Press Association reports: The leader of Ireland’s main opposition party said he hopes Brexit will move Ireland closer to reunification.
Micheál Martin said a reunification referendum should be called if it becomes clear a majority want to see an end to Irish partition over the UK decision to leave the EU.
The Fianna Fáil leader added that Northern Ireland’s 56% majority vote to remain within the bloc could be a defining moment for the region. He made his remarks delivering the annual John Hume lecture at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
“It may very well be that the decision of Northern Ireland to oppose the English-driven anti-EU UK majority is a defining moment in Northern politics,” he said.
“The remain vote may show people the need to rethink current arrangements. I hope it moves us towards majority support for unification, and if it does we should trigger a reunification referendum.
“However, at this moment the only evidence we have is that the majority of people in Northern Ireland want to maintain open borders and a single market with this jurisdiction, and beyond that with the rest of Europe.” [Continue reading…]
The possibility of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU leading to the demise of the UK, is reminiscent of the case in which the doctor comes out of the operating theater and says, “the surgery was successful but unfortunately the patient died.”
The EU referendum question — “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” — had a false simplicity because it didn’t address the issue of the UK’s ability to remain intact outside the EU.
For this reason, Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, is adopting a “UK approach” to Brexit which takes the UK’s continued existence as a requirement in the unfolding political process.
The Telegraph reports: Theresa May has indicated that Brexit could be delayed as she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed “UK approach” backed by Scotland.
The Prime Minister on Friday travelled to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, and discuss plans for Britain’s Brexit negotiation.
In a sign that the new Prime Minister is committed to keeping the Union intact, she said she will not trigger Article 50 – the formal process for withdrawing from the EU – until all the devolved nations in the country agree.
Her comments could prompt anger from EU leaders, who want Mrs May to trigger Article 50 as soon as possible.
Speaking in Edinburgh, Mrs May said: “I have already said that I won’t be triggering Article 50 until I think that we have a U.K. approach and objectives for negotiations. I think it is important that we establish that before we trigger Article 50.”
Ms Sturgeon has promised to explore every option to keep Scotland in the EU, and has repeatedly warned that if that is not possible as part of the UK, it is “highly likely” to lead to a second independence vote. [Continue reading…]
In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the strongest argument that was made against independence was that it would only be by remaining part of the UK that Scotland could ensure its continuing membership of the EU. Both in 2014 and now, the Scottish people have shown that whatever Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK might end up being, Scotland’s overriding priority is to remain in the EU.
Richard Williams interviews the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy: The outcome of the Brexit vote, not surprisingly, upset him. “For me, all my life, England has been really an example, a model. In dark times, this country has so often had the good reflex. I never saw in my lifetime, and I don’t find in my memory, a circumstance in which this country has gone through such a disaster with open eyes and such a popular fervour, left and right united in the same dishonour, nobody wanting to take the responsibility of going out. This is incredible. What’s sad is that England has added a little chapter to the history of the shameful comedy of bad politics.”
The referendum, he says, should never have been called. “A referendum is really the last option. It should not be a regular form of government. There is a great mistake in taking the option of referendum for personal reasons, for domestic reasons, in order to improve a career and so on. And when the destiny of a country is at stake, the destiny of a continent, it’s such a risk to play that with a tiny majority.
“You ask the people for a reply to a question. But democracy is not only a reply to a question. Democracy is first to shape the question, number two to reply, and number three to adapt to the reply with some laws and decrees and so on. Democracy means all three: to raise, to reply and to apply. A referendum is only number two, without the raising of the question and the application. So, even in the most traditional terms of political philosophy, you cannot say that a referendum is the embodiment of democracy. Not: ‘Are you for Europe or not for Europe?’ A question in democratic terms is something more sophisticated. Which can be the product of the will of the people, but not like this” – he snaps his fingers – “on one Thursday.”
And will the consequence of the British withdrawal be to solidify Europe, or to atomise it? “I don’t know. First of all, it is atomising the United Kingdom. Mr Cameron, Mr Boris Johnson and Mr Farage made a big achievement – they took the risk of destroying a great 60-year-old institution, and the many-centuries-old political whole that is the United Kingdom. This is the situation. And Europe without the UK, without the British spirit, cannot be Europe. It will be a huge loss of being, a loss of substance.” [Continue reading…]
Patrick Wintour writes: Boris Johnson’s surprise appointment as foreign secretary is as much about the dismemberment of the foreign office as the sudden resurrection of the Conservative party’s favourite loveable rogue. It is also the first confirmation that Theresa May is going to be prepared to take risks in government.
