Sunday 14 June 2020

How big is your big picture?

How big is your big picture?


    

Introduction

We’re all familiar with the scenario. There’s this huge economic trading area, comprising of previously mutually antagonistic peoples. Within its borders goods and people move freely in a complex economic web that provides luxuries as well as essentials. Its borders are defended by up to date first world technology, its territory criss-crossed by an effective road and transport system. Despite recent economic shocks and problems its citizens live largely peaceful, prosperous and sedate lives. War is a foreign adventure not a domestic calamity. 

Outside its borders the picture is very different; the world is good deal more turbulent, less prosperous and less stable. Those outside see this economic area as a land of promise- they want a share of the good life too. Many of them are fleeing war and persecution, to such an extent that there are mass movements of population putting pressure on the borders of the settled world. 

I’m talking about the European Union, right? Well, no, actually. I’m talking about the Roman Empire in the late fourth century. When I look at that period of time I am increasingly struck by the similarities with today and it seems to me that we may be looking at the migration/immigration issues we face in far too narrow a way. 

So, about those similarities. Well, in the last but one decade of the fourth century events in what was then the Roman province of Britain had consequences in Rome itself and eventually contributed to the British exit from the Roman Empire. Maximus, the military commander in Britain, had himself declared Emperor at York and took his legions out of Britain to march on Rome. Unlike Constantine at the beginning of the century, who had done the same thing, his attempt failed, weakening the Roman grip on Britain in the process. 

Meanwhile, out on the Russian steppes, a series of crises we still don’t fully understand was causing successive waves of people to migrate west. One cause may have been Chinese expansion. Although the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire of the time seem to have been ignorant of each other’s existence (despite armies from both reaching the Caspian Sea, albeit in different centuries), Chinese pacification of the tribesmen on its western frontier possibly set off the migrations which carried on for centuries, as first the Huns, the Goths, the Alans, the Avars and finally the Magyars arrived in Europe. 

Today civil war in Syria, conflict in Africa and insecurity across the Middle East have set off movements of people who are desperate to gain entry to the “promised land” of Europe. 

The end of the Western Empire

To the settled citizenry of the Roman Empire the incomers from the East seemed uncouth and “uncivilised”. In fact, their social set-up was very sophisticated, it just ran on different lines. Those at the top of barbarian society were both well-off and well-informed and as adept at gaining advantage through negotiation as well as force. Roman policy was always two-fold- to keep out where possible or to assimilate by offering foederati status, the right to live within the Empire whilst retaining their own laws and customs. Eventually though, the numbers became too great for assimilation and their leaders perceived the weakness of the Roman leadership. During the fifth century the Lombards, the Visgoths, the Vandals and the Franks gradually assumed control of the various provinces, often in the name of Rome. The magnitude of these changes only became apparent over time. To many citizens in urban centres it was scarcely discernible at first. What mattered to them as ever was security and prosperity.

Whilst you can stretch analogies too far, recent years have seen the sheer number of incomers become a significant factor in Europe; possibly contributing to the result of the  Brexit debate and vote, and to the rise of protectionist ideas in many European countries. Meanwhile, the movement of people has been sparked by events over which the West has very little control (although we may have contributed to the causes). In the long run the Empire was replaced by barbarian kingdoms who nonetheless claimed legitimacy from Roman antecedents. The ruling families of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy inserted Julius Caesar into their family trees and the early Frankish Kings took Roman titles such as Consul.  Today's incomers are more atomised, individuals and families rather than tribes on the march of course, but they are changing Europe too.

So when I say, how big is your big picture, I mean, have you (have I) been thinking deeply enough about what is going on? Is the current situation one that can be managed or part of a fundamental change? The Roman Empire lasted several hundred years, by contrast the current status quo is a post-war construct still decades short of being a century old, whilst its current incarnation only dates back to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. One of the strengths of the Roman Empire was its adaptability; it responded to facts on the ground by re-labelling things or by re-organising the way tax was levied to allow newcomers to still claim to be part of the Roman system even though they were very different in social mores and organisation.  As a result it is very difficult to pin down a year and say, this is when the Roman Empire ended.

 In this country, no doubt influenced by the seismic change wrought by 1066, we tend to talk about 410, the year the Legions left for good, but it is clear a Sub-Roman culture persisted for another two centuries in some parts of Britain before being subsumed by what we now label as an Anglo-Saxon one. Cities such as Lincoln, Chester, Carlisle and others helped to ensure the transition from Roman to Germanic was a gradual one. Something else was going on too. Although it suited Anglo-Saxon kings to listen as their Bards told stories of how their heroic ancestors conquered the land, it seems that the process was more one of assimilation. When writers in the 7th century started talking about the peoples that made up the various kingdoms, they were talking about geography as much as ethnicity. If you lived in the territory of the Hwicce or the Magonsaetan, you were a part of that gens, to use the Latin term, regardless of whether your ancestors were Germanic or Celtic, or something else entirely. 

Europe today

Likewise today; to be German or Swedish or French means to live there and to subscribe to that society, whether your ancestors come from the Massif Central or the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, or from Bavaria or Turkey. There are, and probably always will be, people who believe in racial heritage as the main indicator of nationality and have an instinctive fear of the 'other'; I believe the lessons of the end of the Roman Empire teach us something different; that what counts is the ability to forge a society that can look after its citizens. Further, who among us can genuinely know where we come from? Roman Britain included Celtic and pre-celtic people as well as Italians of course, and the children of Roman Auxiliaries who married local women, who were from all over Europe and beyond. And the Anglo-Saxons? Rank newcomers, parvenu Johnny-come-latelys who didn’t even rock up until two and a half thousand years after the construction of Stonehenge. They were followed by Vikings, Normans, Flemings, German traders who belonged to the Hanseatic league, Huguenot refugees from France and refugees from Central Europe during the nineteenth century.  

So even before the incomers from South-East Asia, the Carribean and Africa put in an appearance, the British Isles were a melting pot of peoples. Always have been, always will be- and maybe, just possibly, we are living through another big shake-up that will transform these islands as well as the rest of Europe.. Now, you can be afraid of that, and react with fear, that is say, negatively, or you can embrace it. The visible sign of all this is of course the rubber dinghy laden with desperate people, the lorry filled with young men hoping to get through the border checks. In the fifth century the modes of transport were different but the hopes and fears of the people on them were, it is safe to say, similar. One way or another, we have to respond, the question is what form will the response take? This question is one of the big drivers of our time; how we respond will say a lot about us and our society. So, I end as I began; how big is your big picture?


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