New Europeans

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Making Histories May04 2016, Amsterdam

Justifying Brexit

These past few weeks a few people have come to visit me from back home in the UK. With them they brought a big box of teabags, updates on life, a bit of post, and all round chill vibes. They also brought with them the reality of the UK referendum on EU membership.

I won’t say I’ve buried my head in the sand on this issue but I really haven’t taken it seriously. Aside from organising my overseas vote (which I’ve still not quite got my head around), I’ve given it little thought at all. But a recent glance at the polls showed an almost unbelievable 50/50 split between those wanting to leave and those wanting to remain. Here I was dimly assuming the exit campaign was still languishing somewhere in the 40s, but no, they have the momentum now to surpass those who want to stay.

It’s not Anglocentric of me to say that this is one of the most important events in the EU’s recent history. It will potentially send the union’s already stagnant economy over the edge. It will stoke the flames of anti-EU sentiment across Europe and give hope to anti-EU parties that they too can engineer their respective country’s split from the union. But most importantly it will decisively check the EU’s moves toward “ever closer union”, after all, no country has ever left the European Union. In short, it’s massive.

At ground level I had a very heated and very quick-fire argument about the merits of the EU with two of my friends. Arguing as we drunkenly ate falafel in the late hours of Saturday night, I found to my surprise that I was forced into the position of supporting exit. I don’t necessarily support exit but I can really understand why people want to leave, much more so, it seems, than my friends back home.

My first argument: there’s no sovereignty in the EU. In the European Council of Ministers, the leaders of our countries get together, and while they’ve been elected by national parliaments, these national parliaments have no sovereignty over the decisions being made in the meeting of the Council of Ministers in Brussels. Which is to say, the body that makes these decisions is not accountable to anyone. No one can fire the European Council, not the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, nor the Chancellor of Germany, nor the President of France. So we end up with decisions that basically no one is happy with. The ministers return to their country and they say, “we tried as hard as we could but in the end we had to follow the council’s decision” all the while using the EU itself as the scapegoat for why they didn’t get their way. No wonder people hate it.

Which leads to my second argument. Ordinary people, many of whom have neither the money to enjoy holidays in mainland Europe nor the knowledge and confidence to get work elsewhere in the continent, who understandably cannot see how much Europe affects their everyday life, who see foreigners with conspicuously different habits and customs happily taking jobs at relatively low-pay and indirectly undercutting their wages, who feel their country is not what it used to be, these people are making a basic sum that their life is better off (more simple) outside the EU. Maybe it’s wrong, but when you’ve spent most of your life in your home country and your living standards are all of a sudden slipping, maybe, just maybe, you’re justified in seeing things that way.

Anyway, those were the two arguments I made to my friends: that there’s no sovereignty in the EU and that people associate it with falling living standards. And as I was making these arguments I found myself more conscious of the fundamental problem with what the EU is all about. Rather than a shared culture, it’s all about a shared economy, since that’s so much easier for bureaucrats and politicians to comprehend.

Economically speaking, it’s completely bananas to think that we’d be better of out of the union. But culturally speaking, it’s the other way around. There’s never been a very effective attempt to influence pro-European sentiment through the soft power of a European commonwealth, never a European Times newspaper, never an encouragement of Esperanto or some other lingua franca, never a clear attempt to encourage people to feel European, or at least none I can think of.

As such, as soon as the economy goes down the pan, the argument for the European Union becomes pretty fucking flimsy. It’s not the EU’s fault that we are living through an incredibly protracted economic stagnation, and the stagnation won’t be resolved by leaving, but the fact that the union is blamed for this is testament to its failure to make a cultural argument for its existence.