Brexit is a disaster for the UK. Given the risk that it will now lose Scotland and Northern Ireland to secession, the country seems to have accepted the idea of Great Britain turning back into “Little England.” Britain is that rare lion that chooses to become as small as a mouse.
To be sure, saving the English realm is all the Brexiteers ever cared about, but what sort of realm has a prime minister who lies to its queen, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson did when he suspended the British Parliament last year?
Through it all, the Brexiteers have exalted the British Empire and former British prime minister Winston Churchill, but they have forgotten 19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, an earlier wanderer of the London streets who warned that history eventually repeats itself as farce.
With Johnson in power, the UK is governed by a pantomime Churchill. Rather than an exponent of courage, it has the Prince of Cynicism — a scruffy knock-off who adapts his opinions to whatever is politically expedient.
The Brexiteers are fixated on the “sovereignty” they have supposedly regained, but it is well known that they owe their success in the referendum to Russian interference and US social-media algorithms.
The “Leave” campaign was a saturnalia of cynicism and fake news, led by charlatans who were only too happy to be mistaken for the country’s staunchest democrats. It was less a moment of truth than a bad novel come to life.
To be sure, Churchill is said to have told former French president Charles de Gaulle (another transient through London’s foggy streets) that England would always prefer the open sea to Europe.
However, if he were around today, De Gaulle would point out that Johnson’s Britain has neither Europe nor the open sea. Instead, it has trade disputes, a pseudo-friendship with US President Donald Trump, and mediocre economic prospects in a world increasingly dominated by powers such as the US, China and the EU itself.
Still, it is painfully clear that Brexit is a defeat for the idea of Europe — that metaphysical chimera, that geopolitical Harlequin’s coat of many colors. To channel Marx once more, Europe is a unique amalgam of German thought (and its demons), French politics (and its spinoffs) and English commerce (and its excesses).
Within the EU, the UK was the modern version of 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill and 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume standing against French grandiloquence, and of former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli checking continental impulses toward Wagnerian chauvinism.
Insofar as the UK represented the sea, it could wash away the provincialism of Paris, Rome and Vienna. Britain brought the irony of Edwardian British writer G.K. Chesterton to international negotiations — and it offered a touch of Byronic cosmopolitanism to instill compassion for Greece during its crisis and solidarity for the wretched of the Earth more generally.
There is a reason why Britain became a refuge for the likes of French author Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand and Austrian psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud, and for governments in exile and resistance movements.
Without the UK, Europe will become more stifling. The continent will still have its Don Quixotes and their splendid dreams, as well as its Sancho Panzas, restraining others’ flights of fancy. It will have the ruins of Rome, the splendor of Athens and the ghost of Bohemian novelist Franz Kafka.
However, Europe will have lost the cradle of liberty.
The fable that Europe will always unite in times of crisis, as though compelled by some physical law, should be dispensed with. Why is it assumed that Europe, in its great wisdom, will respond to every authoritarian and populist thrust with an equal and opposite advance of democracy?
Last year, the looming realities of Brexit did nothing to save the European Parliament elections. The outcome ultimate conferred a modicum of legitimacy on would-be democrat-dictators such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis. It is safe to say that, without England playing its historical prophylactic role, the epidemic of populism would become more virulent on the continent.
The West has not so much been kidnapped as gone missing. Does this mean that the dream of European unity is over? Does the exodus of a member state obliterate the vision of French writer Victor Hugo, and Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel? Does Europe now fit the description of what the great former US president Abraham Lincoln called a “house divided against itself”?
Not necessarily — history is more imaginative than humans are. The EU still has the option of keeping Britain close in heart and mind. Europeans can benefit from their absent partner, by resurrecting the partnership through their actions. They can create a union not of technocrats, but of Churchills.
As an unabashed Anglophile, I will continue to dream of a Europe that, fortified by the legacy left behind within its walls, can show fellow feeling for a cherished family member who has departed.
Europeans have not lost the culture that gave them the Magna Carta, the cosmopolitanism of Gulliver and swinging London. Europeans still know the British legacy of true liberalism passed on to them by 18th-century philosopher John Locke, even if the word’s meaning has become muddled by lazy thinking.
This true taste of Europe is precisely what Europeans need to stare down the truculent faces of democratic-dictatorship.
Just recently in Italy, a Swiftian movement called the “Sardines” beat back populist League Party leader Matteo Salvini.
Europe is not dead. Europeans fight on — without England, but still with the English.
Bernard-Henri Levy is a founder of the Nouveaux Philosophes (New Philosophers) movement. His books include Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville and most recently, The Empire and the Five Kings.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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