Brexit, Nationalism and the International Far Right
This is the lightly edited text of a talk I gave at Hamilton Third Age Learning on exclusionary nationalism and Brexit. It's a long, illustrated, post explaining the connections between the far right, the rise of nationalism and Brexit, Trump and anti-EU movements in Europe today.
Brexit refers to the referendum held on 23 June 2016 regarding Britain’s continuing membership in the European Union. A relatively simple question was asked:
“Should
the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European
Union?”
Voters had two choices:
1.
“Remain a member of the European Union”
2.
“Leave the European Union”
The Result: 17,410,742 voted to leave; 16,141,241 voted to remain.
The leave campaign thus earned 51.9% of the 33.5 million votes cast – a turn out of 72% of the 45 million people eligible to vote. Thus, 37% of the total eligible electorate cast a vote to leave the European Union [or EU]. This result was widely seen as surprising.
When the idea
to hold a referendum was first approved by Parliament in May 2015 it was
intended as a purely advisory measure: indeed, it was argued at the time that
to be a binding mandate, a supermajority of at least 60% of votes cast would be
necessary. However, since June of 2016
the new leadership of the Government, itself installed as a result of the
political fall-out from the referendum, have taken the view that the vote
showed that the British people want to leave and have subsequently followed a
course of action to make a Brexit happen.
On 30 March, this year, PM Theresa May, triggered article 50 of the
Lisbon Treaty, and initiated divorce negotiations between the EU and the UK. There is now a two-year period to work out
the details of the divorce arrangement.
But regardless of the deal worked out, unless a negotiating extension is
agreed upon by both the EU and UK, by the end of March 2019 Britain will
formally leave of the EU.
Why, after a
44-year relationship, was there a vote to consider leaving? What were the issues and forces pushing for
this vote? And most importantly why did
the Leave side win a plurality of the votes?
I will
attempt to address these questions, first by setting out the historical
context, indicating the issues that divided the campaigns, and then answering
directly why I think the Leave side won.
Throughout I’m going to make connections to the broader European and
North American context.
Historical Context
To understand
why there was a vote to leave in 2016, I think we need to first consider the
context of the long-term relationship between Britain and the European
Union. We might describe this
relationship as Britain wanting one foot in, but always keeping one foot out,
of Europe.
The EU’s origins go back
to formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. After initially believing that the
Commonwealth was a suitable Anglo-centric alternative and counterweight to the
EEC, British governments reversed that view in the early 1960s and came to the
conclusion that Britain’s economic future actually lay with Europe. Britain applied for entry into the EEC twice
in the 1960s, only to have their applications summarily vetoed by President De
Gaulle of France.
On the third application,
by the Conservative government of Edward Heath in 1973, Britain was admitted to
the community. This was confirmed in
1975, after a referendum held on the question by the much less-EEC positive
Labour government of Harold Wilson. In
answer to the question: “Do you think the UK should stay in the European Common
Market?” 67% of the population voted
“Yes” with clear majorities in all but two of the UK’s 68 administrative
counties, regions and Northern Ireland.
The Labour government abided by the result despite divisions on the
issue amongst its own MPs and rank and file.
Indeed, many within the Labour Party distrusted the EEC and, when in
opposition after the election of the Conservative Government led by Margaret
Thatcher in 1979, for a while it became Labour Party policy to leave the EEC.
Key pro-Europe members
therefore left Labour altogether and joined other disillusioned centrists who
had formed the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. The SDP would ally and
eventually merge with the Liberal Party to create the Liberal Democrat Party,
and that has been the most consistently pro-European political grouping in
Britain.
Although it had been
Conservative governments that had pushed for and succeeded in getting Britain
membership in the EEC, a vocal group on the right wing of the Conservative
Party also always opposed that membership.
Thus, what would come to
be known as Euroscepticism was present in Westminster from the start of
Britain’s relationship with Europe, found on both the far right and on the left
of the political spectrum. Meanwhile,
the more centrist wings of both main political parties, and the Liberal Democrats,
have been pro-European.
