The odd thing here is that if Britain intends to Brexit, which it does, it would be very helpful to Britain if LePen won, because right now Brussels is determined to punish Britain severely for Brexit, so as to dissuade other possible rebels.
But LePen has said she wants Frexit, and if both France and England are leaving, it becomes quite hard to “punish” them, so long as they work together even slightly. That’s just too much of Europe, and especially Europe’s economy.
As I said in the past, I’d favor Brexit under a left-wing government, even minus the Euro, the binding agreements that are part of the EU make running a real left-wing government impossible, but under the Conservatives, it’s likely be a fiasco.
However the case for France is a lot stronger, because France isn’t winning under the Euro and hasn’t been for some time. France would be better out of the Euro. Again, it would be better that it be done by someone other than LePen, but the left has emasculated itself in these debates by refusing to be for nationalism, and thus ceding the anti-EU argument mostly to the right. (There are some exceptions.)
Frankly, the entire south of Europe should leave the Euro (though not necessarily the EU), and so should France. It just is not in their interest to stay, at least not if “interest” means “the interests of most of the population.”
It is a pity that people like LaPen and Farrage are the people filled with passionate conviction, while most of the left swings in the wind pathetically, and the only major left-wing leader of conviction, Corbyn, has polls leaving him far, far behind the Conservative party. (Though I consider that more an indictment of Britons than Corbyn.)
If the good people won’t do the right thing, it falls to the bad people to do the right thing in so much the wrong way that it may turn out to be the wrong thing.
This, by the way, is true as much of the EU as of leaving the EU. The EU and the Euro in particular were set up to force people into neoliberal policy. This was a betrayal of the spirit of the EU, which was about preventing war, not about impoverishing people. The technocrats are so convinced they are right that no amount of real world evidence of failure can convince them otherwise.
And so the right-wing rises. And Europeans are embracing them more and more.
Create an intolerable present with a clearly intolerable future and people will take a winger on very unpleasant people for even a slight chance to change things.
So it is, and so it shall be–if our elites don’t start changing, or we don’t change our elites.
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Recent events suggest that, whatever they may have originally thought, the Trump administration is in the process of being pulled back into the overall historical attractor of US policy regarding Russia. The Russian establishment had made no secret of its preference for Trump and its belief that Trump was a person with which they could deal on a more even footing, a politician in a mold they understood, etc.
I’m not here to argue whether or not Trump (or Flynn) is some kind of Russian plant, an issue that seems to be occupying many others. I gather that conclusive evidence on this matter has yet to be produced and that it so far lies in the realm of (negative) wishful thinking. However, Russian policy-makers are already voicing disappointment that Russia-favorable entities in the Trump administration are increasingly weakened. The US state, particularly its intelligence community, are deeply set up for conflict with Russia, for better or for worse, and it turns out that the White House is only part of a large infrastructure, and any fantasies of an election resulting in a vast purge and house-cleaning were just that: fantasies. The intelligence community still believes to its core in the necessity of containing Russia.
However, one thing that is different now is the position of Western social liberals. Unfortunately, Russia had decided to back in spirit, if not always materially, movements that are identified with various strains of nationalist conservatism that are hostile to the goals and beliefs of social liberals. This is not only in the USA, but especially so in Europe, with the on-going rise of the Le Pens, the Wilders, and other groups in the world. Once upon a time, social liberal groups were principally parochial movements which were relatively indifferent on foreign policy questions regarding Russia, and to a very large extent also overlapped with anti-war movements — and so were once at odds with the intelligence community.
However, the apparent desire of Russia to return to a world of ordinary nation-state politics, and therefore its willing appearance (at minimum) of siding with conservative nationalist movements, have led to many social liberals now viewing Russia as mortal threat to their projects, and therefore, having a plausible motive to try to subvert political movements like that of Trumpism to their aims. In this situation, social liberals (or “identity politics” movements, or whatever you want to call them) will quite rationally stake out a position that the devil you know (American intelligence forces) are better than the devil you don’t (Vladimir Putin). This is not helped by the appearance of things like Russia loosening its laws on domestic violence.