For diplomacy and Boris Johnson are not, after all, exactly synonymous. Any cursory reading of his regular Daily Telegraph columns reveals praise of Vladimir Putin, calls to accommodate Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and indiscretions about the president of the United States. The Germans have previously singled out Johnson for causing Brexit with “a diet of lies”.
So even though Johnson had played a dominant role in the leave campaign, few thought May would regard it as politically necessary to bring him back into the fold. He may remain hugely popular in the Tory constituencies and large parts of the country but he was always assumed to be too big a risk and someone who might outshine the comparatively dour prime minister.
Margaret Thatcher for instance tended to favour the duller end of the foreign secretaryship, choosing figures such as Geoffrey Howe, Francis Pym or Douglas Hurd.
But the foreign secretaryship may not turn out to be one of the great offices of state in a May government. Much of the heavy lifting on Brexit is going to be taken up by a new Brexit department, and to be conducted by David Davis, a former shadow home secretary and Europe minister in the Major government. Davis had no role in the Cameron government and was untrusted by the Cameron team, but now faces one of the toughest jobs in government. It will be his task to disentangle the UK from the European Union, including when to trigger article 50. Johnson – who has in the past likened the EU to ill-fitting underwear – will be kept away. [Continue reading…]
Polly Toynbee writes: The Boris shock appointment looks strangely out of kilter with May’s “safe pair of hands”. It may please her to see appalled faces in the Foreign Office, but this feels like an isolationist insult to the world. His first global tour will need to be on his knees.
How will the “special relationship” fare when he meets Hillary Clinton, whom he calls “a sadistic nurse”? Or the touchy, but geopolitically pivotal, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about whom he has only just written an obscene limerick rhyming Ankara with wankerer. Funny? Not so much in a foreign secretary.
Racist pro-colonial “jokes” will precede him wherever he goes – “piccaninnies” and “natives” with “watermelon” smiles – a whole back catalogue of deliberate offence.
Those who feel ashamed already at how the world sees our xenophobic referendum will have a lot more to blush about as Boris brags and blusters his self-obsessed way through diplomatic etiquette. The Middle East? He praises Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Europe? He compared the EU to Hitler. This man, unconnected to notions of truth, is in charge of MI6. What kind of negotiator will he be on anything sensitive (and everything is)?
Maybe May hopes he’ll crash and burn, but he can do great damage wherever he goes. The joke will be on us, for letting him treat the rest of the world as his playground. [Continue reading…]
Patrick Wintour writes: Theresa May’s mantra “Brexit means Brexit” is designed to reassure. Suspicious leavers are being told by their new prime minister that there will be no reversal, slippery evasions or procrastination on her watch.
In the referendum campaign she may have been a reluctant remainer, but the message – with Brexiters taking the three top foreign policy jobs in cabinet – is that she will now abide by the people’s instructions. In the best Thatcherite tradition there will be no turning back.
Yet “Brexit means Brexit” means next to nothing since there are so many ways for the UK to leave the European Union, and so many different kinds of new relationship with the EU on offer, each with their own balance of advantage and disadvantage. Indeed few made a more careful attempt to weigh those risks than May herself in a lengthy speech on 25 April.
May is a stickler for detail and doubtless will be alarmed by the absence of a coherent plan for Brexit in Whitehall. If preparation is a prerequisite for successful Brexit, the omens are poor. The official leave campaign, focused on victory and avoiding internal division, drew up only the flimsiest plan for what Brexit would look like, pointing vaguely at the exit door, but with little idea of what lay the other side. Foreign Office diplomats were instructed to draw up no contingency plans whatsoever, supposedly for fear they might leak. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.K. government will be cut off in May from Europol, the European Union police agency that runs the bloc’s databases on criminals and counterterrorism, unless it explicitly adopts a new EU law.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU in the June referendum could put new Prime Minister Theresa May in the awkward position of having to opt into a piece of EU legislation while preparing to untangle the country from its obligations under EU law.
The U.K.’s participation in Europol can continue beyond the spring only if the new government in London agrees to the agency’s new legal status, which comes into force on May 1, 2017.
