Politics

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd is a book about tourists, business people, students, and diplomats who were in Germany in the 1930s. What did they think, what did they notice? Mostly they didn’t notice much. They did little mental gymnastics to avoid characterising the rise of the Nazi state for what it was.

We all know how the black American Jesse Owens was cold-shouldered when he got Gold in the Berlin Olympics.

But a snippet about the Olympics that caught my attention was after the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games the head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, commented on the grandeur of the design, and that the stupendous cost made him thankful that Britain had relinquished its claim to the next Olympiad in favour of Japan.

In the event, the 1940 Olympic Games never happened. The Japanese pulled out in 1938 because they were otherwise engaged with the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937.

The Games were then to go to Finland, the runners-up to the original bid. The Helsinki Games were cancelled, though, because of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. 

The 1944 Olympic Games were due to be held in London, but were cancelled due to World War II.

The 1948 Olympic Games were held in London, and were known as the Austerity Games because Britain was nearly bankrupted by the war.

Food was still rationed in Britain, and would be until 1952. Things were so bad that the Government had to issue regulations to allow the athletes at the Olympics to be fed more than twice the UK national rationing allowance. 

Some countries didn’t attend the 1948 Games.

Germany and Japan were not permitted to send any athletes to the 1948 Olympics, and the Soviet Union didn’t send any athletes because of the deterioration in East-West relations. 

Did those who promoted the free movement of people within the European Union predict this?

Under the heading ‘Population decline’ the 18 January 2020 issue of The Week reported that the prime minister of Croatia says his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”.

He is calling for EU-wide strategies to tackle the ‘existential’ threat in southern and eastern Europe caused by falling birth rates and mass emigration.

Last year, a study found that 230,000 Croatians left (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016.

That’s in a country with a population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.

One can imagine it as the rich countries sucking the creativity and vigour out of the poor satellite countries. Was it foreseen?

We can think back to the decades before the free movement of people was written into the laws of European Union. People emigrated to the United States, for example, because of lack of opportunity or persecution in their home countries.

Not everyone left their homes to find a new life. Some held back. It was those willing to take a chance who went. That is true whether they were running from oppression or running to something.

The result was that the United States thrived (along with other reasons of geography and natural wealth) because it was populated by people who took a chance. I don’t think it is a stretch to picture it that way.

And in that case, the depleted populations of Croatia and the other countries are also the populations that didn’t make the jump, that didn’t risk all. The risk takers have gone. What damage can that do to a country filled with those who stayed behind?

Galileo is a global navigation satellite system. Hold that piece of information because it ties into something that happened recently, which is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia announced a deal about atomic submarine procurement that enraged President Macron of France. How are the deal about submarine procurement and Galileo related? This letter, reported in The Week, issue 25 September 2021, page 31, suggests an answer. Under the title ‘France can’t complain’, the writer of the letter makes this point:

To The Times
One suspects the origins of this rift over submarine contracts lie in the EU decision to exclude the UK from the Galileo GPS system as part of the Brexit deal. Not only was an investment of more than £1bn lost, but the UK will need to find another GPS system for military use. France should not be surprised if the UK becomes a competitor to the EU in military matters.
Roger Downing, Whitchurch, Devon

Is there substance to what Mr Downing says? It seems there is from what I read about the Galileo project in Wikipedia. This is a extract of the relevant parts from the Wikipedia entry for Galileo

Galileo in Wikipedia

“Galileo is a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that went live in 2016, created by the European Union through the European Space Agency (ESA), operated by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with two ground operations centres in Fucino, Italy, and Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

In March 2018, the European Commission announced that the United Kingdom may be excluded from parts of the project (especially relating to the secured service PRS) following its exit from the European Union. As a result, Airbus will relocate work on the Ground Control Segment (GCS) from its Portsmouth premises to an EU state. British officials sought legal advice on whether they could reclaim the €1.4 billion invested by the United Kingdom, of the €10 billion spent on the project.

In a speech at the EU Institute for Security Studies conference, the EU Chief Negotiator in charge of the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier, stressed the EU position that the UK had decided to leave the EU and thus all EU programmes, including Galileo. In August 2018, it was reported the UK would look to create a competing satellite navigation system to Galileo post-Brexit. In December 2018, the then British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK would no longer seek to reclaim the investment, and Science Minister Sam Gyimah resigned over the matter.”

I wrote this in 2017, after the Brexit referendum but before COVID.

I was imagining a scene. It’s the grandees of the Conservative party, mostly men and older. They are watching television in the privacy of their club or a private room at the House Of Commons.

They are beaming. I can hear exclamations of pleasure at what is happening on the screen. It is an episode of Victoria, a dramatised series about Queen Victoria.

She is telling her beastly German in-laws not to try to treat her like a cow to produce children. She tells them off and they step back, abashed. Oh, she is magnificent even In her youth. And now she is on board the deck of HMS Trafalgar and she is telling the crowds how the defeat in Afghanistan is bad, but the Britain has the strongest army and navy in the world and will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Ah, so like Brexit. Germany is that horrid EU, and Trafalgar is to be our victory in the new trade alliances that our new (as yet unfound) partners are hungry for. The production of the TV programme is first rate with a big budget.

A thought crossed my mind that when the producers proposed the series, Victoria, that someone in a corridor of power thought it would be just the ticket to prop up the failing morale of the populace.

Coda

And now in September 2021, again defeat in Afghanistan is centre stage for a little while. Or a kind of defeat, but who knows. Certainly British MPs have made no friends in the Biden Administration with cries of outrage at the US withdrawal.