After becoming Prime
Minister, Margaret Thatcher became much more Eurosceptic than the rest of her
own cabinet. She had supported British
entry in 1973, but as Prime Minister she set about re-negotiating the terms of
British entry in the early 1980s. At
that time Britain was paying a lot more into the EEC budget on a per capita
basis than were other members. This was
partly because of Britain’s late entry into the community, and partly because
farm subsidies made up some 70% of total EEC expenditures, and Britain received
relatively few of these subsidies. The
UK “rebate” negotiated by Thatcher in 1984 reduced Britain’s contribution to
the budget from more than 20 percent of the total in the early 1980s to about
12 percent today. This rebate would
underlie a contentious issue in the later Brexit debate.
Thatcher’s government
also kept Britain from joining the Schengen Treaty area in 1985: this was the treaty that abolished
border checks at the signatories' common borders and orchestrated the
harmonization of visa policies across Europe.
Instead, Britain and Ireland maintained their Common Travel Area: an
open borders agreement comprising the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Isle of Man,
and the Channel Islands.
Schengen was a key step
in the transformation of the EEC into the broader European Union, a process
confirmed by the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The purpose of the EU was to integrate
Europe’s nations politically as well as economically, creating a united foreign
policy, common citizenship rights and a single currency. Thatcher opposed Maastricht, but the
Conservative government of her successor, John Major, signed the treaty, albeit
with the concession that Britain would be allowed to retain its own currency –
and therefore be outside the new Eurozone.
Throughout the first 20
years of its membership, then, Britain was a self-limiting member of the
European integration project.
Nevertheless, membership in the new Europe did profoundly transform the
British economy and many important social and cultural links were
established. For those born after the
1970s, Europe has been as important a constant in national life as has the
monarchy.
And from the 1990s on,
substantial numbers of British people began living in other Europe states and
vice versa. And, of course, the EU
itself also began rapidly expanding, to what is now a union of 28 states.
All states currently under an EU Treaty
Its important to note
here is that it is precisely because of the continuing influence of a
Eurosceptic minority within
Britain’s political class, that Britain has had the least constrained
arrangement of all the EU members.
When Labour leader Tony
Blair, won a landslide victory in 1997, after moving his party more towards the
centre of the political spectrum, it appeared as if Britain had finally
embraced a strongly pro-European Union position. The Labour Party had mostly reconciled itself
to Europe by the time of Maastricht, and Blair’s government worked to build and
strengthen ties with the rest of Europe.
Euroscepticism in both main political parties was quite muted in the
late 1990s and early 2000s, and those opposed to membership in the EU
increasingly gravitated to a number of fringe political groups, which were
brought together by the creation of the UK Independence party (UKIP), led after
1997, by Nigel Farage.
The
main raison d’etre of this populist,
far right party was withdrawing Britain from the EU. It received much positive press from the
tabloid media, particularly the papers owned by moguls Richard Desmond and
Rupert Murdoch. UKIP’s slow but steady
rise in support over the past two decades worried the right wing of the
Conservatives, who feared that even though UKIP has only ever elected 1 MP to
Westminster, a sizeable portion of their own support would eventually flee the
Tories in favour of UKIP.
UKIP’s
main electoral success has come, ironically enough, in elections to the
European Union Parliament, where because of that assembly’s proportional
representation system, UKIP has matched and even outpolled Britain’s mainstream
parties (27.5% of the vote and 24 of Britain’s 73 MEPs in 2014). And in the EU
Parliament Farage has led the small but vocal Eurosceptic group of MEPs (now
called Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy) of far-right
nationalists from
across Europe.
In 2007, after plans for
an official EU constitution collapsed, the Lisbon Treaty was passed
instead. This gave the EU Parliament
more powers and further entrenched neo-liberal economic polices within the
Union. However, the ratification of the
Lisbon treaty coincided with the global economic meltdown prompted by the
collapse of the housing financing sector in the United States.
The financial crisis
engulfed much of Europe, and resulted in massive problems in the Eurozone,
where the oversight of having a common currency but no common fiscal policy led
to some states experiencing acute debt crises. Efforts to save the Eurozone led by Germany
resulted in the near asphyxiation of the Greek economy. Britain had not joined the Eurozone but
experienced their own financial crisis nonetheless.
