Britain’s true triumph

{mosads}While American myself, I am married to an Englishwoman, and so I have seen inklings of these capacities among her tribe before. But perhaps only the confluence of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and these marvelous Olympics could have brought about such a widespread miracle of enthusiasm across this nation.
 
London is perhaps the most multi-cultural city in the world. Walking even in previous years in Covent Garden, say, or along the south bank of the Thames, one routinely encountered a dizzying multitude of languages and a profusion of faces found in no other single place on the planet. With the end of the Empire largely accomplished under this Queen’s reign, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of cheap and easy air travel, and as learning English has become a critical advantage in the global economy, London has, despite its problems, become The World City—everyone feels they have some association or connection with it, and yet it’s still au currant and cool.
 
So it seems fitting that after four years of difficult economic times, in a period of tumultuous change, the world came here to celebrate the young, strong and purposeful. And after a long period of whinging (that is, complaining, in American) the great majority of Great Britain embraced the celebration.
 
This may explain why Mitt Romney’s recent criticism of the organizational competence of the London Games was greeted with such unanimous condemnation. It seemed petty, and conspicuously out of step with the sudden wave of Anglo-ardor. Prime Minister David Cameron dryly noted that perhaps it was a bit easier to put on games “in the middle of nowhere”, a thinly veiled-reference to Romney’s role in the Salt Lake City Winter Games of 2002. Not to be outdone, London’s mop-topped, uber-populist Mayor Boris Johnson, last seen stranded on a zip line during a stunt above central London, led chants lampooning Romney at a rally of 60,000 in Hyde Park.
 
Many Brits seemed to have a similar reaction to Romney’s remark. An English friend commented: “We demonstrated a few organizational abilities running the empire and, say, fighting the Second War.” Quite right.
 
Of course a good many of the British athletes are originally from elsewhere, like the engaging Somali-born 10,000 meter champion Mo Farrar, who after claiming gold said “if it hadn’t been for the crowd I don’t think I’d have won that race.”  Some like Jessica Ennis, the heptathlon champion with the winning smile, and true heroine of these Games, have one parent from a former colony—her father is from Jamaica.  And even Americans are being embraced. Will Claye, a U.S. long-jumper, enthused: “I’m not from this country–but they made me feel like I am.”
 
Forgotten, seemingly, is the fierce British anti-immigrant strain which was so pronounced just five years ago when a more than half a million Poles and other Eastern Europeans finally had just enough money and freedom to come to London. After flirting for a few years with white hot nativist rhetoric and policies, Cameron and other Tories have toned it down, perhaps in part because many Eastern European visitors left after feeling unwanted.  Indeed, Cameron was at pains last week to call London the world’s “most diverse” city.
 
So now all is forgiveness and forbearance. But Britain’s role as a former imperial power, the most far-flung the world has known, is still seen here both as both a responsibility and special privilege. Many Brits feel deep kinship and a sense of shared history with peoples around the globe who gathered for the Games– Indians, Caribbean peoples, West and East Africans, Americans and dozens more.
 
Indeed, last week was the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence, widely celebrated not only in that slightly warmer island nation but by the hundreds of thousands of émigrés from Jamaica who are now proud British citizens. Usain Bolt’s stunning repeat wins in the 100 and 200 meters and other Jamaican victories have added indescribable delight to these festivities. Such events can never repair the injury of the slave trade and the worst of the empire, but they can bring countries together now.
 
One of the greatest Victorian historians, William Macaulay, declared at the height of the Empire that the end of British rule in India and elsewhere would be “the proudest day in English history” provided that Britain left behind its language and the “imperishable empire of our arts and morals, our literature and our laws.” In effect, Macaulay was describing what historians now call ‘soft power.’
 
That is a British Empire made to last, and one that has perhaps finally found its mature place in the world during these Games. It is a lesson American leaders, as we manage the evolution of our own type of empire, would do well to remember.

Bledsoe is Senior Advisor at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, DC think tank, and a former Clinton White House aide.