Europe in the Imaginary

Potentially rich material here in el Gordinao's weekend section. Writers have been asked for their views on Europe. It's a kind of upmarket creative writing exercise where you all sit round in a room and have to write something about 'the moon' or 'my pet'. Useful, I thought for my endless quest to find what it is exactly that Remainists want to keep from the EU. 

As we would expect, lots of cultural baggage has to be bolted on to the concept, so the EU becomes some imaginary Europe, itself then reduced metonymically to a beach, a river, a building etc. In the end the EU becomes only one rather insignificant signifier in a whole chain that probably could have been started by any topic including the moon and my pet

Too much to discuss in detail but try these:

Sarah Perry begins with a memory of playing a piece of Czech music at school, then visiting Prague  in 2016. She felt an immediate 'kinship' 

from the moment I first walked over Charles bridge. The stone apostles, the jackdaws, the violinist with his case open for coins; the beggar who corrected my pronunciation of Jak se máš (“good morning”) and let me give a biscuit to the dog wrapped in his coat [bless!] ; Master Jan Hus’s statue in the Old Town Square; and the good black coffee served with cakes very nearly like those I baked at home, but also nothing like at all: these seemed, in some obscure indefensible way, to belong to me

She knows they will still be there, but she will feel like a visitor not a native. Brexit has limited her imagination?

Bee Wilson: 'Yet when I think of Brexit and food, my objections are less practical than emotional. It feels sad and wrong that we should be shunning European neighbours who taught us so much about how to eat. Is this how we repay all that hospitality? All those oceans of prosecco?' 

It was never a commercial relationship then? They just gave us all that food and drink? We won't be able to experience European cuisine once we leave?

Hari Kunzru becomes a ventriloquist to write on behalf of typical Brit Leavers, no doubt because he knows so many, as we can tell from his mastery of current slang: 'What larks!' He actually seems to be channelling the usual literary reresentations of young male proles in the 1950s. There is quite a lot of contempt and hatred. In a rather strange section, they seem to have it in for linguistic philosophy especially:

We’ve had enough of them coming round here, that’s another thing. Apple picking, changing the bedpan, telling us about the new season’s fashion trends. They can fuck off with their metric system, their Code Napoléon [well-informed proles]. Boney in his tricorn hat [still a bogey man then?], snatching the cook’s leg of mutton [too obscure for this ex-prole I fear]  creeping about in the dead of night. We’ve had experience. Dear Professor Wittgenstein, you are a person with no leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom. You have not given any reason why you should be granted leave to remain.

The reasons Wittgenstein might give would be quite interesting, of course.


Simon Garfield is going to become a German citizen (the nationality of both of his parents).

Afua Hirsch seem to have an interestingly mixed ethnic and national background (with some bourgeois highnotes) but she thinks all the social and cultural changes of the last 40 years are down to EU membership and that somehow time itself will be reversed when we leave. Teddy boys will be back!

...one man I interviewed in the run-up to the referendum told me, incredulous. “As a black man [evidently of about 70 years at least], it was not unusual to have teddy boys chasing you down the street, calling you names. We were not safe. The EU has given us more protection – not just from racists, but from rightwing British governments as well. What black person in their right mind,” he continued, “wants to go back to 1973?”

Val McDermid thinks: 'There’s no doubt that the single market has made publishing across borders much easier' and increased our knowledge of European fiction. Now she says she feels 'kinship with Italians, with Germans, with Greeks. And I like that feeling. Their countries have inspired my work. I’ve set bits of books all over Europe – Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Greece, Italy. And now that’s going to be irredeemably fragmented'. 

This makes her angry: I want to shout, “How could you? How could you be so short-sighted? How could you do this to us?”...

Do what? Prohibit the sale of Scando-noir?
 

Call me simplistic, but I wish they’d all been force-fed [revealing!] a diet of continental crime fiction. If they’d understood nothing else, they might have grasped the underlying concept – bad things happen to people who do bad things.

Robert MacFarlane gets quite poetic about migratory birds and how they mark the seasons in the UK,  'the movement of the birds that bind us beyond borders, a map that unfolds in time each year'. Nice to have the leisure to notice, of course. Sounding a bit like Ted Hughes he describes his feelings and then concludes:

We are related by birds.