The financial crisis,
along with the unpopularity of Britain’s participation in the Iraq war, led to
a collapse in the fortunes of Labour, and the election of a coalition
Conservative -- Liberal Democrat government, led by David Cameron and Nick
Clegg in 2010.
In government, Cameron
repeatedly urged his party backbenchers to stop “banging on about Europe”. But frightened by the continued uptick in
support of Farage’s UKIP, the Tory right constantly hassled him to adopt a
“tougher line” with Brussels. A supporter
of the EU himself, Cameron’s response was largely to appease the Eurosceptics
in his Party. Against the backdrop of
growing economic unrest in the Eurozone, in 2011 he passed the European Union
Act, which required any EU-wide treaty to be first put to a British referendum. Then, in January 2013, in another effort to
quiet the querulous Eurosceptic critics in his own party, Cameron promised
that, if the Tories were re-elected as a majority in the May 2015 election, he
would not only further renegotiate Britain’s membership, he would also hold a
referendum on continued membership by the end of 2017.
At the time this was
viewed as a pretty cynical, hollow promise on the part of Cameron: when the
election was called few pundits, and certainly no one in the Tory leadership,
believed Cameron would win a majority. As
the graph below shows, in 2013 it seemed more likely was another coalition with
the pro-European Liberal Democrats who would never agree to such a referendum.
But with the surprise
majority victory in 2015, Cameron felt compelled to follow through on his
promise to his backbenchers. He embarked
on negotiations with Brussels to fix what he said was wrong with the EU,
including changes in migrant welfare payments, more financial safeguards and
easier ways for Britain to block EU regulations. Despite getting further concessions from
Europe, agitation within his own Party for the promised referendum continued
and In February 2016, Cameron set
June 23 of that year as the date of the vote.
The announcement
immediately prompted government ministers to declare their backing for either
the “remain” or “leave” campaigns.
Cameron, most of the
Conservative Party and most of the opposition Labour Party all backed the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign –
the official Remain group. Cameron
recklessly called this referendum in order to deal with a discipline problem
within his own party. He was complacent
about the outcome, and when it went against him, he would resign the Prime
Ministership.
But a handful of
high-profile Tory MPs organized the official Vote Leave Campaign. Justice secretary, Michael Gove, and former
London mayor Boris Johnson, became the de
facto leaders of the official “Vote Leave” campaign.
It should be pointed out
in Johnson’s case, and most probably Gove’s too, this decision was driven
entirely by their personal political ambitions.
They saw this as an opportunity to capture support on the right of the
Tory party and stake a claim to Party leadership down the road. And, indeed, given his reaction to the result
of the referendum it seems pretty clear that Johnson didn’t even expect the
Leave campaign to win – he certainly had no plan, no idea really, what he was
going to do if it did.
Meanwhile, Farage and
UKIP had a parallel campaign called Leave.EU. A small number of Labour MPs also joined
Leave groups.
Crucially, however, the
new Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn was himself ambivalent on the vote, did the
bare minimum he could to support Remain, and that only half-heartedly.
In fact, Corbyn had long
been a Eurosceptic – voting against the EEC in 1975, voting against the Maastricht
Treaty in 1993 and the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 – and, as a consequence, Labour’s
national campaigning for the Remain side was judged at the time and after to be
anaemic at best. Local Labour activists
worked hard for Remain, but their leaderships did not. Indeed, at the time of the referendum Corbyn
refused to even confirm he’d voted Remain.
Nature of the referendum campaign
The Brexit
referendum had a plethora of organized campaigns. But their collective arguments quickly coalesced
around certain disputed issues.
REMAIN
|
ISSUE
|
LEAVE
|
45% of British exports go to the EU; Britain has
better trade terms because of the size of the EU
|
TRADE
|
Britain could negotiate a new EU relationship
without being bound by EU law. Secure
its own trade deals with non-EU countries like China, India and the USA
|
Per household, Britain pays the EU L340 a year and
gains an estimated L3,000 in return.