While social liberals have not lately been winning elections on their platforms (most notably, in the USA due to the Electoral College structure), it would be a mistake to assume that these groups have no power whatsoever. In fact, they have broad and deep bases of popular support (merely electorally inefficient), and those bases are being pushed into the arms of forces hostile to Russian interests. The combination of Cold War-style intelligence community conservatism with popular social liberalism is one that is likely to lead to an even more hostile neo-Cold War posture on the part of the Western establishment in the medium-term, unless in the short term Trumpism can generate the political competence required to coerce the establishment in the other direction.
For its part, Russia has been attempting to play, in the “further abroad”, a soft power role given that its other options are not effective. It is attempting to play the part of a rival global hegemon without actually being a hegemon. It does not currently have the cultural or technological reach to do so. While it operates a technologically advanced, developed economy, it is still highly dependent on natural resource development and export. That means that the risks accruing from a strategy of using cultural divisions in the currently hegemonic Western social order are high: should social liberals gain the upper hand due to the inability of nationalist populism to operate the levers of state effectively, they will be confirmed in a resolve for further containment and suppression of a Russia that took sides against them.
There seems to be a general belief that 2016 was a particularly bad year. Part of that is the twin political events of Brexit and Trump, and part of it seems to be that a number of particularly beloved celebrities died.
But unless you were in a few specific places, like parts of Syria, and certainly if you were in most of the developed world, your odds of having something bad happen to you were about the same as they had been in 2015.
Certainly Brexit and Trump are both, potentially, earthquakes, though their severity remains to be seen, and I regard both as consequences of decisions that were made over a period of decades.
What made them seem so severe, I think, is that they were, to the liberal classes, surprises. In both cases, polls indicated they wouldn’t happen; and it was conventional wisdom among certain groups that both events were absurd. Trump, in particular, was treated as a grotesque joke when he announced his candidacy, and right up to the last moment, almost literally, icons such as 538 and the New York Times insisted he was almost certain not to win.
When he did, an entire world view went away.
Because they thought it had been impossible for Trump to win. He was a joke, according to that world view, and those who held it have seized, in particular, on “Russia did it!” It was a deus-ex-machina, because their world model simply cannot accept that it happened.
And, in both cases (Brexit and Trump), there is a great deal of shaming and othering of those who voted the “wrong” way. They are castigated as stupid and immoral, people who are too dumb to vote in their self interests, to understand how the world works, motivated almost entirely by racism.
Bad people.
So many liberals in America and Britain now believe they live in countries where half the voting population are evil, stupid racists and that those people are now in charge.
Oh, and the big, bad Russians are also responsible.
While some are willing to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, the policies that even they voted for and/or supported (under Blair, Clinton, Obama, and the EU) might have something to do with all of this, the metaphysics of most essentially boils down to the notion that bad people (Russia, racists) combined with stupid people, are destroying our world.
Because they can see little responsibility for themselves (either in past policy or in the specifics of the campaigns (Clinton’s was notably incompetent)), they have eviscerated their sense of their own power, and thus their ability to create change.
Responsibility and power are exactly equal to each other. You have exactly as much power as you have responsibility, any mismatch is a denial of reality, and if society abets you in denying that reality, as it often does, by giving you more credit or less blame than you deserve, it does not change either your responsibility or power.
It is also true that an accurate perception of blame enables correct action. When Clinton and her team completely fumbled their campaign, not removing them from all positions of power indicates a willingness to tolerate failure again and again. Indeed, after Clinton, the presumptive front-runner, was defeated by Obama in 2008, perhaps the realization should have dawned on us/her that she and hers were incompetent and that she should not be the presumptive candidate. She started with a vast advantage and lost it.
Meanwhile, in the eight years Obama has led the Democratic party, vast losses have occurred in State Houses and Congress.
As for policies which have lead to vast numbers of Britons and Americans being willing to vote for Brexit and Trump; well, I have written on those subjects more than enough.
