In recent years, Euroscepticism has frequently been associated with the right of the political spectrum in the UK, but a number of figures on the left have also voiced their support for the country leaving the EU. Imke Henkel writes that while criticism of the EU’s handling of the Eurozone and migration crises is understandable, such problems should be used as the basis for stronger engagement from the British left at the European level.
Among the British press, which overall shows a bias for leaving the EU, the Guardian is seen as one of the few papers with a friendly attitude towards remaining. However, there are pro-Brexit voices within the Guardian, too. On 20 May, Larry Elliott, the paper’s Economic Editor, made his argument for Britain to leave the EU: “Brexit may be the best answer to a dying Eurozone”. The piece culminated in the provocative conclusion that the EU was “the USSR without the gulag”.
The article sparked a strong response from the Guardian’s former Director of Digital Strategy, Wolfgang Blau. The German born journalist had moved to the Guardian only in 2013 from his previous role as editor in chief at the German digital publication Zeit Online. He left after just two and a half years in December 2015 to become the Chief Digital Officer at Condé Nast International. In February 2015, Blau had been one of four candidates in the internal hustings to succeed the outgoing Guardian-editor Alan Rusbridger. With just 29 votes out of 964 Blau came last by a wide margin. Still, his early departure from the Guardian surprised many in the industry.
Blau’s reaction to Elliott’s plea for Brexit was fierce: “Why I left the Guardian” he headed his objection. Elliott’s position, Blau argued, was more influential, as well within the Guardian as for its readers, than the superficially pro-EU stance of the paper: “What most continental European media seems to miss is that these [Elliott’s views] are mainstream Labour and Guardian positions, despite Mr Corbyn’s current and very, very late endorsements of the EU with its – as he put it – ‘warts and all’. Referendum or not, Brexit or not, these positions will remain a potent factor in the UK for years to come.”
Euroscepticism and the left
This controversy offers some insight beyond the quantitative research conducted by the Reuters Institute into how newspapers influence – and indeed accord with – their readers. What Blau’s response exposes is a clash between the British and the continental European view of Europe. I hail from the continent myself (Germany) and have lived in Britain since 1998. I am acutely aware of this rift.
Elliott’s comment fits into a narrative that will chime with many British readers. He argues that the EU’s relentless neoliberal politics caused the economic misery of countries including Greece, Ireland and Portugal, as well as Finland and even Germany. He claims, with some justification, that the euro was misconstrued and concludes that staying in the EU would shackle Britain to a currency zone that is doomed: “The left-of-centre case for divorce is that Europe doesn’t work, is not remotely progressive and is heading for an existential crisis anyway.”
Elliott claims to write a critique of the EU from the left, but philosophically he stands on the same ground as his right wing opponents. His argument derives from a British exceptionalism that is the mirror-image of the post-imperialist revery of right-wing Brexiteers. For anyone coming from the liberal left on the European continent it seems extraordinary that the answer to the existential problems which currently grip the EU could be to shrug and leave.
The claim that the EU is fundamentally the community that preserves peace, democracy and human rights in Europe frequently generates derision. Brexiteers tend to dismiss this argument, especially when put forward by a German national: to make this case is simply proof of a German guilt-complex as well as a specific German gratitude towards an institution that allowed the historical sinners back into the international community.
This is a nationalistic and narrow minded view. But it has shocking echoes in Elliott’s Brexit-piece. Making German redemption and power the linchpin of the EU ignores the many European countries that came out of dictatorship into the community: Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the Eastern European nations. To call the EU “the USSR without the gulag”, as Elliott does, betrays, if not ignorance of, then at least insensitivity for European history. It also curiously echoes Boris Johnson who found that the EU reminded him of Hitler.
Like the right-wing Brexiteers, Larry Elliott also judges the EU mostly from an economic viewpoint. I happen to agree with his criticism of the design of the Eurozone. I agree that the neoliberal austerity policy promoted strongly by the German government is coming close to destroying Greece – and, I would add, via this route the EU. I do not, however, agree that a Brexit will cure any of this. That it will be a healing shock, as Elliott puts it, is naive and a feeble excuse for national egoism (‘let’s get out and let them deal with the mess’). How would a Brexit help austerity-savaged Greece or Portugal? Does Elliott seriously believe that Britain leaving the EU would shock Mr Schäuble into finally agreeing to debt relief?
The EU and democracy
But what about the democratic deficit? This, again I agree, is a gigantic, troublesome problem. The EU is distant, difficult to understand, often non-transparent. However, the EU is not un-democratic. Like the British government, the European institutions are legitimised through a representative democracy. The British prime minister is elected by his party, not the people. This is why within this parliament we will see a prime minister who will have been elected by 130,000 Tory members and still govern 60 million Britons.
