Empire, Brexit, and the Historical Imagination

Today is Queen Victoria's birthday, a public holiday in Canada (observed on the preceding Monday) and the anchor point for the moving Empire Day holiday (which subsequently morphed into Commonwealth Day).

Debates about the British Empire - was it a monument of civilization or a system of global oppression? - have reminded me of debates about a more contemporary question: Brexit. Does Britain belong in Europe or not?

In a recent Financial Times article, Gideon Rachman examined the claims of two rival camps of historians as they argue about whether Britain has, historically, been part of Europe. Historians for Britain, the euro-skeptic party - led by David Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge - contend that Britain has a long tradition of political continuity and moderate reform (unlike Europe, with its revolutions and reactions, not to mention Fascism, Nazism, and Communism), as well as physical separation from the European continent.

The pro-European party - which lacks a handy label, but did put out an article titled "Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated" - takes issue with these claims, noting that Britain has a long history of close interactions with the Continent. Not least among such linkages is Christianity, integral to Britain's identity, at least until quite recently, but also something to which Britain has no unique claim, but instead shares with the rest of Europe and regions beyond. Moreover, the critics note that Britain had a civil war, which, though several centuries ago, was no less nasty for its antiquity.  So Britain is not immune to such upheavals. And then there's the Empire. "Expropriation, slavery, massacres, oppression, anyone?” asks Neil Gregor, professor of modern history at Southampton.

Rachman concludes that "I do not entirely agree (or disagree) with any of the historians I have met... [but] I agree with Abulafia and the Historians for Britain in one important respect: their argument that the UK has been unusually good at creating successful political institutions and that this is an inheritance worth cherishing and protecting." However, Rachman adds: "But I do not think that this adds up to an argument for Britain leaving the EU."

I would like to pull the lens even further back, so to speak. Ever since Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), the father of the modern historical craft, we - I say this as a member of the historical guild - have focused on history wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it actually happened). This is a perfectly reasonable and laudable standard for historians to pursue. But as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) reminds us, history also has advantages and disadvantages for life. I would not go so far as to say, as Nietzsche might, that we should falsify the historical record for the sake of the impact it has on the present. But we would be fools to overlook the role that perceptions of the past have in shaping our imaginations, which in turn shape our actions.

In this context, I would argue that emphasizing Britain's long history of evolving, moderate, and generally freedom-loving political institutions is useful, even inspiring, for Britain's present, whether that be within or outside the EU. In a similar vein, I think a case can be made that emphasizing the British Empire as a global effort at fostering trade, harmonizing law, ensuring security, and spreading the Gospel is a worthy means of inspiring the men and women of today to deeds of virtue.

You might contend that these visions of Britain's past are as much romance as fact; I would suggest they are simply the product of particular emphasis. But what about all the failures that went along with these positive elements? Ah, you are putting on your critical history hat, as Nietzsche would say. As I pointed out five years ago, we can do that tomorrow. Today we celebrate the good.

Today's image comes from the Canadian War Museum.

Laudato Si' Excerpted

Over at Laudato Si' Excerpted I'll be posting passages from the encyclical by Pope Francis several times a week for the next few months. Below is the introduction to the first installment.

When Pope Francis's encyclical letter Laudato Si' came out, I was a bit befuddled by the media coverage, which claimed that the pope had suddenly become an environmentalist, and also wrote about the poor, with a sprinkling of traditional Catholic condemnations of things like artificial birth control.  Frankly, it sounded like a pretty schizophrenic document (which, in any case, I didn't have time to read).

But I was again reminded of Laudato Si' when I came across a Financial Times article about Yellowstone that asked, "Are humans part of nature, or above it?  Why do we care about setting aside 'wild' lands such as Yellowstone?  Why do we care about the survival of wolves in the first place?  Does nature and wildlife have intrinsic value?"  So I picked up the document and was pleased to discover both insight and coherence.

You can read the first set of excerpts at Laudato Si' Excerpted.

Return of the Grimm Brothers

Why the sudden interest in Grimm's Fairy Tales? There are two recent films featuring variations of the Snow White story:


Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror



Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman


In any event, if you're interested in reconnecting with the Grimm brothers, the FT has a story on Germany's Fairy Tale Road, through their old stomping grounds.

The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God

Trailer to the new remake of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.

The FT liked it. As long as they didn't cut my favorite line, it should be good.

Further Comments on Immigration

My newspaper, the Financial Times, has carried two interesting columns on immigration, a topic I addressed last week.

