How the British political elite has done the groundwork for Brexit

In one month from now, on 23^rd June, the British electorate (or rather those who are registered as voters and can be bothered to cast a ballot) will decide on the future of the United Kingdom (UK) either inside or outside of the European Union (EU).

While the referendum campaign has heated up considerably over the last few weeks, including the inevitable references to Hitler and bendy bananas, and the media’s eyes are turned towards the divisions of the Conservative Party, there is no clear indication as to what the likely outcome is, at least not if we trust in polls. Despite some variation, the ‘poll of polls’ that captures the average of all surveys has for a long time hovered around an even 50/50 split between ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ – which is further proof that opinion polls can be as insightful as asking Auntie Agatha or Uncle Albert.

With often polemical debates running high, and everyone expressing their opinions, I think it is not too preposterous to add my own views as a long-term resident of the UK and one of those pesky immigrants who have come to this beautiful country.

If Britain chose to leave the EU, it would be fair to say that this is the outcome of the long-term relationship that British political and economic elites have had with the project of European integration. In other words, many of those who now argue for ‘remain’ would be at least indirectly responsible for a success of ‘leave’. Here is why, in four steps:

1.  The vote to withdraw from the EU has multiple drivers and is inspired by different, sometimes opposing political views, but it seems reasonable to say that it was primarily high levels of net immigration, notably from Eastern European countries after 2004, that have fuelled the anger and frustration of substantive shares of the population towards the EU.
2. At the same time, over the course of the last years, it has become clear even to the most naïve that economic globalisation, free trade and the financialisation of the world economy, linked to weakened welfare states and ever more competition between states, industries, organisations and individuals, produces a great deal of despair, tension and unrest. With centre-left and centre-right governments equally unwilling and incapable of addressing these issues head-on, it is not surprising that the public support to all representatives of what is seen as the establishment runs low – to put it mildly.
3. Both factors, immigration and the dark underbelly of a globalised world, are well aligned to the long-term preferences of British political elites regarding the EU. Always a strong proponent of an EU that is as large and at the same time as little integrated as possible, the UK was one of the most vocal advocates of admitting Eastern and Central European countries as quickly as possible – and together with Sweden the only EU member state that in 2004 didn’t impose any transitory labour market restrictions on citizens from these states. While the historical responsibility of uniting Europe should not be understated, there is no reason to assume that a slower process, involving an institutionalised partnership between East and West beyond the EU (as it was proposed among others by the French President Mitterrand after the German unification), would have been impossible.
4. When it comes to the negative impact of ‘globalisation’ (to use this as a shorthand for more complex problems), the hopes of the centre-left to turn the EU into some sort of bulwark against the most damaging forms of economic competition while developing a common framework for addressing humanity’s challenges such as climate change or global insecurity, have been crushed, often by the same parties of the centre-left whose ideology consisted of delivering neoliberal policies with a ‘human face’ – an aim that was so largely missed that social-democratic parties across Europe have become an almost negligible force.

To summarise, the orientation of British politics in the last two decades has laid the groundwork for the UK leaving the EU becoming a serious possibility.

This is not to imply that the UK alone is to be blamed for the woes of Europe, given that other countries have been on the same page. Germany for example shares Britain’s basic views, mainly because it has managed so well to turn Eastern Europe into its own backyard factory, with low paid workers assembling goods for export on which German companies only need to put the sticker ‘Made in Germany’. That Britain has proceeded differently by mainly importing the labour force, is hardly more than a variation on the same theme.

This does also not imply that a better integrated EU would be an intrinsically benign project. The recent treatment of Greece and Malta, the obvious lack of democratic accountability, and the one-sided orientation of its economic policy towards ever more competition, as exemplified by the TTIP negotiations, have shown that the EU is in need of profound reform (if it is not long too late for this, as it increasingly appears) – reforms that may have to be negotiated without input from the UK, within an EU under shock from losing one of its key members.

