21 June 2016 – We know that even lone lunatics don’t live in a bubble. They are influenced by outside events. That’s why, when there is an act of Islamist terrorism, we quite rightly want to know if it was, implicitly or explicitly, encouraged by other actors. We do not believe – at least we should not – in collective guilt or punishment but we do want to know, with reason, whether an individual assassin was inspired by ideology or religion or hate-speech or any of a hundred other possible motivating factors. And, no, Nigel Farage isn’t responsible for Jo Cox’s murder. And nor is the Leave campaign. But they are responsible for the manner in which they have pressed their argument. They weren’t to know something like this was going to happen, of course, and they will be just as shocked and horrified by it as anyone else.
Except me. Maybe it is heartless to say and maybe it is because I have spent too much time in the Middle East and seen unspeakable slaughter exponentially greater, but I was inured to the murder of Jo Cox and the Orlando massacre. I watched none of the 24/7 TV coverage. I am simply inured to the violence. As I say in the preface to my book on the Middle East (out in 2017 accordingly to the plan):
I normally live in a world seemingly corralled by algorithms, so when I travel to the Middle East I must bring to my soul an element of chaos to a culture that continually plays its deadly, dystopic sameness.
But onto thoughts of the referendum.
Every month, to keep up on UK politics and other current affairs, I diligently read my Prospect, New Statesman, and The Spectator magazines. The writing is across the political spectrum, and usually pretty erudite. Would the Brexit debate have played out differently in a calmer, less crisis-ridden Europe? Maybe the threat of the UK leaving the EU would have caused citizens and politicians across Europe to think about “ever closer union” and what it actually means or should mean for them.
It’s a nice thought, but in reality virtually nobody in the last ten years or so has been willing to talk about what used to be known as finalité, the purported end-state of European integration. Far from concentrating minds, Brexit has been treated as yet another distraction in an EU facing multiple threats of disintegration. As Andrew O’Hagan noted:
At last autumn’s summit meetings, convened to address the refugee crisis, other member states made clear their view that dealing with the UK was like trying to manage a narcissistic child. Ten years ago, London might have had a different vision for Europe and been taken seriously, even rallied other member states. Now Britain is seen not just as inward-looking, but as selfish and sullen. The very fact that the Brexit debate is almost exclusively about Britain indicates the extent to which Cameron has removed the UK from the project of determining the Union’s future as a whole.
To make it easier for those readers who “don’t get it” I use the following as the best example of what is the core issue for the Brexit side:
Brussels has very limited legal means of intervening to safeguard democracy and the rule of law in member states. Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty sets out the values to which members must adhere: ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.’ Article 7 sets out the procedure for addressing breaches of Article 2. It is long-winded and bureaucratic (trust me, I labored through it) but could lead to suspension of the voting rights of the state concerned as well as any benefits obtained from the EU, presumably including payments. This procedure has been initiated recently with regard to Poland though little happened. Why? It is difficult to see just how much further a non-elected institution can go with respect to a democratically elected government.
And that is the heart of the matter, that at the center of the EU there is a blatant lack of democratic authority. How it confronts the growth of fascism in Europe (let’s not mince words) is going to be a major problem for the UK, in or out of the EU.
And irony abounds. It is an irony that Britain is thinking of leaving after a quarter-century during which the EU has in many ways been reshaped in the image of the UK, has de facto become Breurope, even if that wasn’t always the UK’s doing. This change doesn’t seem so dramatic if one doesn’t fall for the illusion that European integration was once about realizing social democratic ideals. The business of Europe has always been business, though it’s true that the single market was intended not just to increase prosperity, but also to promote peace and increase Europe’s power in the world.
But read your Tony Judt. Postwar elites never believed that an abstract appeal to solidarity across national borders would achieve much; instead, they relied on the hard logic of making states dependent on each other. The declared purpose of the Coal and Steel Community established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951 was to make war between France and Germany impossible, on the basis that their industries would become completely interlocked. There was also a notion that German business and French farmers would acquire a vested interest in European integration – and that has remained the case to this day.
