Why the E.U. Had It Coming

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/why-the-eu-had-it-coming.html

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MILAN — I WAS not surprised by the Brexit vote. Only by those who were surprised. Hadn’t the opinion polls showed the two sides neck and neck for weeks? Haven’t the British been talking about this for decades?

I was not surprised and even less was I outraged. Had I had the right to vote, which I have lost after 30 years living in Italy, I would have voted to remain in the European Union. But I do not think it a scandal that others think differently. If it was a scandal that people voted to leave, then surely it was a scandal to have held a referendum at all. And if it is a scandal to hold a referendum on an issue central to the destiny of a nation and about which its people feel deeply, then I have misunderstood the meaning of freedom and democracy in the West.

So why the extraordinary incredulity and indignation? Why the sense of betrayal? Why do so many people find this result unacceptable? It seems that over the last 30 or 40 years the idea has taken hold that there can be no peaceful or productive future for Europe without the European Union. As a result, anyone who voted to be outside it must be discredited as pernicious or ignorant, perpetrator or victim of some sinister populism. In the United States, this unhelpful reaction has taken the form of likening the leaders of the Leave campaign to Donald J. Trump. But Britain is not America and this was not a presidential election. Immigration played a role, but no one in the Leave campaign was suggesting Muslims be banned from Britain. On the contrary, some Muslims supported the Brexit vote. To see the debates of other countries in terms of one’s own internal politics is always a failure of imagination.

All this shock, horror and kneejerk denigration might be understandable if the European Union were notching up important successes and resolving its member states’ many problems, or if, at the very least, it had a figurehead with whom European citizens could identify, someone of whom one might say, “However badly things are going, I have faith in so and so, I believe he or she really does have the interests of my nation at heart, really is concerned about unemployment in my town,” be it Newcastle or Naples.

Can we honestly say this of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union? Or of Angela Merkel? However much the Union is theoretically a community of nations, we know very well that the most powerful person in it is the German chancellor. And only the Germans vote for the German chancellor. Her first duty is to them. None of us voted for the austere Mr. Juncker, who is nominated by the European Council and approved by the European Parliament. At present our so-called Parliament elections follow a logic that is entirely local and national, with laughably low turnouts and very little sense of what that body actually does. In 2014 just 18 percent of Czechs, 13 percent of Slovaks and 24 percent of Poles bothered to vote.

This is a major failing. After 17 years of the euro, to have the economies of France, Spain, Italy and Greece (which adopted the currency in 2001) in long-term stagnation is a devastating failure. Youth unemployment in Spain is running around 45 percent, in Italy around 37 percent. About Greece the less said the better.

But the Union’s greatest failing is that after decades of regulations of every possible kind it has not brought the nations of the Continent closer together. Day by day Italians are told whether their government’s economic policy has been accepted or rejected by Berlin, but about the Germans they know little or nothing. In each country, we follow our own national news media and are locked into the agendas of our own political systems. We are separate nations but not sovereign nations. We obey the dictates of Brussels and read Jonathan Franzen and “Harry Potter.” We watch American films and follow the American elections far more closely than those of any other country in the European Union. Is this a community?

The middle classes, the cultured elite, love the idea that they are taking part in a historic project that will bring peace and prosperity to the Continent, put an end to war, take steps to defend the environment, protect Europeans from superpower ambitions and multinational depredations, etc., etc. I love this idea, too. Like so many others, I take comfort in this noble enterprise.

But when the project does not bring prosperity, when it does not do enough to protect the environment, when its protectionist trading policies systematically damage the economies of the third world, I, like everyone else, don’t want to think about it; we prefer to close our eyes. This is not the narrative we like to believe we live in.

As late as the 1990s, under the leadership of François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and Jacques Delors, there was a genuine project for eventual political unity in Europe. Idealism was in the air. The introduction of the euro was to be a key moment in the process of sharing sovereignty. But the difficulties of running separate and very different economies with the same currency while the world economy is in crisis have actually increased tension between member nations, such that there is now very little prospect of the kind of unity that might have made the single currency more viable, nor any idea of how to retreat from it. Quite simply Europe is unable to complete the transition it set itself; rather than fording the stream, it is sinking in the mud. In the meantime, the enchantment of the “good community” functions as an obstacle to reform. Why should Brussels reform itself if no country would ever be mad enough to leave?

With Brexit this decades-old spell is set to break. And how does the liberal elite on both sides of the Atlantic react to this deafening alarm? They scream foul and blame the dumb British working classes for spoiling the party. It might be wiser to examine our own attachment to a narrative that is going nowhere.