The decision by British voters to exist the EU (you’ve had it up to here reading about the issue, but bear with me) is not the end of the world, but it’s the end of Great Britain as we have known it for the last 300 years — and potentially the end of the EU as well, a noble experiment that began in 1957 as the Common Market, aimed at ending centuries-old bitter antagonisms, military conflict and intercontinental feuding that saw Europeans lunging at each other in two deadly wars in the first half of the 20th century alone, that resulted in the slaughter of roughly 80 million souls.
The experiment began optimistically: Let’s initially work toward economic integration, facilitated by the creation of a common currency, a common parliament, a common central bank and the free flow of peoples from one member state to another, followed progressively by political concord — a noble experiment indeed.
In the wake of WWII, after it lost its colonies and its supremacy as a world power, Great Britain went from being an “empire on which the sun never set” to an island nation that combined England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as one kingdom. Sure, that represented a stark diminution of Britain’s former exalted status, but the UK remained nevertheless the largest island nation in Europe and the 9th largest in the world, with the second largest economy in Europe and the 6th largest in the world.
Now that kingdom is likely to shrink further, as the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish — who in the recent referendum had voted overwhelmingly against Brexit — begin the process, as seems likely, to go their own separate ways. As equally likely, copycat member states of the EU may be emboldened to follow suit, with disastrous consequences for that experiment that has been 60 years in the making.
England’s insular tendencies and, in recent years, xenophobic fears of the “other,” whether the other is a Pole or a Pakistani, have sadly gotten the better of it. And once a collective drive, propelled by such sentiments, slips into full gear, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop.
The idea that animates the EU is not just noble, but one that makes sense in the global dialogue of cultures, at any time in history, anywhere around the world — the idea that when different peoples, nations and cultures are brought together as one entity representing unity within diversity, the entity becomes bigger than the sum of its subsystems. And Ancient Greece — yes, let’s go that far back — set the tone and gave us proof of that.
After what scholars of Ancient Greece have called the Great Dark Ages, from the 11th to the 9th centuries BC, dozens of city states emerged (consider here Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, Argos, Megara and of course Athens), each with its own government, army, navy, its way of doing things and, well, ethos (a word that they gave us) that often warred against each other and occasionally traded with each other. But only when they banded together for protection against outsiders, say, the Persians, or actualized their innate need for unification, the Greeks found themselves thrust beyond their fixed meaning, thus enriching the world with their civilizational effusions.
In like manner, when the Islamic Commonwealth of Nations was established in the 7th century, it fared just as well, because its founders did not care if the citizens of that transnational, transcultural, trans-linguistic polity were black, white or brown, Oriental, Levantine or African, Muslim, Christian or Jewish. They did not care if those citizens were what we today call Indians, Afghans, Chinese or Indonesians — so long as they were productive members of the Commonwealth. Islam, you see, preempted the American Constitution by well over 1,000 years by positing the notion that “all men are created equal.”
And that is why, drawing on resources from the teleological spirit of their history, modern Arabs around the turn of the 20th century sought to establish the “Arab Nation,” united by one ideology within a single territorial homeland.
But there are times when nations, propelled by rampant populism and venomous nationalism, much as that we see in Europe at this time, develop implosive impulses towards self-destruction. And Britain typifies that phenomenon, a phenomenon, so far as anyone is able to take a coherent view of it at all, has bedeviled philosophers of history, all the way from the Muslim historiographer Ibn Khaldun, in “Muqqaddimah” that discussed how human communities lose their “assabiyeh,” or élan, to the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who defined it in his seminal work, “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930) as a “death wish,” to Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who in his breathtaking “Crowds and Power” (1960) argued how sometimes the interplay of crowds results in self-defeating, self-destructive resolutions.
Do we, as human beings, have something of the lemming within us? Looks like it when we look at Britain today.
We are still too close to the fact to say so, but the end may be nigh for Europe — the kind of end that only its worst enemies may wish upon it.
The experiment began optimistically: Let’s initially work toward economic integration, facilitated by the creation of a common currency, a common parliament, a common central bank and the free flow of peoples from one member state to another, followed progressively by political concord — a noble experiment indeed.
In the wake of WWII, after it lost its colonies and its supremacy as a world power, Great Britain went from being an “empire on which the sun never set” to an island nation that combined England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as one kingdom. Sure, that represented a stark diminution of Britain’s former exalted status, but the UK remained nevertheless the largest island nation in Europe and the 9th largest in the world, with the second largest economy in Europe and the 6th largest in the world.
Now that kingdom is likely to shrink further, as the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish — who in the recent referendum had voted overwhelmingly against Brexit — begin the process, as seems likely, to go their own separate ways. As equally likely, copycat member states of the EU may be emboldened to follow suit, with disastrous consequences for that experiment that has been 60 years in the making.
England’s insular tendencies and, in recent years, xenophobic fears of the “other,” whether the other is a Pole or a Pakistani, have sadly gotten the better of it. And once a collective drive, propelled by such sentiments, slips into full gear, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop.
The idea that animates the EU is not just noble, but one that makes sense in the global dialogue of cultures, at any time in history, anywhere around the world — the idea that when different peoples, nations and cultures are brought together as one entity representing unity within diversity, the entity becomes bigger than the sum of its subsystems. And Ancient Greece — yes, let’s go that far back — set the tone and gave us proof of that.
After what scholars of Ancient Greece have called the Great Dark Ages, from the 11th to the 9th centuries BC, dozens of city states emerged (consider here Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, Argos, Megara and of course Athens), each with its own government, army, navy, its way of doing things and, well, ethos (a word that they gave us) that often warred against each other and occasionally traded with each other. But only when they banded together for protection against outsiders, say, the Persians, or actualized their innate need for unification, the Greeks found themselves thrust beyond their fixed meaning, thus enriching the world with their civilizational effusions.
In like manner, when the Islamic Commonwealth of Nations was established in the 7th century, it fared just as well, because its founders did not care if the citizens of that transnational, transcultural, trans-linguistic polity were black, white or brown, Oriental, Levantine or African, Muslim, Christian or Jewish. They did not care if those citizens were what we today call Indians, Afghans, Chinese or Indonesians — so long as they were productive members of the Commonwealth. Islam, you see, preempted the American Constitution by well over 1,000 years by positing the notion that “all men are created equal.”
And that is why, drawing on resources from the teleological spirit of their history, modern Arabs around the turn of the 20th century sought to establish the “Arab Nation,” united by one ideology within a single territorial homeland.
But there are times when nations, propelled by rampant populism and venomous nationalism, much as that we see in Europe at this time, develop implosive impulses towards self-destruction. And Britain typifies that phenomenon, a phenomenon, so far as anyone is able to take a coherent view of it at all, has bedeviled philosophers of history, all the way from the Muslim historiographer Ibn Khaldun, in “Muqqaddimah” that discussed how human communities lose their “assabiyeh,” or élan, to the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who defined it in his seminal work, “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930) as a “death wish,” to Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who in his breathtaking “Crowds and Power” (1960) argued how sometimes the interplay of crowds results in self-defeating, self-destructive resolutions.
Do we, as human beings, have something of the lemming within us? Looks like it when we look at Britain today.
We are still too close to the fact to say so, but the end may be nigh for Europe — the kind of end that only its worst enemies may wish upon it.