But that’s not to say politics did not hold sway. Quoting Eric Hobsbawm:
The continuing primacy of the single market hasn’t been the only de facto victory for the UK in recent decades. The other was enlargement. Helmut Kohl, concerned about political instability in Germany’s eastern backyard and tempted by the prospect of cheap labour for German industry, led the drive to include Central and Eastern European states. France had vociferously opposed the change, but Britain proved an indispensable ally. In London’s eyes, the EU notion that ‘deepening’ and ‘enlarging’ could be accomplished at the same time was obviously an illusion: enlargement would be at the expense of further integration. Having Eastern Europe in meant that the possibility of permanent Franco-German domination was out.
But, says Alex Massie, a sense of abandonment grew. The Brexiters regularly present themselves as champions of ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘the rule of law’ (the excellence of which supposedly explains the attractiveness of London for global finance – never mind deregulation or the role of the City as a major hub for illicit financial transactions). In recent years countries like Hungary and Poland have started systematically to dismantle democracy and the rule of law within their own borders. They have weakened the judiciary, captured the media, and attacked all opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic. Says Massie:
Brussels isn’t the great threat to the rule of law in Europe, it is increasingly authoritarian individual governments that pose a real danger not just to their own citizens, but to anyone holding a European passport; as long as they are represented in the European Council, the decisions they make affect everyone in the EU. There are even some Tories who understand these perils perfectly well, but they would never speak up for fear that it might lead to ‘more powers for Brussels’. Instead, shamefully, they opted to stand with Poland’s deeply illiberal Law and Justice party when it came under severe criticism in the European Parliament earlier this year (Cameron took the Tories out of the European People’s Party grouping in 2014 and joined an alliance with Poland’s ruling party as well as right-wing populists such as the Danish People’s Party and the ‘True Finns’).
I split my time between Brussels and Paris and it is striking how little attention has been paid to the Brexit debate in the rest of Europe. European leaders were willing to engage in February’s summit kabuki, which allowed Cameron to declare victory at home, having secured some largely symbolic gains. But on the issues that really mattered – above all, free movement within the single market – other member states were uncompromising, making it impossible for Cameron to satisfy Ukip voters (or the right wing of his own party). And this time the UK’s usual allies didn’t see London forging a path they wanted to follow, in the way Sweden and Denmark once regarded Britain as creating possibilities for opt-outs of one kind or another. In theory, it might have been possible to build a coalition around a vision of Europe à la carte, but in practice, even those governments which worry that their own populations are becoming increasingly Eurosceptic realize that a Europe in which everyone can have it both ways would be utterly incoherent.
And the new “German problem”. Said Jan-Werner Muller:
German leaders and thinkers have had to face up to a dilemma. Germany has not succeeded in exporting its vaunted Stabilitätskultur; indeed, as Hans Kundnani has pointed out, Berlin has created a Europe-wide culture of instability (both economic and political – witness the recent difficulties that Ireland and Spain have had in forming governments). At the same time, Germany is strong enough for France to feel decisively weakened. The EU was created to make the role of a ‘European hegemon’ impossible and to get rid of the ‘German problem’ once and for all. But at the moment Europe seems unable to function at all without at least a ‘half-hegemonic’ Germany. The trouble with half hegemons is that they don’t have the means to make a system of states work as a whole simply by supporting the weaker members; at the same time, they are powerful enough to leave everyone else feeling resentful. It’s a story that reminds historians of Germany’s position in Europe after 1871.
There is no doubt that Brexit would be a major boost for right-wing populists across the continent. It is important to understand what parties like the Front National, the Austrian Freedom Party and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz have in common. They have all successfully usurped the language of democracy and, in the case of Marine Le Pen, French Republicanism. They claim faithfully to represent the people’s will and to uphold the ideal of national sovereignty. Le Pen has been particularly skilful, as part of her strategy of dédiabolisation, in appropriating the souverainiste discourse of parts of the French left. Not only has the FN (supposedly) bid farewell to Le Pen père’s racism; Marine is now defending France against Europe in terms of republican, democratic values (as opposed to invoking crude nationalism). Brexit, she said, would be like the breach of the Berlin Wall: a moment of liberation, a triumph for democracy.
Settle down there, girlfriend. Populists always need enemies and conspiracies to explain why they aren’t already in power, or, when they do get to rule, why they aren’t succeeding and why there can’t be such a thing as a legitimate opposition. The EU has served them well in this regard. But it is naive to think that, even after getting rid of the supposed dictatorship of Brussels (and Germany), they would rest content. As we have seen, populist identity politics have been simultaneously directed against supranational elites and migrants. As migration will not magically disappear after an exit from the Union, it’s easy to imagine the vile ways in which populists will mobilize their supporters once they are outside the EU.