The first, from Christopher Caldwell, points out that

opponents of [Arizona's new] law promise to resist it through boycotts and court challenges. It may indeed be overturned. But such action is unlikely to be decisive. Challenges to its constitutionality focus only on a handful of policing elements that could easily be purged in replacement legislation. The bill is long, detailed, carefully crafted and extremely popular.

Caldwell is skeptical of the grounds on which a legal challenge might be fought:

The nub of the constitutional questions surrounding the bill is that the federal government, not the states, sets immigration policy. Does this bill usurp federal authority? At the most basic level it does not – it leaves to Washington the determination of who is and is not legally in the country.

He also points out the strange twists some protests have taken:

Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva has backed an economic boycott of his own state. His district has a Hispanic majority. Only 34 per cent of his constituents are non-Hispanic whites. (Which makes it hard to see how singling out Hispanics for racial profiling would be possible even in theory.)

The second, by Clive Crook, notes that the Arizona law does not differ so widely from the federal statues it seeks to support:

Federal law already requires non-citizens to carry their documents at all times. It is an offence not to. The law’s arcane and sometimes surreal provisions impose many other demands, some more onerous than others. These rules are so weakly enforced that few legal immigrants are even aware of them.

His description of the current system is scathing - and accurate:

A moronic compromise has been struck, one that has achieved the worst of all worlds. To satisfy public opinion, the federal government promises to exert tight control of immigration – then fails to, because it is unwilling to enforce its own laws. And it is right not to enforce them. Apprehend and deport more than 10m illegal immigrants? That would require totalitarian powers and cripple the economy into the bargain. But voters then feel they have been lied to, which they have. Their distrust of Washington increases year by year, making an intelligent solution to the problem ever more difficult.

This pathological bargain has also skewed the pattern of immigration. Illegal unskilled immigrants pour in and fuel a grey, tax-evading, sub-minimum-wage economy. Immigrants with skills, willing to pay taxes but disinclined to evade the law and the border patrol, are shut out.

Ask any US high-technology company how this crimps its productivity – and forces it to send jobs abroad. (Let those workers pay taxes to other governments. It is not as though the US needs the money.) The shortage of highly trained people pushes up the US wage premium on skills, so economic inequality worsens as well. Yes, they thought of everything. I defy anyone to propose a regime more stupid than this.

Finally, he notes what elements are needed for a successful reform package:

The three essential components of the needed reform are easy to see. First, more effective enforcement at and especially inside the border, including credible policing of companies that hire illegal immigrants. Second, wider channels for legal immigration, including a guest worker programme that allows temporary migration sufficient to meet the country’s needs. Third, conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants already in the US.
Without laws that are enforceable and enforced, most voters will oppose amnesty, because they will suspect – and in this case it really will be a reasonable suspicion – that the next amnesty will not be the last.

It is a rare day that I can read not one but two pieces in the London-based FT about my home state. Let us hope that all this media attention and the growing debate will finally lead to some comprehensive, workable and just immigration reform.

Wonder of Wonders!

Clive Cookson, commenting upon Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, writes:

Two chapters caught my imagination. One describes recent work on the way evolution influences embryonic development - a field sometimes known as evodevo. As Dawkins shows, the widely used analogy of DNA as a "blueprint" for the organism is misleading.

There is no overall plan of development, no blueprint, no architect's plan, no architect. Rather, the embryo grows according to local rules encoded in the genes of individual cells interacting with neighbouring cells. Genes are switched on and off by local biochemical signals. As Dawkins says, "this way of generating large and complex structures by the execution of local rules is distinct from the blueprint way of doing things."

The second high spot is Dawkins' description of the way every organism has its evolutionary history written all over it. This produces many internal structures that are less efficient than they would be if they had been "designed". An example is the "recurrent laryngeal nerve" that links the brain and the voice box. This take an astonishing detour in mammals, via the chest and heart, because it has evolved from more primitive ancestors. In giraffes that means a 15ft diversion down the neck and back again.

When Dawkins watched the laryngeal nerve being dissected in a giraffe, he realised the external elegance of animals is an illusion. A real animal is a criss-crossing maze of blood vessels, nerves, intestines, fat, muscles and more.

I generally find Cookson a sensible writer, so we shall accept his acceptance of the factual accuracy of Dawkins' account. (Likewise, we shall accept Cookson's summation as an accurate representation of Dawkins' thought.) What struck me, however, is that even allowing for this factual correctness, Dawkins fails to see the wonder of it all, or wonders improperly.

