This is why Richard Tuck is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government at Harvard:
On the question of whether Britain
should leave the European Union, the British left has been nearly uniform in
supporting “Remain.”
This option seems especially attractive since those
advocating “Leave” on the right range from open racists concerned with the
recent growth of immigration to romantic global free marketeers.
For entirely
understandable cultural and political reasons, the left has not wished to be
associated with that crowd.
But in supporting “Remain,” the left is making a
profound mistake, one capable of destroying its future, whether Britain is in
or out of the EU.
There are several flaws in the case made by left advocates
of Remain: here I want to consider three in particular.
First is the idea,
fostered especially by the dynamic Greek former finance minister Yanis
Varoufakis, that left politics today can only be advanced by concerted action
within the EU.
As I will argue, that is a fantasy, and by adhering to it the
British left is likely to undermine itself seriously—as the Greek left may already
be doing.
Next is the claim that Brexit would hasten the breakup of
the United Kingdom, and consequently (for long-standing reasons of electoral
demography) spell doom for Labour as a party of government.
I argue that the
opposite is the case: Brexit may well be the only thing that could hold the UK
together and offer Labour the opportunity to rebuild on a national basis.
Last is the assumption, which seems to underlie much
pro-Remain thinking on the left, that the EU is fundamentally different from the
multinational trade agreements—most recently the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—that are
reshaping the global economic order.
While many leftists have clear and
well-thought-out arguments against such trade “partnerships,” they give their
unconsidered support to the EU, though it suffers from all the same failings
and more.
As a consequence of these mistakes, the British left risks
throwing away the one institution which it has, historically, been able to use
effectively—the democratic state—in favor of a constitutional order tailor-made
for the interests of global capitalism and managerial politics.
As the
jurisprudence of the EU has developed, it has consistently undermined standard
left policies such as state aid to industries and nationalization.
Constitutional structures that are largely outside the reach of citizens have,
in the modern world, tended almost invariably to block the kind of radical
policies that the left has traditionally believed in.
The central fact about
the EU, which the British governing class has never really got its head around,
is that it creates a written constitution and ancillary juridical structures
that are extremely hard to alter.
Neither British politicians nor the British
electorate are used to this, since Britain has never had such a thing, and they
are treating the referendum as if it were a general election campaign, with
short-term victories that could be reversed in a few years, rather than
something with the long-term implications of the votes in 1788 on the American
constitution.
I
Yanis Varoufakis is one of the most significant left-wing
politicians in Europe.
As someone who witnessed one of its major crises from
within, he speaks with authority about the character of the EU project.
His
accounts of the discussions in the councils of Europe about the euro crisis,
featuring ignorant and preening finance ministers bent almost exclusively on
the exercise of power, are a graphic illustration of what actually happens
within the EU.
Varoufakis is also important because despite his firsthand
experience of the limits of the EU, he believes it can be reformed.
More than
that, he hopes that a pan-European left will be revived through the
institutions of the EU, and that hope is repeatedly echoed by pro-EU figures
within the British Labour Party.
But it would be a profound mistake for the
British left to follow Varoufakis’s loyalty to the European project.
To see
why, we should go back to the theorist with whom Varoufakis himself continues
to identify: the founding father of the European left, Karl Marx.
One of Marx’s most striking insights was the observation
that the various constitutions of the French republics, and their imitations in
other continental states, were deliberately designed to obstruct progress
towards genuine democracy.
Though the French Revolution had introduced
universal suffrage, its significance was immediately undermined by the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and by constitutional structures that
precluded the kind of social transformation that the Revolution’s radicals
wanted.
Marx emphasized this repeatedly in his writings of the 1840s, and the
failure of the revolutions of 1848 and the restoration of the constitutional
orders in Europe only confirmed his judgment.
Accordingly, Marx felt, only a
total revolution would be able to overturn the “bourgeois” liberal economic and
political constitutions that stood in the way of substantive social change.
But Marx, and still more Engels, thought England was
different.
The House of Commons was unconstrained by the kind of constitutional
apparatus seen on the continent, since Parliament was (famously)
“omnicompetent” and the Lords and the monarchy were largely irrelevant.
Marx
and Engels concluded that once the English working class got the vote, it would
be able to use the House of Commons to achieve its political and economic goals
peacefully.
The accidents of history that had delivered this exceptional
institution meant that revolution ought not to be necessary for the kind of
social transformation Marx and Engels had in mind.