Liberals and centrists, as a group, deny responsibility, and thus deny agency. They refuse to put the locus of responsibility in those areas over which they have control. Instead, they blame forces over which they have no control (Russia) or over which they have less control (the current racism that is ex-nihilo, completely unrelated to the policies they have championed for decades).
It is not the crisis, as such, that predicts the future, it is the response. I was able to accurately predict the shape of America and Europe’s economy because I saw the response to the crisis in ’09. The day the outlines of Obama’s stimulus were announced (he’d already fumbled the bailouts, by bailing out the rich rather than ordinary people), I wrote that American jobs and wages would not recover for 20 years. Eight years later, that’s still looking accurate. (The unemployment rate is not what matters here, the jobs/population ratio is.)
So, seeing the liberal response to 2016’s political crises, it is clear that, at least so far, liberals have not learned the necessary lessons. Thus, trends will continue in the wrong direction. Locating the problems as beyond their control, liberals have self-emasculated.
There is still time for that to change, and perhaps it will. So far, however…well…
Happy 2017.
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The changes were meant to make pushing through austerity and bank rescue measures simpler.* Italy’s constitution almost certainly needs changes, but it probably didn’t need these changes.
This is another rebuke to the Eurocrats and the European Union project. The populist right is rejoicing.
Jeremy Corbyn recently noted that the right is taking real grievances and offering solutions which will, at best, only paper over wounds. The left has superior solutions, but has bound itself to a dying world order because of love for internationalism. (By the left, I don’t mean most left-wing parties, like France’s socialists or England’s Labour ex-Corbyn).
Because neo-liberalism has failed, and is finally seen, clearly, to have failed, there are now only three options:
Right-Wing Populism
Left-Wing Populism
Police State Extension of the Current Order
That’s it. Choose your sides. Neoliberalism will only be viable if you’re willing to go full surveillance and police state.
If Trump goes in the direction Bannon desires, and which Trump has been talking up recently when he trashed China, then the neoliberal world order will be over within a year or two.
It should have ended quite some time ago, but it didn’t, and now its dismantling is going to be handled by some very unpleasant people, who, while not incompetent, do not have an ideology and policy set which can actually be expected to work out well for most people in anything more than the short run.
It is as it is.
(*As usual, the best solution would be to let the banks go under and let various people take their losses, bailing out ordinary Italians to some limited extent. Dead banks are dead banks. Let their shareholders and bondholders eat the losses.)
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Now that French politics are heating up, and France is increasingly likely to put up a Thatcherite against the Front National in the upcoming presidential elections, folks, particularly non-Europeans, might start to wonder what exactly is wrong with the Front National if the worst sort of neoliberal is representing the system. Fillon embodies the worst of Thatcherism while simultaneously embracing a reactionary cultural politics. That said, it’s still likely that left-wing French voters will hold their nose and vote for him over Marine Le Pen. Americans especially, after they read the differences in what they stand for, may be aghast in incomprehension at this, because on paper, MLP is, in many relevant dimensions, better than Fillon.
The problem with the FN is not really MLP herself, and relative to their own politicians–even the left-wing ones–American left-wingers will find in MLPs own program lots to like. I find her domestic economic program and objections to the European system to be mostly in the right direction, even if I don’t necessarily agree with her on how to fix the European-level issues.
The actual problem is one of political context. MLP is only the tip of an ultra-nationalist iceberg that has historically sought a confrontation with France’s large Arab Muslim/North African minority whose presence is a direct result of French colonialism. FN supporters wish to direct and control the inner cultural and religious life of the minority community without concomitantly doing anything about the sources of discrimination, etc., provoking counter-reactionary tendencies in the minority community (e.g., alienated youth joining ISIS or putting on niqabs or whatever), in a cycle of escalation that could make the occasional American race riot seem like a kaffeeklatsch. Even Trumpist America just believes in more reactionary policing.
