Brexit, a still life

 

Yes, Europe is in danger. It always is.

By CAROLINE DE GRUYTER

The New York Times, Tuesday, May 3, 2022

BRUSSELS — In July 2020, along with European officials and experts, I was asked to take part in a policy game. Convened by a German think tank, we were asked to play out what would happen if either Matteo Salvini or Marine Le Pen, the far-right leaders in Italy and France, came to power. We spent a few hours frenziedly debating how the European Union would respond to each occurrence. Of one thing we were sure: It would be a disaster.

Neither scenario, of course, materialized. In Italy, Mario Draghi is prime minister and Mr. Salvini is sliding in the polls. In France, President Emmanuel Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen to win re-election. On the same day, Slovenia’s right-wing prime minister, an admirer of Donald Trump, lost too. It was a good few hours for Europe.

That’s about as long as it lasted. In Brussels and other European capitals, relief turned quickly to angst. The French parliamentary elections in June, in which Mr. Macron could lose his majority and be forced into awkward compromises with the far right or the radical left, are the new worry. Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, after securing re-election in early April, remains a disruptive presence on the scene. And Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds on.

Such anxiety is common in Europe. Many people seem to think that the European Union, which in different forms has provided Europeans with prosperity and peace since the 1950s, is always on the cusp of ruin. The past decade — encompassing a debt crisis, a refugee crisis, Brexit, the rise of the far right and, not least, the pandemic — has set off regular cries about the coming end of the union. And yet, despite everything, it endures. In a world of war and calamity, it needs to pull together even more.

The European Union’s solidity is perhaps its greatest asset. But it can’t rely on institutional stability alone. Europe is a dangerous place again. As a former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, once said, the union used to be surrounded by friends, but now it is surrounded by fire. Some neighbors are actively trying to undermine the union and destroy all that Europe stands for — with the war in Ukraine the latest terrifying example. In the face of such peril, which threatens to return the continent to barbarism, the case for binding together more tightly is all the more compelling.

Fortunately, Europeans have gotten to know one another better in recent times. During the debt crisis a decade ago, people across the continent watched heated debates in Greece’s Parliament. The fate of the country, bound to painful economic reforms, resonated far beyond its borders. Europeans likewise take great interest in Poland and Hungary curbing the independence of their judiciaries and press, and want the rule of law to be respected in member states.

Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, and China’s growing economic and political coercion, have brought Europeans together even more. They realize they cannot weather these storms alone: Feeling their way of life is on the line, their reflex is to stick together. They may still not be very happy with the European Union — the way it works, the kinds of compromises it relies on — but they are certainly happier in it.

Such common feeling is of a piece with the union’s structure. The European Union has a federal, statelike construction that should be strong enough to defend common European interests in the face of geopolitical adversity. It has an executive (the Commission), a Parliament representing citizens, a senate representing states (the Council), an independent court of justice, a central bank and even a common border guard. This sturdy federal architecture is the bedrock of Europe’s stability.

In practice, however, it’s not like the federal structures in America or Germany. In Brussels, the de facto capital of the union, member states make most of the decisions. When European heads of state and government meet, they do so as national leaders. They are elected to act in the interests not of Europe but of their own nations. Whatever the issue at hand, they sit down, put their national concerns on the table and start bargaining. In the end, each will find some of its demands in the eventual compromise.

The system certainly has its advantages. It more or less guarantees national ownership of European decision-making; every member recognizes its fingerprints on the final agreement. This sense of ownership helps to explain why the union has survived so many crises in recent years: Member states have invested in it, depend on it and, crucially, want it to survive. But the downside to this approach is that by seeking consensus on almost every issue, Europe becomes as strong only as its weakest link. Leaders regularly make half-baked decisions because some countries refuse to go further, with results that do not always meet Europe’s real needs.

Examples are legion. Hungary, for instance, has blocked several foreign policy statements against Russia or China that all other member states agreed on. Poland, for its part, has single-handedly diluted Europe’s climate goals. And before the presidential elections in France, the government there delayed a decision on a European oil embargo against Russia, fearing the resulting rise of energy prices could favor Ms. Le Pen in her campaign against Mr. Macron. Often, Europe is the plaything of member states seeking to promote their own narrow interests. Mr. Macron, however “pro-European,” is no exception.