If embryos grow due to local conditions, rather than with a central "blueprint", this is a greater, not lesser, cause for amazement. Imagine that a group of construction workers just appeared at an empty lot one day and began building, without any plan or foreman. Each just did his own thing, only stopping or modifying his actions when he bumped into another worker. Each called in friend or associates to aid him in this way or that, as befitted his own little project. And somehow, all these workers, without any coordination, managed to build a complete home. Moreover, this is no mere four walls and a jagged roof: a home which will last for decades, accept expansions, and continue to look beautiful and function properly with only minor maintenance.

Such an occurrence would be exceedingly rare, nigh impossible. Indeed, if it did happen, could we blame anyone for looking for a blueprint, asking if there was an architect or some coordinating genius, some foreman who stepped forward and organized it all? Wouldn't we expect an awe-struck onlooker to ask not once but several times about these things? And if we finally discovered, some how, that a single person had indeed called together these construction workers and started them on their labors, would we not laud him even more than the conventional architect? This man was somehow such a master of human psychology and complex planning that he didn't even need blueprints. Wow.

Dawkins errs widely when he assumes that "no blueprint" means "no architect"; perhaps it means an Architect far greater than any he is willing to acknowledge.

Likewise, it seems to me that Dawkins has missed a key point in his consideration of the internal inefficiencies of animals: these inefficiencies work. He concludes that "the external elegance of animals is an illusion", but this is not the case, seeing as how the "criss-crossing maze of blood vessels, nerves, intestines, fat, muscles and more" on the inside actually does support the beautiful creature we see on the outside. If somehow animals were a scam, if they did not really eat and breathe and run and fly and reproduce and do all the amazing things they do, well, then Dawkins would have good reason to feel cheated. But as long as "external elegance" is real, perhaps we should approach the internal "maze" with a little more wonder, even if some things, like the giraffe's laryngeal nerve, are not as efficient as they could be.

In the end, Cookson concludes that Dawkins has been blinded by his own hatred of religion, reducing what could have been an excellent book to only a mediocre one. Nevertheless, those who do not share Dawkins' fiercely anti-Christian bias ought not dismiss his work simply because of this animosity. Indeed, it seems to me that Dawkins has opened up to the scientist of faith new and exciting ways to marvel at the Maker's handiwork, for which I thank Mr. Dawkins. No doubt to his chagrin.

On the Failure of Population Schemes

What follows is a blog post that I wrote a few days ago for a (very minor) side project of mine, Statecraft & Security. I thought the readers of The Guild Review might enjoy it.

This blog usually discusses matters of security, but statecraft has other aspects as well. An article which caught my attention this morning underlined that point: "Shanghai calls on chosen couples to exceed China's one child limit".

The gist of the article is quite simple: China has too many old people and not enough young people, which will make taking care of the elderly a nightmare. "Shanghai is taking the dramatic step of actively encouraging residents to exceed China's famed 'one child' limit, citing concerns about the aging of its population and a potentially shrinking workforce," the Financial Times writes.

The only thing that prevents me from saying, "I told you so," is the fact that I wasn't around when the "one child" policy was first put in place in 1979. The problems that China is now or soon will be facing are the obvious consequences of their actions. "Shanghai's initiative follows campaigns to encourage more child bearing in other crowded Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which had previously worked to promote small families only to see birth rates trail off..." Well, yes, contraception and abortion campaigns tend to have that effect.

In addition to creating a demographic and economic disaster, "China's decades-old one-child policy... remains a significant intrusion into private life." An added bonus.

What particularly tickles me about this story is that plenty of people pointed out the fact that these kinds of policies will backfire. In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued his highly controversial encyclical Humanae vitae, which articulated the argument that contraception runs contrary to the natural order. If that sounds a bit too philosophic for a statesman to worry about, let me point out that the true statesman must understand the order of nature before he can operate effectively within it. It is a basic test the Chinese leadership have failed.

Must Culture Have Momentum?

Peter Aspden of the Financial Times recently wrote an article titled "Of Classicists and Carbuncles", about the Prince of Wales' ongoing crusade against modern architecture. I see little need to write about the topic; others have done so. But what interested me was a particular passage in Aspden's article. He writes:

Can we really not move forward? This is the element of modernism that the prince most misunderstands. Culture must have momentum. It has to look ahead. That is its point. By definition, culture acts as a commentary on its own time, but occasionally it has to look beyond it, to anticipate what is to come.