But aside from that, MLP has successfully and perhaps even genuinely practised a strategy of dédiabolisation, i.e., the adoption of what would, in other circumstances, be a mainstream left-wing program and distancing from some of the more virulent elements of her party–including the very public shunning of her own father, the party’s elder statesman and nationalist ideologue.
The danger you run with movements in Europe with left-wing dirigiste economic programs and nationalist cultural politics is that they will find it hard to follow through on the former and be forced to rely on the latter. This is likely what will face an MLP presidency:
The Syriza Problem: Upon winning power, MLP will be faced with the problem that in order to implement her economic program, she will have to counteract European systems, particularly in the Eurozone. These systems have been tested against Greece, in that they are designed to punish deviants in a manner that maximizes short-term economic damage to the victim while minimizing short-term damage to or even benefiting the countries applying it (i.e. Germany). Even if there is damage done to the Eurozone as a whole by the confrontation, there’s considerable willingness to accept it in the short run to preserve the system in the long run (Americans underestimate this).
The Syriza/Brexit Problem: Disengagement from Euro systems requires massive technical knowledge and specialized staffing–a fact which both the Greece and the UK have discovered. The problem is, as Greece especially discovered, the people who have this knowledge and ability are almost completely Europeanists and convinced neoliberals. Because the Brexit-UK is still very neoliberal, they may be able to get over this problem eventually, but France will not, if the purpose of leaving the EU or Eurozone is to implement an economic-nationalist policy.
Parliament: The most likely outcome in which MLP wins the presidency is still likely one in which she does not control the Parliament, meaning, she will have a confrontation with Parliament that will likely frustrate her ability to bring any of her economic program at all. This is a problem that Trump likely shares to some extent, even if the Republicans control Congress. In this way, she would be forced to rely on her movement’s cultural-nationalist politics, which at the grassroots are still very reactionary.
That is the problem. What the FN says is in many ways less important than how they got there. Many left-wing French have basically no home in French politics, because they know that upon winning power, the FN will have to abandon the key elements of its economic program, while using the reactionary parts to stay in power. Think of the FN as somewhere between Syriza and (ironically) the Turkish AKP. My real-life left-wing French acquaintances believe that this condition risks leading very quickly to, effectively, civil war. Even if a crisis of this nature is eventually averted, the outcome would be a re-legitimization of the very systems in Europe alleged to be failing, a confirmation and return to the consensus of Europe.
You can think of all of this, from Greece onwards, as a stress test of the European system, and despite its economically inhumane outcomes and appearance of further instability, the system is proving resilient to nationalist attack. The loss of the UK is acceptable, as it was never properly integrated, and continental politicians believe that they can inflict sufficient cautionary pain and humiliation on the UK while removing an obstacle to further integration. It could be that Le Pen has the skills to buck the trend. It would be a huge risk.
I am starting to think that their strategy is probably correct, relative to their aims (whether their aims are good is another matter, although they genuinely believe they are). Nationalist politics as resistance to neoliberal economic ideology at the European level is certainly not a sure-fire success, and I still agree with Yanis Varoufakis’ approach, which requires pan-European solidarity to confront and reform pan-European systems, as difficult as that may sound. And there’s a reason why people in Europe are still afraid of the sort of cultural nationalism that the FN represents.
Fillon, who has said he will cut public sector jobs and rein
Francois Fillon
in government spending, won 44 percent of votes in Sunday’s first-round of voting for the center-right’s nomination. He faces a second-round vote against another former prime minister, Alain Juppe, who trailed him by 15 percentage points.
Polls had him in third place. He came in first. Maybe pollsters should stop polling until they figure out how they keep getting it wrong. Customers might wish to demand refunds.
Fillon thinks Thatcher is the best thing ever and wants to cut 500,000 government jobs.
A neoliberal’s neoliberal, in other words, who is also socially conservative.
Assuming he wins the nomination, he will likely wind up head-to-head against the neo-fascist LaPen.
Here’s how that works:
If Fillon wins, his policies will hurt the French so much that LaPen will likely win the next election.
