Two key arguments continue to be advanced by those who
favour a British exit from the European Union. It is firstly, they claim, a way
of managing immigration. Secondly, it is a crucial step towards restoring
national sovereignty. The two ideas meet in the battle cry ‘Securing Britain’s
borders’.
The modern understanding of national sovereignty – the
principle that the authority to govern emanates from a nation that exists as a single
body able to express its will – is, well, a very European one. It is found in
Article 3 of the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen of 1789. Note the absence of any mention of nationality here.
Indeed, it’s that very universalism – the idea that the Revolution was
producing a blueprint for the governance of all national societies – that drove
many French citizens to believe that their nation above all others was invested
with a mission: to lead the peoples of Europe from tyranny to liberty. And it
was against this national, revolutionary zeal that many European nations reacted.
But, in order to mobilise against the armies of the First Republic and then of
Napoleon Bonaparte, the governments of Britain, Prussia and Russia, for
example, had to resort increasingly to the sort of popular nationalism that
gripped France from the Battle of Valmy to the Battle of Waterloo.
Nationalisms, like nations, do not exist in a vacuum; they
react and bump against each other and are informed by intense rivalries. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries France was to Germany what Arsenal
are to Spurs. But nationalists even at this high point of nationalistic rivalry
were never isolationist. Even the most virulent French nationalists travelled
extensively in the interwar years, sharing ideas, but also expressing
differences, with like-minded movements and individuals across Europe. The
Action Française, a far-right monarchist movement that hankered for a return to pre-Revolutionary absolutism
under a king who ruled by divine right, admired Mussolini’s smartly-clad Black
Shirts, raved about the economic miracle that was Salazar’s New State in
Portugal, and then cheered on Franco’s National Revolution and its eradication
of the Spanish Republic during that country’s civil war. Underpinning this
enthusiasm for authoritarianism was a commitment to the principle of Latinity –
a belief that the Mediterranean nations share the cultural and political
heritage of Ancient Rome and that the region, and the French nation, would rise
again to international prominence by rejecting democracy.
As extreme as the case of Action Française may seem, the
movement reflects a fundamental reality of all national movements. Far from
operating in a vacuum neatly delineated by impenetrable national borders, they
in fact openly engage in a dialogue with other, carefully selected partners.
More than this, they have a long history of conceiving of themselves as members
of a transnational family. Sometimes crude racial politics are invoked to
suggest these family ties, but these family resemblances and connections are
always a matter of geography and culture.
What, then, could we expect of a European Union without
Britain and of a Britain outside the EU? Could Britain enjoy the form of
self-sufficiency that some Eurosceptics invoke in the memory of a pre-EU world
where things could be bought and consumed in what is, for most of us, the
incomprehensible lingo of imperial measurements? Most Eurosceptics are far less
nostalgic and admit that Britain would in fact be forced to seek new partners
in the world. A post-Brexit British government would have to quickly seek these
out in those parts of the world with which Britain enjoys already strong
cultural ties. But where would these be? The United States, either under a
Democrat regime which has already hinted that Britain’s place in the world
would be diminished by Brexit, or perhaps a Republican one led by Donald Trump
who swings from advocate of US isolationism to expansionism on a daily basis?
Or elsewhere in the English-speaking world in Britain’s former colonies, many
of which still carry the scars and memories of imperialism.
Brexit would have wider ramifications still for Europe as a
whole, of course. According to Robert
Niblett, Director of Chatham House Royal Institute of International
Affairs, it would give added strength and momentum to other Eurosceptic and
nationalist movements across Europe. Ultimately,
it could lead to the fragmentation of the remainder of the EU and a return to
the Europe of nations so desired by all Eurosceptics. Britain would then be
free to seek out new partners amongst the shards of the Union. Indeed, it could
be at the forefront of a new alliance of likeminded European states battling
the remnants of the old Union. What voters have to decide ahead of the
forthcoming EU referendum, then, is whether it is easier to reconfigure
Britain’s relationship with its fellow European nations from a self-imposed
position on the margins of Europe or, as it currently does, from a position of
influence within the EU. Either way, Britain cannot escape the necessity of
engaging with a Europe to which it is tied geographically and culturally.
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