The Disintegration of Euro-Atlanticism and New Authoritarianism by Vassilis K. Fouskas & Bülent Gökay

Author:Vassilis K. Fouskas & Bülent Gökay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319968186
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Concluding Remarks

Brexit has to be contextualised. We have argued that Brexit is one of the many morbid symptoms of our times and morbid symptoms come to the surface of politics when, as Gramsci put it, the old is dying but the new has not yet been born. We are at the intersection of the rise of China , and other leading emerging economies, as the importance of transatlantic economies is diminishing. The Brexit debate was informed by the crisis of neoliberal financialisation and the Eurozone crisis . In opting to save the banks and deepen austerity , British neoliberal elites, whether of Labour or Tory stock, failed to address the issue of sustainable growth. In addition, the racist discourse which defined the EU Referendum debate should be understood in the context of Britain ’s imperial legacy and British neoliberal austerity as laid out above. This is how this debate should be contextualised. The terms on which many politicians and mainstream media participated in the referendum debate are symptomatic of a small island country struggling to conceive of its place in the post-Empire world in which Europe itself is in decline. Nostalgia for a particular version of history, a melancholic longing for a glorious past, of course, long preceded Brexit. Brexit came rather as a result of “an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism”, argues Nicholas Boyle. During the campaign, it was felt that the referendum was more about Britain and its imperial legacy rather than just about relations with Europe. A romanticised understanding of Britain ’s imperial past contributed to fuelling the UK’s decision to leave the EU. As Nadine El-Enany has aptly described, “the violence in the Brexit rhetoric of ‘taking back control of our borders’, of excluding others for self-interested goals at a time when thousands of refugees are dying at sea, is resonant of the racism that pervaded imperial Britain at a time of the 1781 Zong massacre which saw slaves thrown overboard by their captor to save a British slave ship and in the interest of profiting from an insurance claim” (El-Enany 2016).

The Leave campaigners based their claims on the assumption that all bureaucracy, exploitation, austerity and impoverishment come to Britain from outside. One morbid symptom gives birth to another. All that unrelenting scapegoating of migrants, exemplified with Michael Gove’s Islamophobic rant about Turkish birth rates and criminality, or Farage’s poster depicting non-white refugees crossing the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015 along with the slogan “Breaking Point”, was a convenient distraction from the material consequences of the Conservative government’s austerity measures. As explained in Chapter 1, rising levels of inequality, unemployment, frustration and anxiety in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 have created conditions much more favourable to the more recent expansion of pseudo-conservative movements and the intensification of the authoritarian aspects of their rhetoric. Brexit debate, which happened within the context of harsh austerity

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