In or out, Britain has to pay to access the EU’s single market.
|
EU BUDGET
|
Britain can stop sending L350 million per week to
Brussels. This money could be spent on
other British priorities, like the NHS.
|
Most EU regulation collapses 28 national standards
into one European standard, actually reducing red tape and benefitting
business.
|
REGULATION
|
Leaving will return control over employment law and
health and safety. Certain businesses
within Britain resented specific regulations imposed by Brussels.
|
Leaving by itself won’t reduce immigration. Countries that trade with the EU form
outside have higher rates of immigration, including from EU countries,
including Britain.
|
IMMIGRATION
|
Britain can change the “out of control” system that
offers an open door to the EU and blocks non-EU immigrants who could
contribute to the UK.
|
At international summits, Britain is represented
twice – by the foreign secretary and the EU high representative Co-operation has helped fight Ebola and
piracy in Africa.
|
INFLUENCE
|
Britain has little influence within the EU. From outside, it can retake seats on
international institutions and be a stronger influence for free trade and
co-operation.
|
But these formal issues
were quickly subsumed by the overall tone of the debate and by key themes that
were only tangential to the formal positions.
Indeed, the Remain
campaign was criticized before and after the vote for not connecting with the
population – particularly in rural and economically depressed areas of
Britain. Not only did Remainers fail to
adequately explain, in emotionally as well as intellectually satisfying ways,
why membership benefitted Britain; they relied on the authority of experts to
make their case; and on the economic consequences
of leaving. Partly this was because the
leaders of the Remain campaign, and most significantly Cameron himself, started
out entirely complacent about the referendum, thinking that the Remain side
should easily win, because they believed their intellectual position,
particularly the economic argument, made their case for them.
Only towards the end of
the campaign when the polls indicated the vote was too close to call, did the
Remain campaign ramp up its rhetoric, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
George Osborne essentially threatening that if Leave won the vote the result on
the economy would be so catastrophic that he’d have to immediately introduce an
austerity budget the severity of which had been seen since the Second World
War.
The Leave campaign,
meanwhile, played unapologetically on emotional responses from the start: on
nostalgia for Britain’s past, pre-EU glories; on anger with Westminster for
years of austerity for the economically disadvantaged while the rich prospered;
on resentment towards the political and intellectual elites for their condescension
towards the masses; on hope for a different future; and, increasingly, on fear
of outsiders.
Appealing
to this variety of emotions was entirely calculated. During the campaign, Michael Gove famously
dismissed the factual objections to Leave’s promises with the statement “the
British people have had enough of experts”.
And
the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign and financial backer of UKIP, the
millionaire Aaron Banks stated immediately after the vote: “Facts don’t work” for winning
votes. “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact,
fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people
emotionally. It’s the Trump
success.” [Note this was five months
prior to Trump winning the US election]
It is important to
remember that this debate played out against a backdrop of general discontent
with the British government and its attitude towards the electorate that had
arguably been growing for decades, and certainly since 2008.
Moreover, the one issue
that came to define the Leave campaign more than any other was connecting the
EU to the migration crisis – the millions of economic migrants and refugees
streaming out of North Africa and the middle east into Europe.
The mass influx of
migrants and refugees was quickly seized on by UKIP and made the centre piece
of the Leave.EU campaign propaganda.
Farage in front of one of their billboards. The picture is of middle-east refugees
walking through the Balkans.
From a Leave.EU pamphlet. It purports to show the probable growth of
the EU to include poorer Balkan countries and Muslim Turkey. Note, however, that the only countries
labelled (other than the UK) are Syria and Iraq, the source of refuges, but who
have nothing to do with EU expansion.
Another exacerbating
factor was the fear excited by the increase in terror attacks on mainland
Europe, particularly the two attacks in Paris (Jan. & Nov. 2015) and in
Brussels (Mar. 2016).
Within this context,
those pushing a far-right nationalist message found a ready audience among a
section of the electorate. I’m going to
refer to this far-right brand of nationalism as exclusionary nationalism – its a bit of a tautology, as all
nationalism is predicated on exclusion: all nationalisms require an other against
which the national community is implicitly defined. But the kind of nationalism embraced by the
far right and populist movements in Europe (and North America) today harkens
back to mid 20th Century varieties, often invoking notions of the volk, ethnic belonging, and
civilizational divides.
