Despite spending much of the past half-century apologizing for the Empire, the British establishment is rediscovering its favorite method of rule. The old colonial district officer, accustomed to keeping the peace between rival communities, cultivating local notables and reporting troublesome political sentiments to his superiors, would find much to recognize in contemporary Britain. He might struggle with the current terminology, but once someone explained what a Cohesion Support and Interventions Function actually did, he would probably feel quite at home.
In an essay we wrote six years ago called ‘Empires of Progress‘, we argued that Western governing elites were increasingly abandoning the assumptions of the nation-state in favor of an imperial conception of political authority. A nation-state presumes a people sufficiently conscious of belonging together to accept common institutions and obligations. An empire governs different peoples, often possessing competing interests and loyalties, through a combination of accommodation, patronage, arbitration and coercion. Nations require citizens; empires administer subjects.
What we then identified as an emerging tendency has since acquired a more distinct institutional and political character in Britain. Successive governments, having encouraged mass immigration and multiculturalism, increasingly employ methods familiar from imperial administration to manage the communal divisions arising from those policies.
More significantly, these arrangements threaten to transform the relationship between the governing establishment and the historic British population, whose national attachments and political preferences increasingly conflict with the assumptions of those exercising power. Here, we examine how communal brokerage, differentiated accommodation and preventive security contribute to this estrangement, weakening the common national allegiance upon which the legitimacy of the state depends.
The imperial reflex, imported into the British domestic realm, we suggest, will prove considerably more destabilizing than its practitioners anticipate.
