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CIAO DATE: 3/00
Britain Deserves Its Millennium Dome
On The Issues
February 2000
Americans may wonder if the British are overdoing their millennial celebrations, but the hoopla in England is justified. After all, the British introduced and disseminated the two most important ideas during the past thousand years: democratic institutions and free–market economics.
Why has the turn of the century been a much bigger deal in Britain than here? Over the past year, a lot of travelers have noticed that the British are making a bigger–and more official–fuss over the milestone than Americans are. After all, the British, not the Americans, have spent about a billion dollars to construct a millennium dome. It’s in Greenwich, on the outer edge of London. It’s the largest domed structure in the world and the home of a yearlong exhibition of British industry, science, and culture. The government has even built a subway line to move visitors to and from the dome.
Spend some time in Britain this year and you’ll discover millennium candy bars, millennium game shows, millennium jewelry, millennium bric–a–brac. This is all a bit strange to Americans, who have grown accustomed to feeling the way the English felt at the turn of the past century–that their country is the center of the world. Is this some kind of nostalgia trip for the British?
Well, Greenwich likes to call itself “the center of time,” ever since the line of zero longitude was established there in 1884. It’s certainly an appropriate site for the world’s largest and longest millennium celebration.
And England, of course, is a very old nation–much older than the United States, whose history doesn’t cover even a quarter of the past millennium. If you take the Norman conquests of 1066 as the beginning of the modern English nation, then its history coincides almost perfectly with the second millennium.
All fair enough points, but Americans still sense something strange about this historical moment. Don’t the British know the twentieth century was the American century? The United States ended the century in triumph as the world’s only superpower, gliding confidently through the longest economic expansion in history.
The millennium thing smacks of hype by the Tony Blair government, which prattles on endlessly about “the branding of Britain.” Don’t they know that the twentieth century has been the story of British decline? The empire has been lost. Get over it!
The British Millennium
Maybe the twentieth century was the American century, but there’s a good case to be made that the second millennium should be called the British Millennium. That’s because the two most influential and enduring ideas of the past millennium both trace their origins to England: democratic institutions and free–market economics.
Look at all the big ideas that failed during the past thousand years. The Western church saw its political influence diminish during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Kings lost their heads, and monarchy was reduced to a symbol. Imperialism–another British invention–was repudiated. Fascism was defeated. Socialism is largely discredited as an economic philosophy. Communism is in terminal decline. Nationalism, at least in its unhealthier forms, is in disrepute.
But democracy and free enterprise have stood the test of time. They are in the ascendancy across the world as the second millennium ends. And both ideas were nurtured in Britain–by great philosophers such as John Locke and Adam Smith, and by great reform movements to extend the franchise, abolish slavery, promote free trade, and establish a social safety net.
The British didn’t just nurture their ideas. They extended them to the far reaches of the world, often by brutal imposition. From the Napoleonic wars of the nineteenth century to the two world wars of the twentieth, Britain has had a decisive influence on the course of events in Europe. The British implanted their ideas in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and all across their Asian and African empire.
When the various colonies rose up in revolt against the mother country, they did so in the name of those same ideals, and threw them back in Britain’s face. Thus, the American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 in the name of Locke’s ideas. The United States became the world’s first nation to be formed out of a colonial revolt, and the first to successfully assert its right to have a government of its own choosing.
Mahatma Gandhi certainly understood the power of British ideas. He was educated at Cambridge University. In the 1940s, Gandhi led millions of Indians to defy British rule in the name of British values: No government without the consent of the governed. Gandhi demonstrated the power of civil disobedience and inspired the decolonization of the empire. He also inspired the philosophy of nonviolent resistance adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
Britain did not perfect these ideas. Rather, Britain originated the ideas while other countries–most notably, the United States–successfully developed them. Thus the irony that Britain has seen its power decline at the same time its ideals have fluorished.
Can any country compete with Britain for the title of exerting the most influence in the past millennium? Spain, perhaps, which concerned itself mostly with extracting resources from the New World and with propagating the Catholic faith. For much of the millennium, Spain and England competed to become the dominant world power. Beginning with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, however, the result became clear.
The church can lay claim to the first millennium. The second millennium is Britain’s–for which the world can pay its respects at a great dome that sits astride the prime meridian on the River Thames.
William Schneider is a resident fellow at AEI and a political analyst for CNN. This article appeared in the January 8, 2000, issue of the National Journal and is reprinted with permission of that magazine.
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