Enrico Reuter - follow me on Twitter: @ReuterEnrico 

From tiger to doormat: An opinion piece on the (fatal?) crisis of social democracy

Surveying the landscape of social democratic parties in Europe is no task for the

fainthearted, given the extent of gloom that awaits any observer: In the UK, the election of a new Labour leader, initially a contest in Tory mimicry, has turned

into an exercise that seems to deeply divide the party, notably between its parliamentarians and grassroots; some German social democrats think about whether they actually should bother presenting a candidate for the Chancellery in 2017 since the Conservative chancellor Merkel appears to be doing such a great job and given that the social democrats stand no chance of winning a majority without an alliance with the more radical left (an alliance they are strictly opposed to); whereas the electoral hopes of the French centre-left appear to rest on the idea that the spectre of the extreme right and the particularities of the electoral system with its two rounds of voting may save their skin in the next presidential election. The situation in other countries seems hardly more encouraging, so that it is not surprising if one asks what has gone wrong since the end of the 1990s, when the centre-left, draped in the cloth of a new ‘Third Way’, dominated European politics and beyond.

The reasons for this malaise are multiple, engrained deeply in national

particularities, but I would argue that there are at least three cross-cutting problems that affect, admittedly to different degrees, all social democratic parties and the notion of social democracy itself.

First, social democracy suffers from a “loss of historical future [that represents] the main source of a political paralysis in the present” (Cunningham,2015, 31). In a period when humanity faces a range of immense challenges, from climate change and democratic disaffection to rising social inequalities and volatile economic conditions, it seems that social democratic forces restrict themselves to the stripped back promise of doing things a bit more socially just than their conservative counterparts. While for example the radical left attempts to reconcile social and environmental imperatives in the concept of eco-socialism, whereas conservative and liberal parties pursue a programme that profoundly alters the relationship between citizens and states, there is no meaningful contribution to these debates from the side of social democratic parties, which appear devoid of any overarching ideas as to what the future should look like, and which seem to believe that focus-group tested micro parcels of policies are sufficient to gather long-term and strong support. Moreover, this unwillingness to ‘think the future’ often goes hand in hand with an acceptance of the key ideological assumptions of their political opponents on the right, which contributes to the ideational hegemony of mind-sets that run counter to the ideals of a society based on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Secondly, social democracy (and the left in general) has lost the source of its power, the support from a coalition of working class and lower middle-class voters linked to an array of diverse progressive forces from all levels of society. It was this base and the strong collaboration with the trade union movement, boosted by the wide attraction of collectivist ideals, that helped to turn the three decades after the end of the Second World War into a truly social democratic moment. Since the 1980s, this support has been eroding due to two interconnected trends: On the one hand, increased levels of individualisation or even atomisation combined with profound socio-economic changes have undermined the collaborative model of post-war welfare capitalism; on the other hand social democratic parties have begun to aim more and more for the infamous ‘centre-ground’ while abandoning any serious attempts to engage with and mobilise voters from lower income strata – which contributed to ever rising levels of abstention and political disengagement from large segments of society that used to be a solid support base. To make matters worse, not many social democratic leaders seem to understand that voting is different from retail and that the involvement, mobilisation and binding of voters and supporters requires more than a friendly knock on the door or some advertisement campaigns every four or five years.

Finally, the wider institutional setting within which national policy-making occurs is no longer as amenable to social democratic principles as it was in the past. Put simply, social democracy assumes that there is a shared interest of all social classes and groups to create a stable, prosperous society, and that a form of consensus can be negotiated within the confines of a nation-state. The globalisation of the world economy and particularly its immense financialisation, combined with the dominance of competition (between states, organisations and individuals) as guiding principle of societies, have altered the parameters of political conflict. The difficulty of acknowledging this problem contributes to the intellectual vacuity of the social democratic mainstream and to the toothless approach in addressing the social conflicts of our times, at least in those instances when some form of opposition is still expressed – which is not always the case, as for example the support of most social democratic parties for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership demonstrates.

One could now say, why should we care? I would argue one should for two reasons: First, with social democratic parties as the traditionally strongest element of the left, the crisis of the former inevitably represents a crisis of the latter, not just from an electoral point of view but also regarding the legitimacy of left-wing policies. If people see social democratic parties fail repeatedly to improve living standards, it is likely that doubts regarding all forms of progressive, solidaristic policies spread. Secondly, even though the European welfare state of the post-war era, with its universal public services, was not only built by the social democratic movement but also by conservative and liberal parties, it was undoubtedly the influence and power of social democratic principles (strengthened by a good dose of fear of the communist bloc) that drove this extension of social rights. It is to be feared that with a social democracy in tatters and alternative forces of the left yet underdeveloped, the near future will be less comfortable for most of us, regardless of one’s political persuasion.

Enrico Reuter