That’s why elections often cause such headaches. Democracy, to be sure, is Europe’s strength. It is the union’s core value, its beating heart. But democracy is also Europe’s weakness. That’s because the union is not really European: Instead, it involves 27 separate national democracies. If one of them produces a Eurosceptic government, it can endanger the entire European project, which depends on unanimity. The union is effectively held hostage every time elections are held somewhere — hardly a sustainable way to do things.

The French election, Mr. Macron said, was “a referendum on Europe.” The problem with Europe is exactly that: Every election is a referendum about Europe, in every corner of the continent. It would be strange if a state election in Montana or Mississippi risked undoing the Republic or derailing its foreign policy. In Europe, this is normal practice. That’s partly why, despite its success as a global economic powerhouse and a beacon of stability, Europe often lacks confidence and looks vulnerable in the mildest headwind.

Yet this paradox needn’t be permanent. In a world defined by instability, great power competition and rising prices, Europe must look after itself — and it has the means to do so. A phased embargoon Russian oil, likely to be finalized this week, is just a start. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, collective provision of defense and security is also a must, as is an energy union. What’s more, some kind of fiscal union — augmenting the current monetary union — might also be necessary, to coordinate the serious investments needed to shore up Europe’s resilience. Recognizing the need for bolstered unity, a group of European intellectuals last week even called for a United States of Europe.

I’m not sure the union will ever come to that. But it would be nice if at the policy game in Berlin this year, instead of fretting over worst-case scenarios, we could perhaps let ourselves imagine a bolder, stronger European Union. If we could all allow Europe to stand a little more on its own feet, it would make a world of difference.

The Western mind no longer understands Putin

By JOHN GRAY

A world torn apart: a woman stands outside her home following
a rocket attack in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo: Emilio Morenatti/AP

The New Statesman, 2 March 2022

The belief that liberalism will inevitably prevail is an illusion that Europe must abandon if it is to win a war of his creation.

Vladimir Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in eight years is seen by many in the West as an act of madness, the last throw of an ageing and increasingly irrational dictator. Raining down destruction on Ukraine’s cities can only end in downfall for him and disaster for Russia. The effect has been to unite the West in a way unseen for decades. Putin’s aggression will backfire, leaving Russia a pariah state on the wrong side of history.

The West does seem to be acting in a much more coordinated fashion. Western countries are supplying ammunition and arms, anti-tank and anti-air weapons and medical aid to Ukraine. Leaders once sympathetic to Putin, such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, have aligned themselves against him. But on their side there is no clear strategy or realistic endgame in view. The assumption is that Putin will be toppled, but escalating sanctions could prove ineffective or self-defeating. The most coherent objective that can be detected in the West’s response – a reversion to the status quo before the invasion – is impossible. History has moved on.

However this war develops, it marks a breakdown in the international system comparable with the end of the first era of globalisation in 1914. It is telling that the abstention of China, a far more powerful autocracy, in the UN vote condemning the invasion has been hailed as a victory for the West. India and the United Arab Emirates also abstained. The liberal order is dead and buried.

The adage that Russia is “Upper Volta with nukes”, which Joe Biden repeated in June 2021 when arriving in Geneva for talks with Putin, underestimated Russia’s capacity to sow chaos. As Putin has reminded us, it remains a fully operational nuclear state. But he has many other, less apocalyptic weapons at his disposal. As well as its grip on European energy supplies, Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter and a key supplier of strategic metals. This gives it a formidable power to retaliate against sanctions. If Putin was to stop the flow of gas into Europe, the continent and the world would be plunged into recession and inflation would spiral out of control.

Isolating Russia means accelerating the break-up of world markets. Last weekend the EU, the US, the UK and other countries agreed to expel some Russian banks from Swift, the messaging system that enables cross-border transfers. The full details are not yet known, but it may be significant that the scheme imposed a selective cut-off. A complete financial embargo, if it could be enforced, would push Russia into using other regional systems, such as that guided by China. The West would be actively promoting a process of deglobalisation.

If Putin’s initial objective was to bring Ukraine back into a Russian sphere of influence, he must have expected to do so relatively quickly. A shock-and-awe blitzkrieg deploying air power and missile attacks on cities, with special forces targeting key facilities and people, would disable Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and allow regime change to be imposed in short order. But Putin’s timetable has not been met. Through its army, popular militias and civil society, Ukraine is resisting valiantly. If Kyiv continues to fight on, Putin may resort to bombing the city into submission, effectively destroying it, as Russian forces did the Chechen capital during the Battle of Grozny from late 1999 to early 2000. Even after such a disaster, Ukrainian partisans could wage a fierce guerrilla war for many years.

