I agree with that, and as a matter of fact, it may be a good thing.
I’ve thought for over 15 years that a multi-speed Europe was the way to go. It actually already is like that (Schengen, the Euro), but in such a limited way. It’s always been clear to me that there was a significant divide between the core members (the Inner Six) and those that followed. Recognizing this and dropping the absurdly rigid “we must all agree on everything before making any progress” dogma would have allowed countries to integrate at their own pace and only if/when they were ready to. It’d also have probably spared us that Brexit debacle.
Some of the “newcomers”, even recentish ones, appear eager to embrace the core members’ vision (Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Spain and Portugal). Others seem a bit more skepitcal and nationalistic-leaning (Denmark, Austria). Greece… has its problems. And the UK, as much as it pains me to say it, was always a major, whining PITA.
Finally, the “Eastern Wave” of the early 2000s may have been a mistake. A move that was both noble and pragmatic but which led to real problems. Listening to Hungarian or Polish leaders, it’s clear that they come from a very different reference point. And of course, it’s played into the hands of the “we’re not racist but we’re concerned about ethnic homogeneity” crowd. I must admit I’m a bit surprised by the veer to the right in the Czech Republic, though. I always saw it as the most Western-looking of these countries.
I lived and worked in Prague for a couple of years and it doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s a very white city with hardly any ethnic faces apart from the vietnamese that run all the convenience stores. A lot of the locals say bad things about ‘gypsy scum’. which basically includes Romanians, Hungarians and anyone else they don’t like.
It’s easy to use the phrase ‘I don’t see colour’ because most days you wont.
However, I was talking from a broader perspective, not just the immigrant issue. It seemed to me that, among the Eastern newcomers, the Czech Republic was the most open to the European ideal and the less likely to fall for Anti-EU skepticism. I guess I was wrong .
The idea of “Western” civilization was always sort of an illusion. Europe isn’t a civilization, it’s a geographical entity comprising multiple different and incompatible civilizations. On some measures like openness to immigration, Eastern Europe is probably the most ethnocentric / tribal places in the world (I am not saying that as a criticism), much more so than Africa and moderately more so than the Middle East, and a recent very interesting poll suggests that most Poles and IIRC Czechs don’t consider themselves ‘western’ but rather part of distinct cultures under thread from the west.
I was surprised by the election results from the Czech Republic but for very different reasons: the Social Democrats and Communists there had taken a reasonably critical stance on immigration / refugees as well, so I assumed that would insulate them from election losses, but it didn’t.
I don’t question the rest of your post but I find this initial assertion… weird.
Of course, “Europe” is a geographical concept first, but claiming that there isn’t such a thing as “Western” civilization strikes me as totally specious. We’re talking about countries which share* :
A double cultural heritage (Greco-Roman + Christian).
A common linguistic origin (Indo-European, except for Finnish, Hugarian, Estonian and Basque).
A series of caracteristic artistic trends (Gothic, Romanticism, Modernism), genres (the Tragedy, the Novel, the Symphony) and techniques (polyphony and counterpoint, realistic portraits - including nudes)
An emphasis on the scientific method, rationalism and secular humanism.
A rather unique experience with colonialism on a global scale.
Yes, there are some differences between various countries, some major but you just have to travel a bit to realize how some other cultures have wildly opposite values and worldviews. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never felt out of place in a European country. I need a couple of days to adapt to some superficial differences and I’m good to go, because the way we think and act are very similar throughout Western Europe, precisely because of this widely shared background.
Perhaps we should start another thread.
This list isn’t meant to imply that Western Civilization is “better” or more “advanced” than others.
Yes, I very strongly disagree with your thesis here, although it’s a rather common one. I’ll respond to your points but not in order.
“A shared history of colonialism” really only applies to the big Western European nations. Scandinavia and the Baltics participated in colonialism only to a small extent, and the nations that were part of the eastern empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey) not at all. This is actually a really important explanatory factor, I think. I think a lot of liberal thinking on ethnicity , race, etc. in America, Britain, France, etc. today is driven by (understandable) guilt for the many horrible things that we did to peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas. This isn’t a sentiment that Eastern Europeans sympathize with, and I suspect the thinking is “why should we feel historical guilt for things that we had no responsibility for?”
Sharing a religion doesn’t really make two people, or countries, part of the same civilization. The bloodiest conflicts, after all, usually happen within religions, not between them (Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians have all been historically even tougher on their own heretics than on nonbelievers, although Christianity was pretty tough on nonbelievers too). Lots of countries outside Europe have a history of Christianity as old as any (Ethiopia, for example), but I wouldn’t consider Ethiopia to be part of the same ‘civilisation’ as England. There are multiple different Christian civilizations just as there are multiple Buddhist and Islamic civilizations. For that matter, Islam builds on the Greek intellectual heritage to some extent as well.
