[Nettime-nl] Joris Luyendijk: Waarom Brexit goed nieuws is (The Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

(Joris L had al 'n beetje hetzelfde gezegd in de NRC vlak voor het 
referendum)


Brexit is great news for the rest of the EU
Joris Luyendijk (The Guardian, June 28, 2016)
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/28/brexit-great-news-eu-britain-sovereignty)


Democrats across Europe are in shock over Brexit, when they should be 
jubilant. That a slim majority of British voters – primarily English and 
Welsh – have acted against their own short- and long-term economic 
interests to leave us is a blessing. For decades British governments 
have played a double game: getting all the benefits of EU membership 
while opting out of its burdens, in the meantime undermining and even 
blackmailing the club from within. All of this is now over.

To understand why Brexit is such good news we must look not at the lies 
of the leave camp but at the arguments of remain. They consist 
essentially of two claims. The first is that leaving would only make 
things worse – what leave rightly derided as “Project Fear”. Second is 
remain’s promise that the EU would never be more than a market. Fears 
over the loss of sovereignty were misguided, remain argued, since the UK 
would block and veto any future moves in that direction.

Let us pause and reflect on what a remain win would have meant. If they 
are ever to become functioning and legitimate democratic entities, the 
EU and the eurozone must reform dramatically. In some cases this means 
the return of certain powers at regional or national level – all too 
often “European cooperation” has become homogenisation and needless 
centralisation. In other cases we may decide to invest more powers at 
European level if this strengthens its democratic nature and increases 
our power versus the corporate lobby.

Had remain won the referendum, the EU would have become hostage to 
British sabotage. Future British prime ministers would veto any 
fundamental change involving the transfer of sovereignty, arguing, 
correctly, that their people had voted only for the current set-up of 
the EU. Britain would continue to demand ever more opt-outs and 
concessions – playing to the fantasy that membership is a British favour 
to the rest of Europe. The British press and Europhobe politicians would 
go on portraying the EU in the most lurid, mendacious and derisory 
terms, making us look terrible in the eyes of Americans and 
English-speaking Asians, Africans and Russians.

The problem with Britain was not that it was critical of the EU. The 
problem was bad faith and delusional thinking. As the referendum debate 
has shown, the country has not come to terms with its own global 
irrelevance – hence its refusal to pool sovereignty. It continues to 
believe that as a sovereign nation it can get everything it had as an EU 
member, and more. When Europe’s democrats talk about “EU reform” they 
mean putting arrangements in place to make Europe’s pooling of 
sovereignty democratic. Britons mean the rollback of that very pooling 
of sovereignty. For this reason, Britain’s membership would have hit a 
wall sooner or later.

Which brings us to remain’s conception of the EU as merely “a market”. 
This is a disastrous view. Markets are never neutral arrangements but 
always political constructs. Consider whether you allow pharmaceutical 
companies to market antidepressants directly to consumers, as in the US, 
or not – as in Europe. Both are “markets”, but the difference in impact 
on society is profound. Think of environmental standards, genetically 
modified organisms, anti-trust law (when is a market an oligopoly?), 
privacy or priorities in enforcement of intellectual property 
violations. Then there is the question of what should be a market in the 
first place: education, health, the prison system?

Leaving these decisions to European technocrats means that we 
effectively hand over control of our society to the corporate lobbies 
that have direct access to those technocrats. These days global banks 
and other multinationals operate on a European level while politics 
still take place on a national level. The consequence is that big 
corporations can play off one European country against the other in a 
regulatory race to the bottom, demanding ever lower if not downright 
homeopathic tax rates.

Is this the EU we want? Or do we build a strong and democratically 
legitimate countervailing power that can operate on the same European 
level as the corporate lobby? If the latter, we need to construct a 
vibrant pan-European political space with real debate and real powers. 
It is crazy that Europeans have their own court, parliament and 
currency, but no pan-European public forum to debate what to do with 
these instruments.

Perhaps the construction of a European demos of this kind is all too 
much, all too fast. What is clear is that the current EU is corporate 
and undemocratic and the eurozone is a disaster. Europeans can throw in 
the towel, dismantle the whole thing and retreat to their powerless 
little countries. Or they can make a final attempt to make the European 
project work.

A minority in Britain wanted to be part of this, but the mainstream did 
not. Let Europe now play hardball in the negotiations and then wish all 
the best to its British neighbours.


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