Nope -- still not convinced. Ludicrously luvvie bits thinly conceal a good deal of snobbishness and hatred of the lower orders. This is what the EU stands for?

Legal manoeuvres

A much discussed intervention in the Staggers  from a lawyer (John Kerr, Lord Kerr as he also is, and  'a leading supporter of Open Britain'.) who as he says 'wrote Article 50'. The gist is that Article 50 can be cancelled if the Government so wishes. I must say I have never heard anyone arguing that it cannot be cancelled, or not realising that it was a political decision, but Kerr seems to think that view is so widespread that

some aspects of the Article seem to me rather inadequately reflected, or indeed misinterpreted, in our current public debate.... The national debate about Brexit should take account of the facts that our Article 50 letter could be withdrawn without cost or difficulty, legal or political. While still in, we also have the option of stopping the clock, in order to consult the people again. But once out, there is no easy way back in.

I can't see much more in this than another input to Remainerism, using the pretext of a legal speech to urge us all to think again, perhaps in the light of T May's piece in the Telegraph where she 'plans to enshrine in law the date that Britain leaves the EU'.   

There are a few side issues though. Kerr reveals a certain political ineptitude  by those drawing up Article 50: 

One of their concerns was to demonstrate that the Union was a voluntary partnership of sovereign nation-states, based on treaties between states, not the incipient super-state of Eurosceptic nightmares. Including an Article setting out a procedure for orderly divorce was one of several ways of underlining the voluntary nature of the Union, and I was its author.... I'm certain no-one dreamed that in 2017, a member state would trigger the procedure.

So it was only gestural. They didn't mean it. They never anticipated it. No wonder they have no real strategy for dealing with it and had to cobble together some list of demands in a particular order. And does 'a voluntary partnership of sovereign nation-states, based on treaties between states' warrant all those tired analogies about families, divorces and British gentleman's clubs or drinking rounds? What does Kerr and the others understand by terms like 'voluntary' and 'based on treaties'?

Strange bedfellows...

More on the superior grasp of Graun readers compared to their journalists in the letters column today.

A scare story recently reported that reversion to WTO tariffs if we left the EU 'without a deal' would be very costly.We would have to trade at crippling levels of tariffs.


Today, an economist from the Adam Smith Institute of all places says that assumes we would charge maximum tariffs on imports. The conclusion is contaminated by Adam Smith Institute optimism and liberal economic rationalism but nevertheless:

You report (4 November) on how Brexit will raise the cost of living by as much as £930 per year for a household, based on research published in the National Institute Economic Review. There is a certain logical problem with this assertion...

The WTO allows charging any rate up to the maximum, including zero, after a 'most favoured nation' deal.

Yes, obviously, politics is involved here – but even so, why would we do something as blitheringly stupid as making ourselves poorer in this manner? The entire point of trade itself is to gain access to those imports of the things that foreigners make better or cheaper than we ourselves do. The only rational trade stance to have is thus unilateral free trade, which this country experimented with, most successfully, after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Brexit offers us the opportunity to do that again – to obey the WTO insistences on MFN [most favoured nation] status and charge ourselves nothing for our purchases of the goods and services of the world. As other research has shown, this will make us all richer, not poorer.

Of course, this will then raise doubts about the opposite and contradictory fear, also voiced now and then  -- a flood of cheap imports. 

Will someone please settle a reasonable price for off-season strawberries?

Another unrepentant...

Gisela Stuart, a former Labour MP played a prominent part in the Leave campaign, but you would never think that from media coverage.That focused almost entirely on Gove and Johnson, making the whole thing look like a contest for Tory dominance. The media probably found it hard to locate ideologically a female Labour Leaver (and still do), especially one of German origin. She more or less disappeared after the vote as attention shifted to Tory leadership issues. She quit as an MP at the last election and remains largely unknown and undiscussed.

Anyway, today she returns in the Staggers (which has done the best job overall in trying to allow Leavers a platform).The main aim is to dismiss the claims that Leavers are 'old racist and stupid' but she adds a couple of additional points too: (1) the UK did not join the euro or the Schengen project and so was already less than fully committed to the European political project (do Remainers want us to join these institutions now?); (2) the UK had always operated on a less national-state level with the Empire and all that so the simple choice between flawed nation state and internationalism was less clear.

