(np) Where are we now?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

The new /London Review of Books/ has a number of interesting statements 
on the Brexit. And though I doubt that the left will "find constructive 
answers", the following analysis by Wolfgang Streeck appears especially 
instructive to me:

> The  decomposition of the modern state has reached a new stage, in the very 
country where the modern state was invented. It was the UK under 
Thatcher that blocked the development of the EU into a supranational 
welfare state on the postwar British model associated with Keynes, 
Beveridge and T.H. Marshall. Since then the neoliberal revolution, led 
by the US and the UK, has for ever closed this window. Instead of 
protecting Europeans from the maelstrom of the world market, the EU has 
turned into a powerful engine of liberalisation in the service of a deep 
economistic restructuring of social life. Under the aegis of the EU, the 
UK has reverted to being two nations, a nation of winners using the 
globalised world as their extended playing field, and a nation of losers 
driven from their commons by another firestorm of primitive 
accumulation. Seeking refuge in democratic protection, popular rule, 
local autonomy, collective goods and egalitarian traditions, the losers 
under neoliberal internationalism, unexpectedly returning to political 
participation, place their hopes on their nation-state. But the existing 
architecture of statehood is no longer designed to accommodate them, 
certainly not in the land of Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. Here, those 
lucky enough to command subnational political and institutional 
resources, in Scotland in particular, hope to use the EU’s supranational 
state regime to break up the national state regime of the UK, /nota 
bene/ to regain and extend local control, and clearly not to cede it to 
an authority even more remote than London.

Discontent is widespread. In many other European countries, a similar 
referendum would have had a similar result. Clearly supranational 
superstate-building has failed as a political programme, and so, as is 
now becoming apparent, has the centralised market-building nation-state 
designed by Thatcher. What comes next? The extent of post-referendum 
confusion in Britain shows how difficult the issues are. That, for 
different reasons, the Leave supporters had no Plan A, and the sitting 
government no Plan B, should not be a surprise. What is surprising are 
the calls for another referendum, Brussels style, ‘until they get it 
right’ – and more surprising still is the anti-Corbyn putsch got up by 
the same Blairites who were so crushingly deserted by Labour voters. The 
agenda is daunting. How to balance local and cosmopolitan identity, and 
how to deal with their different combinations of places, classes, 
interests? How to combine local protection and global participation? 
Distinguish protection of traditional ways of life and diversity from 
xenophobia and racism, and progressivism from elitism? Where to draw the 
lines, where to open up, to defend borders, work out compromises, accept 
living with conflicts and contradictions, and respect passions and 
interests that we don’t share?

In the end it will be up to the left to find constructive answers. At 
the level of European institution-building, one might think about using 
the impending negotiations on Britain’s links with the remainder of the 
EU to make Europe more flexible, less hierarchical, more voluntary, and 
more in line with what is called ‘subsidiarity’ in Eurospeak. A Europe 
of ‘variable geometry’ might be attractive not just to post-membership 
Britain, and pre-membership Scotland, but also to the small countries on 
the margins of today’s EU, like Denmark and Switzerland, not to speak of 
would-be countries like Catalonia or, perhaps, Wales. I could imagine 
something like an EU-lite, a platform for voluntary co-operation between 
countries and regions through treaties and conventions, a flexible 
social compact of self-governing political units, often smaller than the 
large nation-states of today and taking advantage of their small size 
and the associated ease of movement and decision-making to position 
themselves productively in the global system, according to their 
specific resources and capabilities. Such a structure would have to be 
created bottom-up, bypassing the would-be Leviathan, or Behemoth, in 
Brussels; it would offer an alternative pattern of European integration 
and perhaps of modern international statehood, below the superstate 
envisaged under the ‘ever closer union’ formula of the old, now outdated 
treaties, and open to all EU member countries, including members of the 
EMU. (Interesting models of a two-level currency union are now in 
circulation.) Not a Europe of two speeds, as French and German 
integrationists have sometimes proposed, but one of two kinds, competing 
for national and subnational adherence until France and Germany are left 
as the only members of the old Brussels establishment. <

Wolfgang Streeck


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now



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