Don't be terrified, do relax. But this is interesting. In case you
have not heard much about "Brexit," Great Britain, after a popular
vote, is slated to leave the European Union over the next two year
period. Update after comment: Do remember, we did this. Please see at the bottom after the quotations from this article.
"Brexit
is terrifying — and no, not because of the economics," updated
by Zack Beauchamp,
Vox, June 24, 2016.
It sounds to me as though Brexit was in large part a reaction to the
huge rise in inequality in Britain in addition to xenophobia. We
certainly have both of those things progressing here in the United
States, the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer--vastly
richer(!), what with the huge increase in the size of the financial
sector--and fear of aliens--just not quite as sharply. But Zack
Beauchamp also places emphasis on the idea that globalization has
made making war more difficult, because it is more difficult to make
war when you need your enemies' products to build your war
equipment. The author expresses concern that an increase in
independence could lead to a reversal of the difficulty in having
wars.
The quotations below are just a taste, a teaser. I am leaving out a
lot. The article has graphs and charts.
"'What’s terrifying about Brexit [is] that a lot of the global
economy takes certain rules of the game as given," Dan Drezner, an
expert on the global economy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, told me. "They’ve assumed for quite some time
— really, the past 70 years — that the global economy is moving in
one direction, and that one direction is towards greater openness.
... Those rules of thumb are now being thrown out the window.'
"This global order depends crucially on a set of supranational
institutions, like the EU. These institutions can only function if
member states can keep nationalism in check and submit to a shared
framework for governing the world. The global order has served us
astonishingly well, making the post–Cold War era the richest and
least violent time in human history.
"But that optimism is now threatened. British voters, motivated
largely by xenophobic nationalism, have opted out of one of the
pillars of the postwar order, the European Union. For the first time
since World War II, Western nationalism has beaten globalism in a
major way......"
"......Those two things — migration and a shared set of institutions
— are the very rules that integrated Britain into the EU economy and
helped it prosper. A little less than 50 percent of UK exports go to
the EU, and most experts believe that losing privileged access to EU
labor and import markets would shave a significant amount off
British GDP.
"Yet British voters [especially from low income areas] took a look
at all of that and said, screw this. We want to keep immigrants out.
To hell with supranational institutions. We want our country
back......"
"......According to Bell, these lower-income areas aren’t places
that lost out recently due to the financial crisis. It’s about a
legacy of poverty and inequality. 'The shape of our long-lasting and
deeply entrenched national geographical inequality that drove
differences in voting patterns,' he writes.
"These people had little reason to believe Britain’s status quo was
benefiting them. They had no reason to restrain their fear and angst
at seeing foreigners and no resources for understanding the way in
which immigration benefited the UK as a whole. They also had no
reason to trust UK or EU elites, or their dire warnings of impending
economic doom, given their catastrophic mismanagement of the 2008
financial collapse and the eurozone crisis.
"Instead, they saw more and more foreigners coming into the country
and understood it as a threat to their way of life. Fear of
foreigners is deeply ingrained in British national culture, as it is
almost everywhere. Polling data shows high levels of hostility to
immigrants
going
back decades, and mass immigration brought it to the
fore......"
"......Britain leaving the EU is by far the biggest blow to the
liberal system to date. The financial crisis may have been more
damaging the world, but it wasn’t an explicit rejection of the
global system by voters in an advanced democracy. The low-income,
low-educated voters in the UK haven’t seen the benefits from
globalism, didn’t understand them, or — most worryingly — cared less
about those benefits than they did about keeping out foreigners.
"The thing that is truly scary about Brexit is that
it may be just the beginning. Donald Trump is the presumptive
Republican nominee, and anti-immigrant populists are surging in
polls in
France,
the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. These countries, too,
have low-income, low-educated voters who don’t see the global
order’s greatest benefits.
"The concern is that politicians in these countries
marshal the same xenophobic nationalism that fueled Britain's
Leave campaign and use it to push their own countries out of
various parts of the global order.
"'I hope this victory brings down this failed project
and leads us to a Europe of sovereign nation states,' Nigel
Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and one of the
driving forces behind Brexit, said in his Friday morning victory
speech. 'We'll have done it not just for ourselves, we'll have
done it for the whole of Europe.'
"Farage’s hopes, experts say, are not entirely in
vain. 'The [fear] is that the UK exit will encourage a lot of
other rejectionist forces to call for national referenda for
exiting the EU,' Drezner says. 'In that case, God knows what the
hell happens in Europe.'......"
"......You can see how badly this could go.
Instability in Europe rocks the US economy. The recession elects
Donald Trump. Trump’s rejection of international institutions and
norms further destabilizes the global economy, which leads to the
election of right-wing populists in key countries like Germany and
France, who deliver the coup de grace to the EU. This creates
further economic instability, breeding further discontent, which
pushes voters even further to the extremes.
"It’s a vicious cycle — the precise opposition of the
virtuous one created by global institutions. By keeping major
powers united politically and keeping global markets open, these
institutions reduced the incentive for conflict. In the absence of
major conflict, countries grew wealthier and more integrated,
which in turn reduced the risk of conflict further. On and on
again.
"But Brexit raises the prospect of a reversion — of
one shock to the system begetting another. Each shock undoes a bit
of the global order, which makes people poorer and angrier,
begetting more xenophobia and international tensions. As
xenophobia and international tensions rise, markets panic, making
everything worse."
-------------------------------------------
I just received a comment from a friend that reminded me of the
content of this message,
sent
3/15/16 "We" did this: "Voices from Syria: 'This camp is a
paradise compared to life back home,'" as a major causal
factor in Brexit and in the similar social upheavals listed as going
on now in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. It is also
clear that the wealthy and the poor might have similar interests about
who they want as neighbors. The wealth have a much easier time
separating themselves from undesirable neighbors than do the poor,
who have great difficulty in finding the resources with which to
move. It appears that the native poor in Briton would prefer not to
have to try to do the same thing that many poor and middle-class
Muslims are trying to do after what we and our "friends" have done
to them--that is, the European poor might find it difficult to up
and move to some more congenial place after the Muslim migrants move
in from Syria and possibly from other places that we with some minor
assistance from our "friends" have destroyed, such as Iraq.
Larry
