Someone on CBC TV yesterday morning said something about how Britain would not be the same. The line was something like, for the first time in 44 years, Britons will not be part of the EU. This was followed by some reference to a "new world order" for Britain, free now to sign its own trade agreements, or something like that.
This is actually so bizarrely wrong that it is difficult for me to even get excited about. There are potential important implications to Brexit -- and I will say a word about those -- and important lessons from the Brexit process that can be linked to other challenges to globalization and neoliberalism. But, before doing that let me make the key point I want to make: foreign policy has been a problem for progressive politics for a couple of reasons. First, progressives have opposed neoliberalism but somehow let themselves get caught holding its bag (or, at least the blame for its failures). Second, this is because they have not really had an alternative to it. The result is that the foreign policy of progressives is often intensely moralistic and this moralism (which is, I would argue, a good thing) is not matched by its practice. Progressives cheer, as it were, for the right side. They are on the side of innocents who have suffered (say, refugees or victims of climate change). They oppose totalitarian governments and wants us to have no truck or trade with them; they support diversity and argue for individual rights.
These are all good things, but how does the rubber meet the road? With regard to globalization, it doesn't seem to. Progressive political parties question it, point out its problems, champion the rights of workers, but in the end, they don't really know what they should be building as an international order in its place. For Canada, this is particularly true. For example: how is a global reduction of green house gases going to be accomplished? Saying "the US has to cut" is not going to do much good if the US government chooses to ignore that statement. One of the things that Brexit highlights is the need for a progressive political rethinking of foreign policy and the conception of what an international order might actually look like.
This is important because Brexit is not that new world order. Make no mistake about it. Brexiters and UKIPs, and Conservatives are celebrating, but the next day Britons woke up with the exact same problems they had a week ago. Unemployment did not disappear, the national debt was not suddenly paid, racism and sexism did not resolve themselves, Scottish nationalists did not settle in a comfortable new Britain, pollution did not evaporate, etc., etc. If anyone thinks Brexit is a panacea, they are just wrong. Don't believe me? Look around you in a day, a week, a year.
There is an analogous test case: the US. There were many reasons that Trump won the last presidential election in the US, but one reason was that he said what progressive political leadership should have been saying: NAFTA was a problem. Its effects were uneven and, to be sure, some people really benefited from it. But, there were a lot of people who didn't. I am not in any way agreeing with the "Mexicans stole our jobs" discourse because there are serious empirical issues with that and I know the anti-NAFTA discourse became intensely racialized. I am in no way defending that. But, we also need to look at the truth of the matter: the American working class did not do well by NAFTA and it had nothing to offer them. It was a mature trade agreement: there were no more gains to be had by it and whatever gains there were ended passing a lot of people by. And, how did the Democrats respond to this reality? Well ... how did they respond to this reality? Seriously, I honestly don't know.
I'd make the same point about Labour in Britain. I know that the EU was divisive within the Labour Party and among Labour voters. But, what was Labour's policy regarding the EU? What would they have done if elected? In opposing the Tories, they actually came off looking like they were defending the EU and, again, this 44 year old treaty had little to offer British workers. It was not going to provide jobs, improve the standard of living and, in the case of some countries, say Greece, the EU actually imposed draconian measures on the country that caused a general decline in the welfare state and standard of living (particularly for seniors) as the price of helping the country out of the international global economic crisis.
Said differently, if I were a progressive, I'd not look on the demise of NAFTA (a story for another day) or Brexit as something to lament. At the very least, from a progressive perspective, these are international trade (and trade and political) agreements that have run their course. They do not provide inspiration for a new generation. Nor can they address persistent problems in a way that (at least in the case of the EU), they might have in the past. Exactly how progressive politicians have ended up defending neoliberal globalization is a bit of a mystery to me particularly since they did not agree with it (at least discursively) in the first place. What concerns me was the inability of progressive political leaders and parties to put together a viable alternative to neoliberal globalization.
If Brexit will not solve Britain's problems, it does tell us one thing: disaster does not follow if one challenges the institutions of neoliberalism. NAFTA is another case in point. One of the standard arguments against progressive opposition to globalization and neoliberalism was this: withdrawing from globalization = economic disaster. If one tampers with the EU or with NAFTA, something like the economic end of days is on the horizon.
Did that happen?
Well ... no. In the case of NAFTA there might be other reasons that are worth exploring in another post, but the doom of many prophets did not materialize with Brexit and I have deep doubts it ever will. Get me right: I am not saying Brexit will be good for Britain or the British working class. I doubt it will, although nationalism might cover this over for a while. I am just saying it did not usher in a reprise of the Great Depression.
I find this fascinating. One element of recent history that needs to be written is progressive political figures ambiguous, slow, embrace of the international institutions of neoliberalism, such as NAFTA and the EU (I know that the EU is more than a trade agreement). In some measure, I wonder if the Labour Party, the Canadian Liberals, American Democrats, accepted neoliberalism because they felt they had to. Was it because they believed the discourse of impending economic disaster if they pulled away from the process of globalization?
Turns out that might not have been the case. One of the potentially positive things Brexit does is to make it possible to reconsider the international economic order on a fundamental level. This could be a very good thing. It is time to try to think what a progressive global order might look like in real and practical terms. If progressive political parties don't do this, they may win elections but on the international stage ... would anyone notice? There are may things about Brexit that should give us pause but one of the good things is that it has shown that we don't have to accept the economic status quo; we don't have to accept globalization. We can think the international order differently. It is time to start.
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