Thus, Aspden is making the argument that culture should be progressive. Not because there is some teleological goal of goodness toward which it must strive, but simply because it needs to be going somewhere.

So I ask of our readers: First, must culture really always be going somewhere? And second, if that is the case, is going "backward" an acceptable option, or is antiquarianism antithetical to the future-oriented movement of culture?

You Are the Problem!

It is a rare day that I am ashamed of America, but today is such a day. Britain's Financial Times called America's educational system "third rate" and the numbers bear them out. The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) finds that America's slide down the educational ladder of industrialized nations continues. Moreover, our consistently poor scores are not simply relative; in absolute terms as well, American students are getting dumber. A few years ago, when I heard about such numbers I was disinclined to believe them. Now that I work at a major state university, and see the products of Texas high schools, I find it all too believable.

Social and cultural factors doubtless play a big role in all this. Schools alone are not to blame. But the evidence is clear that what happens in the classroom matters, and that underperforming schools are contributing hugely to the problem.

The Financial Times clearly articulated the two things American education needs: "accountability and competition." What does accountability demand? "Firing the worst teachers and shutting the worst schools." And competition? "School vouchers if you want to be radical, or the faster expansion of self-governing charter schools if you do not." The answers are obvious enough.

But will it happen? Don't count on it. "Teachers' unions have a death grip on the system and are having none of it." Let me be more specific: the National Education Association, with its 3.2 million members and $300 million annual lobbying budget is the single biggest obstacle to good schools in America. Members of the NEA: YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. Abandon your union and the job security of your failing colleagues and try actually putting the interests of America's children first.

And lest you think that this is just my right-wing, small-government, anti-union rant, let me point out that the poor and minorities suffer most in America's schools. Al Sharpton - who recently called school reform "the civil rights challenge of our time" - agrees with me on this one.

And I will now step down from my soapbox...

Back to Basics

“Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models” of questionable reliability. “Our tank is near empty of data and we are running on theoretical vapour,” he argues. There is a compelling need for “more tiresome and prosaic confirmation by experiment and observation”.

Those comments could have been made about a variety of disciplines. There is definitely an inordinate interest among certain historians in theoretical matters, to the detriment of actually doing the work of history. Frankly, I blame the literary critics from whom we picked up most of the mumbo-jumbo. Anthropology, sociology, politics and probably every other field in the humanities suffers in the same way. But they were in fact made by James Lovelock in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, and were quoted in Justin Marozzi's manifesto of an article, "Back to Nature," appearing in the Financial Times.

Marozzi, a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), is a founding member of the Beagle Campaign, which is pushing the RGS to return to its original mission of mounting its own expeditions. In the last two decades the RGS has shifted its attention towards funding other people's projects or engaging in educational efforts. Both are important, but the net result, the Beagle Campaigners argue, has been a decrease in actual exploration and the hard data it brings.

The Beagle Campaign should probably serve as a warning to scholars of all stripes: at the end of the day, there is no substitute for the nitty gritty work of research. Failing that, we're just building houses of cards or castles in the clouds.

Choose What You Read

It seems every city with a subway system has free newspapers to go with it. This is definitely the case in Washington (the city of which I still consider myself a denizen, in many ways), whose Express and Examiner I find rather less than satisfying. It is the case in London as well, and as it turns out, Claire Wilson has no higher opinion of the free Tube dailies than I have of their Metro counterparts:

"They're just designed to depress, scare and sedate you. Page after page, there's nothing but paedophiles, stabbings, murders and drunk celebrities," she relates in today's Financial Times. "These papers aren't simply annoying, they're quite harmful."

So Claire and her friends decided to do something about it. Like all good young people of the modern age, they founded a Facebook group, Choose What You Read, dedicated to the proposition that commuters should consciously choose their morning reading, rather than passively accepting whatever is handed to them. But what made Choose What You Read more than just a Facebook protest was their decision to start handing out free books at Tube stations every first Monday of the month.

Their efforts are little more than a drop in the bucket when compared with the numbers of the free dailies, something Claire says she recognizes. (Well, she probably 'recognises' it...) But if even a handful of people are moved to think more consciously about what they read on their morning commute, she's willing to consider the effort a success.

If such a campaign were ever to come to the Federal City - and wouldn't it be great if it did? - I, for one, would be happy to help out.

Photo credit: "obama and hilary discussed .... (in bed)", by Pookalali08, courtesy of Flickr.