It rejects
multi-culturalism and all forms of cosmopolitanism in favour of hard cultural
boundaries, or at best, demanding the complete cultural assimilation of
newcomers to the ‘established’ norms of the nation. These are self-described populist movements,
pushing back against elites thought to be out of touch with the realities of
“authentic” society. Much of Europe’s
far right nationalism today tends to proseltyze against neo-liberalism in favour
of national economic boundaries, or at least for economic policies that promise
to favour those economically disadvantaged within the national community as
opposed to ‘globalist’ elites.
The core of the Leave
vote in Britain last year were attracted to these ideas; they are fully
embraced by UKIP. We can see this by
comparing what we know about UKIP voters and the demographics of the
referendum.
UKIP’s supporters and others who were passionate about the
Leave campaign are not just single-issue Europhobes or political
protestors. Their Euroscepticism is
combined with clear ideas about immigration, national identity and the way
British society is changing. They distrust the political elite at Westminster,
who they regard, rightly, as being overwhelmingly middle-class, highly
educated, socially liberal and comfortable in an ethnically and culturally
diverse society. In contrast, those who vote UKIP tend to embrace exclusionary
nationalism because they are uncomfortable with the way British society has
changed: they find multiculturalism alien and threatening.
In a 2014 study, the political scientists Matthew Goodwin
and Robert Ford concluded that: “UKIP's
support has a very clear social profile, much more so than any of the
mainstream parties. Their electoral base is older, mostly male, working class,
white and less educated.”
They found that 57% of professed UKIP supporters were over
the age of 54, while only one in ten were under 35; 99.6% of UKIP supporters identified as white;
55% of UKIP supporters had left school
aged 16 or under, with only 24% having attended university. Ford and Goodwin
also found that UKIP's support base was more working-class than that of any
other party, with 42% of supporters in blue-collar jobs. 81% believed that immigration undermined
British culture, a view shared by only half the wider British population.
On economic issues, there was a divide between UKIP voters
and the party itself. In contrast to the
party's economic liberalism, UKIP supporters often held more leftist attitudes
to the economy, with almost 80% opining that big business took advantage of
working people and almost 70% thinking that privatisation had gone too far.
However, much like the situation
in the USA, UKIP’s leadership, and many of those leading the charge for Brexit
and espousing economic nationalism in Britain today are essentially members of
the liberal elite that their own supporters criticize. UKIP and the Leave.EU campaign have been
funded by multimillionaires who have benefitted from neo-liberalism. They have been given huge amounts of media
exposure by billionaire media moguls, who are often interested in reducing
regulation (and taxes) on their businesses, but really have no plan for (nor do
they care) about the plight of the economically disadvantaged that make up the
base of their support. Playing on
cultural issues – immigration, sovereignty, national identity – allows them to
connect at an emotional level to their supporters, despite their divergent
economic interests.
The BBC helpfully
produced the following charts comparing the voter profiles of Brexit and the
2016 Election:
Looking at these charts
its striking how closely they resemble the data compile about UKIP supporters
in 2014. Moreover, with the exception of
incomes, it is also notable how closely the profile of those who support Leave
matches that of those who voted for Trump in November 2016. This is not a
coincidence. We now know there has long
been connections among the leaders of the Leave campaign, particularly Farage’s
Leave.EU and the Breitbart group led by Stephen Bannon that successfully
orchestrated Trump’s winning campaign.
The social media data
mining that led to the profusion of fake news being sent specifically to voters
that might be swayed by it was undertaken by the US company Cambridge Analytica
for the Leave.EU campaign and the Trump campaign simultaneously. An investigation of whether this broke UK
election laws is currently underway.
The same tactics, the
same appeals, the same rhetoric, was applied in both the Brexit and US
elections, and it crops up in other nationalist movements across Europe as
well.
But why did Leave win?
On the one hand, it has to be noted that the Remain side was largely ineffectual and complacent about the outcome, believing it had the “facts” on its side, until late in the campaign when in desperation it turned instead to blatant fear mongering about the possible consequences of a “Brexecution”. But “facts” were not the currency of the campaign. The inability of the Remain side to engage voters using facts about membership in the EU and possible consequences of leaving, was made apparent on 7 June 2016 – two weeks before the referendum, when only 24 percent of voters said they felt "well" or "very well" informed about the issues, according to BMG Research polling released by the UK's Electoral Reform Society.
