When working overseas in some trouble spot with dubious governance, endemic corruption and self serving elites, it is quite common to meet aid workers who are British (me, for example).
We have, on the whole, have been used to working abroad and mostly ignoring what has been going on at “home”, because in the past there has always been a solid gold guarantee that not too much will ever change, and “home” will always continue to be the same decade after decade. Solid and stable, as it has always been.
But now Brexit has changed all this. The rest of the world has watched, half appalled, half tickled, as the UK experienced about 48 years worth of intrigue in the first 48 hours after the vote for Brexit (when measured on a UK scale of political craziness and instability). In many ways, the UK has become a lot more like the field. And with the very idea of Britain being under threat, you might soon meet Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish aid workers instead. As you all kindly step in to help us navigate this maze, here are a few things that everyone could learn from the Brexit mess.
- When your country is going through an unprecedented level of political turmoil, it’s not always fun to listen to foreigners making jokes about it. Some British people – very few obviously, but a few – may have been guilty of doing this to locals in the past, particularly when we are in expat bars in “interesting” places with a few beer inside us. But now that many of my friends from the despotic or corrupt countries I’ve worked in have begun making jokes about the UK, I understand that this is wrong and unfair. As a British aid worker I am, of course, taking this as an opportunity to strengthen my cross-cultural sensitivity skills and increase my empathy with people in situations of political fragility and economic uncertainty. However, I would like to respectfully decline any offers of mediation/ monitoring of the electoral process from my Facebook friends in countries that have a “more stable” leadership structure.
- Let us note that despite the instability and chaos caused by Brexit, the utilities still work and the trains still run on time (more or less, anyway. I’m told that there is a bit of a crack-up going on at one railway company). For a country who has created a meme about “Keep calm and carry on” – we British really should.
- For all the professionals in the aid sector with challenging passports, it must be interesting to see us freaking out about possibly losing the right to work in 27 other countries without a visa. At this time, British aid workers like me need to remember that it will still be possible to just turn up and visit, often for up to three months or so. We will not have to plan our trips several weeks in advance, spend half a day queuing and then tell an embassy our life story including marital plans, bank details and how our careers are going just fine where we currently live – thank you. Freedom of movement is a relative thing, and we British still have a lot of it. Even post Brexit, there are a lot of equally skilled field colleagues who would quite happily swap with us the level of visa free travel that their passports can give them.
- If some of your British friends are worried about Scotland leaving and what this will do to our country, it is worth noting that any split is likely to be more Czech Republic/ Slovakia rather than north/ South Sudan. For over a hundred years the football teams have been separate and this has not been the end of the world. The Romans seemed to able to make it work. It is highly likely that post-Brexit we post-British will too.
- If you are Scottish, the plus side of independence will be that foreigners will no longer confuse you with the actions of the English – both past and present. The Scottish can be the Canadians to our Americans when the London government decides to do some intervention somewhere (probably in the Middle East). I can see a future full of backpacks with Scottish flags sewn onto them.
- As a British aid worker overseas, I have worked on many, many programmes where democratisation, good governance and citizens empowerment are key themes. So what can we learn from Brexit? For those who believe in a future of closer international co-operation and interdependency, it seems to indicate that democracy and empowering people to make their own decisions can have its downsides. Working overseas in some “new or transitioning democracies” I have met several aid workers who have concluded that giving people the vote has increased ethnic tensions, created interesting new divisions and helped to forward the interests of self serving corrupt elites at the expense of everyone else. But obviously this doesn’t hold true in the case of the UK. Oh. Hang on.
- Brexit does cast aid worker generalisations about the “maturity of the local democratic culture” in “the field” into sharp relief, particularly when you see some British citizens talking about how they voted and why. Maybe people make suboptimal democratic decisions when they are presented with bad choices, whether the democratic culture is mature or not? Boiling down a complex set of issues around the UK’s European identity, globalisation, immigration, macroeconomics, future opportunity and how much you like (or don’t like) Boris, into a simple yes or no answer was bound to lead to problems. This may also be the case in other places when you introduce democracy into ethnically fractured societies and give people a choice between one lot of people with guns who might abuse them and another who definitely will, given the chance.
- Finally, if there are any of our American aid worker friends out there enjoying the spectacle of Brexit a little bit too much I would remind them that Donald Trump is still very much in play. Please, please, pay attention. It really can happen.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter.
