The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age by James Kirchick

Author:James Kirchick
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General, Political Ideologies, Nationalism & Patriotism, World, European
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:38:47.799000+00:00

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Brexit: From Great Britain to Little England

England … will save Europe by her example.

William Pitt the Younger, 1805

We seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

John Robert Seeley, 1883

IF THE ORIGINS OF THE LIBERAL WORLD order can be traced to May 7, 1948, when leaders ranging from Konrad Adenauer to Winston Churchill and a young François Mitterand gathered at The Hague Congress to chart the future of European political and economic cooperation, future historians may pinpoint its unraveling as having begun on June 23, 2016. That was the day Great Britain decided—against the counsel of every major political party, the governor of the Bank of England, nine out of ten economists, the president of the United States, the leaders of every European country, labor union heads, captains of industry, the International Monetary Fund, Stephen Hawking, the secretary general of NATO, the former chiefs of MI5 and MI6, and David Beckham—to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, becoming the first member state to do so. After more than four decades of tempestuous marriage, the relationship between Britain and Europe entered into protracted divorce proceedings.

Approval of “Brexit,” the portmanteau adopted to describe this less than amicable separation, immediately plunged the United Kingdom into political, economic, and social crisis. Within hours of the vote result, Prime Minister David Cameron announced his intention to resign, setting off a Conservative Party leadership race to succeed him. Several days later, Labor MPs overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence against their leader Jeremy Corbyn, furious that he had barely lifted a finger to assist the “Remain” campaign. Acknowledging that businesses and households would indefinitely delay spending and investment in the face of such profound economic uncertainty, Bank of England governor Mark Carney warned of “economic post-traumatic stress disorder.”1 The Economist Intelligence Unit, meanwhile, warned of a 6 percent contraction in GDP by 2020 and increasing unemployment.2 Britain’s AAA credit rating, which it had enjoyed since 1978, was downgraded to AA. After only a week in post-Brexit Britain, police logged a 500 percent increase in hate crimes, with everyone from long-resident Cypriots to native-born black Britons reporting abuse at the hands of freshly emboldened English nationalists.3 Finally, beyond all these tangible aftershocks, a deep and ineffable sense of unease set in among many Britons, particularly younger ones, who had voted overwhelmingly to stay within the EU. At risk was their future conception of themselves as Europeans, along with the benefits that identity accrues, not least of which are the “four freedoms” they had long taken for granted: the free movement of goods, services, persons, and capital across the union.

Brexit has many fathers, none so telegenic and omnipresent as Nigel Farage. A perpetually tanned and pinstriped, chain-smoking former London City banker, Farage was until July 2016 the longtime leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose raison d’être for the past quarter-century has been Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Farage believes

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