Shortly before the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the Grand Duke of the Byzantine Empire is supposed to have said “Better the turban than the mitre”, i.e. that he’d prefer to submit to conquest by the Turks than to embrace Catholicism and ally with the west. I think that says something interesting and important about the extent to which eastern Christians and western Christians, then and now, see themselves as part of the same civilization.
Again, I think the real thing that convinces me is to look at, e.g., the Inglehart-Welzel map of cultural attitudes. Eastern and Western European societies are, on the ‘survival vs. self expression’ axis, very far apart indeed. They’re much closer on the secularism vs. tradition axis (i.e. eastern European societies are secular without being liberal). Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world - Wikipedia
there’s even a little evidence in the last five years they’ve been moving farther apart, see the video here:
The level of discourse in the British media around this has been frankly appalling. This from the BBC’s Political Editor is beneath contempt. Dismissing Irish concerns about a border that crosses the country but also apportioning blame on Ireland for no solutions being readily proffered. It reeks of privilege and the cravenness of the British Establishment and media to come to terms with the true implications of the Brexit vote.
Both for the immediate and palpable economic concerns regarding cross-border trade (much of the border region is amongst the poorest parts of Ireland and Northern Ireland as a whole is one of the poorest regions in Northwestern Europe) and the more grave risk of stoking up violence again, the above statement is pathetic. The Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, is about as far as you can get from being an Irish Republican ideologue in the Irish political mainstream. His back of the envelope cost/benefit analysis of Brexit leads him to the obvious conclusion that a hard Brexit would be a disaster for Ireland, north and south.
I read that BBC piece as reporting on other people’s opinions, rather than necessarily endorsing them. That’s the BBC for you, anodyne by statute. She even links approvingly to an Irish article which takes a different view.
Just to expand a bit on this, consider these four entities
A) GB (England, Scotland and Wales)
B) Northern Ireland
C) The Republic of Ireland
D) The rest of the EU
The current political situation is thus, with respect to customs union, freedom of movement etc:
There can be no hard border between A and B - it’s the same country after all
There can be no hard border between B and C - because of, amongst other things, the Good Friday Agreement.
There can be no hard border between C and D - that’s the full EU, and C will be a member ongoing
Given that the current idiots in government want to leave the customs union and the single market:
There must either be a hard border between A and (B + C + D) or between (A + B) and (C + D)
The former breaks the integrity of the United Kingdom (and if that happens Scotland will demand to stay in the customs union, single market too), and the latter leads to, well, a return to a darker past.
The current UK Government is basically sticking its fingers in its ears about this issue. It doesn’t help that the Tories are barely holding onto power by openly bribing the DUP. The Irish Government isn’t exactly stable either.
I’ve gone back to thinking that Mrs May is just playing the long game - muddle through as if in denial for as long as possible, watch the contradictions pile up until the whole thing collapses in chaos, and then offer a second referendum with the expectation we stay in the EU. Because, there really is no good outcome for the UK otherwise. The Irish border issue is unresolvable, there is no good trade deal, there is no taking back control, there is no good economic outcome, there is no limiting immigration below the jobs available. And Mrs May, despite her lack of political skills and charisma, is sharp enough to see all this, and ruthless enough to do it this way.
She might possibly see it that way. Whether she is that sharp, or that ruthless, is open to doubt - she’s not been known for sudden surprises or flexibility in the past, her present situation doesn’t give her the majority to be ruthless, and her attempt to get such a majority turned out to be a complete misjudgement. As indeed was her insistence on pushing ahead with triggering Article 50 with no more than the back of an envelope to show what the government thought it wanted out of it; but that’s water under the bridge.
If this is true, at what point in the last 40+ years did it become true? Which treaty made it unresolveable? because I don’t recall that ever being put to the people.
As it happens I do agree, the history of the EU has been irreversible integration by incremental legislation. Make it more and more difficult for any country to take a backward step. Thing is though, this was always going to come to head and far from being the fault of the current lot, this is on the heads of every previous government that failed to admit to the path that the country was taking and the fact that previous treaties are practically irreversible.
And in the middle of all this, Fianna Fáil, the party holding up the Irish government through a “confidence and supply” arrangement, start throwing shapes about a general election :smack: A general election that literally nobody in the country wants or thinks is a good idea now.
I’m as far as you can get from being a Leo Varadkar supporter but I can’t really fault how he and his government are dealing with this particular crisis. The UK is entitled to leave the EU if it wants to but it isn’t entitled to breach its obligations under other agreements including the GFA. If it wants the GFA to be renegotiated it needs to open up that dialogue now. Otherwise, it needs to find a form of Brexit that is compatible with those obligations. If this means a Brexit that isn’t as Brexity as some hardliners want, that’s not Ireland’s problem to deal with.
