Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.

These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

What good did it do?

For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.

Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.

Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.

It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…

Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?

That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.

Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.

Sovereign projects

The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.

But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.

Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.

There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).

Posting

With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…

A Happy New Year

Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!

For a while during the initial phases of the first lockdown, there was some discussion about the prevention paradox, the risk that beneficial actions taken on a population basis will leave many individuals thinking: what’s the big deal, or, why should I pay that price? 

The first Covid lockdowns in Europe helped to slow the spread of the virus. However, since relatively few people knew anybody who had contracted the virus, there was an insidious view that led to the “huh - there’s nothing to worry about” perspective that in turn led to people ignoring the rules at the individual and small group level, because those individuals couldn’t truly process the cost-to-them-benefit-to-others analysis. 

So… that link to Brexit, then?

It’s tenuous, I’ll admit, but since it did occur to me in this context, I’ll stick with trying to figure out what it was I thought I meant.

Having the UK in the EU was a form of prevention paradox because, although the weight of the UK and like-minded countries within the EU - those who were suspicious of ever-further integration - put a significant brake on that integration, nevertheless individuals and groups could still feel that having the UK in the EU was a higher cost to them, whilst never eliminating the risk of superstatism. If I try to parse the definition from above:

“[A preventive measure] … [brings much benefit to the population] yet [offers little to each participating individual]”

Becomes…

[Having the UK in the EU] … [enables free trade and bureaucracy-free travel to the whole country] yet [does not give each individual immediately better conditions, more money, succour in patriotism or prevent "the EU" from smashing “us” and “them all” together]

Something like that!

The opposite is clearer: now that Brexit has happened, could the EU now be more inclined to drift towards that federal superstate so detested in principle by those who loved their nations? Perhaps the fact of taking the UK out of the EU makes the thing that many were suspicious of more likely. It’s just that German and Dutch, Polish and Italian opponents of the superstate are no longer supported by their British colleagues.

Told-you-soism

You can imagine Brexiters now actively hoping that the EU will fling itself gung-ho into becoming a superstate, purely so that they can say “told you so!” Indeed, perhaps there is even now a secret clan within the European Research Group working behind the scenes to promote and to facilitate the institution of a Grand State of Europe…

The Brexit paradox?

Although I think I managed to squeeze the logic into the constraints of the definition of the paradox, I can’t strongly argue that the UK being in the EU was a true prevention paradox; it was just a prevention.

But this is exactly what I hoped that my blog would do for me - getting me to “think in writing”. This post has also been a thought starter for trying to describe what being European means to me.

A note to my friends and contacts in the UK

Don't leave me stranded on the Continent...!