UK’s shock withdrawal could start a trend of neo-nationalism

NEW YORK: In 1999, historian Norman Davies predicted the breakup of the UK. There was nothing inevitable about the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, he wrote in The Isles, and no reason to think it could withstand the competing nationalisms it contained.

Likewise the EU. “Nothing stands still,” says Davies, whose history of the British Isles foreshadowed Scotland’s 2014 bid to secede. “Everything is moving in some direction or another.”

The drift demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the institutions that secured relative peace and prosperity for three generations of Europeans and Americans. The Brexit campaign has shown that many are willing to throw these over without a credible all about whom does the public trust,” he says. “Now they don’t trust anybody.”

Brexit was also an expression of rising English nationalism, said Davies, and it fed on the same drivers as other the nationalist, anti-EU movements rising across Europe. Think Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, or Austria’s Freedom Party.

“The EU is an organisation that was created after World War II for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully,” says Davies. “But many people have now forgotten all about that.”

That might be because the bloc floundered in addressing recent challenges, such as the euro area’s difficulties and the influx of refugees from the Middle East.

The backlash Brexit represents is understandable, says Simon Fraser, a former career diplomat whois now a managing partner of Flint Global, a London firm that advises corporations on how to navigate the EU. “People are challenging the conventional wisdom around trade, openness and co-operation” because they feel let down,” says Fraser.

That’s by no means all the EU’s fault. For decades, Brussels has served as a convenient scapegoat for national leaders looking to dodge blame for unpopular policies.

But the EU has, like other institutions that set the terms of the global economy since World War II, failed to adapt to the upheavals following the end of the Cold War, said Fraser. The question of how to integrate China and Russia, into largely Western-built economic and security structures was left unanswered. Those institutions were unable to November’s presidential election will decide the same for Americans. Yet the Brexit and Trump campaigns are likely to have a deep impact.

There’s a word for where the world is heading now: “G-zero,” a label coined by Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political-risk consultancy, and economist Nouriel Roubini in a Foreign Affairs article five years ago. The reference was to the progressive irrelevance of the G-7, G-8 and then G-20 to global governance.

Trade was an early indicator. The last full-blown global deal was the so-called Uruguay Round in 1995. Since then, only partial and regional trade pacts have been achievable. Now, the prospects for even regional agreements are fading.

“Brexit fits very closely” into this procession towards a world without collaborative international institutions, said Bremmer, noting the campaign on both sides has been almost entirely inward-looking. “We have moved from a situation in which the transatlantic relationship was the most important thing, to everyone for themselves.”

Brexit may hold a more optimistic lesson. The changes under way could produce new or restructured arrangements for international management, rather than the Hobbesian world Bremmer fears.

China’s leaders, for example, have looked on with puzzlement at the British debate. China may champion national sovereignty and chafe at US dominance, but it is also pragmatic, said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute. It gains from the existing economic order and sees multilateral economic institutions as useful – in the EU’s case, to the tune of $590 billion in trade last year.

Although the Brexit movement may well encourage similar efforts to leave in other EU countries, it is likely at the same time to accelerate new ideas to reshape the union, according to Davies.

Calls to reform the EU have been made before – to little effect. In the long term, Europe can’t simply return to a “normal” era in which nation states were pre-eminent, according to Davies, because that was never the norm but a brief and bloody aberration from other forms of European union, such as empire.

“It was in the 20th century that national sovereignty really ruled the roost, and the EU was formed to cure that,” the historian says. “If the EU were to collapse now, something similar would have to be invented.” – Washington Post