If we were to argue that the EU is democratic, then we would point out that EU commissioners are appointed by national governments who have been elected by the people. But indirect democracies also need several layers of elections and appointments to remain operable. Too many layers might render the process undemocratic. Then reform is needed. But again: You do not get reform by sulking and turning your back.
However, the undemocratic nature of the EU is the most persistent British myth on both the left and right. As Paul Mason, another left-wing Eurosceptic Guardian-commentator puts it: “in Britain I can replace the government, whereas in the EU, I cannot.” This is not true. The EU parliament is elected by the European citizens in each country. The EU Council consists of elected ministers and head of states of each country (and the Commission is, as stated above, appointed by national governments and subject to a vote by the European Parliament).
The EU’s problems are well-known. It faces a gigantic risk of diluting its values of freedom, democracy and human rights through its diabolic entanglement with the autocratic, human rights violating and journalist imprisoning regime in Turkey. European democracy is under threat in Poland and Hungary, not to mention the short-sighted strangulation of Greece that Elliott – and Mason – rightly attack. And we need to find a solution to deal with the millions of poor and violated people from outside Europe seeking to enter the continent.
But all this is not a reason to avert our eyes and retreat from the firing line. It is, instead, the reason why the British left should make a strong case for greater engagement at the European level. Europe needs the cool headed British voice. We need the excellent, world class British diplomats, economists and intellectuals to address these problems. Make the EU do what it should do.
However, to many British readers – and journalists – exceptionalism comes so natural that they do not even recognise it as such. And liberal, left-wing writers don’t spot the similarity between themselves and right-wing positions on the EU. They are influential, because their view sits all too well in the British narrative of Europe across the political spectrum.
This is what increasingly exasperated Wolfgang Blau, and indeed other continental European journalists at the Guardian. The Guardian might publish a greater number of pro-remain than pro-leave articles as the Reuters Institute established. From a liberal continental European perspective, however, the views it expresses are not so dissimilar from those calling for Brexit.
____
Note: This article was originally published on EUROPP – European Politics and Policy.
Imke Henkel – University of Lincoln
Imke Henkel is a Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Lincoln. She also writes about British politics for Zeit Online. Between 2004 and 2014 she was the London correspondent for the German news magazine Focus. Before that she covered the British economy and British businesses for Süddeutsche Zeitung.
It is nicely written about anything, unfortunately. I struggle to understand why an idea of preserving one’s own home rendered as exceptionalism. Then in case if we don’t want to be exceptionalists we should all fall off a cliff like lemmings? That would be a solidarity I believe as opposite to exceptionalism. Europe doesn’t want to reform and isn’t showing any signs of reformation. The opposite is actually true, so why to insist on this mesalliance ?
I would like to take this discussion/debate on to a much deeper level in order to avoid the simplistic binary of democratic versus undemocratic.
If we view and disect the various Eu institutions on a continuum of political power then I would argue the following.
1. The Eu parliament has the least amount of executive power to form new eu laws or amend treaty. The obvious democratic deficit here is that MEPs are elected on a national basis only so UK citizens have no or little informed democratic knowledge to politically affiliate with like-minded MEPs and their policies on a European scale. This democratic deficit obviously exists for all European citizens which leads to an overall political incoherence and fragmentation which does not exist within nation-states. As a result, the perceived level of democracy within a national democractic framework is viewed as much higher and much more coherent compared to perceived levels of democracy with the Eu democratic framework. This is especially so because the policy of 27/28 of MEPs is either factually unknown or factually considered irrelevant due to varing national circumstances and concerns. Whilst it could be argued that this disparity of policy relevance also exists on a national level, national social media outlets tend to create a fairly high degree of coherence from these national disparities and as a result national parties will invariably and to varying degrees incorporate this coherence into their policies. This simply does not occur at a European level to any significant degree. In this respect, the democratic deficit is a result of no coherent European polity.
2. The Eu Commission which does have much more executive power to propose new eu laws or amend treaty in its capacity as a governing civil service body is not directly elected by a voting public electorate but only by proxy vote. This is not dissimilar to proxy democracy when selecting leaders within national political parties but this does not detract from the fact that this is merely a form of selection rather than a form of election which could be loosely described as a form of internal democracy. In this respect, the democratic deficit is a direct result of the Eu commission wishing to maintain a centralised control of the Eu project of ever closer supranational union.