OK, each of these is debatable, but it's a start...

Ends justifying means

Word of Russian ‘black cash’ financing leave campaigns is fast becoming a torrent. As the inquiries pile up, hard evidence could delegitimise the EU referendum

An interesting opinion piece in the Guradina today. A Putin-led conspiracy to influence Western politics by means of 'black cash' is given a further airing. Normally directed against Trump's campaigns, this time it is given currency and space in a still (just about) sensible newspaper because it connects with the running theme of anti-Brexit hopes and fears.

Russian cash might have funded Brexit campaigns claims Dr Mark Galeotti, 'a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and head of its Centre for European Security'. Galeotti cites himself writing for the European Council on [sic] Foreign Relations to claim that Russia is actively attempting to interfere with European politics using a number of techniques. And 'Brexit may prove the perfect case study.'

Evidence? Well, 'Russia'  was apparently delighted with the Brexit vote according to a Guarnida article which did a roundup of international reactions, although Putin was not really that enthusiastic himself. Luckily 'the West' is now on its guard though.

But:

A steady trickle of hard information and soft rumour about Russian support for Brexit [from where?] risks becoming a torrent. Some of this support was, frankly, of questionable impact. Too much is often made of the alleged influence of the English-language Sputnik news agency and RT television channel, or even of the online trolling and disinformation campaign. Evidence that they actually changed minds – rather than just pandered to existing prejudices – is still lacking. 
However, there is a growing likelihood that later this year or early next we will see solid evidence of financial support for the Brexit camp, too [and this is likely to have been more effective?]

The evidence that excites Dr Galeoti here is an increasing interest in the finances of A Banks, a prominent Leave supporter, and the recent arrest of a Farage aide on money-laundering charges in the US. There will be more...

 according to US intelligence sources with whom I have discussed Moscow’s activities [bound to be objective then], there are other cases of what the Russian spooks call “black cash” supporting pro-Brexit campaigns and campaigners, likely to be revealed over the course of the several inquiries taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. Of course, assessing the impact of these operations will require careful study and scholarly rigour [not terribly evident so far] . But when has this stopped anyone using eye-catching allegations for political advantage?

The 'political advantage'  might accrue to the Remainers, thank goodness, so that's OK then, even if it is not actually supported by 'careful study and scholarly rigour'  :

Hard evidence of active, covert Russian interference would delegitimise the original vote, given the narrow margin of victory. Hardcore Brexiteers will risk looking like Putin’s “useful idiots”. This would allow the government to re-run or even disregard the referendum without looking as if it is admitting a mistake or challenging the popular will. It would also smooth the way to allowing article 50 to be revoked or ignored with no penalty [apparently,some EU folk would want us punished even if we cancelled withdrawal]...It is possible that his [Putin's] active measures helped tip the balance in the Brexit referendum. Even more likely, they will help tip the balance back.

So naive and virginal are the British electorate that it would never dawn on them that Russia might be trying to influence public opinion in Britain? Nor the USA or the EU?  They would be so shocked to discover the 'facts', and so easily persuaded by Dr Galeoti and the Remainers' pursuit of political advantage that they would abandon whatever other reasons they might have had for voting Brexit and demand a reversal of the vote

What a dog's breakfast  of self-supporting comment, supposition, and reedy straws glued together with die-hard Remaining and ideological paranoia. If the object of this stuff was to argue that the moon landings were faked or that Russia had already contacted alien visitors, I doubt the Guraun would have even read it.

But any old tosh will do if it supports Remainerism

Disciplne and punish

M Bloomberg, ace financier, thinks Brexit is a bad idea and said so at a conference. Naturally, this became news for the Guardian. If reporting remarks at conferences like this is news, it must make journalism very easy and cheap.


There was one odd phrase that reminded me of some issues though:

But what they are doing [Brexit]  is not good and there is no easy way to get out of it because if they don’t pay a penalty, everyone else would drop out. So they can’t get as good of a deal as they had before.”