The new Europol law, adopted by the European Parliament in May, will put the agency under the European Parliament’s scrutiny—a move the U.K. opposed when it was negotiated—and make it easier to set up specialized units to fight terrorism and organized crime.
A spokeswoman for the British government said no decision has yet been taken on Britain’s endorsement of the law, having been left for the consideration of Ms. May, the former home secretary. She added that London still has time to opt into the new Europol law before it comes into force.
“It would be odd for them to opt in while they’re negotiating Brexit, but luckily she’s been a minister of interior for the past six years, so she knows what’s at stake,” said one EU diplomat familiar with the discussions. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Theresa May promised to fight “burning injustice” in British society, govern for the poor and marginalised, and create a union “between all of our citizens” in her first remarks as the UK’s prime minister.
Standing outside No 10 Downing Street after visiting the Queen in Buckingham Palace to “kiss hands” and be formally anointed as Britain’s second female prime minister, May made a bold grab for the political centre ground.
The former home secretary looked directly into the waiting television cameras, and said she would make decisions based on the interests of struggling families, not the rich.
“If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know you’re working around the clock. I know you’re doing your best. I know that sometimes life can be a struggle.
“The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives,” she said.
“When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws we’ll listen not to the mighty, but to you. When it comes to taxes we’ll prioritise not the wealthy but you.
“When it comes to opportunity we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”
May said she would follow in David Cameron’s footsteps as a “one nation” prime minister, but her emphasis on social injustice suggested a shift of tone. [Continue reading…]
Katharine Viner writes: One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig,” the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”
The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.
Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.
“We couldn’t get to the bottom of that source’s allegations,” she said on Channel 4 News. “So we merely reported the account that the source gave us … We don’t say whether we believe it to be true.” In other words, there was no evidence that the prime minister of the United Kingdom had once “inserted a private part of his anatomy” into the mouth of a dead pig – a story reported in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many people presumably still believe to be true today.
Oakeshott went even further to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: “It’s up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not,” she concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish claims were published on the basis of flimsy evidence, but this was an unusually brazen defence. It seemed that journalists were no longer required to believe their own stories to be true, nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to the reader – who does not even know the identity of the source – to make up their own mind. But based on what? Gut instinct, intuition, mood?
Does the truth matter any more?
Nine months after Britain woke up giggling at Cameron’s hypothetical porcine intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at 8am, announcing his own resignation.
“The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected,” Cameron declared. “It was not a decision that was taken lightly, not least because so many things were said by so many different organisations about the significance of this decision. So there can be no doubt about the result.”
But what soon became clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of a campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign to victory suddenly crumbled. At 6.31am on Friday 24 June, just over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have £350m a week spare to spend on the NHS – a key claim of Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan stated that immigration was not likely to be reduced – another key claim.
It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along. This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased. [Continue reading…]
David Wearing writes: “I’m not a racist, but…..”; “I haven’t got a racist bone in my body”; “it’s not racist to have concerns about immigration”. We’re all familiar with Britain’s broad repertoire of phrases for denying or downplaying prejudice. But with a fivefold increase in reported hate crimes since the Brexit vote, it is no longer tenable to sweep this issue under the carpet. We have to be honest. This country has a problem.
It is frequently said that, because a majority voted for Brexit, racism and xenophobia cannot be a significant part of the picture. This is consistent with the popular misconception that these forms of prejudice are restricted to the margins: a few far-right boot-boys, 1950s throwbacks and a handful of the socially maladjusted. It is a profoundly naïve assumption.
The proportion of people admitting racist views to pollsters is 29%, and given the social taboo around racism, the true number is likely to be higher (recall, for example, the UKIP councillor who said she had a problem with “negroes” because there was “something about their faces”, while simultaneously insisting that she was “not a racist”). A quarter of Britons say immigrants, including any British-born children, should be “encouraged” to leave the country – echoing the standard ‘send them back’ demand of the far right. A further 30% of those polled could not say that they definitely disagreed with that position. These figures are dismaying, but will only shock those who have never experienced racism, and the widespread complacency about it, for themselves. [Continue reading…]
In the West, the top three watershed geopolitical events of the modern era are commonly seen as the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the al Qaeda attacks in the U.S. in 2001, and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The 1995 Srebrenica Genocide, has largely been forgotten and outside the Muslim world its significance never widely grasped.
