Ah, how quickly the years fly by. It feels like only yesterday that my college roommates and I were dancing around our living room to this episode of Auto-Tune the News, in which Nigel Farage hurls a barrage of insults at Herman Van Rompuy, then-President of the European Council. For anybody who’s new to the UK Independence Party, “Euroscepticism,” and the debate surrounding Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, this clip is a good introduction to the kind of cartoonish chest-puffery that goes in on this corner of European politics.
It’s a damn catchy song, too, I must say.
You have the charisma of a damp rag! [Damp rag!]
You have the appearance of a bank clerk! [Bank clerk!]
Who are you, I’d never heard of you! [Eat my poo!]
Nobody else in Europe’d ever heard of you!
But I’ve no doubt that it’s your intention
To be the quiet assassin of European democracy,
Perhaps that’s because you come from Belgium
Which of course is, pretty much,
a non-country.
We don’t know you
We don’t want you
The sooner you’re put out to grass, the better
We don’t like you
We don’t want you!
[Our logic and reason have proved you wrong!]
[Go back to Douchebagistan where you belong!]
[Don’t make me have to start World War III!]
[Bring it on, these guns are WMD!]
Well, that was 2010. I was a young, impressionable undergraduate, and Nigel Farage, so far as I knew, was just some attention-seeking nutjob making the most of a captive audience. Now, six years later, I am a young, impressionable law student, and Nigel Farage has successfully convinced a majority of the British people that the the United Kingdom should withdraw from the EU. At long last, Albion has freed herself forever from the tyranny of damp rags, bank clerks, and quiet democracy-assassins. Rule Britannia, &c.
As an American, I’m not sure I’m qualified to have an opinion on Brexit. That hasn’t deterred me from having one, of course. I am worried and unhappy, for the most part. I say “for the most part,” because if I’m honest with myself, the strange corner of my mind that speaks only in bagpipes is pretty excited over the possibility of Scottish independence, and the much remoter but not inconceivable prospect of Irish reunification. I would much rather have the UK in the EU, and my pleasure would of course be utterly nullified by any resurgence of sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland, but still—can you imagine England surrounded on all sides by independent Celtic nations with continental alliances? Isn’t that the precise situation that roughly eight centuries of English foreign policy were specifically devoted to avoiding? And they blew it all in one afternoon! In the year of the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, no less! England. ENGLAND. What the actual hell are you doing? [1] If I had a time machine, I would use it to individually visit every prominent statesman in English history and tell them with the story of what happened here, because truth be told, I enjoy watching grown men cry. [2]
Of course, if Brexit’s oracles and apologists are to be believed, the UK’s break from the EU was inevitable, because of the psychology of human beings’ attachment to place: and it was desirable for that same reason. As Milo Yiannopoulos has it: “It’s little wonder that [EU supporters] just don’t understand why the plebs back home are so attached to their national identities, and will fight so hard to defend them. They’re constantly frustrated that their voters won’t get with the program, put down their flags, and become faceless, rootless members of a global society… For millions of increasingly angry, and freshly politically motivated people, [national identity] is more important than the strength of the pound. And that’s why the globalists will lose.”
This whole situation brings to my mind the novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesteron, written in 1904. It’s the story set in an imaginary future version of England, a bureaucratic state where the monarch is chosen by an impersonal lottery. The man who happens to get the job, a bored satirist with no interest in governance, decides to invent an elaborate system of ritual, history, and heraldry for the several boroughs of London. At first, the whole courtly routine is just a Renaissance Faire-style farce, but within the space of a few years, the boroughs have developed a keen sense of regional identity, and end up literally going to battle against each other over a contentious development project in Notting Hill. It’s a good parable about the strange symbiosis between nihilism and idealism in politics: how schemes and speeches conceived in total cynicism can capture the imagination of some segment of a population, and take on a life beyond their architects’ control: and how—at least for those lucky ones of us who happen to like the place they grew up in—our emotions are easily roused by appeals to the local, the particular, the belovedly familiar.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill also a story about the importance of maintaining a robust sense of humor in public life. As the facetious king tells the zealous young provost of Notting Hill in the aftermath of a great battle: “When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.”
Well, laughing at times like these probably does us some good. But sometimes the mistake has already been made, and it is too late to laugh our friends to their senses: sometimes we can only laugh, because we are afraid of what will happen next. The Napoleon of Notting Hill, after all, was written before either World War, before the imaginative, poetic genius of nationalism had laid waste to the entire continent of Europe, before millions of young men were corralled to slaughter on the killing-fields of France and Flanders, before entire nations turned on their neighbors in hatred, to torture them, to murder them, to incinerate their corpses in crematoriums. I very much doubt that Chesterton, when he wrote the words quoted above, had any inkling that such horrors were only a few decades down the road. And indeed, we none of us ever know what is only a few decades down the road.
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The fact is—bagpipe-dreams and auto-tuned Nigel Farage aside—this situation is very bad. I don’t mean bad for the British pound, or for Britain’s attractiveness to investors. Perhaps that’s the case, but I am not well-versed in economics and confess to having a general prejudice against economists. But I mean that it is bad in a larger and more existential sense. In some ways, the UK’s referendum on EU membership is our own country’s big government/small government debate in another guise. In governmental terms, we are all caught between a rock and a hard place: between, on the one hand, the sprawling, impersonal, and seemingly unaccountable bureaucracy of big government—EU-style or US federal-style government—and the local tyranny of small-minded men. But, of course, we don’t really favor either of these paradigms on logistical grounds: rarely do we seriously consider whether, in some particular instance, a local or a larger-than-local administrative unit is better-equipped to meet our needs. Instead we vote on our feelings, feelings about a kind of vague personality we ascribe to our society at large. Some of us may vote one way because we like the atmosphere and aesthetic trappings of cosmopolitanism; some of us may vote another way because we want the people on our televisions to look and sound like they’re from our hometown. To pretend that race and religion are not implicated here would, of course, be highly disingenuous.
This tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the regional and the global—the tricky emotional juggling-act of allowing ourselves to feel fondness for the places and things that are dear to us, without insisting that our environs be a well-choreographed, monochromatic pageant—the challenge of fostering inter-regional cooperation that does not erode distinctiveness for a corporate uniformity—these are questions of identity faced by every region of our increasingly-globalized world. The European Union is one of history’s great experiments in striking a balance between these many factors, in the interests of promoting lasting peace between nations. The Leave campaign pretended blithely that they did not know what this experiment was for. The fact that it is emotionally simpler to stick to those whom you understand to be your own kind, rather than to work in partnership with others, they dressed up as some miraculous discovery of their own. And they claim that the fact that it is, for at least 53% of British people, easier to feel some emotion about “the United Kingdom” than for the vaguer civic entity of “Europe,” is evidence that the UK has no place in the EU, rather than a glaringly obvious demonstration of the kind of natural self-preference that an institution like the EU exists to mediate.
Things only become uglier when we examine the immediate reason why many people voted “Leave.” They voted “Leave” because they are alarmed by immigration rates, and now, with the Syrian refugee crisis, and the rise of ISIS, it is safer to make immigration a target of national ire than it was back when people were simply griping about there being too many Eastern Europeans around town. Insofar as many of the people who worry about immigration now were worried about it before the heightened terrorist threat, ISIS is a red herring: but it’s a tougher narrative to refute, playing as it does on people’s most visceral fears. My brother, an American who lives and works in London, sent me a picture of a typical Leave poster: “ISLAMIST EXTREMISM IS A REAL THREAT TO OUR WAY OF LIFE,” it says. “ACT NOW BEFORE WE SEE AN ORLANDO-STYLE ATROCITY HERE BEFORE TOO LONG.”
Never mind, of course, that the Orlando shooter didn’t “sneak in” on an asylum claim: he was an American citizen, born and bred: one of millions of American-born Muslims, none of the rest of whom have killed anybody in the name of ISIS. The UK may well sustain an attack from ISIS if they stay in the EU. They are probably equally likely to sustain an attack from ISIS if they leave the EU. An extremist does not care one bit whether a country is in the EU or not; and for an attack to be successful no one from the outside need even cross the border. ISIS is an idea, much more than it is an organization: anyone who can get a hold of a weapon can be its ambassador.
While its image is in the public consciousness, ISIS will have its converts, and I think we may even be surprised at what some of these converts look like. You can call ISIS “Islamist extremism,” but it is also simply a manifestation of the evil that exists at all times in the world: it is the same impulse, dressed up in religiosity, that makes a man beat his partner, a mother abuse her child, a child torture an insect: the same boredom, the same shame, the same hatred. It is not and never will be eradicable, because it is encoded too deep in every one of us, and only wants the right combination of circumstances to be let loose. (Sometimes, even a philosophy as tepid as that of the “Leave” campaign may be sufficient, as the murderer of MP Jo Cox could tell you.)
But if we want to be good people, we cannot waste our time complaining that evil exists, while at the same time refusing to do what we know to be right. If the UK wants to stand against what ISIS represents, they must take in as many refugees as they can. They must not allow men, women, and children to die on their doorstep, while they have the power to give them safety and shelter. But the UK has, like the US, chosen a cowardly path, and that is a disgrace.
In the end, the personalities we ascribe to nations, as conglomerates of individuals, are largely fanciful, and break down on closer inspection. Like most Americans, I am prone to a recurring delusion that Europeans in general, and British people in particular, are unusually intelligent, and that the grandeur and sorrow of these nations’ long histories makes their inhabitants, by some kind of geographic osmosis, calmer and wiser and more far-sighted than us upstart Americans. But of course, that’s nonsense. We are all idiots, and what’s more, we are not very good people. We care more about the preservation of our narrow routines of existence than about easing any part of the great suffering that is in the world. We believe that our “way of life,” the particular place and the time we live in—never mind that thousands of unrecorded years of human history are now dissolved utterly, an entire mystery to us—is worthy of special preservation, even if we must must knowingly abet the infliction of suffering to keep it so.
Perhaps this is the best we can do as humans; perhaps humans have done and never will do any better. But at this time when there’s so much talk of making nations “great,” it seems to me that our countries have never deserved that appellation less. And there are surely many more dark and dreary days to come. The UK may yet be spared its Brexit—a second referendum, an Article 50 loophole, a Scottish veto—and the US may be spared Donald Trump. But there is still something very rotten in us.
Brianna Rennix is a 2L.
[1] Yes, yes, I know, Wales voted also Leave. I am fond of Welsh bagpipes, so this is something of a conflict of interest for me.
[2] Speaking of ironies, it’s also rather precious that the UK believes a popular mandate is all that ought to be required to extricate oneself from a supranational governmental structure. If only India had known; a referendum could’ve saved them a lot of bother in the 19th century.