And populists would not be Brexit’s only winners. Putin has long sought to divide the EU, if for no reason other than to undermine its ‘soft power’ and to show that in a tough world it takes tough men like him to make things happen (as Putin observers have argued, many Russians actually like Europe, but they do not respect it). Orbán, whose government has benefited from a major loan from Moscow, has been quietly doing Putin’s bidding (and dividing) inside the Union. Another Russian state bank loan, to the Front National, a €9 million investment in a kind of business plan for European disintegration, has not yet yielded the desired return. So far as Russia is concerned, Brexit would be a valuable, globally visible sign that the dream of integration is finished; most important, the EU’s capacity to impose and renew sanctions on Russia, which so far it has managed surprisingly well, would be weakened.
And, oh yes. There are others who might secretly be hoping for Brexit. The financial industry on the Continent calculates that it might get London’s business. Southern countries would reason that the balance of power had shifted in their favor and might make another attempt to escape German half-hegemony. Renzi is already rehearsing the role of leader, after Hollande’s miserable failure in 2012. The Italian prime minister stresses growth and even has ambitious plans for further integration, including a common European unemployment scheme. More important still, Renzi has been trying to argue that Europe’s multiple crises also present opportunities for trade-offs: Italy could help Germany with refugees, for example, if Germany were to relax its relentless demand for strict adherence to the rules on national deficits. So far, Berlin has flatly refused deals of this sort; if it were to give in a little, the question would soon arise whether other ‘Northerners’ might want to follow the example of Brexit. Polls indicate that if the UK goes, a majority of Swedes would want to leave as well. Jimmie Akesson, the leader of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats, is already calling for a referendum on EU membership. If nothing else, it is clear that the EU cannot afford to give a post-Brexit UK a good deal.
The proponents of secessionism, another major form of identity politics in Europe today, probably also expect to gain from Brexit. One has to imagine that Brexit would be followed by another referendum on Scottish independence, which in turn could be the prelude to the break-up of Spain, Belgium and possibly Italy. However, even if an independent Scotland were quickly admitted to the EU, that wouldn’t solve the problem of the secession of Catalonia and the chances are even slimmer that the Lega Nord would finally seek an actual separation of its fantasy creation, ‘Padania’, from the rest of Italy. Belgium has its problems, but break-up would mean at least one party losing the capital of Europe – an unacceptable downside on which even all Belgians can probably agree.
Europe still hasn’t yet found an institutional architecture that would create stability. The euro has brought about the very conflicts European integration had been intended to prevent. One of the Union’s founding fathers, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, once spoke of the need to ‘detoxify the relationship between France and Germany’; now, the nationalist toxin is back virtually everywhere in Europe. Nobody at this point can or, for that matter, even really wants to move forward with ‘ever closer union’; Cameron secured an opt-out from something that for most Europeans has become meaningless. But in no country is there a majority for leaving (or dissolving the club) either.
I do not have a horse in this race bit I believe the UK should elect Bremain. Let me end with Mr Werner:
A UK that goes it alone, and especially a former UK, will not necessarily lose two of the things that the EU achieved in the postwar period: peace and prosperity – even if most economists agree that the latter will be significantly diminished. But it certainly will lose power. It won’t have a seat at the table when the EU, the world’s largest economy, makes its deals with China and the US. Merkel has tried hard to keep Cameron invested, or even just interested, in a Europe where Britain has enormous clout because of its economy and, not least, its military. A UK that stays in will not solve the EU’s problems with Schengen and the Eurozone; but securing the former and strengthening the latter are not necessarily threats to Britain. The UK isn’t condemned to be a spoilsport for ever, let alone the solipsistic nation into which Cameron’s ill-timed referendum has turned it. Brexit would make Germany even more powerful, and Germany’s continued attempts to keep Europe British without Britain would create even more conflict and resentment.
But a UK that remained and co-operated selectively with Berlin might just make the EU more stable, better able to project power, and less toxic. Eventually, after what is likely to go down in history as a lost decade for Europe, the EU might even become an area of hope again.
I know. I am a cynic and I ended on an up note. I still envision the complete destabilization and fracture of the EU and a similar fate as the Soviet Union. I am merely trying to buy time for my family. A Brexit will accelerate the inevitable.