The early members of the Labour Party in England (who were
more Marxist than their successors cared to admit) understood this, and
believed that a properly organized working class, using representation in the
House of Commons as its vehicle, could institute radical economic and social
change.
And compared with the life of the working class in the nineteenth
century, working-class life after the growth of Labour vindicated their confidence.
Indeed, the greatest achievement of the Labour Party, the creation of the
National Health Service, would have been impossible in a country with strong
constitutional constraints on the legislature, since it required the
large-scale expropriation of private property in the shape of the old endowed
hospitals.
That is a major reason why so few countries have adopted the NHS
model: in most of them it would have been illegal, just as similar proposals
would be illegal in the EU today.
In the 1980s, however, demoralized Labour politicians began
to seek the shelter of continental-style constitutional structures.
The most
important of these was the EU, which functions as a set of constraints on the
internal politics of its member states exactly as did the bourgeois
constitutions of the mid-nineteenth century.
There are many reasons why the left began to lose faith in
a system that did not have constitutional constraints.
Partly, it was
distressed by Thatcher’s electoral success—though in fact the Labour Party
split (largely over Europe) in the immediate aftermath of her first electoral
victory, before the scale of the transformation she would usher in was clear.
Indeed, the split in the Labour Party itself facilitated that transformation.
The
general turn to a discourse of human rights (recently traced by Samuel
Moyn) also served to weaken the intellectual case for an
omnicompetent democratic legislature, despite the fact that in Britain that
legislature had largely coexisted with a remarkably tolerant and liberal social
order.
No matter the cause, however, the main outcome was that British politics
became, for the first time, constrained by EU commitments.
The left—and all of Great Britain—has suffered as a result.
The same structures that the eighth president of the European Commission,
Jacques Delors, promised to use in the interests of the working class turned
out by the time of the 2007–08 financial crash to have been used instead to
push through a variety of neoliberal economic and social policies that have
only damaged the European working class.
This, of course, would not have surprised Marx.
As he
understood, the point of constitutional structures such as the EU is almost
always to enshrine and make permanent the political and social assumptions of
their moment of creation.
As a Marxist, and given his own bruising encounters
with EU institutions, Varoufakis should perhaps see this better than anyone.
But despite fiercely criticizing the way the EU handled the Greek crisis,
Varoufakis has remained loyal to the idea that left-wing politics can be pushed
through using EU institutions, if only the parties of the left across Europe
can properly coordinate their activities.
History would suggest that this is a vain hope. Even if
Europe’s left parties do succeed in forging a common program, the EU is not the
kind of political entity whose approach to the world can be altered by popular
politics.
Popular politics is precisely what the EU was designed to obstruct.
Like independent central banks and constitutional courts, its institutions are
essentially technocratic. Technocracy is not (as some like to pretend) a
neutral or rational system of government.
Instead, it confers immense power on
culturally select bodies whose prejudices will be those of the class their
members are drawn from.
Varoufakis believes that the EU may change, and many in the
British Labour Party agree.
But the kind of shift in European politics that
Varoufakis and others want to see is simply not possible within the present
structures of the EU: it would require sweeping institutional change
of a kind nowhere on the agenda.
Without that, like the Labour Party in
Britain, the left in Europe is reliant purely on an article of faith—a
conviction that the left must prevail, even in the face of all the
constraints imposed on popular sovereignty by the EU.
The British governing class in the late twentieth century
threw away the most valuable institution it had inherited, an institution whose
preservation was the most obvious imperative for their predecessors: a House of
Commons that was not constrained by a constitution.
A vote to stay within the
EU will render their casual trashing of it irrevocable, and end any hope of
genuinely left politics in the UK.
II
If these fundamental considerations were not enough to
persuade the left to vote to leave the EU, pragmatic politics should do so.
The
Labour Party since Blair has made a fundamental misjudgment about how to gain
power, a misjudgment intimately related to its stance on the EU: this is its
misunderstanding of Scottish politics.
It is now clear that the Labour Party, as it has existed
for more than a century, is dead, and its death has been caused by its dramatic
decline in Scotland.
Since England has always been a fundamentally Tory
country, and shows no sign of becoming less so, it is hard to see anything like
the old Labour Party taking power through English votes alone.
With the rise of
the Scottish National Party (SNP), which in Scotland went from winning less
than half as many votes as Labour in the 2010 general election to winning more
than twice as many in 2015—in part by attracting roughly one-fifth of Labour
voters—it also seems highly unlikely that the Labour Party will win back
Scotland.
The EU is relevant here because modern Scottish nationalism
is essentially the working-out within Britain of the logic of the EU.
