Brexit: Splendid and tragic, brave and cowardly

No reader of the Washington Examiner will be guilty of the crudity of mind of mere pundits. Brexit’s final implementation is tragic, splendid, perverse, brave, spiteful, glorious: It transcends simple accounts. In Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, he writes:

Politically, Britons faced a binary decision: remain or leave. Historically, we can all have broader sympathies. I do not know which to prefer.

The following 13 things, which seem to contradict one other, are simultaneously true.

I

Brexit risks economic self-harm.

II

Brexit is extraordinarily bold. Academe, the press, and almost the entire political class all backed “remain” at the 2016 referendum. Their warnings were extreme. The electorate chose to be audacious and has not repented.

III

Brexit is the partial defeat of a heroic experiment.

In 1494, Europe entered a period of general warfare. Systems of alliance dragged the whole continent into more and more enormous wars, eventually enveloping the planet. After 1945, there was an attempt to transform warlike Europe into a zone of peace and economic fusion. This imaginative, daring endeavor succeeded, astonishingly. Today sees its great reverse. Russian President Vladimir Putin waits to conduct us back to before 1945.

IV

Brexit is less sharp a change than it looks. The final settlement will probably be “soft,” with Britain closely aligned with EU law.

V

Brexit’s old hat, the culmination of a 70-year debate.

As post-war Western Europe coalesced into what was then disarmingly called the Common Market, the British establishment thought, in a troubled, discontented way, that it would be better, or less bad, to be in the EU than out. Many in Labour were against joining such a capitalist club. Most Conservatives were glumly in favor, and the oily Edward Heath signed the accession treaty in 1972. Three years later, with the entire national press (but one communist rag) campaigning “yes,” along with the leadership of both main parties, a referendum approved continued membership.

Yet, the minority did not accept defeat, and, within a few years, it became clear the debate hadn’t been laid to rest even among the elite. Britain had not signed up to any one thing. The whole point of the “European project” is that it’s not a thing: It’s “progress towards an ever-closer union among the peoples.” Every judder along the track toward a federal Europe disconcerted the English. Membership in the union could never be settled. Rancor tended to grow. Government after government was ruined by a stale, intractable debate voters were keen to put behind them.

VI

Brexit is the correction of a historic mistake.

When Britain first applied for membership, it was twice vetoed by Charles de Gaulle. Brentry would threaten the “break-up of the community,” he said, claiming the Anglo-Saxon realm “does not at present belong to Europe as we have started to build it.” Under de Gaulle’s weaker successor, the British were allowed in, but de Gaulle was right: They’ve always been troublesome, bad tenants who never felt at home and might now make good neighbors.

VII

Brexit is an example of anti-immigration populism, like the election of Trump.

VIII

Brexit is nothing of the sort. In many circles, it’s still not respectable to be “leave” — all “leavers” (including, let us recall, a third of Britain’s racial minorities) must be xenophobic half-wits, they say. That’s a snobbish delusion.

Equally deluded is the idea that all “remainers” are unpatriotic decadents for whom England is just one region in a postnational social democracy.

The millions have more complex convictions.

IX

Brexit undoes a fraud. The ruling class was disingenuous about selling accession to the people. The diplomat who negotiated British entry, the wonderfully named Sir Crispin Tickell, admits, “From the beginning, we were joining more than just a free trade area. Heath knew the EU would evolve towards a political union. We didn’t have great arguments about the ultimate destination.” The politicians assumed the people could be brought around to the thrill of integration. The people resented being hoodwinked.

X

Brexit is an existential expression of national destiny. Since the 16th century, when England lost its last continental possessions and evolved a religion separating it from both Catholic and Protestant Europe, there’s been a sense of the uniqueness of the English nation. Scotland and Wales, inasmuch as Wales is a nation, don’t share this. In William Shakespeare’s Brexit-y play Cymbeline, the islanders decide that they won’t pay tribute to the continent. “Statist though I am none, you shall hear the legions sooner landed in our not-fearing Britain than any penny paid.” The British win, then, in an Olympian gesture, accede to Europe anyway:

Sovereignty, the ultimate freedom of England to choose its fate, matters more than legal and financial arrangements.

XI

In the course of the 20th century, every nation in Europe fell to the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, or both, was itself involved in atrocious aggressions, or survived through ignoble neutrality. After 1945, the harrowed, ruined states of Europe clung together. The kind thing to say is that they wanted to surmount history, especially the Nazi concept of inevitable war, an endless “class struggle between nations.” The unkind thing to say is that they’d lost their right to nationhood and knew it. A few days ago, the European Commission’s Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, asserted, “The European dimension gives more strength to our own national patriotism.” That’s an axiom or truism in Brussels, not in England, which generally looks back on 20th-century history without shame.

XII

Brexit represents a failure of the party system. The Conservatives were not held to account by Labour under the unspeakable Jeremy Corbyn, a Marxist republican pacifist sullenly hostile to the EU (as to NATO). He wouldn’t let Labour take a position. Johnson’s Brexit won by default.

XIII

Brexit’s an opportunity for the European Union. The federalist project has just lost its main obstacle. We may live to witness the emergence of the world’s richest megastate, the revival of the Roman Empire.

Richard Major is a novelist living in Virginia. His eighth novel, Piracies, was published in January. His website is www.RichardMajor.com.