It was a bishop of Lincoln, the strangely nicknamed Alexander the Magnificent, who commissioned one of his clerical underlings, Henry of Huntingdon, to write a history of England. In that Historia Anglorumbegun around 1123, Henry told for the first time the story of Canute (Cnut) and his courtiers and how the king used the inexorable tide to demonstrate the limitation of his powers. Despite claims by the people of Southampton that it happened in their city, the Canute tale is probably apocryphal. The moral, however, is eternal.
Nowadays, when we want to avoid facing up to our own impotence, we don’t flatter kings, we have an argument about semantics. If we’re in a quandary about how to deal with an ultra-violent terror group based in the Middle East but able to wreak havoc in our cities, we debate whether to call it Isil, Isis or Daesh and pretend for a few moments that this discussion in some magical way alters the organisation itself. Or, to take a different example, we try to draw distinctions between who exactly is a refugee and who is an “economic migrant”, when it is horribly obvious that many people are both.
You can see the purpose behind the latter kind of debate. If Ali or Amara is a real refugee then he or she will stop at the first EU country they reach and not try to get to Britain. Which is, after all, always a safe distance across the sea from anywhere that a refugee would come from. I sometimes wonder where questing Britons think they would want to take refuge if disaster or dictatorship consumed us. Belgium or far-afield Australia? My money is not on Belgium.
But the point is that it doesn’t matter whether you call Isis the WI or call refugees at Calais a “swarm”. Thanks to globalisation, the world has changed to the point where old national ways of thinking about and doing things are irrelevant. The leaf falling in Damascus eventually disturbs the air in London. As the German government recognised this week — as refugee hostels were burnt in a German town — “Europe is facing a great challenge for our generation. Never before have so many people fled political persecution and war as today, many of whom seek refuge here with us in Europe.”
Perhaps, once, all this could have been contained and localised. Throughout the 20th century we who are old enough to recall such things read reports and sometimes saw pictures of famines or great repressions in faraway places. The stick figures of Bihar or the victims of one of Mao’s titanic whims hardly knew where Europe was, let alone how they might escape there. We, in turn, never dreamt that thousands of them might pitch up at Calais or Roszke.
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Roszke? Until yesterday I didn’t know where that was either. It is on the Hungarian-Serbian border, and yesterday Hungarian police were firing tear gas at migrants/refugees who were trying to leave a processing centre there without being finger-printed. Some of those people might be en route to Britain though a BBC reporter could not find any — possibly disappointingly — who wanted to come here.
Most had travelled from Syria and the areas of Iraq controlled by Isis (sorry, Daesh) through Turkey and Macedonia, where the overwhelmed authorities let them through without hindrance. When the Hungarian authorities finish their fence along the border with Serbia, the migrants will find another route. Perhaps across the Black Sea to Moldova and then into Romania. Who knows?
What has changed is not the number of wars or deadly events in the world, but the capacity and determination of people to escape them. In India today there are nearly a billion subscribers to mobile phones. In towns and villages throughout what used to be called the Third World there are people without access to proper sanitation, who nevertheless have access to communications. Many of these can exchange pictures, stories and videos of far-off places. This capacity can help them improve their lives in situ, which is what most of them want. But it also means they can see how well that uncle who went to Sweden is getting on.
And for a tiny proportion that technology and the knowledge it brings means they can travel to where the mayhem is, take part in the bloodshed and then export it around the world. Thus at the weekend we had a Moroccan, who had lived in Spain and France, and had a sister in Brussels, getting on a train from Amsterdam to Paris with a Russian-designed assault rifle, and being prevented from killing people by three Americans and a Brit.
To some people the answer to all this is to imagine a world in which a country like Britain retreats back to its islands, festoons its borders with barbed wire and armed guards, and rebuilds its navy so we can trade mostly with the Commonwealth. Henry of Huntingdon would have recognised Nigel Farage.
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A related mentality blames what is happening on our previous interventions in world affairs. The barely spoken but ubiquitous thought is that if we had somehow helped maintain the Assads, the Saddams, the Gaddafis (and, in future, the Putins) in power, the migrant crisis would never have happened. Brutal, of course, but better than the alternative.
It has a certain hard-eyed appeal, this consigning of millions of nameless others to dictatorships. But it won’t work, which is why we are on the receiving end of so many Eritreans. I’d go further. Helping the rebels in Libya to resist Gaddafi was never a bad thing to do. That regime was doomed one way or the other. The mistake was congratulating ourselves on not losing a soldier and then getting out, leaving the Libyans with their zero history of state-building to get on with it.
This week Germany’s ministers for foreign affairs and economics came up with an ambitious yet essential ten-point plan for Europe to deal with the migrant crisis. From London — silence. We are the country where the last opposition leader congratulated himself on what had happened in Syria. We are Canute’s courtiers on the shore.
John Donne’s 1624 poem was a moral exercise rather than a practical one. He thought we should behave as though no man was an island. But now, four centuries later, it is literally true. That bell — you can hear it loudly, don’t pretend you can’t — tolls for us.