In the late 1960s, young students such as myself supported the Common Market (as it was then known), and Britain’s membership of it, for a mixture of reasons, but mainly for political and cultural ones. If post-World War II peace was to survive, then Western Europe needed some degree of economic and political unity that monitored Germany; the US needed an allied bloc to set against the Eastern European nations that by then were firmly in the communist bloc; and economic recovery from dismal austerity required expanding markets and greater movements of people and skills.
However, many of the original motives became perverted and obscured, the EU was born as a child of post-war positivism and liberalism and naive faith in Western democracy as a bulwark against the demonstrably “failed states” of Germany, Italy, Spain and parts of Eastern Europe.
However, in the period that the Common Market evolved into the present EU, three major tendencies cemented into an agenda that drastically moved it away from such simple faiths and visions, and that has recently lead to the harsh treatment of debtor systems from Cyprus to Greece to Spain, and are likely to soon extend to Italy and several of the new-member nations, the latter of whom tend to promise many things more in hope than with conviction.
First, the EU is ruled by the economic ideology of the so-called “troika” of Germany, the IMF and the European Bank, which tends to see everything in terms of market economics. Thus, the loose Euro-migration policies are not children of radical sympathies for migrants and their needs, but merely aspects of the logic of markets — if goods and capital and knowledge markets are unrestricted within Europe, then labor markets must also be.
This is the logic behind the “liberal” profile for migration under Smithian classical economic assumptions that migrants add to the labor market. Competition in that market thereby represents an optimization of use of labor and this happens best if labor freely moves from job to job, skill to skill, location to location. This does not speak to local communities, notions of cultural and political identity, or worker solidarity, nor to the location of special welfare regimes for poor workers, the unskilled or unemployed within particular nations. Anti-EU votes in Britain could be seen as a refusal of this theorizing and its social outcomes.
Second, the dominant central political parties have moved firmly right in the past 20 years in the US, UK, France, Germany and elsewhere, and the British referendum result could be seen as a rejection of major parties and a move toward extremes, minorities and a rat-bag collection of competing and often contradictory policies and perspectives. For instance, the “exit” groups in the UK have bought into temporary alliance people who seriously dislike each other and could not be ever visualized as belonging in the future to one party central to UK politics.
Third, to an extent the vote is a rejection of globalism and financialism, the rhetoric of austerity, which has often merely disguised regressive policies of low taxation, low expenditure, and low innovation — thus combining failing social services with low-growth economies — in order to protect the livelihoods or extreme wealth of financial groupings, investors and bankers, in what might be called the post-1971 perspective of the IMF and of the EU.
The pattern of voting in the referendum proves this. Industrial areas throughout the northeast of England that house manufacturing, labor unions and established working communities, rejected the EU wholeheartedly. This was unexpected because no one was taking much notice of people’s consciousness of EU neglect of industry.
Contrariwise, in London the vote was very sturdy in support of staying in the EU, massively counter to the all-Britain tendency. This was expected, as London is linked to massive financial service provisions, and IMF financial tools and influence.
This is now a long-term tendency associated with the rise of financial services in less-regulated regimes with higher incomes and employment in service sectors of all kinds, in contrast to decline in manufacturing and other services, a rise of individualism and a decline in community. The profound extent of this structural change has been, to an extent, made less obvious at a global level by the rise of new economies, notably China and India, that are growing on the basis of more traditional manufacturing industries.
It is clear that for natural supporters of European integration and cooperation, the pathway of Britain should be to stay in the EU, but then for its government to be given the mandate of a strictly British electorate to work as a radical reform locus, perhaps in partnership with nations such as France and Italy, one which protected the original market and political purposes of union, but seriously modified the troika’s faith in the pure and simple power of markets.
From such a new innovative locus could be created European-wide legislation for progress in wages and work conditions, as well as investments in technical infrastructure that would encourage greater private innovations in manufacturing, as well as newer sectors. This possibility has now disappeared.
EU history shows that markets do not just work to clear away inefficiencies in some painless way. Economics is a political business. Britain voted “out” of Europe not because Britons dislike Europeans, or because all “leave” voters thought that the UK could handle foreign markets more efficiently than it could within the EU, rather, the outcome is a rejection of central national politics, a challenge to the power of non-elected elites and a dislike of the seeming loss of control resulting from the dominance of IMF-type global financial capitalism.
This might never have been clearly voiced or made comprehensible by any UK party. Indeed the labor party failed to offer this position. There seems little doubt that British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn thought Britian should “remain” because a vibrant UK in Europe could serve to halt a move to the right and away from left liberalism that was at the heart of the original British support for Europe in 1975.
However, his nerve or his verve seems to have failed him.
So, it is possible to interpret the vote to “leave” as the latest indicator of tendencies that are also of importance to other nations, including Taiwan under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government. The lessons for President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the DPP is that politics cannot be dominated only by issues of finance and globalism or, in Taiwan’s case, economic, political and cultural relations with China. If mainstream parties such as the DPP or the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) wish to remain at the center of politics, then they must take people’s local concerns more seriously, especially those relating to employment, social welfare and the environment.
Just as the central-liberal theories of free markets for labor and skills that governed the development of large migrations of peoples in Europe should have been associated with strong social policies to ameliorate or counter the social and employment outcomes, so too in Taiwan talk of the southward movement or high-tech key industries should be set amid coherent policies concerning the conditions and levels of employment in older trading areas and manufacturing industries, as well as environmental deterioration associated with large urban areas, and nuclear power installations in a land so subject to earthquakes.
The British referendum speaks to a need among all democratic systems to recover trust, welfare and civility as the elements at the heart of all political decisionmaking.
Ian Inkster is a professorial research associate at the Center of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London, and editor of international journal History of Technology.
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