If LaPen wins, well, LaPen wins.
The left is not a factor because Hollande has betrayed everything they stand for and alienated the left-wing base completely.
Frankly, France should leave the Euro, at the very least, and quite possibly the EU. They are not winning from it any more. Because only LaPen will say that, and because the left continues to insist on irrelevance as they relate to real problems, LaPen is the future, whether Fillon wins this time or not.
This is the twilight of neoliberalism. As I have said for many years, what follows will be an age of war and revolution. This is where neoliberal policies inevitably lead, and we are now on the bleeding edge of that new era.
There will be a chance to do the correct, kind things starting in four to eight years, when the weight of demographics favors young people enough. In the meantime, the old will simply have to age out of politics.
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…The chances are we’ve gone too far,
You took my time and you took my money,
Now I fear you’ve left me standing,
In a world that’s so demanding…
— New Order, “True Faith”
In this post, I discuss the options for the UK in its relationship to the EU after the Brexit vote, particularly in light of the fact that Theresa May’s government has decided that freedom of labour movement is to be sacrificed on the altar of the hostility towards immigration–which is held to have driven much of the support for Leave. It is also increasingly clear that the EU will take a harsh view of British attempts to separate trade access to the EU from the access of EU citizens to British work opportunities. I argue that, overall, this position is justified and mostly reflects an EU leadership representing the interests of their citizens in the face of a United Kingdom that, for whatever reason, believes that it can take what it believes to be the beneficial parts of its relationship with continential Europe and leave behind what it mostly (and wrongly) considers to be the costly parts. I make this argument despite a dislike of and disagreement with some of the governing attitudes in continental Europe: The historic demands of conservative, Eurosceptic UK politicians would have exacerbated what is bad about the EU and attenuated what is good about it.
The Taxonomy of Brexits
In practice, the European Union is actually a constellation (or maybe nebula) of treaty-defined entities. An EU member is a country that participates in a certain subset of them, but not necessarily all of them (there is of course a more formal definition, but I am talking about the institutional mechanics)–the UK is one of the exemplars of this choice. Conversely, there are countries that participate in some of the EU institutions, but are not members–the best exemplar of this is Norway, which participates in the single market, the unified visa area under Schengen, in the scientific bodies, and pays a significant charge in lieu of membership dues.
We are now months after the Brexit referendum returned a clear Leave result (52-48 is not a small margin, and immediate do-overs after buyer’s remorse is a democratically terrible idea), and the United Kingdom faces a choice in how to implement the referendum. The taxonomy of choices resolves to two major taxa of future possibilities: “hard” or “soft” Brexit. Under a “hard” Brexit, the UK effectively reverts unilaterally to a mostly exterior relationship with the countries of the European Union without (much) special status or access to EU-related institutions. The UK becomes like a nearby Canada, in other words. There’s no question that the border will remain open for Brits to visit the EU, but they will likely do so under the same visa waiver terms under which Canadians and Australians live, which generally excludes labour competition with EU citizens and permanent residents, outside of designated priority professions. Goods and services will have to be negotiated by treaty separately, but they will have to be agreed-upon by the entire EU, meaning that everything, absolutely everything, would be on the table, and more favorable terms than the current access to the single market would not be on offer.
Under “soft” Brexit, the UK becomes, in practice, mostly like Norway. That is, it would retain access to the single market, have to pay dues, and remain a participant in many of the institutions–but will emerge from the direct, if often only superficial, supervision of the European Commission. Much less, in terms of the UK’s real capabilities, would change, but some aspects of internal policy and regulation become officially independent of EU authority, and much influence in EU institutions would, of course, be lost.
The division between these two types of Brexits turns out to revolve around one issue: The separability of the Four Freedoms of the European Single Market. These are: freedom of movement of (1) goods; (2) labour; (3) capital, and; (4) services. These freedoms, presently well-entrenched in the EU treaty framework, are supposed to guide convergence towards a fully-implemented, single market (meaning: It’s not fully implemented). If, as a Leave supporter, your problem with the EU lies elsewhere, for instance, in its economic regulatory framework, then you would still be willing to accept the Four Freedoms, and soft Brexit is an option that other EU partners would accept in overall good faith, especially since the departure of Britain from the rest of the EU’s convergence framework would enable other agenda items, that the UK has deliberately hindered, to go forward with minimal overall disruption.