Personally I’m particularly interested in seeing how this pans out for the DUP. Hard to imagine any good outcome for them.
This thread is about that very thing - Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement. The mechanisms that delivered a reasonably peaceable outcome to NI rely heavily on an open border with the other half (three quarters, whatever) of the island. Close the border and suddenly not only do the mechanisms not work as well as they need to but the republicans immediately get riled (followed by the unionists getting riled because the republicans are riled) and pretty soon a few hotheads (of which NI has its share and then some, alas) start thinking unpleasant thoughts.
Which is not to say that extraction from the EU is impossible without regressing to a darker, bloodier time, but it would require careful planning and negotiation, something the current government is showing no signs of. And it’s certainly not possible with the DUP in its current elevated position of influence.
Thing is, the difficulties Sandwich raises don’t really stem from greater political/legal integration. They’re more economic.
Unresolvable Irish border issue: This stems from Britain leaving the Customs Union (which we voted on in the referendum in 1975). Once ROI becomes the external border of the EU customs union, there has to be a hard border because that’s what how customs work.
No good trade deal: Well, there is. It’s called being part of the EU single market. If we choose not end that deal, it shouldn’t need to be spelt out that alternative deals will one way or another, fall short of that. It is literally impossible for an alternative deal to make it easier to trade with the EU than being in the single market does. And again, this a fundamental matter that goes back to our initial membership, not some new development or consequence of some arcane Brussels regulation.
There is no taking back control: actually I think there is. Albeit it’s an incredibly vague phrase, we seem to be manoeuvering towards going our own way on regulation, going our own way on immigration controls and going our own way on corporation taxes etc. To get that control we have to give up some of the benefits of integration, but we’re all grown-ups who know you can’t have your cake and eat it.
No good economic outcome: probably not (see above on trade deals). It’s likely (but not certain) that inward investment, for example, will fall because Britain will no longer be an entry point to the single market. But again, that’s not because the EU have passed legislation making it so. It’s a consequence of putting up barriers to trade.
No limiting immigration below the supply of jobs available: again, nothing to do with EU regulation. Britain has historically high employment rates and low unemployment rates. There are just not that many Brits looking for a job. If there’s an opportunity to create jobs by investing, those jobs will have to be filled by people outside the UK. They might be Poles, they might Australians, they might be Indians. But if there are 500,000 vacancies and 400,000 Brits seeking jobs, there will be 100,000 immigrants. Or we don’t let 100,000 immigrants in and the jobs go unfulfilled and we lose all the benefits of the jobs and profits and wealth creation we could have had.
This is all a fundamental paradox of Brexit. Before June 2016, if you asked even the hard-core leavers (your Bill Cash, Teddy Taylor or Dan Hannan types) they’d have told you straight up that they thought the economic side of the EU was great, that they loved the free trade and the common market which we’d signed up for, and that their problem was only with the creeping centralisation of the EU with respect to interfering in domestic policy on e.g. prisoners voting, foreign policy and other non-economic issues. And yet, now that Brexit is happening, it’s all about leaving the customs union, leaving the single market, undoing trade harmonisation and generally unpicking the economic side of EU membership. And it’s happening because there is no blueprint for Brexit and none of these guys had an actual plan. Which is why we now are where we are on Ireland: the consequences were obvious to people who thought through the issue, but ignored by those demanding change.
Okay, let’s say animal cunning rather than sharp and ruthless. She’s certainly no four dimensional chess playing leader like our colonial cousins are blessed with.
I agree her majority doesn’t give her scope to ruthlessly push through Brexit on behalf of the rabid wing of the Conservative Party. And that her attempt to get such a majority showed that the nation wasn’t in that space either. There is no plan for a successful Brexit, but triggering article 50 was what the Brexiteers demanded, and not triggering it would have the nationalists and socialists up in arms about a stab in the back.
As I said, following the will of the people to the letter to the best of her and her party’s ability, while the contradictions and impossibilities stack up remorselessly. It’s not that she is failing to deliver the gloriously successful Brexit we were promised, it is that that dream is unrealisable. She is waiting for a clear majority of the country to come to that conclusion too.
Or, she is just an ageing life-long politician who grabbed her last chance for the top job while it was there. But it could also be both.
I was using ‘Irish border issue’ as a shorthand for the Good Friday Agreement. I don’t know if that is really a treaty, but it is the basis for the constitutional settlement between the republic, the province* and East Britain. It also has dozens of provisions which are effectively unworkable without Northern Ireland staying in the European Union. Pick any two from three:
peace in Ireland
Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom
Great Britain leaving the jurisdiction and institutions of the European Union
for some reason, I initially mistyped ‘province’ as ‘problem’. Ho ho ho
.
