SOMETHING IS happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or even a transformation, nobody is quite sure which. Opinions in fact differ quite sharply as to what the "it" is that we are passing through.
Seasoned, even, dare I say, senior observers in the United States tend to identify what they see quite simply as decline. In the most obvious, palpable, undeniable sense, a decline in relative power must certainly play some part. This is not 1914, and Britain, though still one of the principal global trading powers and possessing the fourth- or fifth-largest economy in the world, is no longer Number 1. And it has to be admitted that a large part of what drew many foreign observers to this country was the thrill of reaching the center of affairs. For Norman Podhoretz, to visit or even to live in London was once to be in the modern Athens or Rome. Now, he tells us in a melancholy essay in Commentary--"The Last Time I Saw London" (January 2001)--that he no longer bothers to read British newspapers or keep up with the English literary world. To judge by the pop and rock stars and feminists whose images adorn the new wing of the National Portrait Gallery, he concludes, "the forces at work in the culture and polit ics of England in the second half of the 20th century had left a sorry--nay, tragic--wreckage behind."
Podhoretz summarizes the view of Britain held by Aleksa Djilas, a Belgrade commentator:
The country's culture has declined; its sense of itself and its purpose have descended from the heights they formerly occupied; it has pulled down the curtain on the demonstration it once put on of what a tiny island could accomplish by adhering religiously to a moral code of duty, honor, work, and national responsibility; and it looks not with pride but with shame at the power it once had.
