Give me a one-handed economist, the US president Harry Truman is reported to have said in frustration at the way his advisers would balance any view with a case for the opposite. Seeing both sides stimulates the mind but paralyses the will. It is useful to know the contents of the other hand, but action means grasping just the one.
In the closing days of a campaign, politicians do not have the privilege of admitting the strengths in their rivals’ case. But columnists do. Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that I intend to vote Remain tomorrow. I could rehearse economic arguments that have been better expressed elsewhere, but in truth my support for the cause is cultural and historical. Acloudy instinct crystallised into conviction over a decade ago when, as a foreign correspondent in former Soviet republics, I watched the boundaries of liberal democracy, the rule of law, civil rights and prosperity advance eastwards under the administrative rigours of EU accession. The process was imperfect, and vastly superior to the alternative – a slide back towards Kremlin vassalage.
So count me in. But there is always the other hand. And in a spirit of candid ambivalence that politicians cannot indulge, I want to confront the argument advanced by leavers that I find most disconcerting. I don’t mean the argument that has been most effective, which is the claim that quitting the EU slams the brakes on mass migration. There is equal potency and mendacity in the promise of national redemption by thwarting a phantom horde of rapacious Turks, but another Guardian rebuttal at this stage is not going to shift the dial of public opinion.
The argument that gets under my skin, the itch I must scratch before polling day, is made by liberal, internationalist leavers (who should be feeling sullied by complicity with the tactics their official campaign has deployed). It is this: what if we accept that the EU fulfilled its mission to neutralise the ancient bellicosity of rival nations, but then lost its way so badly that the benefits are being reversed? What if the project of integration that was meant to inoculate Europe’s tribes against national chauvinism has been driven too far, so that it has become, instead, an incubator hatching the beast it wanted to slay.
The case study for this view is the cycle of resentment between Athens and Berlin in negotiations over the terms for a Greek bailout. In Greece the deal was depicted as an extortion racket, with punitive austerity demanded by Angela Merkel, manifesting her country’s famous domineering impulse. In Germany the same dynamic was construed as ingratitude from a wastrel country that cheated its way into the euro, squandered the proceeds and expected taxpayers in more frugal countries to foot the bill.
A shaky compromise was reached, but not before ugly caricatures had been disinterred from shallow graves in Europe’s recent past. The underlying problem is that a currency union needs a facility for rebalancing between rich and poor areas. That is easier within nation states than it is when one people’s earnings must be transferred to foreign coffers. Political elites presumed a level of economic solidarity in the formation of the euro that raced ahead of actual fellow-feeling among Europeans. That, it is claimed, makes an aggressive backlash inevitable.
And even if Britain is permanently excused participation in that rickety enterprise, Brexiters warn that membership of the wider union guarantees contagion when the nationalist fire catches. This account is unnerving because it strikes at the moral core of liberal pro-Europeanism. Those of us who see virtue in a project born of collective atonement for the atrocities of the mid-20th century must confront the possibility of chronic malfunction. What if a machine designed for cooperation has become an engine of discord?
But even in a dystopian account of Europe’s evolution, it is hard to see how unilateral withdrawal does anything but accelerate the danger. There is a strain of apocalyptic relish in British Euroscepticism that wants the EU to fail so much it sees only the evidence to prove failure inevitable. The wish is father to the thought.
Meanwhile, other member states and European institutions muddle through their various crises, driven by a will to make the project work that is constantly underestimated on this side of the Channel. It is easy to point at design flaws in the EU architecture, but worth also pausing to admire the resilience of institutions and diplomatic relationships that have shown more flexibility than critics will ever admit in managing simultaneous shocks: Russian military adventurism; jihadi terrorism; population migration on an epoch-defining scale – all against a backdrop of economic stagnation, with the tremors of the great financial crash still reverberating.
Under the circumstances it is reasonable to doubt the capacity of the EU to contain, let alone dispel, destructive centrifugal forces. But it is tendentious to fashion that anxiety into a fatalistic view of the European project as a conveyor belt towards calamity. Such pessimism presumes that people have no choice but to channel fear and frustration into tribal nationalism directed at incumbent elites. Of course that is what the Brexit ultras would have them to do, but there are other ways – other political traditions – through which insecurity and anger can be addressed.
The EU is not a separate, autonomous power in Europe. It is a collective mechanism for national politicians to deal with their problems. It is only seen as the enemy of democracy and prosperity when national politicians collude in the fiction, written first in Britain, that “Brussels” is something extrinsic and alien to their own domestic cultures. If that notion takes hold – and the UK experience advertises its shabby utility to every self-serving maverick and opportunist – the continent really is in trouble.
Even when pondering the gloomiest prognoses for Europe it is hard to conceive of any circumstances where British interests would not still be served by membership of the only forums available for managing interlocking crises. But it is also horrible to think that the virus of EU-phobia might be our parting gift to neighbours with whom we have spent a generation in common endeavour; that tomorrow’s vote might be the start of a nationalist conflagration. If the tinder of European discontent is so dry, please let it not be British rage that strikes the match.
