January 1, 2019

BREXIT IS THE EPITOME OF 1989:

If we must look to the past, let's make it 1989 - a year of transformation (John Harris, 1 Jan 2019, The Guardian)

Whatever happened to the future? Brexiteers cling on to a fantastical mixture of empire, war and an England whose genius was supposedly embodied by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, Donald Trump harks back to an America of economic might: musclebound men toiling in car factories and coalmines, and splendid isolation. A recent issue of the Economist surveyed politics in Europe and the US and observed "an orgy of reminiscence", partly traceable to the fact that millions of westerners cannot shake off a deep and understandable sense of decline.

There's an obvious irony in having to look back to find something better, but 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of a run of events that embodied pretty much the polar opposite: optimism, faith in the future and a sense of shared humanity that could not be more different from the polarised, rancorous mood of today. As this year unfolds, the events of 1989 - a year as replete with significance as 1848, 1945 or 1968 - will be celebrated and picked apart; in Berlin there will be an impressive run of commemorative events . Leafing through histories of the time, and thinking back to what happened, what most sticks out is a set of emotions and impulses that we would do well to revive: defiance, joy, an urge to run headlong into whatever happened next.

The year 1989 was one of largely peaceful revolutions that swept through central and eastern Europe, calling time on Soviet communism. In that region of the world, humanity confronted a wall of power that surreally crumbled away.

Mr. Harris is entirely right; he just misunderstands his own point.  The end of the Cold War was simply a matter of electorates reclaiming self-rule from oppressive transnational entities.  While that is most obvious in the case of the fall of the Iron Curtain and eventually the USSR itself, in the West the removal of the Soviet threat meant that we could no longer justify occupying several nations along important naval choke points: South Africa, Palestine and Ireland.  Likewise, our fascist allies in places like Chile and the Philippines were forced to liberalize once the threat had passed.

Subsequent and ongoing armed conflicts are overwhelmingly just a function of working out the rest of these transnationalist breakups--Yugoslavia, China, Russia, Iraq, the Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.

Meanwhile, though the Left dreams of, and the Right is terrorized by fears of, a transnationalist future, the reality is that the determinative political force in the West is centrifugal, not centripetal.  Voters in Catalonia and Scotland will get their own nations back soon enough; places like Belgium, the PRC, Iraq, Israel and the Lebanon are unsustainable as single entities; and if a Puerto Rico or a Wales coalesced around an independence movement no one would stop them from leaving.

All of this helps explain why, contrary to the Remain crowd, the Leavers represent the future, not the past.  The fancy of a unified European state has always been delusional and never moreso than when the entire political globe is being driven by a movement towards increased popular sovereignty. To look at the long run of Anglospheric history and see in it a destiny where Englishmen would allow their nation to be governed by unelected bureaucrats from France and Germany is to indulge in fantasy.

Of course, the flipside of this is that the Right is indulging its own fantasy when it dreams of a walled nation, impervious to immigration and trade. Even the most nationalistic and demographically challenged of states, like Japan, are being forced to accept greater immigration and seek out freer trade, just to preserve their economies. Globalization--which amounts to nothing more than the information revolution exposing the entire globe to Anglospheric ideas--has sped the End of History, which consists of the democracy, capitalism and protestantism that Britain and its children had arrived at by the late 18th century.  Various states may try to resist one of the three strands, but their efforts to do so are doomed. Mankind has proven ludicrously unable to determine any superior way to organize itself.  

MORE:
Why Britain decided to leave the EU - but other countries haven't (Anthony Browne, 29 December 2018, The Spectator)

We are just about the only EU member that has not had experience of dictatorship in living memory (Sweden is the other major exception). In Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania and so on, the older generations remember what it is like to live under a dictatorship - sometimes into the 1970s and 80s - where the government really is the enemy. That is not true in the UK. That leads to a far more fundamental trust in our own government and institutions than in almost all other EU countries. I know that might sound incredible with our politics in the doldrums, but we fundamentally expect and unashamedly demand our government works for us, in a way that is very rare in other EU countries, where the population are often astonishingly suspicious of their governments. In Italy, for example, people so distrust their successive national governments because of their incompetence and corruption that they have been generally happy to transfer power to Brussels as a way to raise standards. In the UK, Denmark and Sweden, popular belief in democracy is notably more fundamental than other EU members, quite simple because we have been practicing it continuously for so much longer (albeit interrupted by Nazi occupation in Denmark's case).

Finally, we are the only EU member with an alternative family we belong to. Living in Brussels, I was always impressed by how much other EU diplomats felt their countries had to hang together to protect themselves against the outside world. 'It is all we have: each other,' I remember one explaining. But as a country we also feel very close - indeed closer - to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is not just at government level with agreements like the Five Eyes intelligence sharing regime and (except the US) a common head of state, but it is part of our culture, as a result of shared history and language. If you look at the statistics on where British people go to study, go on holiday, go to work, and who they marry, we are far closer to these other English speaking countries than any other EU country is. No other EU country has that alternative large and successful developed family (yes, Spain has much of Latin America, Portugal has Brazil, France has Quebec, the Netherlands has the Afrikaaners, but in no case is it a large family of peers; the Scandinavian countries are all very close, but three of them are already in the EU). A third of the global economy is countries we feel very close to who speak our language, and that makes us more secure as a country about striking out on our own. Leading Australian politicians have been notably vocal in urging us to leave the EU and come back to our family.

None of this is an argument for Brexit, but it does help explain why Euroscepticism led to a referendum to leave the EU here, and not anywhere else.

Posted by at January 1, 2019 9:36 AM

  

« ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE: | Main | THERE'S A REASON MILLER HAS TAKEN OVER WH COMMUNICATIONS...: »