A protracted conflict would obviously be risky for Putin, but threatening it could give him a winning hand in his game of force and fear. The West’s worst nightmare – an unending Syrian-style bloodbath in the middle of Europe, with millions of refugees spilling out across the continent – may be his most potent weapon. We have already seen a similar tactic tried in Belarus earlier this year. Looming behind negotiations is the threat of a scorched earth strategy.

There are many who could not have imagined Putin launching a campaign of such brazen barbarity. They must have forgotten the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the attempted murders and the death of a British civilian in Salisbury, the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and the methodical repression that has made Belarus into a Russian colony. They cannot have noticed the parallels between the Russian assault on Ukraine and the invasion of Georgia in 2008, which Putin presented as a peacekeeping operation designed to prevent ethnic cleansing in his proxy state of South Ossetia. They did not grasp that interspersing terror with deceptive diplomacy is Putin’s way of waging war.

A prolonged struggle in Ukraine would not necessarily work to the West’s advantage. Biden has handled the crisis reasonably well. Yet there can be no certainty regarding American policy after the presidential election in November 2024.

The Republicans are divided on whether – or more precisely, how – to continue Donald Trump’s style of politics. When he defends Putin, the influential Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks for a large and growing section of the American right, who regard the Russian autocrat as an ally in the American culture wars. On 22 February Trump praised Putin’s recognition of the two Donbas pseudo-states as “genius” and described his invading troops as “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen”. Many in both the main US parties regard Ukraine as a distraction from the challenge posed by China. The US is bound to Europe by Nato, which remains the cornerstone of Western defence. The alliance is strengthening its forces in Poland, the Baltics and elsewhere. But can future presidents be relied on to honour the US’s commitments? If not, Europe could be left to fend for itself.

Many will say this would be no bad thing: Europe has freeloaded on America’s security guarantee for too long. But building an autonomous European defence capacity will take time. France is a serious military power but lacks anything like the logistical, intelligence and high-tech warfare capabilities of the US and its allies. Emmanuel Macron’s project of a European army remains a chimera. Lulled into torpor by the belief that major wars between states belong in the history books, Europe has run down its capacity to engage in conventional warfare. (So, too, has the UK.) While Putin was systematically upgrading Russia’s military forces, Europe was disarming itself.

The fundamental question is whether European states have the will to defend themselves. Aside from Poland, the Baltic states, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, there is room for doubt. Some in the French political classes may have a personal interest in good relations with Russia. François Fillon, the former prime minister and one-time frontrunner in the 2017 presidential election, joined the board of the Russian petrochemical company Sibur in December 2021. In Germany Nord Stream 2 has been paused, not decommissioned. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced a raft of measures, including increased defence spending and building up energy reserves, that have rightly been described as a turning point in German foreign policy. Yet Germany is still reliant on Russian gas as a result of Angela Merkel’s policies. The ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder heads the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG. He is also chairman of the board of the Russian state oil company Rosneft, and in early February was nominated to serve on the board of Gazprom. He has issued statements deploring military conflict in Ukraine, but there is so far no sign of him renouncing these posts.

If Putin’s larger plan is to overturn the post-Cold War settlement in Europe, sections of its elites might not be too discomfited if he succeeds. Against this background, his ruthless gamble does not look so irrational. But could this war nevertheless be his undoing, as so many in the West want to believe?

Certainly, there are risks. Contrary to the stupefying cliché, he does not rule Russia with the authority of a tsar. His power is transactional and precarious. If the invasion stalls, a coup mounted by oligarchs fearful of a costly conflict must be a real possibility. (Ironically, isolating Russia from the world’s financial system could strengthen Putin’s hold over the oligarchs, since it would force them to keep their wealth in the country.) The scale of popular dissent is hard to judge. There have been demonstrations against the war in cities throughout Russia and thousands of protesters have been arrested. Many Russians, on the other hand, consider the West the enemy – a view that could become more widely held if sanctions impoverish the majority.

Putin’s war has torn up the view of history that guided the West for the past 30 years. When Tony Blair told Labour’s party conference in September 2005, “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer,” he encapsulated the ruling myth of the age. Across the world thousands of economists nodded sagely. Fervent internationalists cheered the dawn of a universal regime of human rights. But the millennial transformation Blair announced did not come to pass.