Economic Freedom as Compromise
If, however, your problem with the EU is with the implementation of the Four Freedoms, then, Houston, you have a real problem as a Brexiteer. Because every country in the EU has some significant sectors vulnerable or sensitive to one or more of the Four Freedoms. The Four Freedoms establishes a relatively simple guiding framework for compromise among these issues. I hope that it is not too difficult to see that allowing countries to withdraw in spirit and practice from one or more of these freedoms, while retaining full privileges on the rest, is a recipe for disaster for the entire Single Market project, because some countries would become “free riders” to the detriment of the other countries, which would in turn cause the disadvantaged countries to withdraw from other freedoms, in a downward spiral that would dismantle European economic unity.
The Four Freedoms and the regulatory framework that accompanies them makes the Single Market a far superior trading arrangement to treaties like NAFTA, and, yes, TTIP. The common regulatory framework, needless to say, impedes (however, does not prevent) the degree of race-to-the-bottom behaviour that you see in NAFTA-like deals, by creating a regulatory and arbitration system that is, yes, considerably more accountable to the public than the infamous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) that is a common practice in bilateral treaties. European, particularly British critics, decry the European Commission and its institutions as being very distant from popular sovereignty, and the criticism is true, to some extent; but that the road to accountability is long does not mean that there is no road at all, in contrast to international arbitration tribunals, which are sensitive to very little.
But more importantly, the free movement of labour is essential if you decide you want to have free trade at all. It is increasingly clear that trade deals like NAFTA, alleged to lift poor countries out of poverty by exporting low-skilled economic activity to these countries, actually have deleterious effects on developing countries. Mexico has experienced a great labour dislocation from exposure to competition from sectors that were domestically important but more productive and heavily subsidized in the US. Free movement of labour at least slightly ameliorates this by permitting workers in sectors negatively affected by this dislocation to find work in countries that directly benefited from it (overall). Because NAFTA does not lift border controls on the free movement of labour, Mexican workers who go where the work has gone (to the US) cannot send back remittances that reflect the higher US value of their labour, because they live under a wage-suppressive environment of immigration control. Needless to say, US workers do not benefit from the immigration controls as much as they are told.
What UK Eurosceptics are demanding, when they demand immigration controls for EU labour while retaining access to freedom of goods, capital, and services, is that UK business be able to profit from access to new markets in Bulgaria and Romania, countries that cannot yet compete in productivity with the UK, and yet fail to offer Bulgarian and Romanian workers the ability to improve their lot and their skills in higher-wage, higher-productivity environments with UK domestic labour protection, such as exist. It should not be hard to see why this is toxic.
European Unity and Freedom of Movement
The choice that Theresa May seems to be making is for a hard Brexit, particularly as signaled by some public pronouncements suggesting that existing EU-citizen workers in the UK would not be fully protected and grandfathered into the post-Brexit arrangement–that is, they are being designated as bargaining chips. The only condition under which it makes sense to use their status as a bargaining chip is to make an attempt for the UK to have privileged access to the EU without accepting any reciprocal obligations. (Whether it is actually possible to use them as bargaining chips this way is another matter.)
For the choice to be something in the middle between a hard and a soft Brexit, the EU would have to allow cherry-picking among the four freedoms, and therefore its own demise as a political project. I have described some of the reasons for this above. The EU is not going to passively accept its own demise at the hands of right-wing British Eurosceptics, some of whom have made no secret of their desire not only for Britain to leave the EU, but for the EU project itself to fail.