Scotland
joined the Union in 1707 to enjoy an economic union with a large market and a
global trading power.
But with the advent of the EU, which guarantees Scotland
virtually the same freedoms of trade and movement as the 1707 Union did,
Scotland no longer needs to be united with England.
Once the Common Market
began to take its current shape, the power of European integration to advance
its cause began to dawn on the SNP, and as soon as it switched from an
extremely hostile to an enthusiastically pro-European position in the 1980s its
electoral fortunes began to improve.
The leaders of the SNP make no pretense
about the critical importance of the EU for their project.
If the UK leaves the EU, however, the situation immediately
changes.
There is the pessimistic view that faced with a UK outside the EU, the
SNP would still reasonably press for independence and with it EU membership for
Scotland.
It could do so knowing that it is extremely unlikely that the ties
between England and Scotland would deteriorate.
The precedent would be Ireland,
which has in effect had a passport union and an integrated labor market with
the UK ever since independence, including during the roughly twenty years in
which it maintained its own currency, before it joined the euro.
A similar
example is the Nordic Passport Union, which has guaranteed free movement of
people and an integrated labor market among the Scandinavian countries since
1954.
But one can reasonably take a different view. Following a
Brexit, the EU would effectively be equivalent to the eurozone and the Schengen
area, and would simply proceed to a much higher level of integration.
It is
hard to see it taking any other route, unless (as some apocalyptic scenarios
imagine) it fell apart completely.
Would the SNP leaders want Scotland to be
subsumed into a union of that kind?
Their terror of endorsing
Scottish membership of the euro in the referendum campaign suggests that they
would be very unwilling to exchange membership of the United Kingdom for
membership of the United States of Europe; their ideal is the continuation of
the present relatively unintegrated European arrangements within which
something like the current Scottish economy could persist independently of
Westminster.
Their current enthusiasm for Britain’s continued membership
reveals their own political judgment about the significance of the EU for their
cause.
So if the UK leaves the EU, Scottish independence comes to look much
less plausible, and a chance is offered to the Labour Party to rebuild in
Scotland.
It may not be much of a chance, certainly, but staying in the EU
offers virtually no chance at all. Contrary to what almost all commentators
have concluded, Brexit may be the only way in which the United Kingdom can be
preserved.
In turn, it is also the only way in which a British Labour Party can
be rebuilt.
III
One of the odd things about British leftists’ support of
the EU is that when they are invited to support a very similar institution with
a different set of members, they resolutely refuse to do so.
Many people on the
left now oppose both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
They do so partly for economic
reasons.
But much of the opposition to these trade agreements is based on their
political implications, and in particular the regulatory structures which they
put in place and impose on individual states.
As the Yale Law School professor
David Grewal has emphasized, these treaties are not old-fashioned trade
agreements to lower tariffs.
Instead, the treaties attempt to construct
coordinated regulatory structures in a wide variety of areas, ranging from
workers’ rights to industrial policy and environmental regulations.
Such
provisions clearly intrude on areas of national life that in the past were
presumed to be the preserve of national governments.
Furthermore, the treaties create
mechanisms for so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which amount
to the creation of supranational courts, ruling in accordance with loose
principles and free from appellate scrutiny.
Liberal defenders of global capitalism led by President
Obama like to stress the fact that the treaties enshrine workers’ rights and
gender equality, and they imply that the other provisions are necessary to
enforce these rights and to prevent states from restricting free trade through
such means as the manipulation of labor laws and heath and safety regulations.
But the fundamental fact is that supranational intervention on behalf of
left-wing causes is bundled together with intervention on behalf of modern
global capitalism, and it is not difficult to see which type of intervention
will have—and is intended to have—the most lasting impact.
Everything I have just said is commonplace in discussions
on the left across Europe. But many British leftists do not see that these
points also apply to the European Union.
The EU anticipated both this kind of
bundling of left-wing with right-wing promises and the assumption that modern
free trade requires a supranational structure with powers to intervene in the
internal life of the member states.
Because there are so many ways in which
regulatory hurdles can be erected to restrict trade, it is argued, regulation
has to be managed at a supranational level.
And like the Partnerships, in
practice the EU subordinates its concern with workers’ rights to its concern to
maintain the freedom of companies to shop around within the EU for the weakest
regimes of labor protection.
To see that one need only look at European Court
of Justice judgments concerning transnational labor disputes within the EU,
which the European Trade Union Confederation has described as confirming “a
hierarchy of norms . . . with market freedoms highest in the hierarchy, and
collective bargaining and action in second place.”
