In 2008 British Council Spain teamed up with Greg Clark, high-profile (and well-paid) urban consultant, promoting the idea of making cities more prosperous by opening them up to increased migration and cultural diversity; OPENCities. These ideas themselves were very much based on the long discredited work of Richard Florida in his books way book in 2002. The British Council’s original work was to twin Spanish Cities with British cities, to “share best practice” on how to open their cities up to greater international migration. Of course, this was a clear way of showcasing the achievements of the United Kingdom in the field of multiculturalism and its success in international education. It is this type of work, “selling the UK” – its language, its universities, its cultural products and tourism, which means the British Government continues to fund the British Council around the world. Unfortunately for the UK, the slow collapse of the post-war consensus, accelerated by the explosion of liberal inspired wars around the world and the 2008/2009 financial crash, called into question this very “internationalism” and Europe and elsewhere have seen a rise of authoritarian nationalisms, a desire for erecting borders rather than removing them. This was dramatically shown in the UK’s decision in 2016 to exit the EU largely on the basis of “controlling migration” and taking back control over its borders”. A rather embarrassing fact for the hubris of the British council, clearly the UK they were selling was not an entirely truthful reflection of what the UK actually is. Indeed, as OPENCities is now a project funding by URBAC (an EU Body) it is highly unlikely the UK can continue to participate in the very project the British Council was responsible for launching.
These events encourage us to ask just how far British Liberal Internationalism is so wrapped up in the ELT project. Of course, the main force for English’s continuing success around the globe is American economic, political and cultural power and we will attempt to explore that power elsewhere. However, British Liberal Internationalism redefined itself within this new structure and the great TEFL project was launched inside of new reality of declining British hegemony. We refer people to our piece on Jack Haycraft and the rise of International House for a further discussion of these events; a piece we are trying to update some ten years since we originally published it. This is not suggesting America has not itself shaped ELT provision but that the UK was more pushed to involve itself in this process as a means to promote its interests abroad (where it didn’t enjoy the same power of America) and, counter-intuitively, define itself at home.
What is British Liberalism, Let alone British International Liberalism?
Liberalism is a heterogeneous and often contradictory set of ideas. British liberalism had to adapt itself to its own local environments (meaning both at home and abroad) and is therefore not easily compared to American liberalism or French or German Liberalism. However, there is no doubt that the UK was a leading proponent of liberalism and these ideas have helped directly shape liberalisms elsewhere. Useful for the purposes of defining a working model of liberalism in general would be to focus on one of the undoubted founders of liberalism, John Locke. As Beate Jahn (2018) usefully summarises:
According to Locke’s theory, then, the three core principles of liberal thought are private property, individual freedom and government by consent. These principles still lie at the core of most conceptions of liberalism. Today they are embodied in the market economy, human rights, and democracy. Crucially, however, in Locke’s theory these principles are mutually constitutive: private property constitutes individual freedom, and individual freedom requires government by consent; and the main task of government, in turn, is the protection of private property, which completes the circle by upholding individual freedom.
Now Locke was writing in the 18th Century and it was difficult to see even then how the majority of the people, long since robbed of the means of reproduction and now wage slaves could aspire to actually owning property when that property was already so well divided up in the UK amongst the elites. And if private property should be the basis of participating in governments then the franchise would indeed be restricted to very few people. The same could be said of British ideas of free trade which are also linked to liberalism though often sub-categorised as economic liberalism. No doubt Adam Smith writing at a time before large scale industrialisation could envisage a growing propertied class rather than a proletariat simply because he felt workers would not give their maximum and only if people owned their own business would they work to the maximum (invisible hand). Patterns of urbanisation and industrialisation quickly disproved such optimism as the misery of the cities became quickly self-evident. The collapse of agriculture in the UK following the Napoleonic wars led to to more people flooding the cities looking for work.
In America it was different. Once robbed by their own colonial masters, the Brits, to even trade amongst their own territories, having to trade indirectly through their English masters’ controlled ports, the implantation of liberal ideas were a different matter altogether. Indeed, this idea of the propertied man lay behind Lincoln’s land grab as Native Indian land was conquered to allow just this for settler farming communities. Proving liberalism and genocide were never far apart.