The mistake of British Eurosceptics, at least those who care about maintaining a privileged economic relationship with the European Union, is to fail to understand many continental politicians and bureaucrats, and significant portions of the continental public really “mean it” when it comes to European convergence. While the spectre of WW2 hangs in the air, somewhat faded due to the inevitable passing of those who survived it, continental Europe has still had regular reminders that it, the originator of colonialism, is in the modern world now itself susceptible to divide-and-conquer politics steered by greater, exterior powers. Critics of the EU say that the democratic legitimacy of its institutions is undermined by the non-existence of a European “demos,” but policy-makers are well aware of that. That is the whole point of the convergence process. The EU, in fact, has programmes to encourage social relationships between citizens of member states, precisely out of a desire to ensure that a European demos emerges in a future generation, and, yes, the United States of Europe can thereby be finally constructed.
Freedom of labour movement is a element of the unification of peoples explicitly envisaged by the construction of the European Union. In addition to its role in helping the Single Market to be mutually beneficial, the workplace is a key element of social integration and the building of trust between peoples at an individual level. Among younger British people, the policy has already shown signs of working–one of the complaints of younger Brits about Brexit is precisely that they were the generation that had both the most developed European identity and the highest intention of taking advantage of freedom of labour movement, of educational movement, and other related European freedoms.
National and Personal Factors
I would be remiss if I stayed only at the “high” institutional levels when discussing the dilemma into which the EU must now force the UK. There is certainly a personal dimension that cannot be ignored. British Eurosceptic politicians and media, both UKIP and Tory, have attacked what most continental Europhiles, both official and otherwise, see as the emotional core of the EU project, and did so consistently and constantly, so much so that EU immigration is seen as a prime driver of the Leave vote. Indeed, so much so that Theresa May feels compelled to choose it over Single Market access. Anyone who believes that such a consistent attack on a core belief and life work of many European politicians and bureaucrats would have no effect on how the negotiation proceeds is fooling themselves. Greece’s and Syriza’s offense during the 2015 negotiations was to attempt to step off script and make it politically impossible for German politicians to sell the band-aid to their own public; this is nowhere near as offensive as a direct political attack on free labour movement. If the UK gets off this with less visible damage than Greece, it is only because the UK is, for various reasons, economically much stronger than Greece–and not a member of the Eurozone.
Furthermore, it evidently became a bad habit in UK politics to blame domestic policy failures on the EU. The UK was never a member of the Eurozone, and there is nothing about the EU that prevents the UK from running a more social-democratic economy than it has. It was always within the power of the UK to handle its own housing crisis, its economic inequality issues, its infrastructure issues, and so on. What flaws the EU has (and it definitely has flaws!) cannot be blamed for very many of the problems now viewed as causing the political alienation that has led to the Brexit vote. Now, yes, it is a common sport across the EU for national politicians to blame Brussels officials for preventing them from doing things, and this is often true: The Commission has known democratic legitimacy issues, even if it is better legitimized than ISDS arbitration tribunals. Eurocrats are used to serving as the “distant scapegoat” function. The problem is that UK politicians did not, apparently, know when to pull back, or they knew it and chose to go over the cliff anyway, because an internal Tory party battle was more important than keeping the European project together. EU negotiators are human; they are not going to simply accept that they were the cruel masters from whom the British people needed freeing.
Therein lies a major, unavoidable issue. There are parties, particularly in countries like France and the Netherlands, that would likewise wish to scapegoat Brussels for whatever goes wrong and sell an EU breakup as a panacea. Former (?) colonialist countries like France have populations that share the imperial nostalgia issues that right-wing British Eurosceptics do. It would be actually irresponsible if EU negotiators simply attempted to go for the narrow-sense, economically most mutually beneficial deal with the UK possible. It must be seen that the EU was not the author of British woes, but at worst neutral. This is quite a different situation from Greece and the Eurozone, where, in material terms, the structure of the Eurozone acted as a real straitjacket on Greek well-being and Greek fiscal democracy.
