Post | Brexit

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.

These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

What good did it do?

For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.

Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.

Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.

It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…

Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?

That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.

Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.

Sovereign projects

The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.

But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.

Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.

There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).

Posting

With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…

A Happy New Year

Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!