On
the other hand, the Leave campaigns were effective in mobilizing people because
they pretty much ignored facts altogether or just made them up. Indeed, many of its claims were debunked during
the campaign as exaggerations, mischaracterizations or outright lies.
The Leave Campaign bus
with its claim that £350
million was sent to the EU each week – money that could be spent on British
health care instead. This was
proven to be misleading during the campaign, as government figures showed that in 2015, the UK contributed an
estimated £12.9 billion – after the automatic rebate of almost £4.9 billion –
to the EU budget, while EU spending on the UK was £4.4 billion. So the actual net contribution by the UK to
the EU was £8.5 billion – or £164 million a week. And literally hours after the vote’s results
were tallied, Farage and other Leave leaders immediately backed away from the
claim that any money saved would be spent on the NHS, saying that it was a
‘mistake’ to make that claim during the campaign.
Indeed, after the
referendum, the independent authority in Britain charged with ensuring
commercial advertising does not employ misleading claims, indicated that many
of the Leave campaign claims plastered on their billboards, posters and
leaflets would have been disallowed under its own rules, compared to only a
handful on the Remain side. But there is
no authority policing political campaign claims for fears of impinging on free
speech.
But more than just
bending of the truth, as I noted earlier, Leave appealed to emotional responses
rather than rational ones. In
particular, Leaver campaigners played on anxiety about immigration and
resentment towards cosmopolitan elites.
As Gove said on a SKY News Television talk show, to much applause in the
audience, “the elites have done very well out of the EU, that’s why they
support it, but what about decent, ordinary people?”
Similarly, claims made by
the Leave campaign that EU migrants were overwhelming the native population,
taking British jobs and “stealing” welfare benefits, turn out to be misleading
at best – but they spoke to those who felt that Britain was changing in a way
they didn’t like.
Lets put the facts up
against the emotional responses by going over some of the numbers: the
population of the UK is currently about 68 million, and net migration to the UK
in 2015 was 333,000, with
an estimated 184,000 people coming from the EU. The
number of people living in Britain but born elsewhere currently sits at about
9%; in the USA its 13%, in Canada its 20%, in Australia 27%. The government released official figures in
May of 2016 which showed that around
1.2 million British migrants were living and working in other EU countries,
compared with around 3 million EU migrants living and working in the Britain. Of that latter number 114,000 EU migrants
were receiving some form of working age benefit from the government, or less
than 3%. In contrast, 14.5% of the total
working population were claiming some form of working-age benefit.
Economic migrants from the EU in Britain are thus much less likely to be
receiving government support, of any kind (indeed they are barred from some
benefits by government policy), and their economic impact on Britain is largely
positive.
But such figures were dismissed by
Leave campaigners who instead held meetings in front of Polish delicatessens on
otherwise ‘traditional’ British high streets, hinting rather obviously that
cultural prejudices rather than economic realities underpinned anxieties about
immigration.
Indeed, there was a clear
racist undertone in much of what Farage’s campaign, in particular, had to say
the migration and Syrian refugee crises.
The fact is that Britain already does control its borders with regards
to non-European migrants because it is not a Schengen state. Moreover, it processes asylum seekers because
of other international treaty obligations, not specific EU ones. And compared to the rest of Europe it has
received relatively few asylum applications: the average number of asylum
seekers per 100,000 local population in 2015 in the EU as a whole was 260; in
Hungary it was 1,799; in Sweden 1,667; in Germany 587; in France 114, and in
Britain, 60. Europe is facing a major migration
and refugee crisis (which is actually more cyclical rather than unprecedented),
but Britain is not.
But the Leave campaign
exercised passions, rather than disputed facts.
No more was this obvious than in the murder of Labour MP and remain campaigner
Jo Cox barely a month before the referendum by an far-right, racist Leave
supporter.
In short, the Leave
campaign was able to mobilize nationalism which relies on appeals to emotional
attachment, ideas about national identity, and nostalgia. And while some who voted Leave embraced a
relatively benign nationalist stance (and have pointed, reasonably enough, to
the many flaws of the EU), many others have gravitated to a harder and less
benign form of exclusionary nationalism.
Conclusion: Exclusionary Nationalism and Europe
In the early and mid-20th
Century exclusionary nationalism was a powerful ideology that divided Europe
(and much of the world) against itself.