It is the right that ought to applaud this kind of
structure, and the left that ought to be hostile—this is the paradox at the
heart of the current British argument about EU membership.
Free trade is never
the unalloyed good to everyone which is promised: everything depends on the
political power of the various groups concerned, something the left has usually
understood, and which the renascent U.S. left has rediscovered.
Anxiety about
the TTIP in Britain and the rest of Europe is well-judged; but there is no
point in resisting the TTIP, or even employing European political institutions
to prevent the EU signing up to it, if we remain within the EU.
Everything that
is objectionable to the left about these trade partnerships, with the single
exception of the fact that the United States is involved, should be
objectionable to the left when it comes to the EU.
This was what the original
opponents of the Common Market in the Labour Party understood in 1975, and time
has merely proven them correct.
IV
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the left’s natural
position should still be one of opposition to the EU. Why is this message
proving so hard to get across?
One reason is the fact that many centers of the
left, such as universities, have done very well financially out of the EU.
Overall, Britain contributes more to the EU budget than it receives back, but
it has proven easier for many academic institutions to negotiate grants from
the EU than from the UK government.
But this is scarcely a good argument:
first, those institutions should not be protected from democratic politics,
particularly as far and away the bulk of their funding still comes from the UK
taxpayer, and second, no one knows how negotiations would go in the absence of
EU largesse.
No government, aware that universities can at the moment get
funding from the EU, will offer money of its own, but that does not mean it
would not do so if that funding were withdrawn.
The most powerful reason, I think, is cultural and
political hostility to the supporters of Brexit, and in particular to their
stance on immigration, and a fear of what happens in general if they win.
But
this fear is self-reinforcing.
The left is frightened because it has chosen to
abandon the field to its enemies, rather than because of any necessary cleavage
between left and right on the EU.
One can put this point in a more vivid way by
asking, Why is there no British Bernie Sanders?
Sanders has shown that the
alienated working-class vote can still be won by left-wing policies,
particularly on global trade, and need not be abandoned to the radical right.
But the British left cannot make that move, despite a degree of windy rhetoric.
And the reason it cannot is that its power to propose genuinely left-wing
policies has been severely circumscribed by the EU.
The way for the left to address the immigration debate is
to understand that immigration is to many people only the most vivid and
proximate sign of a more general loss of political power.
Nothing will answer
those people’s concerns unless they can be told that decisions about
immigration policy are going to be in the hands of the British electorate, like
all decisions of major importance.
The debate can then begin over what kind of
immigration policy the left should support, and whether (like the present
system) it should in effect give priority to white Europeans over the older
classes of immigrants in Britain, predominantly South Asian, who wish to unite
families and move easily between Britain and South Asia.
The left should also
appreciate that the traditional heart of modern left-wing politics, a planned
welfare state, is rendered virtually impossible if Britain stays in the EU,
since no one will have any idea of the population numbers in the UK even in the
near future.
This is an illustration of the way the free movement of people, as
well as of goods and capital, in the EU almost necessarily entrenches markets
rather than collective planning.
Many of my English friends on the left reply to these
arguments with despair: nothing can now be done to change the situation, the
forces of globalization are too strong, the political culture of Britain is too
conservative.
Membership of the EU offers shelter, despite its patent lack of
democracy and its basic sympathy with capitalism.
But this is to rationalize
defeat.
There have been times in living memory when the left in Britain could
assert itself successfully, but those were times when it understood the nature
of Britain’s political structures and could use them.
The lack of political
possibilities perceived by so many people today is the result of quite specific
decisions, above all to enter the EU, and I see no reason why reversing that
decision would not open up real possibilities for the left in Britain again.
Masterful. The real Brexit case, silenced by the media. But not very effectively, with 40 per cent of Labour supporters preparing to vote Leave. Alex Gordon was screamed down by a pair of harridans on The Westminster Hour for predicting that, but the polls now bear it out. Only 10 points behind the number of Tory voters who are voting Leave. Half of them are Remainiacs. Half, which does at least account for where all the Eurofanatical Tory MPs came from, including the one who got more than two thirds of the vote for Leader. Based on the most recent Leadership elections Tory members are even more pro-EU than Tory voters in general while Labour members are less pro-EU than Labour voters in general even though two out of every five of those are Brexiteers.
ReplyDeleteMasterful, yourself. That is very well said.
DeleteOne of those harridans was a Blairite MP, and the other was the presenter. But it was impossible to tell which was which.