In the Muslim world, the slaughter of their co-religionists in Bosnia contributed substantially to the emergence of a common consciousness on foreign policy. According to this global discourse, Muslims were now on the defensive across the world: in Palestine, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere. A large number of Arab, Turkish, Caucasian, central Asian and other Mujahedin – in search of a new jihad after Afghanistan – went to Bosnia to fight. It was among European Muslims, however, that the Bosnian experience resonated most forcefully. ‘It doesn’t really matter whether we perish or survive,’ the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina [Dr. Mustafa Cerić] remarked in May 1994, ‘the lesson will always be there. And it is a simple one: that the Muslim community must always be vigilant and must always take their destiny in their own hands. They must never rely on anyone or anybody to solve their problems or come to their rescue.’ This ‘Zionist’ message echoed across the immigrant communities in western Europe, especially Britain. ‘Bosnia Today – Brick Lane tomorrow’ warned the banners in one East London demonstration. Some of the most prominent subsequent British jihadists such as Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl, and the Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg – were radicalized by Bosnia. In other words, the new Muslim geopolitics of the mid-1990s was a reaction not to western meddling but to nonintervention in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing [my emphasis].
A decade later, when Nadeem Azam interviewedCerić (who in 2003 in recognition of his contributions to inter-faith dialogue, tolerance and peace, was awarded UNESCO’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny peace prize) he reiterated his message on the necessity of Muslim self-reliance.
What are your feelings about the future of Islam in Europe?
Not very good. The rise of fascism combined with an officially-sanctioned tendency to be unreasonable when it comes to discussion about Islam are bad omens. I am not a soothsayer but I can see the reality of a day when the treatment of a Muslim in Europe will be worse than that of serial killer: we are, I am afraid, on the verge of seeing a situation develops whereby it would be a crime to be a Muslim in Europe. The events of 11 September, 2001, have made things worse. May Allah protect us.
But having such feelings does not depress me. It actually should motivate us and make us even more resolute in our efforts. More importantly it should make us think of planning and organising. If the day comes – like it did in Bosnia – you might be unable to control events around you but you should at least be ready to do what is needed to be done by a Muslim at such an hour.
[…]
The message of the four year-long war we fought is a simple one: that the Muslim community must always be vigilant and must always take their destiny in their own hands. They must never rely on anyone or anybody to solve their problems or come to their rescue; they must always rely on God and the faith, goodness and compassion within their communities. This is very important. Our strength will always be reflective of the strength of our communities.
Today, Cerić’s fears are clearly all the more well-founded as across Europe xenophobia and Islamophobia relentlessly grow and in the United States a presidential candidate gains the strongest boost to his campaign by promising a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims.
The lesson that Srebrenica taught many Muslims in the West was that even when they are in no sense foreign or culturally set apart, they are still at risk of exclusion and elimination.
Last month after the EU referendum in the UK, a resident of Barnsley, South Yorkshire (five miles from where I grew up), when asked to explain why he had voted for Brexit said: “It’s to stop the Muslims coming into this country. Simple as that.”
Among opponents of the war in Iraq, a widely accepted narrative has long been that the antidote to the unintended consequences of so much ill-conceived Western meddling in the Greater Middle East over the last 15 years is to simply step back and disengage. This sentiment, in large part, is what got Barack Obama elected in 2008. Let the region sort out its own problems or let closer neighbors such as the Russians intervene, so the thinking goes. The U.S. has much more capacity to harm than to help.
Yet as the killing fields of Syria have grown larger year after year, the message from Srebrenica merely seems to have been underlined: the magnitude of the death toll in any conflict will be of little concern across most of the West so long as the victims are Muslim.
After Donald Trump called for Muslims to be shut out of America, Michael Moore declared: We are all Muslim. And he promoted the hashtag #WeAreAllMuslim.
Expressions of solidarity through social media are easy to promote and of debatable value, yet the isolation of Muslims in this instance, rather than being overcome, merely seemed to get reinforced. #WeAreAllMuslim was mostly deployed as a sarcastic slur shared by Islamophobes.
The global trends are strong and clear, pointing to a future marked by more and more social fragmentation as people withdraw into their respective enclaves where they believe they can “take care of their own.”
We live in a world in which we are getting thrown closer together while simultaneously trying to stand further apart. It can’t work.
