Anthony Barnett, speaking at Occupy Democracy, letmelooktvI don’t know about you, but I am in bad company – the company of everybody else. I have scorned Britain’s self-described “Eurosceptic” prime minister and his Remain camp for being self-contradictory. He claims his deal delivers an unbelievable “best of both worlds” when by solemn treaty it means the UK commits itself to “facilitate” an ever-closer political union that he abhors. I have scorned the self-described “liberal-cosmopolitan” ex-mayor of London and the cohorts for Leave, as being self-contradictory for heralding an unbelievable economic renaissance to be brought about by independence from the EU thanks to returning democracy to Britain, meaning elective dictatorship. In a coming chapter I will scorn the leader of the Labour party for being self-contradictory if he wants to install the most left-wing government ever in the UK (which I applaud) while saying sweet Fanny Adam about the democratic challenge the EU presents (that the Leave campaigners are so right to pose), for to be left-wing and not constitutionally democratic is not to be left-wing at all. For this week’s example of being self-contradictory see Paul Mason’s scorching assault on the EU as the authoritarian host of “rentier monopoly corporations, tax-dodging elites and organised crime”, which we must nonetheless remain in to “bide our time”.
And now for mine. Hopefully it is only a mote and not a beam in my own eye but I support DiEM 25, the Democracy in Europe Movement, with its call to “Democratise Europe, or it will disintegrate!” I think this makes sense, as a way needs to be found for the EU to become a democratic process for Europeans or it can’t survive. But it must seem contradictory to call for membership of something that has to be dismantled if not overthrown! Just like everyone else, in this strange referendum, I am arguing against myself while trying to appear completely convinced of the coherence of my position.
Why this set of tensions? The answer lies in the EU. I’m a war-baby, I first hollered in the months that German and Soviet armies battled through the winter for Stalingrad, to determine the European outcome of the second world war. In my lifetime the European Union is the most successful, progressive project of political transformation and human improvement bar none. Yet today it is an engine of division and reaction. The sequence that led it from its incredible benefits to its current disastrous influence is buried in the genome of its conception. But so too is the energy and life-force that has helped lift a continent from a nightmare of war, genocide and destruction to freedom, wealth and collaboration. To be for it, is to be against it. While the most interesting of the Brexiteers, Boris Johnson, is against it to be for it.