In order to see the world clearly, we need to understand the fall of communism. The West misread the forces that overthrew the Soviet state: it was brought down not by intellectual dissent or economic inefficiency, which dogged the system from the start, but by nationalism, religion and working-class revolt. In Russia the trigger for the communist collapse was the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Westernising reform programme. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 19th century, “the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself”. Positioned ambivalently between Europe and Asia, Russia was never going to become a facsimile of the West.

The triumph of liberalism was a mirage. There were wars in the Gulf, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Many were wars of resources or religion – types of violent conflict that were supposed to be fading away. The war in Ukraine continues this pattern. The role of resources will become apparent as sanctions fail or rebound. The influence of religion will remain obscure or incredible for most in the West. Some have noted Putin citing Ivan Ilyin, a 19th-century émigré Orthodox theologian and supporter of the White armies in the Russian Civil War, as one of his favourite writers. Not many noticed when last August Tass reported that Putin’s Mephistophelian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had denounced the West for backing Ukraine’s church, which in October 2018 split from its Russian counterpart after three centuries of accepting Moscow’s authority. While calling for peace, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia has come out in support of Putin. Ukraine is being invaded, it seems, in order to reclaim Kyiv for Holy Russia. Western observers are baffled by the way Putin has invoked Russian spiritual values to justify the bloody conquest on which he seems bent. Some dismiss his profession of faith as a cynical ploy, others diagnose insanity. A few – of whom I am one – suspect his Orthodoxy could be genuine. But while he may hold the fate of Europe in his hands, it is a mistake to focus on him as the sum of all our fears.

Putin is the face of a world the contemporary Western mind does not comprehend. In this world, war remains a permanent part of human experience; lethal struggles over territory and resources can erupt at any time; human beings kill and die for the sake of mystical visions; and saving the victims of tyranny and aggression is often impossible. These are hard truths, to be sure. But the time for pretence and illusion has passed. The enervating dream of a global liberal order must be abandoned, and the reckless disarmament of the past decades reversed. Only then will we be prepared for whatever Putin’s war brings.

Great again? Or the FALL of the USA?

By Fintan O'Toole

The Irish Times, Saturday 25 April, 2020

US president Donald Trump has claimed he was being sarcastic and testing the media when he raised the idea that injecting disinfectant or irradiating the body with ultraviolet light might kill coronavirus.

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?

The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division.

They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American psyche dance naked on live TV. If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. Who, other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? 

How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

There is, as the demonstrations in US cities show, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

Brexit: Bad Advice from the People

By IAN McEWAN

There is no turning back. The stubborn negotiation to say enough about Theresa May, and after Boris Johnson for a brief period, has achieved the most masochistic and meaningless ambition ever dreamed of in the history of the islands. The rest of the world, with the exception of Presidents Putin and Trump, attended the process in amazement and dismay. In December, a majority voted in favor of the parties which called for a second referendum, but these unfortunately could not make common cause. Now we have to pick up the tents, maybe to the sound of church bells, and hope that the 15 years of difficult road we are going to take will bring us back to something similar to what we had, with our multiple trade and security treaties, health and scientific cooperation, in addition to thousands of other useful agreements.The only sure thing is that we will be asking ourselves questions for a long time. Let’s put aside for a moment the lies of the campaign in favor of leaving the EU, its suspicious funding, the Russian intervention or the ineffective Election Commission and let’s think of magic dust. How is it that a question of constitutional, economic and cultural consequences of such magnitude was settled with a simple majority and not with a super majority? A parliamentary document (Briefing 07212) from the time of the Referendum Law of 2015, indicated the reason: the referendum had to be purely consultative. The consultation was to "allow the electorate to express an opinion". How has "consultative" been transformed into "binding"? Thanks to the blinding dust that the populist hands threw into our right and left eyes.

We have endured the crippling bond between the government and the opposition. Corbyn held the door to Europe open for Johnson to cross. In this case, if one went far enough to the left, one ended up meeting the right which came from the other side and threw himself into its arms.

