The UK left and the EU Referendum

There is no coherent left argument for exit, it just looks like there might be. There has been a notable lack of real enthusiasm among the UK left for the EU, and that has opened up all opportunities for the exit campaign. My suspicion is that the treatment handed out to Greece during the financial crisis is a real problem for a lot of people. The hope that the social democratic model could be saved by Europe hasn't work out. Moreover I cannot think of anyone who thinks the current shape of the confederation (and that is what it is, not a union) is optimal.

But we are not being asked what kind of European Union we want to be part of, though if it is to survive that is clearly going to have to happen and won't be at all easy. The question being asked of the electorate in the UK is in or out, and the answer has to be in.

The European Union was created because the European states system, based on the balance of power, did not work. More specifically, the three major imperial states (four if you include Russia, but that gets complicated), could not reconcile their sovereignty doctrines, and claims to act independently, with limited forms of democratization, without in turn destroying international peace. The point of the EU is to depower toxic large-state nationalism and to articulate some kind of cosmopolitanism that doesn't replace more local loyalties, but tempers them.

We should not underestimate how close to the surface the old loyalties lie. In my own view, the recent historical work on the commemoration of the First World War has gone dangerously close to celebrating the passions and commitments that drove Europeans to slaughter one another. I'm constantly perturbed by how unaware some of my colleagues seem to be of the nostalgia for uncomplicated identity that infuses their writing.

Obviously the exit of the UK will not cause a European war, but UK exit from the EU would injure, possibly fatally, the project of creating a reasonable, livable Europe. Even if we could go back to a past of independent sovereign nations and uncomplicated identities, who would want to? And the question that is really pressing is not would we want to like in that kind of Europe, but would we want to live in that kind of UK? The real nightmare is a revived agressive British nationalism that would threaten the complex, plural political experiment that, almost unnoticed, has been going on across the whole British Isles for the last thirty years.