At some point we either embrace the fact that we are all human and have the capacity to advance our mutual interests, or we will continue down the current path of self-destruction.
* * *
Last year, Myriam François-Cerrah, a British journalist who is also a Muslim, took a group of young people from the UK — all of whom were born in the year of the genocide — to Srebrenica where they learned lessons that arguably have more relevance now than they have had at any time since 1995.
The events immediately leading up to the genocide are recounted in this segment from the BBC documentary, The Death of Yugoslavia:
The Guardian reports: For a woman on the verge of running the country, Theresa May has seemed almost preternaturally calm over the past few days.
“She’s basically the same as ever; quite relaxed and cheerful. There’s no sense of the prison shades falling,” says a longstanding friend who has observed her closely during the campaign. But then, unlike Andrea Leadsom, seemingly badly shaken by a single weekend of hostile media coverage, May knew better than anyone what to expect.
Over the past six years, May has weathered riots, sat in on a decision to go to war, and chaired an emergency Cobra meeting in the prime minister’s absence following the murder of soldier Lee Rigby.
She has been diligently doing her homework for years and, while even she did not foresee David Cameron resigning in these circumstances (let alone the collapse of all other contenders), she is as ready as she will ever be. The question is whether that is anywhere near ready enough for the turbulent times ahead.
Tory grandee Ken Clarke’s unguarded remarks about her being a “bloody difficult woman” probably did May nothing but good with female voters – and she turned them to her own advantage at the last parliamentary hustings, promising that European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker would soon find out how “bloody difficult” she could be.
But even her friends concede Clarke has a point. “She can be a bugger,” says one otherwise admiring colleague succinctly. “Not easy to work with.” May fights her corner tigerishly and, unusually for a politician, she does not seem bothered about being liked.
It is typical of her take-me-or-leave-me approach that she anaged to win the support of almost two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues despite refusing to bribe waverers with job offers. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian is a bit coy about welcoming Theresa May’s arrival in Downing Street, hence the headline: “Theresa May: unpredictable, moralistic, and heading to No 10.” But the URL for this article is more revealing: theresa-may-the-vicars-daughter-poised-to-pull-the-tories-and-the-country-from-the-abyss. As so is the sub-headline: She may lack a grand political vision, but in a time of national crisis, her calm consistency and sense of moral duty may be just what is called for.
Though ultimately brief, the Conservative Party leadership contest offered fascinating insights into the nature of British politics today. Rhetoric, performance and gender replaced talk of policies and political priorities.
In the end, Theresa May showed that she had a much more powerful grip on the realities of wielding modern political power and will be the UK’s next prime minister. Andrea Leadsom’s inexperience, meanwhile, was exposed in the most public, and almost humiliating manner.
This election was not about the nature of the ship (the British state) nor its direction – because the ship is unstable and the course is uncharted waters – so it has had to be about who was better equipped to be captain.
The contest was therefore about character. And the captain must be a character who is steady, determined and reassuring. In the glare of the public spotlight Leadsom failed on all those fronts. May looked like she was already at the ship’s wheel.
The Guardian reports: The governance of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should be reinvented within a new voluntary union in a bid to save the UK from disintegration, an independent all-party group of experts will argue this week.
The Constitution Reform Group, convened by former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Salisbury, is to make the the case for radical constitutional change in the UK by claiming the need has been boosted by the vote to leave the European Union.
Their proposals say the existing union should be replaced with fully devolved government in each part of the UK, with each given full sovereignty over its own affairs. The Westminster parliament, the group says, should then be reduced to 146 MPs. The individual nations and regions of the UK would then be encouraged to pool sovereignty to cover the matters they wish to be dealt with on a shared basis.
The proposals say they “start from the position that each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is a unit that both can and should determine its own affairs to the extent that it considers it should; but that each unit should also be free to choose to share, through an efficient and effective United Kingdom, functions which are more effectively exercised on a shared basis.”
The new construction suggests a complete reversal of the UK’s current constitutional arrangement, in which all sovereignty formally rests in the centre and is then devolved to regions on a piecemeal basis. [Continue reading…]
Miguel Otero-Iglesias writes: In the wake of the Leave campaign’s shocking win in the U.K.’s In/Out referendum, commentators have painstakingly defended Britain’s rampant Euroskepticism as part of a larger trend.
