Brexit, Nationalism and the Dark Side of Democracy

The biggest event in world news in the past week was of course the results of the United Kingdom’s referendum over whether to leave the European Union. Though the polls had been quite close in the run up to the election, most people, even including some of the leaders of the Leave camp, expected the Remain side to come out on top. To the surprise of almost everybody, the Leave side won, by a small but clear margin. Since then people have been trying to figure out not only the consequences that might be expect to arise from the vote, but also why it went the way it did.

While the Leave camp made a number of arguments about why leaving the EU would be good for the UK, they were mostly distorted or outright false. The money the UK gives to the EU is easily outweighed by the benefits it gets from membership, and while there are no doubt quite a few unreasonable regulations imposed by the EU bureaucracy, I would suspect that in fact most of them are justifiable and even necessary. What’s more, if the UK wants to maintain a close economic relationship with the EU, which some of the leading Leave politicians claim to desire, it would have to keep complying with many of the regulation, at least as far as goods being exported to the EU are concerned. The reactions of the currency market and stock market show that investors take a very pessimistic view of the economic consequences of the vote, and though the markets do sometimes overreact to political events, in this case they seem likely to prove right. A more reasonable criticism of the EU is that, like so many other governments around the world, it sometimes seems to work more in the interests of big corporations than ordinary people, and the EU specifically is overly fond of austerity measures that hurt most people (without really solving the economic problems they are supposed to address). But it seems unlikely that the kind of right wing government that is likely to be formed in the wake of a British split from the EU will be substantially different in these respects. If anything, it might make things worse by freeing big business from the restraints imposed by the EU in the name of the environment and human rights.

Though without actually asking all of them it’s impossible to know why all the people who voted to leave did so, it is certain that for at least a few of them it came down to nationalism and even downright racism. The Leave campaign made use of a lot of scaremongering rhetoric about the refugee crisis in Europe, implying that the UK would soon be invaded by a horde of mostly Muslim people from places like the Middle East if it didn’t cut ties with the EU. This xenophobic attitude resembles that of many far right parties in Europe itself, and of course that of the presumptive Republican nominee for US president (dubbed by a young girl of my acquaintance “Pumpkin Hitler”). In all cases they ignore the fact that statistically speaking, refugees are much less likely to commit violent acts than native born people, particularly right wing extremists, a fact tragically illustrated a few days before the UK vote when a right wing British racist murdered a Member of Parliament who was outspoken in support of refugee rights.

Since nationalism certainly played at least some role in the Leave victory, this vote is yet another example of the mostly harmful consequences of nationalism. Given that the differences between humans of different nationalities and ethnic groups are actually miniscule, even more so since if you trace things back far enough everyone has ancestors of diverse origins, it makes no sense to care much more about the interests of people of one’s own nation than those of everyone else. While it might not be possible to get rid of all borders now, an ideal world would indeed be borderless. In the meantime, the EU, for all its faults, represents the kind of direction we should be going in. Of course the EU itself needs to be more welcoming to refugees, and it can’t let larger countries like Germany run roughshod over smaller countries such as Greece. But at least the EU manages to maintain a much better balance of interests between different nations than is seen elsewhere in the world, where nations like China and even the USA use their size to bully other nations. This is one reason for supporting the rights of smaller nations (including occupied ones such as Tibet) until we can get rid of nations altogether. So while I don’t care for nationalism, I’d be more pleased than otherwise to see Scotland hold a second vote on independence with a different result from the first one, especially in the wake of the Brexit vote (in which Scottish voters overwhelmingly voted to stay in the EU), as long as it is merely an expression of a diversion of interests rather than local chauvinism. Another useful step towards minimizing nationalist feelings is to ensure that everyone receives as balanced and objective an education as possible regarding history and the current geopolitical situation, rather than one that is biased towards one’s own country – in other words the opposite of the kind of education that people receive in most countries, with China being just one particularly egregious example.

Unfortunately, until countries all over the world stop indoctrinating their people in nationalistic thinking, election results such as the one in Brexit vote will continue to occur. Nationalism and ethnic prejudice represent the dark side of democracy, allowing extremists all over the world to get a disturbing amount of power through elections. This doesn’t mean that we should abandon democracy, but it does mean that until we can get rid of or at least drastically reduce these harmful attitudes we need institutions that can help restrain populist leaders and parties who appeal to them. While I think it is unlikely that the abovementioned Pumpkin Hitler can win in the US, it is bad enough that he even has a chance. It’s also disturbing that parties like Britain’s anti-immigrant UKIP are growing across Europe, and in countries like Hungary are even dominating the government. This is largely down to nationalism, and it is because of nationalism that a democratic China, for example, would not necessarily be more peaceful toward neighbors such as Taiwan, the Philippines or Japan. Hopefully more and more people will begin to understand that their interests are under more of a threat from forces such as overly powerful multinational corporations and financial institutions (not that even these are monolithic interests groups or unequivocal evils), economic inequality in general or climate change than from immigrants or ordinary “foreigners” of whatever origin.