Is There an Upside to Brexit?

Pro-Brexit demonstrators marching in London. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Pro-Brexit demonstrators marching in London. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

No one knows yet what, if anything, will happen on March 29 — B-Day, the day when Britain is to leave the European Union. It could be a nonevent; it could be a disaster. Likely, it will be somewhere in between. But while the world fixates on the negatives — and there are many — of Brexit, it does have its upsides.

The European Union’s most globally minded member is leaving, forcing the bloc to rethink its mission and vision at just the right time. And a large part of that rethinking will now involve a plan for how London and Brussels will work together over the long run.

Set aside for a moment the doomsday predictions of medicine shortages and endless queues at Dover port. Beyond the Brexit risks and shocks lies an opportunity for a new bilateral relationship that could strengthen both Britain and the Continent. The world is headed for a new great power rivalry, one in which Britain and Europe could easily get squeezed — or, if they play it right, could prosper.

The new global conflict, put simply, is between free and unfree market economies. For a long time, the West had dismissed the idea of a stable, healthy economy under an authoritarian regime. Authoritarians could engineer short-term booms; they could cook the numbers and manipulate their currencies. But in the long run, the thinking went, they would all fail. Only under liberal democracy could markets truly thrive.

China has upended that assumption, demonstrating how to decouple personal freedom from freedom of innovation. With a gross domestic product of close to $25 trillion, China has become the world’s largest economy. It has figured out how to harness the effort and talent of its 1.4 billion people to go beyond just manufacturing to embrace next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence, putting it in a position to someday be the most powerful economy in world history.

For the first time in modern history, technological leadership is being assumed by a power unchecked by the democratic vote. In fact, China has a legal tradition the mirror opposite of the West’s, putting collective interests above individual rights.

There are no guarantees that China will maintain its lead. After all, its current edge is rooted in intellectual property theft, unfair trading practices and the exploitation of less-wealthy states, especially in Africa. And who knows how sustainable its style of civil oppression will be?

But China's Communist Party benefits from hindsight. It appears to have learned lessons from both the rise of the British Empire (piracy is quite a good primer) and the fall of the Soviet Union (Glasnost can cause chaos). Although its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, the backbone of its bid for global dominance, has recently suffered some setbacks, China maintains a clear strategic outlook. Unlike Europe, it speaks with one voice, and expresses one vision.

It is naïve to believe that this epochal power shift will leave Western democracies untouched. We are already seeing China’s role in Europe growing, both as a model and an influence. In 2016 Hungary and Greece, who have received billions of euros of Chinese investments in harbors, railways and power stations, blocked a reference to Beijing in a European Union statement criticizing its expansionist territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The West, in other words, needs a stronger backbone — starting with the mutual interests embedded in a post-Brexit European alliance. That alliance needs to be the core of what we might call the Wider West — a global group of states that seek fair competition with China. Britain, with its Commonwealth heritage, could be the ideal facilitator for such a bloc. So could the Asean states, and the countries that lined up to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement before Donald Trump scrapped it.

Sure, Chinese politicians themselves pledge to enhance multilateralism whenever they meet with Western counterparts. At this year‘s Munich Security Conference, Yang Jiechi, a senior foreign policy official, portrayed the Belt and Road Initiative as an “pathway toward building a community with a shared future for mankind.” He later said: “China respects human rights. The ethnic groups in China are all working together.”

The Munich audience was too polite to ask the obvious question: Can you believe the foreign policy visions of a government that lies so blatantly about domestic realities? The only constant in an era of staggering change for China is its increasingly tough social control.

Obviously, Brexit is not necessary for Europe, or the West as a whole, to push back against China. But by shuffling the European deck and forcing Brussels to rethink its core principles, Britain’s departure will have a clarifying effect, pushing both sides of the English Channel to see the scope of the challenge before them. Neither can stand up to China alone; even together, they might not be enough. But as the core of a global entente, they can meet the challenge.

Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing opinion writer.

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