On “Brexit”
To understand the threat to the European Union, you must consider the three thousand years of total war that preceded it.
For the better part of three thousand years, Europe bled for gods, kings and tyrants. Despite the best intentions of its many statesmen, the fractured landmass of myriad peoples, cultures, and beliefs devoured itself in a constant cycle of conquest and hegemony culminating in the loss of nearly an entire generation — more than 50 million souls— between 1914 and 1945.
The incommunicable experience of those wars, and the unimaginable prospect of some future conflict featuring nuclear weaponry, counseled a different course. Hubris would give way to humility; political rivalry to economic cooperation. The peoples of Europe would come to appreciate what they shared, rather than what set them apart. So began the project we now know as the European Union.
This is the lens through which we must understand the referendum through the United Kingdom elected to leave the E.U. last month. Not tax imbalances, “terrorism,” or even nativist anti-immigrant xenophobia — though each of these strawmen merit essays of their own — but the virtually three thousand years of total war that preceded it.
Human memory is short, but it is important not to understate just how significant a departure the last 71 years of relative peace and stability in Europe has been. It is an absolute historical aberration. By some calculations, the European continent has fought more wars than any other, and according to some historians, owes much of its technological achievement to an insatiable thirst to make war ever more efficiently and effectively. But beginning in 1945, annualized European battle deaths have been a infinitesimal fraction of their recorded historical averages dating back to 1400.
This Pax Europa was the careful product of deliberate acts afforded by unique (if tragic) circumstances. It amounted to the fabrication of an entirely new political identity, right down to a new, distinctively “European” symbolic constellation of values, norms, and institutions — right down to the format of the common currency (think of those classically-themed but non-existent monuments printed on Euros, and the way they imagined an idea of a singular phantasmal European civilization). It was an imposed artifice, and maybe it was doomed, but it provided a necessary predicate — the pacification of Europe — for global stability and prosperity.
And now, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, the crowd moves to unravel it. After the British exit and inevitably survive the short-term fiscal consequences in spite of the EU’s best efforts to make their departure as painful as possible, the continent’s Eurosceptics will be emboldened to make their moves. The Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Austrians, and French could each be next, and NATO could itself dissolve, in what could well become a violent lurch back toward a 19th century concert of power that not even Bismarck could permanently tame. Nuclear armaments might temper the violence where they exist, but spur arms races where they don’t. Land skirmishes might be few, but tripwires may crop-up on borders where trade and travel once flowed freely.
From a purely democratic or even republican perspective, these challenges merit no more than a shrug. Though a democrat might begrudge the irresponsibility of British politicians for enabling or encouraging the result, she cannot deny that this is the express mandate of the majority— however dimwitted and vile. And while that idiotic xenophobia and its resulting initial financial shock might be the story today, the judgment of history could well be very different.