3. The Eu Council contains more executive power. Similar to the Eu commission, heads of state are selected although they do represent political parties that have been publically elected. Therefore, their selection is through a process of internal democracy as opposed to being elected by a publically voting body. In this respect, the democratic deficit is a result of the democratic deficit that exists when internal democracy takes precedence over a public wide vote which is similarly exists within national based democratic systems.
4. The Eu Treaties have arguably the most amount of executive power since they enshrine Eu policy which is not elected by a public body but is again selected and maintained through internal democracy. This is where the most radical democratic deficit exists since democracy is the process by which a voting public electorate can choose which policy they wish to live with over a finite period of time. In this respect, the democratic deficit is a result of prioritising historical-based policy over and above the current and future concerns of a voting electorate which might even be described as embuing the features of totalitarianism.
Overall it can easily be seen that the degree of democracy present within an independant sovereign democractic nation-state is significantly higher than the degree of democracy present within the EU whether in cultural terms, political terms or policy-making terms. This is particularly apparent when a distinction is made between elective democracy and selective democracy with the former most typifying a sovereign nation-state and the latter most typifying the EU. Perhaps most importantly, whereas national policy arising from an independant sovereign state is largely determined by a voting public through elective democracy, policy arising from the Eu is largely determined by national representatives who themselves have either been selected on the basis of selective democracy in the case of the Eu council or in the case of the Eu Parliament, have been selected by elective democracy, but the degree of political coherence is so low as to make it ineffectual as a means by which a voting electorate can directly address its concerns as a political body.
This last point is largely due to the lack of a coherent European political identity which may or may not be desired by the European population as a whole. Whilst the Eu project of ever closer union might go some way to resolving this issue, in the long term it will undoubtedly mean the end of national sovereignty which may or may not be a good thing. However, since no evidence based research exists to support either case, only conjecture and opinions, then this issue remains unresolved. One obvious dynamic that needs to be considered is the merits and dismerits of localised as opposed to centralised policy making and whether subsidiarity as a top down version of decentralisation is more or less effective than sovereignty, being more of a bottom up form of decentralisation. In this regards, which of the two would better meet the ecological, social, economic and political needs of the human and nonhuman inhabitants of Europe and the World at large.
Therefore, when considering the merits and dismerits of sovereignty and subsidarity, is this research question better answered by experimenting first on a national scale as opposed to experimenting first on a European scale? If applying the precautionary principle, as usually promoted by the Eu and other research institutions, then the tendency will be to first experiment at a localised scale which in this case means the national scale. This means that Brexit could offer the possibility of exploring this dynamic between sovereignty and subsidarity decentralisation which could not occur whilst remaining within the Eu, due to the policy constrictions inherent within the Eu treaties. So far from being UK exceptionalism, Brexit is an opportunity to explore and to help resolve the many social and ecological problems associated with Eu exceptionalism.
In conclusion, in solely simplistic binary terms the EU is significantly less democratic than an indpendant sovereign nation state especially if elective democracy is considered a higher form of democracy compared to selective democracy. Brexit is an opportunity to explore the dynamic between sovereignty and subsidiarity on a national scale which could inform the problems associated with Eu exceptionalism.
Re: “The claim that the EU is fundamentally the community that preserves peace, democracy and human rights in Europe frequently generates derision. Brexiteers tend to dismiss this argument, especially when put forward by a German national: to make this case is simply proof of a German guilt-complex as well as a specific German gratitude towards an institution that allowed the historical sinners back into the international community.This is a nationalistic and narrow minded view.”
And are you really going to argue that this has nothing at all to do with Germany’s support for the EU and it’s comparatively (at least by British standards) relaxed attitude towards the erosion of national sovereignty? Really?
“However, the undemocratic nature of the EU is the most persistent British myth on both the left and right.”
What myth? The peoples of Europe have, as a point of fact, rejected ever-closer union repeatedly in the past, only to be told to keep voting until they get the answer right. Sometimes its even more brazen: when the French and Dutch voters voted down the European Constitution, their governments simply reintroduced it as the Lisbon Treaty — and this time denied them a vote. In the UK, meantime,polls have shown for over 30 years that only a small minority (20%) want “more Europe.” Yet despite the fact that the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties would never have passed had they been put to a national referendum, UK governments signed up to them — even after violating promises to give us a referendum on the last. These are real issues and they are fundamentally democratic issues.
It’s not about British exceptionalism (whatever that is) it’s about the majority of Britons’ opposition to political unification with the continent.
You may not like said opinion, but it is that of the overwhelming majority of the British people.