Brexit, Boiled Hard
If there’s anything underhanded about the EU position on these matters, the blame goes principally to the people who set up the EU treaties well before this point. The article 50 exit procedure is deliberately designed to disadvantage the exiter by turning the tables: Exit is turned into exclusion, and exclusion happens automatically after the (too-short) deadline. No negotiation is possible until the country in question puts on the article 50 dunce cap and sits in the corner of shame. The architects of European convergence have always been especially careful to ensure that convergence is a one-way procedure wherein departure is so costly as to be better to be avoided at all. This was done, to put it in Ianwelshian terms, because they thought it was the right thing. Otherwise, European convergence would not be externally credible, and its lack of external credibility would be a further invitation for foreign powers to play wedge games.
One may argue that a hard Brexit also damages Europe as it disrupts the flows that currently exist, and this is always costly. European leaders have made it crystal clear that the project is more important to them than the short-term cash flows. Just as the British say that they can find substitute buyers and sellers, so can the rest-of-EU–with, in some ways, greater efficiency, because manufacturing still significantly exists on the continent. And everyone, even German industry, knows that the destabilization caused by separation of the four freedoms of the Single Market would, in the medium term, be more costly than putting up tariffs against the UK, to be negotiated down in a later and less UK-favorable process than full UK membership.
In this instance, I do explicitly take a strongly EU-sympathetic position on this. The aftermath of the Leave campaign has shown that anti-immigrant hysteria, nationalist nativism, and colonial/imperial nostalgia had a major impact on the shape of this, not a major desire for either libertarian economics or left-wing fiscal expansion. These are real dangers and ought not to be rewarded by political victories. Even under a hard Brexit, it still remains fully within the power of UK politicians to ensure that ordinary people are at least exposed to only minimal immediate suffering, and if they are not willing to use their means to protect their people, we know, once-and-for-all, that the woes and alienation of the people of the UK were never because of Europe.
I assume that Cameron is done and there will be a new Conservative leader. (Update: And he’s gone. This is just a thing, not a good thing or bad thing, until we know who replaces him.)
There may be a general election. I hope so.
This is going to be really bad for ordinary Brits IF the Conservatives remain in power because there are a lot of worker and environment protections and so on that the Conservatives want to scrap.
I expect the EU to try to be very vindictive. Bear in mind, however, that Britain buys more EU goods than the other way around. Still, Brussels can’t let this pass without punishing Britain severely, lest other nations get the same idea.
A lot of other nations will be in a better position if they leave: Greece, Italy, Spain, and Finland top the list, but even, say, France, might be better off. So, yes, this is an existential threat to Brussels.
Brussels should take this is as a rebuke of its anti-democratic ways and of its austerity policies, BUT current politicians won’t be able to. If they are replaced, however, there is some hope for serious democratic fixes to the EU. Hope is not the same thing as “I expect.”
Because the EU is a neoliberal organization, this could be to Britain’s benefit IF Corbyn winds up in charge. The best case scenario right now is if Cameron steps down, a new Conservative leader is elected, there is an election, and Labour wins.
But the same newspapers and media outlets who were pro-Remain will still be against Corbyn, because they actually like the idea of losing labor, environmental protections, and so on.
The leave campaign was run on a pretty racist and anti-immigrant basis. That creates a rather ugly mandate. It will be up to Labour and Corbyn to turn this into something hopeful and good, rather than something stupid and nasty.
I’ll be curious to see if attempts are made to keep Britain in the EU regardless, also.
Still, this is a big deal, and historic. It will be VERY interesting to see how it plays out.
Update: This graphic is interesting but completely unsurprising.
Basically, people who are doing well voted for the status quo, those who aren’t voted against. Scotland doesn’t trust London to run Scotland (which should be no surprise) and wants Brussels as a counter-weight. (Scotland should have left Britain and stayed in the EU, I’d judge).
So be it. If you don’t make your country work for at least the majority, I will hear no complaints when the majority pulls the rug out.
And now the Article 50 Process will be invoked. Here’s the text in full:
Article 50
1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.
4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.
A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.
The kicker is in numbers 2 and 4: It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.
and
A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
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