Although not its cause, appeals to exclusionary nationalism mobilized
millions to fight in World War I.
Resurgent again in the interwar years, exclusionary nationalism was
further radicalized into the variety of ideologies we know as fascism. That radicalized nationalism fueled another,
even bigger war, that took away tens of millions more lives. In other parts of the world across the 20th
Century, exclusionary nationalism has been the ideological force behind
innumerable wars, genocides and atrocities.
But the European
integration project begun in the aftermath of the Second World War was supposed
to stop this – at least in Europe, to that point the epicentre of nationalist
conflict. The idea of a new Europe,
begun with a partnership between France and Germany, Italy and the Benelux
countries took root in the 1950s, and by 2010 had brought together most of
Europe under its rubric.
Supra-nationalist institutions, common economic interests, common social
and legal protections, and a common European identity, was heralded as the
antidote to nationalist divisions. One
could be a patriot of France or Germany or Britain and also be a citizen of Europe.
This is not to diminish
the challenges to, and inherent problems of, this new Europe. As much as its social and legal policies
protect citizens, its embrace of neo-liberal economic policies has aided in the
furtherance of economic inequalities, both between states and within them. Such inequalities breed resentments. Similarly, other global events, such as the
current migration crisis, have become challenges that also breed disenchantment. The far right, ironically organized and
co-operative across national boundaries, has fed on that discontent, and with
the aid of social media, spread their exclusionary nationalist message. They have been successful in part because the
great European experiment of unification has failed to adequately justify its
own existence and give people, especially those socially and economically
disadvantaged, a reason to support it.
The
late historian Tony Judt noted in a prescient 1996 essay, “A Grand Illusion?”
that “just as an obsession with ‘growth’ has left a moral vacuum at the heart
of some modern nations, so the abstract, materialist quality of the idea of
Europe is proving insufficient to legitimate its own institutions and retain
popular confidence.” In other words, the mere objective of unification is not
enough to capture the imagination and allegiance of those left behind by
change, the more so in that it is no longer accompanied by a convincing promise
of the indefinitely extended well-being.
We are witnessing now a
rise in far right nationalist challenges across Europe, indeed the world, and
the EU is one of its main targets. In
the Netherlands, France, Hungary, Austria, Germany, indeed in most EU states,
far right nationalist and populist groups have taken root since the end of the
Cold War in the early 1990s, chipping away at the legitimacy of the EU. There has been a rise of nostalgia for the
seeming certainties of the nation state and a call to national memories that
gave meaning to the collective past. And in the
last few years, due to conflicts particularly in the middle east, there has
been the rise of Islamaphobia. For all these reasons, exclusionary nationalism
has returned with a vengeance, to Europe, and indeed to the United States (and
to India and Japan, and host of other countries).
Given the British
one-foot-in and one-foot-out approach to Europe, it should perhaps not be a
surprise then, that it was in Britain that the Eurosceptic far right should
have had its first major success. The
Leave vote in 2016 amounted to just over a third of all eligible voters. Perhaps half of that number were and are
committed to the far-right nationalist views of Farage and UKIP; some had
principled reasons for wanting the divorce, and I’d wager that the remainder merely
wanted to send a message to Westminster – a kind of virtual poke in the eye for
being ignored by government – or were swayed by unscrupulous promises made by
Leave leaders.
But more than anything
the Brexit vote was an attempt to turn back the clock, not 40 years, but a 140,
back to when Britain could bask in splendid isolation, because it’s empire
was the envy of the world and its navy ruled the waves. But this is a nationalist fantasy totally at
odds with today’s world.
Let
me finish by noting a sardonic commonplace in today's Russia: “the future has
become unpredictable — and so has the past.” That phrase rings true for Russia
where Mr. Putin plays the nationalist card because it's the only card he can
play — since he certainly can't play the economic card, the bright future
card. But its now true for Britain too.
The Brexit vote was also a vote for revisionist history, for a vision of
Britain for the British — of England for the English, really — that hasn't
existed in a very long time, if ever.
Today in Britain, the future looks uncertain and the past unpredictable.
Today in Britain, the future looks uncertain and the past unpredictable.
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