While America was gripped by the double anxiety of a raging pandemic and the desperate and unlawful attempts of an outvoted president and his die-hard and misinformed supporters to cling on to power, the world also witnessed another sobering event, the Brexit. Great Britain at long last was leaving the European Union, making the British channel again more than a mere geographical divide.
I call Brexit a sobering event because to me it is one more reminder of how difficult it is for humanity to build inclusive and enduring bonds and stay together. The tendency toward fragmentation reminds me of the biblical story of the tower of Babel. Men and women worked together to built it. But then as they were coming close to their goal, God decided to give them different languages. Cooperation became impossible and the project collapsed. Humankind would splinter into different factions, each going its own way. The fact that God’s will was the culprit of this fragmentation does not make it any less unfortunate and over time destructive.
In today’s world, the role of a religious God is played by a host of humans playing god, equally determined not to let humankind come together. These human gods take the form of ambitious politicians or selfish business people. Fragmentation, that is, the “Us” versus “Them” divide becomes to some the road to power and treasure. Such gods wrought Brexit by telling an anxious working class of Britons lies and half truths about Brussels bureaucrats, hostile immigrants and the promise of renewed glory for Old Albion.
The move to an untethered Great Britain harkens back to the idea of nation-state. The idea that a country with greater national, religious, and cultural cohesion is a more effective administrative unit. But the record is mixed. The Greek city-states thrived as independent entities while external threats were effectively managed. But disunited they eventually fell to the armies of Macedon. The disparate Hellenistic kingdoms became renowned cultural centers, but they, in turn, succumbed to the power of Rome. The Roman Empire, first based in Rome and then in Constantinople, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and the Soviet Union all ruled over dozens of people with different ethnicities, languages and creeds.
All these (and other empires) were militarily strong, kept land roads and sea lanes free, and protected their peoples from foreign enemies. They did unify large parts of humanity but under autocratic rule that did not always respect the rights of different ethnic and religious groups. When dogmatic religious or political ideologies prevailed, these empires would also squelch cultural, intellectual, and artistic creativity. When years ago, I read Jacob Burckhardt’s history of Renaissance in Italy, I could not help but realize how Renaissance blossomed out of the independent city-states of Venice, Florence, Padua and Genoa which let the arts and letters thrive by fending off Rome’s Papal power. Soon after that, the creative explosion of Renaissance emerged not in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire but in independent and more democratic Holland. A century later the political, social and commercial preconditions that led to the rise of free markets and capitalism first took hold in England, not the rigid multi-ethnic monarchies of continental Europe.
So, the lesson of history is that large state conglomerations project power and stability but often stifle individual rights, creativity and innovation. Nonetheless, this is not an argument one can raise in defense of Brexit. Great Britain is not escaping an autocratic empire. It leaves a union of democratic states each with enough autonomy to foster creativity and innovation, and all dedicated to civil and individual rights. The European Union is the first experiment in history where independent democratic countries decided to cede some of their sovereign power in the interest of pan-European peace and a common future. If the concept of the nation-state after the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 was the right solution to bring an end to the religious wars of Europe, equally consequential was the Treaty of Rome in 1957 that established the European Economic Community as the solution to putting an end to disastrous intra-European national conflicts. It is against this bigger purpose any cost and friction of a unified Europe must be stacked against.
It is, therefore, from this big-purpose project Great Britain is walking away. And what an irony this is! The same Great Britain that had no qualms about ruling over half the world in the name of the Crown, it is now the country that balks at a European order in which it had an equal voice, a voice it deprived of its imperial subjects.
Around the time Great Britain was embarking on its empire-building project, here in America, a newly independent country was embarking on a novel experiment of forming a multi-ethnic democratic state within its borders. Unlike the British project of joining foreign people from all corners of the globe under British rule, the American experiment was to become the home of people from around the globe governed by a constitution of the people.
As it happens with all undemocratic empires, in time, the people that made up the British Empire split off in order to pursue their own national destinies and Great Britain itself retreated to its geographical and national borders. That’s a devolution not open to America. Here we are destined to live together – multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-creed. We have no internal borders behind which we can retreat and live in racial, ethnic and religious purity.
That’s why the trends of racial friction and the rise of religious and white nationalism we have seen in recent years should be sobering to all Americans. The American like the European Union project is to teach people the possibilities of “We” in contrast to the fear of “Others.”
So, to me Brexit means walking away from building a “We” world just like the splintering of Americans by race, creed, or any other divisive idea is walking away from the original American project of building One out of Many.
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