First, it was just James Bond who discovered BMWs. Now the BMW has discovered Rolls Royce. So, have the last bastions of Britain crumbled under the European onslaught? Have the Germans finally fulfilled Adolf Hitler's dream of conquering England? Not quite. It's just that Britain has become more European than it would like to admit. It may be dragged kicking and screaming into the European Union but it has already lost its sceptred isle status. Britain, despite the frenetic selling of the Cool Britannia slogan, has become part of the continent.Once the site of trembling romantic awakenings in E.M. Forster and Henry James' novels, Europe has now become more than a geographical entity for its recalcitrant neighbour. Just as Cool Britannia, the slogan that powered Tony Blair into power, is a concept. So, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Stella MacCartney may be inventive designers but they have to work in Paris to be stars. Just as The Times may be one of the oldest newspapers in the world but it is nowowned by an Australian-American.Of course, if you remember your George Orwell, Englishness itself is a notion, which is less than typical. Whether it is the BBC accent or the public school culture, England is hardly the monolith that we think it is. And that was when the Empire hadn't self-destructed. Now it lies in ruins, with even the outback, Australia, considering doing to Queen Elizabeth what she did to Princess Diana - reducing her royal status.That the empire is dead is old news. What is new is that Britain is also not the cultural leader it thinks it is. Despite the desperate state patronage of its pop establishment - first by Blair at 10, Downing Street, and now by the Queen at Buckingham Palace - English pop remains derivative. So much that its supergroup Oasis actually imitates an earlier English band, the Beatles. And one of its biggest exports, Sir Elton John, freely lifts from his own earlier compositions (Candle in the Wind worked for Marilyn Monroe as much as it did forDiana).Perhaps it was Diana who sealed the fate of Britain. The country's most famous name was anything but English in temperament. Her fashion sense was infinitely apart from the lady in the handbag routine of her mother-in-law and closer to her counterparts in Monaco. And her pet therapies were surely the antitheses of the buttoned up English. The woman who started with Elizabeth Emmanuel naturally ended up weeping at Gianni Versace's funeral.As for cinema, one has been hearing of its revival since David Puttnam's Chariots of Fire. While every year sees either a Four Weddings and a Funeral or a Full Monty, the drizzle determinedly refuses to become a downpour. British thespians thrive only when they are transplanted on American soil. Take a simple fact: who has played two American presidents, Richard Nixon and John Quincy Adams, in the space of two years? Sir Anthony Hopkins. Who played the Hillary Clinton clone, Susan Stanton? Emma Thompson. And the doomed American on Titanic? Kate Winslet.Itwas said that Americans were the ultimate assimilationists. Now the English seem to have taken on that task. As vulnerable to McCulture as they are to European uniformity, perhaps they will end up spawning a truly mixed cross-breed. Don't forget Britain also carries the burden of having colonised large parts of Asia and Africa. Immigrants from former outposts have made Britain a Third World nation in more ways than one. So an Indian Arundhati Roy can win the prestigious Booker prize as much as Blair can be better known as a Friend of Bill and can get away with speaking French in Paris without an accent.Really, Margaret Thatcher is fighting a losing battle. Euro or no Euro, the ethos that was once splendidly isolationist has now created an export house. Whether it is a Martin Amis or a Tina Brown, they are reviled at home but succeed famously in America. Perhaps because Britain has become like India - where cultural unity exists only in the minds of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers. Just because CoolBritannia rhymes with Rule Britannia doesn't mean that the world still swears by England. Most of it just chooses to swear in their language.
