Working out why Brits voted the way they did in the EU referendum (beyond the answers they themselves gave in polls immediately after the event) will, doubtless, occupy analysts of all descriptions for a very long time, but, writing in Prospect, Roger Scruton has a characteristically interesting take, some of which has implications far beyond that of the immediate British debate.
You’ll have to read the whole thing, but some extracts:
It is true that a country’s stability depends to a great extent on economic growth. But it also depends on social trust—the sense that we are bound to each other by a shared loyalty, and that we will stand by each other in emergencies. Social trust comes from shared language, shared customs, instinctive law-abidingness, procedures for resolving disputes and grievances, public spirit and the ability of the people to change their own government by a process that is transparent to them all. The hope of the founders of the EU—Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Walter Hallstein, Altiero Spinelli and others—was to create new forms of identity that would replace the national feelings of the European people. They were moved by the belief that national feeling is exclusive and, when challenged, belligerent, and they were seeking a more open and “softer” alternative.
It’s important to note that those founders recognized that this “European” identity did not yet exist. This was an identity that, however gently, however insidiously, was to be imposed from the top, the creation of another New Man in a century of New Men.
Scruton:
There are other ways of building trust than those exploited by the nation state. Urban elites build trust through career moves, joint projects, cooperation across borders and what John Stuart Mill called “experiments of living.” Like the aristocrats of old they form their networks without reference to national boundaries. They do not, on the whole, depend on a particular place, a particular faith or a particular routine for their sense of membership, and their language is the international language of commerce. In the recent vote they would have experienced little hesitation in saying we should remain in the EU, since it threatens their way of life, if at all, only at the margins. However, even in post-modern conditions, this urban elite depends on others who do not belong to it: the farmers, manufacturers, clothiers, mechanics and administrators for whom attachment to a place and its customs is implicit in all that they do. It is surely not difficult to imagine that, in a question that touches on identity, the producing classes will very likely vote in another way than the urban elite—the consultants, financiers, academics and denizens of the art-world—on whom they depend in the end just as much as the urban elite depends on them.
And Scruton highlights the implacability of the European project, a project that only knows one direction, an implacability that is both a source of strength yet, quite possibly, a dangerous fragility.
Increasingly, many Europeans no longer wish to obey orders issued by foreigners whom they never elected, or to sacrifice their national interest to an agenda dreamed up 70 years ago by people long since dead. The real problem, as I see it, is that the European people have not been merely subject to a treaty, but governed by it. They have surrendered their law-making powers to an institution that has no ability to respond to what the people want, rather than to what was laid down in the original instructions. Like the Bolsheviks, the Eurocrats imposed a form of government that cannot adapt, that has no reverse gear and which must be going ever “forward,” even if it is forward to destruction. It is surely time for the whole continent to awaken to this folly. For it is true in politics as it is in biology, that the failure to adapt is the prelude to extinction.
But that ‘extinction’ could be a very long time coming. In the meantime, the continuation of the EU in its present form will represent the extinction of the Europes that could have been, Europes shaped by modern realities rather than ancient fantasies, Europes where a Brexit would not have been necessary.
Scruton laments the choice posed by the EU referendum:
I therefore regret that the choice that was offered to us in the referendum was simply whether to “remain” or to “leave.” For neither of those decisions can bring us any nearer to what is really needed, which is a new treaty, one adapted to Europe as it is now, a treaty that will answer to the growing reluctance of the people of Europe to be bound by post-war illusions and post-modern visions of community.
He’s right, but the EU has ensured that such a treaty has never seen the light of day, and probably never will.
All that was left to the Brits was a yes or no, a maddeningly crude binary that reflected the reality of a hobbled, hollowed-out democracy.
Yes or no was what it had to be.
Brexit: Yes Or No Was What It Had To Be