They point to the wave of discontent sweeping through the Union, from Sweden and Denmark in the north, to France, the Netherlands and Austria in the center, and Italy in the south. Influential pro-European pundits have now joined starkly anti-EU politicians such as Nigel Farage in arguing the EU’s disintegration is now irreversible. Today’s dominant view, it seems, is that most Europeans do not want to be ruled by Brussels.
This pessimistic diagnosis is inaccurate. Europeans are angry about how the EU has handled the asymmetric effects of globalization, but the majority do not believe that leaving the Union is the answer. The fact is that Britain — or more concretely, England — is an outlier in the EU in that respect.
The English, especially those forming “Little England,” have always been uncomfortable in the EU. The eurozone crisis only reinforced this feeling. English exceptionalism has many sources: Westminster’s democratic tradition; its imperial past; and its special relationship with the U.S.
English is the world’s lingua franca, and the City of London its most prominent global financial center. Britain is extremely proud of its seat in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons. All this makes a large majority of English believe they are primus inter pares in the EU club.
This sentiment is exceptional. Of course, other European nations are proud too, and believe they are better than their neighbors to some degree. The Dutch have always punched above their weight in international affairs. The Nordic countries are right to brag about their welfare systems, the Mediterraneans about their lifestyle and their food, and the Central and East Europeans about their work ethic and resistance to Soviet rule. And what can one say about the boundless pride of the French? It certainly shares many of the features of English hubris.
Nonetheless, these countries have neither the capacity nor the desire to go it alone. [Continue reading…]
Atilla Yesilada writes: The predictive acumen of political scientists is pretty weak, but I daresay that Brexit is a critical threshold for world history, and Turkish politicians sorely misread it.
The EU will face increasing strains after the departure of the UK, which will reflect on Turkey’s relations with it through economic, political and social dimensions. While Ankara considers the EU a spent force, seeking her future and fortune in the Muslim world and the Shanghai Five, neither better democracy nor more prosperity is likely to occur without closer integration with the EU.
The Brexit vote was against globalisation, immigration and, strangely enough, against a very remote event, namely Turkish accession to the EU.
To the extent Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nowadays associates herself with the leadership of the Sunni Muslim world, Brexit can be said to be a vote against Islam as well. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The latest draft version of the TTIP agreement could sabotage European efforts to save energy and switch to clean power, according to MEPs.
A 14th round of the troubled negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal between the EU and US is due to begin on Monday in Brussels.
A leak obtained by the Guardian shows that the EU will propose a rollback of mandatory energy savings measures, and major obstacles to any future pricing schemes designed to encourage the uptake of renewable energies.
Environmental protections against fossil fuel extraction, logging and mining in the developing world would also come under pressure from articles in the proposed energy chapter.
Paul de Clerck, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Europe, said the leaked document: “is in complete contradiction with Europe’s commitments to tackle climate change. It will flood the EU market with inefficient appliances, and consumers and the climate will foot the bill. The proposal will also discourage measures to promote renewable electricity production from wind and solar.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Two weeks after Britain’s EU referendum, Europe has defied predictions that the UK’s vote to leave would inspire a surge in copycat breakaway movements, with establishment parties enjoying gains and populists dropping points in the polls.
In Germany, the Brexit aftermath has seen Angela Merkel’s popularity ratings surge to a 10-month high, almost returning to the level the chancellor enjoyed before the height of the refugee crisis last September. An Infratest Dimap poll published on Friday also marks a two percentage point gain for Merkel’s party, the centre-right CDU, and a one point gain for the centre-left Social Democratic party.
Rightwing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, meanwhile, has seen its ratings drop by three percentage points to 11%. The anti-refugee party’s struggles may lie in its leader’s failure to contain an internal rift over an antisemitism scandal.
“The Brexit debate has fostered a more pro-European climate among the German population,” said Infratest Dimap’s managing director Michael Kunert. “The government is profiting from this trend while populist, eurosceptic parties are suffering.”
In the Netherlands, seen as one of the countries that could potentially follow Britain’s example, support for the Freedom party of far-right politician Geert Wilders has fallen to its lowest level since last autumn. One poll suggests Wilders could win 30 out of the 150 seats in parliament if an election were held now, three fewer than a week ago, though his party remains the most popular in the fragmented Dutch political landscape. [Continue reading…]
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