BRITISH Council: just say the words, and a series of powerful images from the last decade come flooding into my mind.
A brilliant weekend of new British playwriting in Leipzig, a high-powered devolution conference in Valencia, a fantastic woman in Bosnia – with the worst smoker's cough I ever heard – who had worked for the British Council through nightmares of confl
ict and who interrupted a high-speed drive to the airport to take me on a detour through the Sarajevo backstreets, to visit a veteran human rights campaigner she'd just discovered I knew. There's the calm corner office in Kiev, full of ambitious young Ukrainians honing their English-language skills; and the tiny, well-barricaded villa in downtown Pristina – with a decorative red phone-box in the garden – where a bright, wise Kosovan staff talk complicated sense about their country's aspiration to independence, and what that means to the local Serbian population.
For 70 years, in other words, the British Council has been the body which – mainly out of sight of the British citizens who pay for it – has sought to promote understanding of British culture and language outside Britain, and to foster ever warmer cultural and educational exchange with communities and individuals across the planet. There's no point in denying that a faint whiff of old colonial style sometimes still clings around the council's operations; and like all publicly-funded British bodies in recent years, it has suffered its share of arbitrary funding changes, tedious pseudo-commercialisation and pointless restructuring.
Despite all that, though, the post-Cold-War British Council has essentially played a blinder in responding to changes in global politics, targeting its work in areas where it can make a difference and completely changing its representation of Britain to reflect the realities of the newly devolved nation. Since 1999, it has represented Scotland abroad so well that culturally interested citizens in Lisbon or Leipzig often seem better informed about Scotland's booming cultural scene than most people here at home; and it has worked hard to forge stronger relationships in areas such as the Arab world and Iran, where mutual understanding can be in short supply.
It's therefore both puzzling and vaguely infuriating to find the British Council, of all institutions, suddenly nominated as the Russian government's whipping-boy in its diplomatic row with Britain, which began with Britain's attempt, last summer, to extradite Kremlin favourite Andrei Lugovoi on suspicion of involvement in the murder in London of the anti-Putin dissident Alexander Litvinenko. It's not that the bullying of the British Council represents some kind of new phase in diplomacy, in which cultural affairs take centre stage. Anyone whose memory stretches as far back as the 1980s – never mind to the height of the Cold War – will recall how large a part the control and harassment of artists played in the methods of the Soviet state, and how counter-productive it finally proved.
What fairly blows the mind, though, is the extent to which President Vladimir Putin's pals in the Russian security service are simply reverting, under pressure, to a default mode of operation that involves exactly the same aimless, cack-handed bullying of the cultural sector. Given Russia's booming energy wealth and the influence that comes with it, it might at least have been hoped that Mr Putin and his chosen successor, Dmitri Medvedev – while hardly champions of human rights – would have sought to win the forthcoming presidential election with a positive vision of a newly prosperous and powerful Russia playing a constructive role on the world stage. Instead, they apparently prefer to base their appeal on a mess of clapped-out anti-colonial rhetoric directed against an "opponent" whose imperial power is long gone; and whose modest cultural activities in Russia are helpful to thousands of Russian citizens each year.
What the British Council row throws into particularly vivid relief, in other words, is the increasingly contemptible tendency of national governments, across the planet, to evade the colossal economic and environmental issues facing us by reverting to infantile, nationalistic blame-games. It happens at European summits, where the leaders of the planet's most affluent region cannot even agree on a rational agricultural policy, so busy are they grandstanding to their domestic electorates about how they protected them from this or that evil European scheme. It happens in global climate change negotiations, to an extent that beggars belief given the urgency of the issue. It happens in the US elections, where some politicians would rather waste breath fantasising about where America's next batch of external enemies are coming from than get to grips with the nation's mounting economic problems.
And we should not flatter ourselves, finally, that it could not happen here. At the moment, we in Scotland are experiencing the shining, progressive face of nationalism, in the shape of a government more able, more outward-looking, and more imaginative about the nation's future than any we have experienced since devolution. But how do we think it will be, in 20 years, if either Scotland or England turns out to have taken a serious false step in the energy game? Will we in Scotland, if we are the winners, be exporting energy to England in magnanimous style, or cheerfully abusing our new stranglehold over our neighbours, as Russia currently does? And will any of us, in tougher times ahead, be absolutely immune to the kind of nationalistic grandstanding, justified by junk history and the dredging up of old grudges, that has characterised Russia's handling of the British Council affair? I hope so. But the price of decency in international relations is eternal vigilance; and a refusal, on the part of thinking citizens everywhere, to be told that ordinary people elsewhere are their enemies, when in fact – as the work of the British Council daily demonstrates – they are overwhelmingly our brothers and sisters in the struggle for survival, fulfilment and peace.
The full article contains 992 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
