Brexit

[jsburbidge]

From 1066 until 1558 the territories of the English Crown included some land in the continent; this ended only with the loss of Calais to the French. Until the Nineteenth Century, the monarchy laid claim, officially, to the title of King (or Queen) of France.

 

England remained tightly involved in Europe's shifting politics, to the point of going to war with the Dutch under Charles II; being ruled by a Dutch king from 1688 until William of Orange's death; fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession; getting a set of German monarchs whom it still has not left behind - Victoria grew up more German than English. England was involved in the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Crimean War, all as a result of a combination of interest in the other side of the channel and involvement in continental alliances. That's not even beginning to deal with the 20th Century.

 

England, and Britain as a whole, have never been in any meaningful sense independent of Europe. (The Scots were linked to the French and the Low Countries when they were a separate country.) Even Caesar's invasion was a response to Brittanic support for the Gauls.Brexit is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of English history, just as it is based on a further misunderstanding of economic and technical history: the brief pre-eminence of Britain economically between the mid-Eighteenth Century and the early Twentieth was a one-off chance produced by a relatively open and unified society (which provided fertile conditions for the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions) and enhanced by the equally accidental presence of major reserves of coal and iron. Well before the First World War it was being overtaken in both productivity and innovation by the Germans and the Americans. (These days, by GDP, Britain and France are tied almost neck-and-neck and both are well behind Germany; its economy is one-eighth the size of the EU.) Britain no longer really "punches above its weight", if it ever really did  - at least since Suez.

 

It has had its chance to decline gracefully, trading power for tourism by retaining its trappings. It has now rejected that chance, choosing instead to hold onto the threadbare rags of an imperial illusion. Where it will be by this time next year is anybody's guess.

Comments

[graydon]

Brexit is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of English history

Sold as, but based on a desire to loot an entire wealthy nation's public sphere.

There's a lot of delusional politics involved in the execution, but the reason and the motivations are simple and rational and even moral if you're a mammonite.

I keep hoping someone with suitable scholarly credentials will do a history of England as a pirate state. I think that's more correct than not, and it might give people a way to think about the empire as a nuanced mistake.

[jsburbidge]

The same would apply to the Dutch, the Portugese, and arguably the French (pirate state status). The French are iffy only because of their more continental orientation.

The driver from the moneyed classes of a hoped-for bonanza from getting rid of EU regulation is undeniable. What I find interesting is the way in which the leaders seem to have consumed their own propaganda. Johnson is no doubt an outlier (= "useful idiot" in the terms of an earlier age), but Gove et al. have departed from consensus reality in ways which are likely to damage their own interests.

I have just been reading about London in the 19th Century. There are some alarmingly relevant parallels to the short-sightedness of the ways in which those in power approached social problems then and the way their successors are doing do now.

[graydon]

Definitely the Dutch and the Portuguese. (Note the long English-Portuguese alliance!) I think the French aren't, mostly because overseas possessions never became central to the national self-conception.

People flee facts because facts are intolerable. I think there's a strong parallel between in the 19th and the rise of the common man (sitting on industrialisation, but also the period between 1860 and 1915 when power meant rifle regiments and there was no way around it) with the consequences for the elite exercise of power and the present, where anybody paying attention realises who is going to be blamed for climate change and recognises that the kids already think that murdering a few hundred billionaires is an obvious and necessary thing to do on the way to solving the problem. It results in similar la-la-la-I-can't-hear you notions of permanent exaltation and eternal access to power in the elites of both periods. Which in turn results in poor decisions from any external perspective, but completely inevitable and necessary ones form inside the worldview.