Brexit: Lessons from the east about what folly it would be to choose isolation
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Version 0 of 1. Aboard a small boat chugging down the Perfume river in central Vietnam, watching a family of water buffalo graze on the bank, I had a thought about Britain’s membership of the European Union. The thought irritated me. I had put 6,000 miles between myself and home to avoid doing any thinking about our politics. This was a holiday with my wife to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary. But the longer we were in Vietnam, the more my head was pestered with thoughts about the momentous choice facing Britain. Fortunately, my wife is highly tolerant. If she wasn’t, we wouldn’t have been celebrating the significant anniversary. Rising above the Perfume river stands the citadel of Hue. The last feudal emperors of Vietnam built it as a powerbase from which to rule their kingdom. Little good were the citadel’s great walls when the outside world came knocking. French colonialists arrived with their gunboats in the 19th century and turned the emperors into their puppets. The next unwelcome visitors were Japanese occupiers during the Second World War, followed by the conflict with the US which ravaged the country between the 1950s and the 1970s. The Tet Offensive saw the ruination of many of the citadel’s finest buildings, which are now being painstakingly restored with help from Unesco. The Americans were only the last, and not really the most important, foreigners to put troops on Vietnamese soil. As some Vietnamese like to say: “The Americans were here for 15 years, the French were here for 90 years, the Chinese were here for 1,000 years.” Two millenniums of resisting a succession of foreign invaders have forged a tremendous sense of national pride in the Vietnamese. At the same time, this is a country that has become an ardent joiner of multinational organisations and economic partnerships. “Deep international integration” is now its lodestar. Membership of Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) is seen as crucial to its security and prosperity. It takes pride in hosting summits of Apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation). It has signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which seeks to create a single market from 12 countries with a combined population of around 800 million commanding 40% of world trade. Modern Vietnam has grasped what its feudal emperors did not: you can’t wall yourself up against the world. That is a lesson rubbed home by more recent history. Three decades ago, Vietnam was isolated and impoverished. Still bleeding from the deep wounds left by the war, it was one of the poorest of the poor. Its Soviet ally was broke and imploding under the weight of its contradictions. Collectivisation imposed in the name of Marxism after reunification in 1975 had been a disaster. The big turn came in the mid-1980s. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Doi Moi (Renovation). The ruling Communist party calls its economic policy “the perfection of a socialist-orientated market mechanism”. To anyone else, it looks like capitalism rampant. Vietnam is now one of the most vibrant of the “frontier markets” that are going to produce an increasing slice of the world’s future growth and trade opportunities. One American investor, a frequent visitor since relations between his country and Vietnam began to normalise, remarks: “I see change every time I come. It is physical.” There’s the new highway connecting Hanoi with its international airport. There’s the vast Samsung factory, the world’s largest mobile phone assembly plant, on the outskirts of the capital. There’s the proliferation of luxury hotel resorts around Da Nang. And the thrusting phalluses of mammon which compete to dominate the skyline of Saigon. The communist road to capitalism has its amusing contradictions. Every town has its statue reverencing Ho Chi Minh, the “father of the nation” famed for the simplicity of his lifestyle. An imposing example of Ho statuary stands in Saigon’s richest district, in a square he shares with luxury stores flogging Chanel perfumes and Cartier jewellery. You can pay your personal respects to Uncle Ho in Hanoi by visiting the tomb containing his embalmed body: think Kremlin mausoleum with a hint of pagoda. A few blocks away, Prada and Gucci welcome worshippers at the temples of consumer capitalism. On its current growth trajectory, Vietnam’s economy will soon surpass that of several European countries Vietnam has its dark side, of which more in a moment. But it is impossible not to be wowed by the progress it has made over the past three decades, nor impressed by its potential. Poverty has fallen steeply; levels of education and health have risen sharply. Average incomes are many multiples higher than they were. On its current growth trajectory, Vietnam’s economy will soon surpass several European countries. With a population rising above 90 million, it is already the world’s 14th most populous country. That population is very young. More than half of the Vietnamese are under 30. They seemed to this observer to be sparky, hard-working, pragmatic and eager to get on. This is one of the happening countries of the world and the world is noticing. Barack Obama will be visiting in May. Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, called in on Hanoi in the past fortnight. David Cameron visited last year, the first British prime minister to make the trip. A Britain that wants to maximise its future prosperity will seek to be part of the future of coming countries such as Vietnam. There is Vietnamese interest in aspects of Britain, particularly a perceived British expertise in insurance, banking, science and technology. But compared with other global actors, we are not that significant in the Vietnamese scheme of things. Certainly not as important as its complex relations with the US and its Asian neighbours, especially the historic enemy and one-time occupier to the north. In so much as the UK matters to a country such as Vietnam, our influence is leveraged through membership of the EU. After three and a half years of negotiation, the EU and Vietnam recently signed a free trade agreement (FTA). When Mr Hammond came visiting, getting the FTA ratified was the main point of the talks from the perspective of his hosts. That is one of more than 50 agreements with countries on every continent that will be forfeit if Britain quits the EU. Brexit would not only trigger years of horribly complex and acrimonious renegotiation of the terms of trade with our former EU partners – it would also mean starting again with the rest of the world. The Brexiters don’t like to talk about this. When they are forced to address this consequence of self-ejection from the EU, they airily dismiss it, as Michael Gove did in the Panglossian speech he recently delivered on behalf of the Outers. You do not have to accept every doomsday projection to see that this would impose a steep penalty on growth. The renegotiation of so many trade deals would take time, a punishingly protracted amount of time, time that Britain really cannot afford to waste when the shape of the global economy is changing so rapidly, new players such as Vietnam are jostling for pieces of the action and the rest of the world is organising itself into trading blocs. It is extremely hard to see how Britain could possibly get better terms negotiating on its own rather than as part of a team of 28 nations. It is incredibly easy to see how Britain would get much worse terms. Those are self-interested reasons for sticking with the EU: we will be better off in. A more altruistic argument was suggested by my journey through Vietnam. The embrace of globalisation by its rulers has not been accompanied by an adoption of a free market in politics. Vietnam is still a one-party state. The Communist party retains a monopoly on power. All the TV stations and newspapers are state-controlled. In the latest index of world press freedom, Vietnam is ranked 175, fifth from bottom. Pro-democracy campaigners are chucked in jail. Monitoring bodies describe the human rights record as “dire”. Public resentment about corruption is so widespread that Vietnam’s prime minister recently felt obliged to tell the rubber-stamp parliament that he would do something about it. Can Britain nudge Vietnam towards a more democratic path? Acting alone, we just don’t matter enough to Hanoi to have a chance. As an actor within the EU, there is a better hope. As a price of the free trade agreement, the Vietnamese government had to swallow a commitment to legalising workers’ rights, including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining. It also signed up to higher environmental standards. Britain within the EU can help to achieve that sort of progress; Britain acting alone cannot. There is strength in numbers. If Vietnam, a country with such a fiercely forged sense of national identity, can grasp that there is no future in trying to hide in a citadel walled against the world, then it will be mighty perverse if Britain makes the opposite choice. |