What have we learned in our blindness? That those who did not prosper in the old state of affairs had no compelling reason to vote for their maintenance; that our prolongation of parliamentary chaos was the result of an error in approach when formulating a yes or no question for which there were dozens of answers; that the long-standing ecology of the European Union has deeply influenced the landscape flora of our country and that the uprooting of these plants will be brutal; than what used to be called hard Brexit became soft; compared to the threat of non-agreement which still persists today; that any form of exit, according to the calculations of the government itself, will cause the economy to contract; that we are good in the multiple and bitter division: young against old, cities against countryside, university graduates against those who give up; Scotland and Northern Ireland against England and Wales; that any past, present or future international trade agreement limits our sovereignty, as is the case with the Paris Agreements that we sign or with NATO membership, and that, therefore, "regain control" has been the most promising and empty cynical of this deplorable period.

We were surprised. A few years ago, we were asked to list the country's problems - the gap between the rich and the poor, the overwhelming national health system, the north-south imbalance, crime, terrorism, austerity or the housing crisis, among others - the majority would not have thought of including our membership of the European Union. How happy we were in 2012, with the feeling of satisfaction that followed the success of our Olympic Games. So we didn't think about Brussels. What set us in motion was what Guy Verhofstadt called a "cat fight" in the Tory party. These cats have been fighting for decades. When they dragged us on and pushed us to take sides, we suffered from a collective nervous breakdown. Then enough people wanted the anxiety to go away and wanted "to get Brexit done." Repeated ad nauseam by the Prime Minister, it seemed almost rude to wonder why.

At the very beginning of the referendum campaign, we learned that “at the gates” referred exclusively to emigration, but also that it was the decision of the United Kingdom, and not of the European Union, to authorize the unlimited emigration of persons from countries applying for EU membership before the expiration of seven years of legal residence; that it is the United Kingdom which has chosen to allow emigrants from the European Union to stay in the country for more than six months without work; that the UK has successfully defended EU enlargement to the east, and that it is our country, not the Union, which admits that emigration from third countries continues (and why not?) while that from the EU decreases. We also learned that it was the United Kingdom, and not the European Union, which had decided to replace our patriotic blue passport by a garnet one. Although, when I look at them, my old passports seem almost black to me.

History has committed many injustices with the British state, but very few come from the European Union. Brussels did not insist that we neglect the post-industrial cities of the central and northern regions of England. Nor did he ask us to let wages stagnate, to allow billionaire donations to go to the CEOs of bankrupt companies, or to put shareholder value to social good, to sink our health care system, our social assistance and our Sure Start Family Assistance Program, we will close 600 police stations and allow the breakdown of public education centers.

The task of the Brexit campaign was to convince the electorate otherwise. In the referendum, it obtained a success of 37%, enough to change our collective destiny at least for a generation; to lead a sufficient number of people to believe that the source of all their grievances is a hostile external element is the oldest trick in the populist's manual. Like Trotsky for Stalin, the United States for the mullahs of Iran and Gülen for Erdogan, it's now Brussels' turn.

Hedge fund owners, plutocrats who donate to the cause, Eton elders and newspaper owners present themselves as enemies of the elite. No more magic powders. To say that the problem in Northern Ireland has been resolved is a dangerous hoax. We have seen the shame of the reasoned argument fall. The Brexit impulse contained important elements of the blood and earth ideology with touches of imperial nostalgia. These frightening desires went beyond mere facts.

We adopt a slang: "article 50", "frictionless trade", "just in time", "safeguard". How much we liked to use this slang. We have learned to respect an "invisible border". Before it all started, only a few knew the difference between the customs union and the single market. After three years, little has changed. A survey carried out last year found that many Britons thought that "falling asleep" was the same thing as being on duty. I wish.

Brexit leaders and the Leader of the Opposition have always lacked the time to start the two-year article-50 clock. They were afraid that those who had voted for the exit would change their minds; that among voters who did not go to the polls last time, supporters of the permanence doubled those for the exit, and that young voters who joined the census were overwhelmingly in favor of the European Union. The generals of brexiters they rightly feared a second referendum.

At a minimum, we can all agree that we will be a little poorer. As one of my school teachers said, if it’s really worth doing something, it’s worth it even if it’s done wrong. Theresa May never dared to say that with Brexit we would be better. She did not even tell us if she would vote for the exit in a second referendum. We must recognize her honesty. On the contrary, Boris Johnson, during his presentation to Parliament of his vision of the post-Brexit panorama, promised to close the wealth and opportunity gap between the north and the south of the United Kingdom, and to make the country the nerve center of the most advanced battery technology. He forgot to mention that the European Union had not intervened against the realization of any of these projects.