On the Delights of Susie Boyt

Those who know me well will know that I have a crush on Susie Boyt. On the list of my secret love interests, she ranks very near the top, right up there with Rosie Thomas and St. Clare. While cleaning out my room at the end of the semester, I happened upon an old Financial Times with one of Susie's columns from August, "Remembrance of things pasty". Here's a particularly delightful passage:

When the plan was hatched to buy some pasties and we drove to the dairy and selected the medium-sized Traditionals and watched as they were wrapped by the lady in the pinny whose hair was flecked with flour, and the cost was indelibly scored on the half-cellophaned bags, I was in a wonderful trance.

I hadn’t tasted a Cornish pasty for 10 years – I don’t eat things like that these days – and I pictured a savoury fantasia of crisp, dancing, short-crust pastry crescents, camply crimped at their edges, encasing a luscious yet delicate combination of strong-flavoured meat and thick gravy and tender vegetables ... We were in Cornwall, after all. I licked my lips and felt daring in the extreme. My inner librarian stopped telling people to be quiet and threw off her spectacles and unpinned her hair.

Imagine my shock, then, when I bit into said baked morsel and immediately realised my mistake. I had been fantasising not about a Cornish pasty (mutton, onion, potato, white pepper) but a steak and kidney pie (steak, kidney, mushrooms, ale-gravy)! It’s a wholly different beast. How could I have been so stupid? The Cornish pasty’s innocence in this matter was not under dispute, for it was neither trying nor failing to resemble its distant second cousin. It was a case of mistaken identity, and I was the victim.

Susie is so many things that the modern world is not: classy, well-read, unpretentious and cheerful. In an age when cynicism and depression are almost vogue, Susie writes, "Few people associate cheer with style, as high spirits are the antithesis of cool. Yet I do wish cheer could make a comeback. It’s really not a bad look." Well, perhaps it's making a very small comeback, on the second page of the Life & Arts section each Saturday morning.

Banality Dressed up as Provocation

When the Financial Times says your English Department is idiotic, you're probably doing pretty bad. Well, that is exactly what has happened to Harvard.

Harvard's plans to change their required courses, "reveal a confusion about what a college English department is suppose to do," writes Christopher Caldwell.

Under the new regime, students will take courses in four “affinity groups” or “common-ground modules”: “Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions” and “Shakespeares”. Two of these (“Poets” and “Shakespeares”) are consistent with English as it has been taught at Harvard for a century. The other two are not. “There is no such thing as writing that is indigenous or ‘native’ to England,” runs a copy of the department’s guidelines for “Arrivals” obtained by the Harvard Crimson. “All the great writing between the 7th and the 12th century is produced by invaders and immigrants who knew that ‘they’ came from somewhere else.” This is a banality dressed up as a provocation. English literature surveys have always stressed the influence on English writers of foreign ones.... If literary influences were what Harvard wanted to stress, there would be no reason to scrap its current approach. “Arrivals” appears to be a pretext for teaching more about migration, building a bridge to the doctrines of post-colonial and cultural studies in which the many professors are heavily invested. The description of “Diffusions” reveals similar preoccupations: “What is this nation, ecosystem, town, region, community, continent? What does it mean to belong to a where, and what are the signs, and forms, and idioms, of belonging – and unbelonging.”

Caldwell is left to conclude that "The goal is to take the most superficial, unliterary and easily politicised aspects of the study of English and pretend they are the throbbing heart of the whole enterprise." Yet it was not always so. "Harvard’s English department was always relatively conservative," but by the 1980s "roughly half the faculty pined for an English department more like Yale’s or Princeton’s, which were quicker to embrace 'deconstruction', 'theory' and cultural studies. Freed of the need to master, say, Milton, junior faculty could devote their reading hours to continental semioticians."

Today, a note to would-be majors on the Harvard English website shows that theory has won there, too: “To ask how and why writers of different times and places have represented men and women (or the rich and the poor, or the coloniser and the colonised) as they have done is the question that compels cultural studies – a form of history and anthropology combined.” This is Harvard’s invitation to “the best that has been thought and said”? Even 25 years ago, we assumed that spending four years with Shakespeare, Donne and Keats was self-evidently “worth it”. Yet here is someone in the English department who feels that, to appeal, English literature must be passed off as anthropology.

An accusation that has beset English since it caught on as an academic discipline in the 1850s is that it is idleness masquerading as scholarship. This view was once held to be the badge of hard-headed businessmen and other philistines. But all those who believe that English is not a real field of study until it is garlanded with practical or political concerns embrace a version of it, even if they do so from the heights of a university English department.

