Brexit and the New World Order that Wasn't

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.

The Left, Brexit, Trump and the Future of Political Economy

Outside of Canada, the last year has not really been kind to progressive politics and ... even in Canada ... there are signs of worry. No one is going to defend -- or, no one who thinks of themselves as a progressive individual (see earlier blogs for what this might mean) -- can or should defend the British Conservative Party nor the current incarnation of American Republicanism. Both have become more stridently extreme. Both have stripped away the veneer of respectability in politics to pander to very base ideas. And, if left in power very long, both will wind up causing just tonnes of problems.

This said, one might ask: what can we learn from these developments? There are, I want to contend, important lessons for progressive (or, leftist) thinkers in these developments because the success of more extreme right wing politics is, simultaneously, the failure of progressive politics.  Most commentary -- at least the stuff I have read -- has focused on explaining why Trump or Brexit occurred. The general conclusion -- for good or ill -- involves a combination of factors that amount to strategic miscalculations one the part of party establishments or moderates or the general public. I strongly suspect that large sections of the US and UK population will, very shortly, have a serious case of buyer's remorse but in the meantime learning only this lesson is detrimental to progressive politics because it is about how to win elections. And, again for good or ill, progressive movements have been not bad at this. I know ... I know ... progressives have not gotten all they wanted. But, they managed to elect Obama to two terms despite intense reactive racism in the US; they got rid of Harper; kept the Labour Party in power in Britain for years. The record, overall, is not all that bad.

The problem progressives have is that they often don't know what to do with power when they get it. (Now, to be honest, it seems the British Conservative Party has the same problem.  They didn't like Labour governments but once they had settled in ... well ... what came next never seemed very clear. There is a standard script -- cut taxes, talk about people getting soft, say environmentalism has "gone too far" -- but, we have all heard that a bunch of time and ... seriously ... how much lower you gonna cut taxes on the wealthy? How much less can they pay? How much less environmental protection can one actually have?) And, this is where the left can learn from Trump and Brexit.

One of the odd things about the election of Trump and about Brexit is that the left was left (ha ha) holding the bad of the old right. The left never supported neo-liberalism and campaigned long and hard against it. Organized labour railed against free trade, said that the working class would pay the price for multinational corporation super profits, indicated that mobile capital created a race to the bottom in terms of environmental protection, etc. Said differently, progressives were always the ones who said that government needed to rethink (or, renegotiate) NAFTA and who said that there was nothing wrong with protecting domestic markets to ensure high employment rates, and that one did not need to embrace globalization (in the form of the EU or of NAFTA or the TPP) in order to have a vibrant economy. So ... how did progressives end up fighting a rearguard action in favour of the very policies they opposed while right-wing populists scooped up victories adopting leftist ideas about putting big business in its place?

I recognize that this right-wing populism was mixed with a lot of racism. Said differently, right-wing populists were able to mobilize a racist language about (in the US) Mexican "stealing jobs" (when in reality it was American corporations in their quest for super profits who were creating the rust belt) but ... you see the point. One need not embrace racism to be concerned about the fate of working people and to raise questions about neo-liberalism. Indeed, most progressives I know raised precisely these questions and were vibrantly anti-racist. And, here is the thing, in theory, progressive thinkers raise concerns about neo-liberalism all the time. In practice, in government, running the show, they tend to make their peace with it. This is the lesson that progressives need to learn. Why make peace with the very thing that you oppose? Is this a case of "only Nixon could go to China"?

Maybe. Right-wing populists can talk tough to big business in a way that progressives no longer can (and, in the US, maybe have not since the days of Kennedy) because they know that the right-wing media will not mobilize against them, in the US Tea Party activists will stay silent, Fox News hosts will have nothing to say, and that the moderate mainstream media won't do a very good job reporting this and so will do one of their standard "some people say this; some people say that" reports. Progressive politicians, in other words, have been worried about a bad media, about protest, and about business reaction. If Obama or a Labour PM had raised questions about NAFTA or the EU, the right would have been all over them. Fox would have predicated a  disastrous recession; would have talked about  "government over-reach", would have explained the price consumers would pay for "special interests." I recall FTA reporting of US Democrats who raised questions about free trade. One right-wing journalist calmly explained that if Democrats had been in charge of lightbulbs, we would still be using candles to protect unionized candle makers. Nothing of this sort has gone on in opposition to British Conservatives and American Republicans raising similar types of concerns.

But, there is more than biased, two standards media spin going on here. For a variety of complicated reasons progressive, moderate, reformist, and leftwing thinkers embraced internationalism and globalization but in the process became heavily confused about it. They embraced it because they wanted to win elections and felt that they wouldn't without it, but they embraced it because they really were committed to internationalism and, on one level, you can see why.  Progressive internationalism involved evening out standards of living (improving economic development) in marginalized economies; diversity at home, respect for difference and acceptance of refugees, among other things, including finding ways to address common international problems (human rights, climate change, e.g.). Said differently, moderate (Democrat) and progressive (Labour) leaders confused neo-liberal globalization (bringing down barriers to business) with a different form of globalization that approached issues from a humanistic and ecological perspective. Defending the latter became defending the former but ... it actually ain't really so. And, in the process, in the wake of this confusion, centrist and left-wing politicians were left holding the bag for policies about which they were -- or, should have been -- deeply suspicious.

Let me give you an example: Hilary Clinton  was, more or less, silent on the issue of NAFTA. Instead, she focused on another job-creation strategy. This strategy might have made sense. I don't actually know because I didn't investigate it. She could have maintained this strategy but she also should have taken aim at NAFTA and, I think, she could have done so in a way that did not "scapegoat" Mexicans. I think a lot of Bernie Saunders' popularity arose from the fact that he did precisely this.  The Democrats could, for instance, have pointed out that Mexicans did not "steal" jobs, rich people elected to move companies south of the border. They could have argued that this is a reason to strengthen the labour and environmental side agreements to NAFTA. They could have argued that this is a reason to better regulate business. Said differently, instead of keeping (more or less) silent on the issue while taking about the importance of international openness (which is a good but vague thing), Clinton and other Democrats could have pointed out that it is the very weakness of these agreements that harms both Mexican and American workers. Strengthening them would allow for higher wage rates and better environmental protection. Regulating business -- say, the mobility of plant and capital -- would allow for public good assessments of relocation and whether or not they are actually needed. It would have allowed and open and needed discussion on this issue: how much profit is enough? After all, if a company is leaving Ohio or Michigan or Missouri to make *more* money elsewhere ... should one not discuss exactly how much money one should be making? Surely, in a day and age of widening income gaps such a question is of some importance?

Said differently, the new right (let's call them that) has caught moderate, progressive, leftist politicians by surprise. The new right is deeply unpopular with some sections of the old right but that does not matter too much. Perhaps, in fact, moderates and leftists made too much of the dislike of, say, Republicans for Trump or British Tories for Brexit. The success of this new right, however, highlighted a problem with the political centre and left. Instead of demanding changes to international trade agreements, they missed an opportunity to shape discourse and, in the process, it took on nasty racist tones. As Labour and the Democratic Party rethink their politics, they would do well to bear these points in mind.