To put it with an Orwellian twist, I'd say that the UK will stick with Oceania, that is the great Anglo-Saxon combo....
However, I think that the UK will have no trouble thriving in the vicinity of post-fascist Eurasia.
Here's a historical reminder excerpted from The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, by Alvin Finkel and Clement Leibovitz (c)1997:
[p.284]
CONCLUSION
The argument that this book has made, simply put, is that Chamberlain made what he considered to be a formal deal with Hitler in September 1938 that gave the Nazi dictator control over central and eastern Europe in return for a solemn assurance that Nazi guns would never be aimed in the direction of western Europe or any corner of the British Empire. This collusion was the logical result of official British reaction to the Nazi government from the time Hitler came to power in 1933. From the beginning, the governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, took the view that whatever Hitler's faults, he was the best if not only alternative to the Communists of Germany. Though they recognized that Hitler's intentions to rearm Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty could ultimately represent a military threat to their own country, they were convinced that Hitler's focus was on expansion eastwards to grab the lebensraum that he claimed the German population required. The goals of Nazi expansionism would, they believed, inevitably produce a military clash between Hitler and Stalin that they hoped might result in a dismemberment of the Communist state. This would rid the elites of Europe of the Communist threat which had menaced them since 1917 and which they had been unable to extirpate in the aftermath of the establishment of the Bolshevik regime because of troop mutinies and demonstrations at home opposed to intervention in the affairs of the former Russian Empire. They were so obsessed with the perceived Communist danger that they were prepared to gamble on the security of their own country, wistfully hoping that Hitler would prove the instrument of their fondest goal. Though the French elite, more concerned than the British about the possibility of a German invasion of their country, were divided on this approach, the French right received a big boost in pursuing a pro-Hitler foreign policy from the British opposition to making anti-Nazism rather than anti-Sovietism the fundamental objective of Franco-British foreign policy.
The Anglo-German Naval Pact in 1935 and the British and French refusal to react to Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 grew out of this perspective of how the democracies should deal with Hitler on the one hand and Stalin on the other. Britain reconciled itself to the rearming of Germany and the march into the Rhineland before they had occured. We argued that it did so because it was willing to countenance a free hand for Germany in the east and, in any case, was unwilling to see Hitler overthrown for fear that the next German government might be controlled by Communists. Prime Minister Baldwin was explicit in Cabinet that France, which considered repelling the Germans from the Rhineland, had to be made to see that Hitler was the best alternative available as leader of Germany if the communist danger in Europe was to be averted. With the free hand to Hitler conceded early on, it is fair to say that Britain accepted in advance both the takeovers of Austria and the Sudetenland. Indeed, as we have seen, Britain was prepared almost a year before Munich to let Hitler do as he wished in Czechoslovakia. Public revulsion however forced Chamberlain to attempt to get Hitler to modify his appetite at the same time using the Czech crisis as a pretext to meet three times with Hitler in an effort to get, as he admitted to the king, a "general agreement" with Germany that would unite the two nations against the Soviet Communists. The three Chamberlain-Hitler meetings in September 1938 formalized what had been an informal understanding between Britain and Germany to that point, with France, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance, concurring: Germany could do as it wished in central and eastern Europe and the democracies were not to intervene, particularly should Germany carry its warfare to the Soviet Union. Racism against Slavic peoples made this betrayal of the interests of much of Europe on the altar of antibolshevism appear more palatable.
The "deal" between Hitler, on the one hand, and Chamberlain and Daladier, on the other, at Munich, which in turn simply confirmed the deal worked out by Chamberlain and Hitler at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg, fell apart because when push came to shove, Hitler had more faith in British and French democracy than the rulers of Britain and France themselves. While he trusted Chamberlain and Halifax, he was convinced that the pro-Nazi foreign policy that Britain and France were following would not outlive the prime ministerships of Chamberlain and Daladier. Aware that public opinion in both countries was against the Fascist dictators and their intimidation of both their own peoples and aggression against their neighbours, Hitler believed that he had to face the possibility of a return of the Popular Front in France or of a government in Britain led by a firm anti-Nazi such as Churchill, Eden or Cooper. Such governments, he reasoned, would disavow the free hand in the east that he had received from the leaders of Britain and France and take advantage of a German assault on eastern and central Europe to attack Germany from the west. Unwilling to risk having to fight on two fronts at once, he began plans to attack the West so as to neutralize the Western countries before he invaded more countries of central and eastern Europe to pursue his lebensraum.
[...]
It's important not only that the truth of what transpired in Britain and France as Germany rearmed comes out but also that the underlying causes be exposed. There is an assumption in much writing on this period and on other periods that the leaders of the democracies, however conservative their economic and social policies, are democrats. While they may be interested in the protection of the property and privileges of elites, they are considered to be willing to fight for and perhaps lose their battles within a framework of mass democracy and elected governing bodies. Unfortunately such an assumption is often untrue. It is quite clear from the evidence of the 1920s and 1930s that the elites in Britain and France, as well as other countries, were contemptuous of the parliamentary regimes they were forced to work under, hostile to labour parties and trade unions, and terrified of Communists and large-scale strikes. Largely unwilling to allow sufficient redistribution of wealth and power to weaken the ideological threat posed by socialism and communism, many members of the elites welcomed the fall of democracy in such countries as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany. The enthusiasm of the big businessmen and landlords of the fascist countries for the new regimes, regimes whose establishment owed much to the bankrolling of the dictators by vested interests, confirmed the increasingly anti-democratic views of the British and French establishment. While they happily moaned the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, they made excuses for the right-wing dictators, suggesting that the countries they led were somehow unsuited to democracy. Unfortunately, it would seem that when wealth is too greatly concentrated, the powerful social class controlling that wealth will stoop to any level to maitain their privileges. The general incompatibility of democracy with plutocracy seems to be confirmed by the behaviour of the British and French elites of the 1930s.
[snip]
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Guess what.... On the eve of the XXIst century, those plutojerks are back in Euro-town! |