The redefinition of our new trade relations with the European Union will be a concern that will last for several years. As for the position of the United States, take a good tour of the Midwest of the country and spend a month crossing a desert of monocultures without seeing a wild flower. To compete with this, our agriculture should be ready to receive an injection of hormones. Our farmers should get rid of unproductive hedges, trees that separate fields and three-meter limits, all those parts now pieces of a museum. In its trade talks with the European Union, the United States has not considered tightening its regulations on animal husbandry, food production and environmental protection, although this would have given them access to 500 million consumers. The great American agrarian industry will not change its attitude for a country of only 65 million inhabitants. If we want a deal, we will have to lower the bar.

The times of damage and loss are coming. In a dangerous world beset by noisy "strong men", the European Union was our greatest hope for an open, tolerant, free and peaceful community of nations. The expansion of populism in Europe is already threatening these hopes. Our withdrawal will weaken resistance against the xenophobic tendency. The lesson of our country's last centuries of history is simple: the turbulence on the European continent will lead us to bloody conflicts. Nationalism is rarely a peace project. Neither does it care about the fight against climate change. It prefers to let the tropical forests and the Australian forests burn.

Take a road trip from Greece to Sweden and from Portugal to Hungary. Forget your passport. How rich, what exuberance there is in the gastronomy, customs, architecture and languages ​​of this group of civilizations, and how profoundly and proudly different each national state is from its neighbors. No sign of oppression from Brussels, nothing of the gray commercial monotony of the continental United States. Remember all you learned about the dilapidated and desperate state of Europe in 1945, then contemplate the tremendous economic, political and cultural achievements: peace, open borders, relative prosperity and promotion of individual rights, tolerance and freedom of expression. Until yesterday, it was the place where our older children, if they wanted to, would live and work.

All this is over, and for the moment the force is on the side of English nationalism. Its champion is the pro-Brexit cabinet of Boris Johnson, whose monument will forever remain a mocking smile perfected in the days of the former Soviet Union. I lie, you know, and I know you know, but I don't give a damn. Like when they said that "the five weeks of Parliament's suspension has nothing to do with Brexit". Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg were the masters of the mocking smile. The premature decision of the Supreme Court which held that the suspension was clearly illegal still stings. Recently, former Interior minister Michael Howard began to murmur against the judges. Expanding political control over an independent judiciary would be in keeping with the Johnson-Cummings project. Hungarian Viktor Orbán leads the way.

Supporters of the permanence have defended a nicer world, but we have always been the herbivores of the debate with our huge bonachonas and our ridiculed demonstrations. "A crowd full of hate," The Sun said; "An elite," The Daily Telegraph wrote. If 16 million is an elite, it’s to be welcomed that the UK is a model of meritocracy.

The truth is that we have been excluded. Thanks to the work and the grace of Corbyn and his mediocre lieutenants, we did not have an effective voice in Parliament. On her first day at the helm, Theresa May promised at the gates of Downing Street that she would rule for all British people. Instead, she threw half of the country to the dogs to appease the right wing of her party. Boris Johnson's rally was originally decided by a very small group of former voters, most of whom have said in polls that they would like Donald Trump to rule the United Kingdom and that they looked forward to hanging being restored. Similarly, Johnson reached the lowest level of populist vulgarity when he declared last June that the country would break away from the EU incubus. His dream has come true.

As for the extremes, we have never stabbed or killed a member of the Brexit Party in the street; we have rarely shown a propensity to send anonymous death and rape threats like the ones Gina Miller, Anna Soubry and many MPs have encountered on numerous occasions. However, anti-Semitic Labor Party emails were shameful, as was the crowd that besieged Rees Mogg's house and made fun of him. But supporters of the permanence do not shrewdly urge our compatriots to cause unrest in the event of a second referendum whose outcome would be unfavorable. About two-thirds of the voters did not vote in favor of the exit. The majority of businessmen, unions, farmers, scientists, finance and the arts were against the Brexit project, and three-quarters of MPs voted to remain. Ignoring the obvious public interest, however, our representatives crouched behind party cliques and "the people have spoken", that grim Soviet phrase, and his successor, "respect Brexit". It was the magic powders that clouded the mind, blinded reason and reduced the opportunities for our children. 
Copyright © Ian McEwan 2020

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