The exam-season procrastination of a history and politics student: That’s right, I made an EU flag with cut-out stars. Judge all you want!
An insidious force is re-emerging in Europe, and creeping into the politics and social dialogue of every European nation. The UK’s referendum on European Union membership is just one arena of this dark and deepening struggle – And may prove to be one of the most important.
In theory, referenda should be celebrated as an effective means of engaging in direct democracy. However, this referendum has become warped by the troubling tensions rippling just beneath the surface of the European community, and the UK has become a microcosm of the wider malaise which keeps our continent divided. We have seen progressive far-sightedness shunned in favour of short-term selfishness, thoughtful compassion crushed as a result of xenophobic paranoia, and inclusive national discussion drowned out by narrow-minded party politics. We have seen ill-informed economics and wall-building immigration policy take precedence over matters of social justice, welfare, science, learning, and culture. We have seen Jo Cox, an active and optimistic MP murdered in the street for her political views. In February, when the 23rd June vote was announced, there was little hope that this debate would be the epitome of high-quality social engagement. But the toxic political fog that billows reeking across Britain and Northern Ireland has dismayed even the most pessimistic observers.
Hopes quickly dwindled among those of us that thought the 2014 Scottish independence referendum would act as an example of high-minded dialogue and as a warning against the dangers of negative campaigning. It was with a sense of tired resignation that first minister Nicola Sturgeon commented upon Remain campaign scaremongering: “We only have to look at the Scottish independence referendum to know that kind of fear-based campaigning starts to insult people’s intelligence and can start to have a negative effect.”
Veteran Channel 4 broadcaster Jon Snow wrote bluntly in the Radio Times at the start of June: “In my reporting life I cannot remember a worse-tempered or more abusive, more boring UK campaign than that which is under way right now. Some of us were perhaps fool enough to think that the referendum we witnessed in Scotland in 2014 would provide a template for dealing with a second one on membership of the European Union. But the reporting interest this time round has been focused on abuse and intemperate challenging of facts by both sides. That is in itself dauntingly boring.”
The EU referendum, then, has descended from an opportunity for intellectually stimulating national congress, to a foggy battlefield between the scattered and divided advocates of European engagement and the repugnant but coherent figureheads of a resurgent isolationism, with hordes of understandably confused ‘undecideds’ caught in the crossfire.
What really isn’t clear in the midst of this claustrophobic debate is the wider significance of this referendum, and the previously mentioned ‘insidious force’ which is muddying the waters. Some clear-minded individuals have spotted out this ill-defined phenomenon and its symptoms.
Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has called out unaccountable top-level shadow politics and a lack of compassion in pan-continent austerity economics as engines for European disintegration and the return of the far-right. His recent book And The Weak Suffer What They Must? bemoans the direction European integration has taken. In it, he insists upon a rapid democratisation of pan-European institutions as the only way to prevent dictatorships like the 1967-74 military junta in Greece, or even the hateful regime of the Nazis in the 1930s, re-emerging from the ruins of a self-destructing EU.
Progressive French economist Thomas Piketty has repeatedly raised another condemnation of misguided neoliberal technocratic doctrine, pointing out the dire social consequences of uncompromising austerity and extreme inequality. Between Varoufakis and Piketty, if our current direction continues, and with the tragedy of the Syrian civil war burning away on the horizon, the only options appear to be an economically and socially rigid ‘Fortress Europe’, or the disintegration of the European project altogether, along with the destruction of the inclusive and forward-thinking social values that, although currently obscured, still lie as the bedrock of EU values.
The European Commission itself, while remaining committed to the post-2009 Eurozone crisis austerity model, has become increasingly concerned by the political lurch to the Eurosceptic right. They have seen this at a parliamentary level in almost every Member State, especially in the likes of France (Front National), Germany (AfD), Slovakia (Kotleba – Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko), and Austria (FPÖ), and at a government level in Hungary, under Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, as well as Poland, where prime minister Beata Szydło’s Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) government has set off major alarm bells in the office of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.
Long-simmering economic turmoil from within, a refugee crisis from without, and a perceptible fear of terrorist attacks from all angles, has brought back the ‘insidious force’ we are seeing today. This phenomenon has driven Europe to catastrophe before, and appears to be doing so again today.
While the existence of a dark and worrying undercurrent in the British referendum debate is widely acknowledged, there has been little joining of the dots in the mainstream debate as to the wider deterioration of European society into divisive paranoia. In a typically British manner, hard times have pushed the UK towards island-mentality isolationism, instead of continental solidarity. With the fear of today’s European crises clouding our vision, the UK is now at risk of ripping itself into irrelevance in a futile bid to escape.
Perhaps the most striking feature at the heart of this ‘insidious force’ is the fear and narrow-mindedness which drives it, and here lies both its strength and its weakness. On a continent as ancient and bloodstained as Europe, perhaps a hesitant negativity is understandable. Indeed, for a project as ambitious and inherently positive as the European Union to emerge from the ruins of the Second World War is a miracle in itself, and we should cherish the fleeting idealistic optimism which built such flawed but fully-functioning institutions in the first place. A convincing Remain vote in the UK’s referendum is an opportunity to rekindle the spirit of unity that birthed the EU, and which, with the return of inclusive and progressive political will, can continue to positively shape it. At the very least, a Remain result will keep us at the top European table – one fiery Member State in the midst of a tumultuously multicultural and hesitantly bound alliance – when the next crisis strikes.
The insidious force at the heart of European politics is here to stay, for now at least. Yet tomorrow, the 23rd June 2016, is a chance for UK citizens to stamp out some of its creeping tendrils, and to reconnect with a Union in dire need of unity.
Ishneich 