobinical 'enthusiasms'.

Europe has also been much exercised by something scarcely noted in London but of considerable cultural significance in a wider context. In Anglo-Saxon countries, asserting one’s own ethnic or cultural identity is rarely regarded as a threat to the constitution unless you go into direct criminal opposition to it.

Europe's republican tradition has identity more bound up with the wider culture - after all, many of its national identities had required the relatively recent suppression of smaller linguistic identities in waves of enforced state formation (as the British Crown once did to the Welsh). Ask the Occitans and Catalonians.

The emergence of a new faith-based and regionalist culture of difference is unnerving republican traditionalists.

Cem Özdemir, MEP, a German Green and so a liberal in the American sense, and a naturalized German at the age of 18, declared, in response to Erdogan (not that Erdogan was saying much else in practice), that Turks should accept the democratic principles of their country of residence.

Özdemir is far more typical of European (and American) Muslims than the Caliphatics. The 'debate' with Hizb Ut-Tahrir is a massive red herring that rather suits the new Liberal Right (in which category we must include many alleged 'socialists') in its struggles for influence and power within Europe.

He points out that Turks are not so understanding of Kurds and this is another problem. Let us leave what Özdemir believes and point out a common factor on both sides - both are not concerned with strengthening their own communities so much as trying to pressure and reform the other without full understanding of local conditions and realities.

Erdogan's public declaration did nothing to help the Turkish cause amongst the public in several countries (Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway) that (unlike London) fear Turkish entry into the EU.

There is, of course, a similar but far lower key debate in the UK but the assimilationist model is cast in more American terms and faces strong resistance from a generally anti-republican and libertarian culture outside the London salons. In the UK, Muslims are expected to sustain a private life, work hard and respect the secular state.

Erdogan’s statement in Germany has been scarcely noticed because it would be British Pakistanis who would have told an interfering Pakistani Islamist PM to mind his own business if he stepped over a line, while the milder thesis that a Pakistani can be both Pakistani and British is uncontroversial in itself.

The wave of largely ignorant commentary on Archbishop Rowan Williams' opening of a debate on sharia law merely confirmed that the undermining of this loose, liberal consensus (that you can be who you like so long as you obey the law) by suggesting another law was just not acceptable - it did not mean that Muslims were being asked to become 'someone else' and more British.

These are complex issues, but the bottom line is that the central debate (in both the UK and Europe, in their different contexts) is moving away from terrorism and war per se towards issues of culture and assimilation. The lineaments for longer term re-alignments in what passes for ‘left’ and ‘right’ in this context have begun, yet the final trajectory is uncertain.

It is probable that indigenous republican populism will tend to the right (more ambiguously in the UK) and libertarian approaches to the left (though, again, these attitudes seem to be emerging on the British centre-right). As we have seen, many socialists take a radical republican position, while many traditionalist conservatives adopt more easy-going approach.

Whatever is happening, the cultural differences between core Europe (where the debate is cast in similar terms in French, Nordic and Germanic cultures) and the UK still seem to be profound, with the Mediterranean cultures representing yet another, more tolerant and (ironically in terms of stereotypes) far less excitable model.

The fourth major zone is, of course, the ‘East’ whose focus is Russia rather than Islam and who produce a migrant flow of their own. Whether this lot can ever be truly united is a moot point but the cultures of the major US zones are equally diverse and somehow it works.

How this will play out politically is pure speculation at this stage but, if the European Project does complete itself (which, on the odds, is probable), then we can see the distinctive regional political cultures of America re-emerging in a different form in Europe.

For Deep South, American West, Mid-West, Eastern Seaboard, read Euro-Mediterranean, Atlantic, Core Europe and the East.

The future logic is for British and Mediterranean cultures to tend to one broad model and Core Europe another, with the East as ‘swing voters’. The East may have disproportionate influence to its numbers for a while - much as it does in the Eurovision song contest.

As in the US, the core ideology is likely to be quite 'right-wing' by recent historic standards but within a liberal framework. Leftists who see a Socialist Europe are living in cloud-cuckoo land and yet we may see major shifts within and between these regions as economic and cultural circumstances change. Coalitions may come up with surprising alliances as they do in America.

The increasingly ridiculous and dangerous cultural war between an Aunt Sally Islam and loopy radical liberals is important for this long term reason - far beyond the immediate issue of bad feeling between traditionalist Islam and Europe. 

It is setting the tone for the cultural alignments that will play their role in creating the 'grand coalitions' that will, one day, form the great parties of Presidential and Parliamentary Europe. And you are as good a judge of what those parties will come to represent as we might be at this early stage in the game ... the best advice is not to commit to anything too early.

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[TPPR is appreciative of information provided by Bood & Co. in Paris.  The interpretation is entirely that of TPPR and should not be assumed to be that of its correspondents]