On Japanese Soccer Culture

The Financial Times recently had a very interesting article on soccer in Japan, which has one of the best teams in Asia, if not the best. Some of the article related the ups and downs of particular players and matches, but the part I found most interesting was about the fans:

The odd thing was that Philippe Troussier, their French coach, seemed oddly gloomy throughout the tournament. On a windswept terrace at their Beirut hotel, he gave the sort of despairing, dyspeptic interview that usually indicates a manager is coming to the end of his tether.

Japan had no football culture, he moaned. There was none of the ruthless desire to win he had experienced during his years coaching in Africa....

Football existed in Japan before 1993 but not in a meaningful way. Before the J League was inaugurated, Saburo Kawabuchi, the head of the Japanese football federation, sent researchers round the globe to report back on issues such as fan behaviour, tactics and marketing.

In the short term, it worked – the J League boomed and the national team was set on its way to Asian supremacy.

The problem, though, is that what began as mimicry has remained just that – it has not taken root and become organic. Kawabuchi has spoken of fans losing their inhibitions when they enter a stadium, taking on different national characteristics in the style of their support. “They are Japanese living in their own country,” he said, “who have abandoned a little of their Japaneseness.”

But that is the issue: fans put on great shows of colour and noise that are impressive until the game starts, at which it becomes apparent that their spectacle is divorced from what is happening on the pitch: a goal is scored against a team, and their fans carry on their song without missing a beat.

Shunsuke Nakamura (pictured), Celtic’s Japanese winger, made the point indirectly in speaking of his love for the fans in Glasgow. “They let the players raise their level,” he said. “They’re amazing. Their cheers change in response to the play.” Which, implicitly, is not the case in Japan.

It is fandom learnt by rote.

This Is Not Yet the End

On a day when the front page of the Financial Times reports the the worst stock plunge for the S&P 500 since 1987 and the worst ever for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it is not surprising that many people are saying this is the end of the Anglo-American system. Not least among them are Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister. "Once again, Anglo-American capitalism is a bad word," Charles Wyplosz writes. "And globalisation is next in line. Speeches at this year’s United Nation General Assembly by leaders from every continent reveal the depth of contempt that has been lying low, buried underneath the apparent success of the globalisation process."

However, what do we find on the Comment page? Two articles saying just the opposite.

In the midst of all this woe, Michael Skapinker has decided to take a look back into history. "It is fascinating to look back at the Financial Times of 30 years ago, just before the US and the UK embarked on their years of liberalisation and deregulation. The similarities between 1978 and 2008 are striking, as if the two years are bookends to the fantastic stories in between." These were awful times for the Anglophonic cousins on either side of the Pond. "Britain was plunged into its icy winter of discontent, with half-empty supermarket shelves and rubbish piled in the streets, as road hauliers, hospital workers, school caretakers and many others went on strike." Jimmy Carter declared that the United States was undergoing a crisis "threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America".

It did not, of course, last. In a story that has taken on mythic proportions in certain circles, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan changed all that, ushering in a period of prosperity (and ending the Cold War while they were at it). So too, Mr. Skapinker writes, this crisis will pass. "One day, with new regulations in place, companies will return to raising funds, banks to lending and financiers to making money. New York and London will remain the best places to do this because they retain the advantages they had before." And what exactly are these advantages?

The first is language. Lehman Brothers may have gone overnight, but it takes centuries for a language to disappear. A global generation has invested years learning English, which has no ready challenger.

The two cities' second advantage is law. The US may be excessively litigious and lawyers may charge outrageous fees in both cities, but where else would you look to the law to defend your corporate rights? Shanghai? Moscow?

The third advantage is collective brain power. This may seem laughable, given where bankers' supposed intelligence has landed us now, but the solutions to this crisis will come in cities most open to raucous debate from whoever has anything to contribute. The next 30 years will be different, but New York and London will rise again.

Mr. Wyplosz concludes that Messrs. Sarkozy and Steinbrück are simply out of touch. "They have denounced excesses, such as bonuses, but that does not even begin to address the root cause of the crisis. They have described financial markets as unregulated. This is simply wrong. Financial markets are tightly regulated. The problem is not just that the regulation is inappropriate, but also that supervisors have not enforced it."

"So will Anglo-American capitalism fade away? Maybe, but that will be decided in Washington, not Paris and Berlin. One thing is sure, neither France nor Germany can mount a serious challenge, at least as long as their people and leaders mistrust and misunderstand finance."