Could what we’re experiencing today in Britain – the economic and social problems, ludicrous governments, right-wing extremism, culture wars, riots and general anomie – be a sign or symptom, or even an effect, of what ex-US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously described in 1962 as Britain’s having ‘lost an Empire, but not yet found a rôle’?

Despite Conservative objections, that did not seem implausible at the time. A little early, perhaps: Britain still had a fair number of colonies to get rid of in 1962, and a pretty extensive ‘informal’ empire – money and influence – parts of which have managed to survive, albeit much attenuated, until today. All the same, once India had gone, then much of Africa, and following the Suez débacle in 1956, the writing was clearly – to everyone save a few deluded ‘Empire Loyalists’ – ‘on the wall’. This was obvious to most of us Brits then, and even more so to our ‘cousins’, like Acheson, across the water.

I don’t want to quarrel with this. Indeed, I’d put the effective loss of Britain’s ‘formal’ empire even earlier – see my The Lion’s Share. And the seeping away of the trappings of empire after the Second World War did leave spaces that needed to be filled by something. Empire Loyalists saw that ‘something’ as a revival – somehow – of the old Empire. Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – was their final redoubt, which fell of course in 1980. The Falklands didn’t fall, but were hardly the foundation you could rebuild an Empire on. (They had always been marginal to British imperial power in any case.) The ‘Commonwealth’, which survived the breakup of the Empire, was another possible focus for post-imperial loyalty; but a rather too liberal, ‘multi-cultural’, weak and disobedient one for the Empire Loyalists and pro-Rhodesians to feel comfortable with. Much later on this vestigial ‘imperialism’ could also be said to be manifested in the Brexiteers’ ideas of a ‘global Britain’, the ‘Anglosphere’, post-European trade deals with former colonies, and the like.

But there were alternative ‘rôles’ on offer. One was for Britain to ally more closely with the USA. This was one of the earliest solutions offered, by people who as early as the 1890s saw the way things were going, including most notably the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The second – anathema to the likes of him – was for Britain to assert, or re-assert, her influence in the evolving (under a succession of different names) European Union. This of course was what eventually came to pass, when the Conservative government of Edward Heath finally negotiated Britain’s adhesion to it in 1973. That could have bestowed on Britain a new replacement ‘rôle’; and arguably did.

But not, of course, to the liking of those Britons who hankered after a more ‘independent’ and by implication ‘powerful’ rôle for their country; or – more importantly – of those who didn’t really care one way or another about what ‘rôle’ Britain should play in the world, but were willing to go along with the Brexiteers’ false argument that her ‘subservient’ one within the EU, and tracing this back, her loss of empire, were at the root of all their domestic woes.

So, in the event Britain has tried out two new putative national roles for herself since the loss of her formal empire. The first was the European one; the second the anti-European one, which seems to be fed with memories of what the old imperial role is supposed to have meant for her. Both have pretty well failed, rôle-wise; and it is this that could be said to confirm Acheson’s view: that Britain had no idea what she should do once the Empire had gone. In other words, we have still not ‘found a role’.

I say ‘we’; but the truth is that only a tiny minority of us Brits really cares a fig about our ‘role’. Most of us – apart from politicians and historians – are almost entirely indifferent about what part our nation plays and played in the world, until that ‘part’ is falsely tied in with more social and individual concerns, like today. I think I demonstrated this in my The Absent-Minded Imperialists; although I should point out in fairness that the reading presented there is controversial. Most people didn’t care about the Empire; and so hardly cared about it when it had gone. So the implication of Acheson’s claim – that it was important to them – is misleading.

In any case, ‘rôles’ can be established in other ways than by crudely political and military – ‘imperial’ – means. Cultural is one. Social is another. Economic is a third – although that way colonialism can lie. Moral is another. (The Dalai Llama has no battalions.) In the broader picture, power, control and empire are arguably less admirable and desirable than these, and many others. ‘We used to have an empire’, as Brexiteer mobs are sometimes heard shouting. – So what? We still have (or had) Shakespeare, Turner, some wonderful mediaeval cathedrals, our language, our universities, and the NHS. Empires never last for ever. Some of these might.