Britain had to adapt to its own circumstances, the narrowness of its own property ownership and democratic franchise. Up until 1832 only 2% of the adult population actually had the vote. Cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds weren’t even represented in parliament. The 1832 act did extend representation to these cities but it only extended the franchise to a total of 200,000 people. Its liberalism was not static but it was very much confined by the narrow political settlement of the Glorious Revolution 1688. We can contrast this with the French Revolution, where capitalism had hardly penetrated agricultural relations. Here liberalism was not a wing of the establishment but a complete rupture, indeed in the end days of the Revolution Robespierre declared universal suffrage though his regime did not stay around to see it done. It was left to Napoleon to transform agrarian relations but he did extremely little to encourage rule by consent. We mention all of this because we want to outline the key mutation which takes place with British liberalism at the latter end of the 19th century and which comes to define modern Britain despite its decline.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw revolutions across Europe, revolutions not just to sweep away the Ancien régime but revolutions like the Paris Commune which threatened to install the lower classes in positions of power. Capitalism was quickly becoming dominant throughout but in the cities it was being challenged in its most developed countries by groups demanding better living conditions and greater particpation in government. The solution for so many countries was to seek answers abroad in stealing resources and creating new markets which they could control. This was the so-called Age of New imperialism. No country led this move more than the British, seeking to pacify those at home by spreading its influence and economic tentacles through every part of its colonies. No more so than in India. For example that great legacy of India’s railways is not one of generosity but far more darker as Shasi Taroor points out:
The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”. In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.
The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources – coal, iron ore, cotton and so on – to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.
And worse still:
Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to “protect investments”. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men – whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.
Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an act of parliament explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England, and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After independence, 35 years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again. There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for Britain’s railways, the London-based Rendel, today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.
The colonies therefore allowed the UK access to cheaper resources, huge profits from investments which the colonised country guaranteed through their own taxes, and, essentially economic opportunities for high level colonial administrators, soldiers and low level civil servants. The Indians could simply not be trusted to run their own affairs and needed to be guided by gentleman educated in liberal Britain. Of course, this education was offered to elites in Indian Society, and India’s first Prime minister under independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, like so many other of the Indian Elites was educated in a top British private school, (in this case Harrow) and then Oxbridge (in this case Cambridge).
In other Colonies, however, like New Zealand and Australia, the idea was to directly recreate British style Institutions and democracy. Not only did the UK export its convicts but it also exported administrators, engineers, farmers etc. A surplus population who could become proud property owners (after first dispossessing the native populations).
In view of the above, we would ask readers to think of the tight relations between the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the world of ELT. We would also ask whether Kachru’s three circle (Inner, Outer, Expanding) is affected by the fact that he was educated in India before going to study in America, seeming to ask different questions than those being asked in the UK dominated TEFL world (with its focus on NNESTs (Non-Native English Speaking Teachers) and teaching positions within universities. Indeed, as pointed out elsewhere, how can you have an International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language conference always held in the UK and despite recent efforts (especially plenary speakers) are invariably dominated by speakers from the UK, Australia and New Zealand?
Post-War, Britain finding a new place in the World
Following the second-world war Britain was clearly a declining force economically and politically but politicians like Churchill were still interested in projecting the UK as a world power, for which he coined the term “The Three Circles” (most unlike Kachru’s three circles). Churchill believed that now the UK, despite steady decolonisation and weakening currency and an under-performing economy, would be a major player in three circles of influence; namely the Empire and Commonwealth; a strong, united continental Europe that Britain would not be an actual part of but a strong partner; and the transatlantic “special relationship” with the United States. As Sanders and Haughton put it:
Britain once took a ‘wide-view’ of the world, in which the security of the Empire and its possessions across the globe were synonymous with the security of the homeland, a position that was no longer economically or politically viable after the 1960s – but the emphasis on power and interests [has remained] constant. To the extent that British foreign policy is still about the projection of power and influence… the three circles device maintains its core utility, since the latter is essentially a way of thinking about how Britain retains a major role in the world and remains a ‘player’ in the game”
The fact that the UK post Suez/ decline of Empire felt obliged (forced) to navigate closer to the Common Market and recognise a new way to exercise international power does not change the three circles but changes the relationship the UK’s has with them. Think how IELTS is not really an International English Language Testing System but an exam owned jointly by Cambridge and the British Council which while being accepted (at least the academic module) for studying in the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa and many colleges in the US, its general module is not acceptable for working visas in the US. Similarly, Cambridge exams have enjoyed great penetration in many countries and the UK remains the top destination to travel to study English, despite the rise of Australia and New Zealand capturing a growing market in Chinese students and Ireland growing rapidly (with perhaps scope to take over UK post Brexit). The reality is that while the US is the major driver in the continuing expansion of English, the UK has leveraged the market well and it has done so within the three circles paradigm.
