Brexit is overwhelmingly analyzed as a British phenomenon, to be “understood” in narrowly British terms, even though, through the eyes of a Europeanist like me, it’s just one more event in a much broader story: the transition from the bipolar Cold War world to something different, something that remains to be created and institutionalized.
Something more traditional.
I don’t see Brexit as a revolutionary event.
It looks rather like a continuation of the end of the post-war world, which itself was a most unusual period: there was no major war, and two superpowers could dictate major world events.
In that unusual period, various myths were generated, of which the most important (and most misleading) was that, henceforth, international conflicts and disagreements would no longer be military, but economic (one of Bill Clinton’s favorite mantras).
This myth went hand in hand with the notion that liberal democracy was henceforth the model for the whole world. You remember “the end of history,” don’t you?
That being the case, it followed that borders were anachronistic, and national character could be undone.
The European project was based on these fantasies.
Helmut Kohl, the driving force behind the creation of the eurozone, embraced the ugliest stereotype of his own people.
Left to their own devices, he thought, the Germans would kill again.
Therefore they must cease to be Germans and transmogrify into Europeans, and the solvent that would dissolve German national identity was to be the euro.
If you ask the French, Italians and Dutch how that worked out, they will tell you that the Germans now rule Europe thanks to the euro; military force is no longer necessary.
All over Europe, you will find people intensely disgruntled with German power, who bridle under Ms Merkel’s diktats, and yearn for greater independence.
For extras, the Brussels bureaucracy turned out to be obnoxiously intrusive and corrupt.
Finally, there’s a revolt against political correctness.
The people despise the current elites, both because things are tough and getting tougher for most people, and because the political class is manifestly afraid of the self-declared enemies of the West. Listen to Pierre-André Taguieff:
"The elites also face the accusation of being blind, complacent, or powerless to manage new threats to nations:
first, massive and uncontrolled immigration;
and, second, what looks like a new Muslim conquest, backed up by various Islamist movements’ theories (from pietistic Salafists to Jihadists[14]).
These two reasons for fear and self-defense take on a broader significance, even a tragic sense, in a context marked by the crisis of the welfare state and the failures or the pernicious effects of human rights based politics.
On both fronts (immigration and “Islamization”), strictly “humanitarian” politics are impossible. They are pseudo-politics, or, more accurately, they belong to the impolitic, because they disregard the fundamental fact…that it is not us who designate the enemy, it is the enemy that designates us, regardless of our “genuflections, bows and other claims of benevolent understanding.”