This policy of 'pour encourarger les autres' has also cropped up in many EU spokespersons' accounts of the talks, and for Remainers it just seems entirely reasonable and unworthy of comment. But it is odd. Other countries have to be threatened with punishment to stay in? Only the threat of punishment keeps them in?

So it is not just economic self-interest that provides the solidarity but something extra, something moral in the sociological sense, something that will invoke a punitive reaction from the guardians of that morality if there are any attempts at autonomy. It's a rather early form of morality at that.

There are unmistakable undertones of such morality in the hurt and vengeful Oedipal willy-waving that we have seen from EU spokespersons especially Juncker. He usually articulates it via lame analogies -- the EU is a family or gentleman's club bound by mutual obligation and honour. He even tried a more populist example by suggesting the UK was somehow ducking out of standing its round in a pub. At its most dignified, the argument is that the EU has prevented war in Europe -- nothing to do with NATO of course. They used to add that it had brought unparalleled prosperity too -- not so easy to claim these days.

These are feeble moral arguments that could be modernised by even basic liberal/social democrat arguments about a role for a State -- as referee, guarantor of economic stability, representing something above the petty conflicts and narrow self-interests of economic life, something like 'civil society', to use the liberal terms. JS Mill would do. But of course, neo-lilberalism has scornfully torpedoed all these arguments. The State is now openly partisan, imposing policies for the benefit of finance capitalism, and to hell with civil obligation. 

So the EU has to reach further back to archaic moralities. We'll be hearing arguments from the Church or the crowned heads of Europe next.

EU obiter dicta=news

Classic Guradina news coverage today after the joint statements about the progress of the latest round of talks with the EU on Brexit. The EU line is the same old same old that insufficient progress has been made because there are issues unresolved, like the price of the absurdly-named 'divorce bill' . Technically, the other issues like the Irish border and the rights of EU citizens are unresolved too: the British side says these are minor administrative matters as indeed are trade tariffs which can just be agreed to be equal. Citizenship rights have also been seen as technically straightforward --existing EU citizens get automatic rights of settlement -- but the sticking point there is the role of the European Court of Justice in overseeing the exercise of these rights.

However, there still seems to be willy-waving on both sides. The EU is playing the mandate card discussed by Varoufakis and used to frustrate the Greek referendum (not on exit but on demanding better credit). Regardless of any particular claims, the EU claims it has a bigger mandate, from the whole 27 ( but only via their spokespersons, not a referendum or anything) , to proceed in a particular way, in this case to insist that their specified issues of separation are settled before any progress can be announced. No-one doubts for one moment that the EU Council of Ministers and or the Presidency could ignore or manipulate this 'mandate' as they do in so many other areas. The prioritising of the actual demands seems pretty arbitrary after all.

British willy-waving seems to be focussed on the European Court. Surely no-one expects it to confront the UK Government in a major way over any disputed rights of EU citizens? The mostly likely outcome is substantial agreement on matters based on the habitus shared among legal elites in all European countries?

The whole thing just seems like the sort of posturing you always get in negotiations. The standard ploy is to raise the stakes by threatening all sorts of dire consequences, and the Brexiteers have been unleashed to give interviews about EU intransigence hardening the resolve to just walk away. But this has frightened the Remainieri. Poor old E Maitlis on Newsnight last night was in a real flap panicking because 'no deal' suddenly seemed actually possible and her interview turned into a counselling session --for her.

El Graun reports the statements in the usual way, outlining the EU view in the headline and on the front page while offering the UK version on p.16 (There is a different form to the story on the website and a new angle with a demand that Government release some anxious views from 'business' ). The whole thing is seen as threatening chaos, deepening the [moral] panic, by combining the EU statement with additional domestic stories about a tide of amendments put down for the next discussion of the Brexit Bill (as if amendments meant actual defeat), and internal plots against the Chancellor by 'hardline' Brexiteers (they could only summon up a long-retired former Tory Chancellor).

One interesting consequence has been that el Garubdia has had to put some support behind not only the Chancellor, but T May of all people.Having slagged her off for weeks as an incompetent robot (unusual combination but not unknown to fans of Marvin the Paranoid Android), they now see her as the only bulwark against hard Brexitism. It doesn't matter what else she may have done -- Remainers must pack in behind.