And it is here that we must consider its further attempt to project power, by arguing that it is a socially liberal country whose success is based on diversity and multiculturalism. Indeed, we can see how many esoteric cultural references (like Shakespeare and obscure British inventors) to the UK started disappearing in textbooks after the 1970/1980’s and textbooks adopted a much more diverse perspective on the UK and the promotion of pop culture already very well-known and accessed around the world (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Madonna etc). Something followed by German and French Language Learning textbooks to lesser success.
OPENCities was clearly an outgrowth of this British liberal hubris which purported to show the UK as the most open and diverse model of economy and way of thinking. English teachers were not only there to teach a language but to share the culture and possibility of globalisation from the perspective of an an invented country. A process which started way back with Jack Haycraft in that “tiny apartment” in Spain had met its extreme by 2008.
It is little wonder then that many TEFL teachers working in the EU should shake their heads and puzzle over how the invented nation they sell abroad should pull the rug from under them by voting for a different view of the relationship they have with the EU and then re-orientating radically towards the a Trump-led US (the antithesis of social liberalism) in such a dramatic manner.
It is probably because they were blind to the xenophobia and immigrant sentiment that had been growing since the September 11 attacks and the general feeling, taking a rightward move since the Port Alegre statement of Another World is Possible and the subsequent anti-globalisation protests, and, of course, the consequences of the economic crash and austerity policies which followed. Indeed, during all this open for business, diversity is great the same Labour Party promoting that vision were also busy turning anti-immigrant feeling into a vote winner. We covered the disgusting the collaboration between English UK and racist minister Phil Woolas, on these very pages.
Where now??
People would be strongly mistaken for feeling the British state is going to abandon British Liberal Internationalism. Put simply it cannot afford to. However, it is clearly trying to redefine itself on the international stage with closer ties to the US and a rising national authoritarianism. It will still want to promote/leverage its language industry and universities though. In adopting this strategy, however, it allows opening the door to other “competitors” for this market and influence. It also risks major language change in the EU, though it is difficult to imagine such a rapid turn given how much the continent has already invested in learning it (especially amongst the elite) and the expansion of English throughout the rest of the world.
We do know that this is a long-running story of British liberalism and its continued attempts to shape the world in its own desired and convenient image. Perhaps when people started asking “to take back control” they were not referring to a border but a sensation that the UK was losing its “wide-view of the world” it had enjoyed since the days of Empire and becoming too ensconced in a technocratic project that limited its ability to project itself for its own interests.
Our hope is that the organic crisis of British institutions, a direct result of the underlying contradictions of global capitalist order, will bury British liberalism forever, even though we share with so many the fear of another alternative which is raising its head. This said, as teachers at home and abroad we must embrace the fact that globalisation as it stood was not in our interests and we should look at our diverse communities to see how a different internationalism might be built from its ruins. To quote Judith Butler in an interview on the perceived precariousness of our modern lives:
I think that Arendt was right to criticize those forms of individualism that presume that freedom is always and only a matter of personal liberty. Of course, I am most glad to have my personal liberty, but I only have it to the extent that there is a sphere of freedom in which I can operate. That sphere is coproduced by people who live together or who have agreed to live in a world in which the relations between them make possible their individual sense of being free. So perhaps we might regard personal liberty as a cipher of social freedom. And social freedom cannot be understood apart from what arises between people, what happens when they make something in common or when, in fact, they seek to make or remake the world in common. I am struck by the way Arendt’s position echoes that of Martin Buber, whose cultural Zionism interested her a great deal in the 1930s. For Buber, the I only knows its world because there is a you who has consciousness of that world. The world is given to me because you are also there as one to whom it is given. The world is never given to me alone but always in your company. Without you, the world does not give itself. We are worldless without one another.
Our so-called freedoms and liberty have been bought at the expense of others, indeed as we have tried to show here, our fantasies of who we are have also been constructed by fantasies of how other people are (like the childish Indians the Brits were forced to civilise). It’s time we got to know each other and we have to abandon the hubris of so-called progressive ideas like British Liberal Internationalism or for that matter American Exceptionalism in order to do so. We can start by joining a union, setting up a coop, or even a local teachers’ support group and then branching out into community campaigns.
Note: The picture above is taken from a monument in Lichfield, England, dedicated to the Captain of the Titanic. Lichfield voted 59% in favour of Brexit 41% against and is represented by an arch Eurosceptic MP. Who cares if the Brits sink, all that matters is to “Be British”.
Marxist TEFL Group 