On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, is to deliver a letter to the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, informing him that after 44 years of membership, her nation is leaving the European Union. Approximately two years later, after negotiating the terms of that departure, the union will lose at a stroke “an eighth of its population, a sixth of its G.D.P., half its nuclear-arms cache and a seat on the U.N. Security Council,” as Susan Watkins, the editor of New Left Review, noted recently.
Ms. Watkins is a “Lexiteer,” as left-wing supporters of ‘Brexit’ like me are known. We were hardly a significant force among the 52 percent of Britons who voted to leave in the referendum of June 23. But we were an influence. A counterweight to the anti-immigrant fear mongering of the former leader of the right-wing U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, Lexiteers argued a left-wing, democratic and internationalist case for Brexit. The position was expressed crisply by Perry Anderson, the former longtime editor of New Left Review: “The E.U. is now widely seen for what it has become: an oligarchic structure, riddled with corruption, built on a denial of any sort of popular sovereignty, enforcing a bitter economic regime of privilege for the few and duress for the many.”
Although Lexiteers have little patience for the national nihilism of “Davos Man,” the globalist elite, we are no xenophobes. We voted Leave because we believe it is essential to preserve the two things we value most: a democratic political system and a social-democratic society. We fear that the European Union’s authoritarian project of neoliberal integration is a breeding ground for the far right. By sealing off so much policy, including the imposition of long-term austerity measures and mass immigration, from the democratic process, the union has broken the contract between mainstream national politicians and their voters. This has opened the door to right-wing populists who claim to represent “the people,” already angry at austerity, against the immigrant.
It was the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual architect of neoliberalism, who called in 1939 for “interstate federalism” in Europe to prevent voters from using democracy to interfere with the operation of the free market. Simply put, as Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission (the union’s executive body), did: “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”
The union’s structures and treaties are designed accordingly. The European Commission is appointed, not elected, and it is proudly unaccountable to any electorate. “We don’t change our position according to elections” was how the commission’s vice president Jyrki Katainen greeted the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece in 2015.
The European Parliament is not a real parliament. It is not a legislature; its deputies neither offer manifestoes nor carry out the ideas they propose to voters. Elections in improbably large constituencies, with pitifully low turnouts, change nothing. As a Parliament staff member said at the European Research Seminar at the London School of Economics, “The only people who listen to M.E.P.s are the interpreters,” referring to the members of the Parliament.
The European Council, an intergovernmental body where decisive legislative power actually lies, especially for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, comprises member countries’ heads of state, who generally meet just four times a year. They are not directly elected by the inhabitants of the nations whose fate they decide. As for the union principle of “subsidiarity,” a supposed preference for decentralized governance, it is ignored in all practical matters.
The wishes of electorates are regularly brushed aside. When, in 2005, a proposed European Constitution was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands (most governments did not even allow a vote), this meant nothing to the proponents of the European Project. A few cosmetic tweaks, and the constitution was imposed anyway; only then, it was called the Lisbon Treaty. (Ireland, the only state to allow a referendum on the treaty, voted against it. So Ireland was told to vote again until it got it right. That’s democracy, European Union-style.)
Whatever the union could have been, since the 1980s it has made neoliberal economics an integral part of the project. By doing so, the union transformed itself into what the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called “a powerful engine of liberalization in the service of a deep economistic restructuring of social life.” The single market, the Maastricht Treaty, the single currency and the Stability and Growth Pact combined to impose policies of deregulation, privatization, anti-labor rules, regressive tax regimes, cuts to welfare and financialization, and put them beyond the will of the people.
Noting that the tools of Keynesian economics, upon which social democracy relies, are now illegal in Europe, even The Economist got queasy, writing that this arrangement “feels politically very dodgy.” As for the European Union-United States trade deal, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, it reads like Hayek’s midcentury fantasy come to life, potentially empowering corporations to sue elected governments for daring to listen to what their electors want.
Another key institution of the neoliberal union is the European Central Bank. Unelected and unaccountable, the bank’s governors are committed by treaty to favor deflation over growth, to prohibit state aid to stricken industries and to enforce austerity measures. Likewise, the single currency acts as an economic chokehold on entire regions of Europe, which can neither devalue their currency (as sovereign nations can) to become competitive nor grow their way out of stagnation because they are forced by austerity to shrink their economy.
The human cost has been grotesque. The European Union’s economic waterboarding of Greece resulted in a quarter cut from hospital budgets and spending on drugs halved, while rates of H.I.V. infection spiked, cases of major depression doubled, suicide attempts rose by one-third, and the number of stillborn babies rose by 21 percent. Four in 10 Greek children were pushed into poverty, and one survey estimated that 54 percent of Greeks have become undernourished. Philippe Legrain, a former adviser to Manuel Barroso, then the president of the European Commission, observed that as “Europe’s creditor in chief” Germany “has trampled over values like democracy and national sovereignty and left a vassal state in its wake.”
In extremis, elected national governments are effectively forced out and replaced by compliant technocrats, as George Papandreou of Greece and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy discovered. Sitting atop it all is the European Court of Justice, which issued rulings that the workers’ right to strike was subordinate to employers’ right do business freely. Hayek must be smiling.
Though the Leave slogan was mocked, Brexit really was about “taking back control.” Democracy needs a demos, a people for whom government is of, by and for. Without one, all you have is inter-elite management, treaty law and money grubbing. But how will “the people” be constructed? Politics will decide. A left populism will not seek to define the people as the far right does, in opposition to the immigrant other, but in opposition to those powerful neoliberal elites that are no longer able, as Professor Streeck says, “to build a social framework around the hot core of capitalist profit making.”
It has been a colossal error by Davos Man left-wingers to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.
Right now, the left in Europe is playing by someone else’s rule book in a rigged game. One part of each nation, the winners, have been “using the globalized world as their extended playing field,” as Professor Streeck put it. One, if not the only, meaning of Brexit is that, having lost faith in glib promises of a globalization for all, the other part of the nation — the losers, the shutout and the disdained — have decided, in desperation, to make a sovereign gesture: to change the rules by returning to nation-state politics in order to have a go at leveling things up. They are “seeking refuge,” in Professor Streeck’s words, in “democratic protection, popular rule, local autonomy, collective goods and egalitarian traditions.”
Rather than leave the field to the nativist right, some of us on the democratic left are going with them.
Alan Johnson is a senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center and the editor of its online journal, Fathom.