How the Brexiters wove their rabid tale
Their own history inspired them, but Europe’s story never did
The British have voted to send their own currency into seizures and to isolate themselves from their own continent, all because someone told a better story than someone else. The story of Britain inspires feeling in Britons; the story of Europe does not.
Never mind that the story fed to Leavers was racist, stupid and dishonest — it was powerful. The European Union failed to create an idea of itself that people care about, and so people rejected the EU. In some ways, the story of Europe’s failed mythology is the story of cosmopolitanism’s decline.
One man who articulated this failure clearly last month was, somehow, the former London mayor and probably soon-to-be-Conservative party-leadership-hopeful Boris Johnson, who doesn’t tend to articulate things as much as he bumbles his way through them.
“There is simply no common political culture in Europe,” he said.
The trouble is that Johnson and his fellow self-harmers, the Leave supporters, don’t regard the EU’s failure as a failure, as such — they regard a dearth of common European political culture as a matter of fact that ought to be accepted rather than a challenge that must be faced.
As you well know if you’ve ever sat on one side or another of the nature-versus-nurture debate at a tiresome dinner party, culture is forged over time, not discovered at birth. Political culture is, of course, no different. History may be one damn thing after another, but it is the meaning deliberately assigned to these events that shape how we think about ourselves and our communities.
The EU doesn’t mean much to many residents of Europe. Of course it doesn’t. Its meaning hasn’t been effectively cultivated, so how can it be felt? Economic experts may be correct in warning that Brexit could potentially lead to lost jobs and even a recession; technocrats may be correct in pointing out that Britain isn’t even in Europe’s border-free zone; anyone half-literate may be correct in pointing out that lies about the EU have encompassed everything from a ban on all curved bananas to criminalization of the imperial metrication system.
But correctness cannot inspire a sense of belonging to a group, and facts can’t make someone feel like they’re part of a community.
That is the job of stories, as well as the symbols that bring stories to mind. I have seen few homes in Europe flying the EU flag from their bedroom windows, and expect that even fewer could recite the lyrics to the European anthem. This is the task and the weak spot of cosmopolitanism: Large associations and organizations must inspire loyalty from people who normally reserve loyalty for their own families and their own nations, which they think of as a family. The myths and ceremonies of nationalism may make cosmopolitans uncomfortable, but every community is, in some respect, imagined, and the larger ones are hardly exempt from the imperative of vision.
Brexit’s racist, stupid and dishonest story, after all, was so powerful that it was told by even some of those who wanted to remain. Resigning Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t author the story of a Britain under siege by foreigners, but he shared versions of it, issuing diresounding warnings about migrants. Like someone who trains a Rottweiler to kill and is shocked when the dog turns on him, Cameron threw bones to the rabid far-right before it turned on him at Brexit ballot boxes. When one strengthens extremists by using diluted versions of the stories they tell themselves, one can only expect those stories to win.
If one doesn’t tell a good story at all, one might expect to lose.