Facing up to the impending UK referendum on the European Union

Professor Tony Payne - Deputy Director at SPERI

The key political point here is that a progressive ‘Remain’ position must not allow itself to be trapped in the upcoming referendum campaign in a place that is uncritical of the contemporary EU. That simply will not play with the current mood, as best we can discern it from polling evidence, of the British people.   Instead, it has, somehow, to perform the trick of arguing as persuasively as possible what has unavoidably to be a nuanced case. It needs, in short, to call for major reforms of the EU, but do so from a standpoint that recognises in the EU too vital a geo-economic and geo-political structure for the UK to walk away from. This sort of case (which is easy to mount in the academic and intellectual arena), is notoriously difficult to pull off in the rough and tumble of 24/7 modern electoral politics. It must be seriously questioned as well whether the UK presently has any politicians – whether Cameron for the Conservatives or on this issue Alan Johnson (who is not even the party leader) for Labour – capable of displaying the gravitas, flexibility and cunning needed to carry such a task through to a successful outcome. Nicola Sturgeon will probably be able to deliver a majority ‘Remain’ vote in Scotland, but where is the leader capable of setting out for all of the peoples of the various nations of the UK a compelling and optimistic vision of where the UK can fit happily into the contemporary European and global order?

Nevertheless, this is surely the task and it is unfortunate that some on the left, such as Owen Jones, have run away from the challenge in favour of a short-sighted embrace of the idea of ‘Lexit’. Even a journalist (and SPERI International Advisory Board member) as hard-headed in his analysis of political economy as Paul Mason has lately considered, and seemingly taken seriously, the notion of ‘Brexit’ as an ‘economic opportunity’. This is a dead-end alley and it’s puzzling that it appeals as much as it apparently does, especially when there is another powerful argument that left thinkers and politicians can and should now be making about the EU with all their available energy. This focuses on the key question of democracy and asserts in a nutshell that the EU was undemocratic in its inception, has been run consistently from a technocratic (and therefore anti-democratic) mind-set and has now accumulated such a debilitating ‘democratic deficit’ that the latter has become a major threat to the EU’s very survival.

This argument has been developed most powerfully in Germany through the voice of Jürgen Habermas, the eminent philosopher and leading public intellectual. Even though he is now eighty-six years old, Habermas has engaged the debate about the future of Europe energetically and cleverly. Although deeply critical of Germany’s management of the Eurozone economy and especially its treatment of Greece, he has remained a passionate advocate of a united European project, albeit one that needs to be deeply and seriously further democratised. Habermas takes the view that embedded national capitalisms of a social democratic or even a social market hue have run their course, overtaken by the power of globalising markets. Even powerful European nation-states, such as Germany, France and the UK, can no longer manage this power without peril to their different social orders and are finding with each new day that their many post-1945 social and political achievements are disintegrating before their eyes.

This is certainly what many of the people of Europe, including the people of Britain, seem to be seeing with growing starkness of vision. They have to be persuaded that that these achievements can best now be defended and enhanced by proper democratic stewardship at a regional (that is, EU) level – that the EU can in effect be remade to work better in the service of its citizens. This is really what the UK referendum campaign needs to be about, not silly discussions of how to reclaim and retain a mythical sovereignty that has long disappeared anyway in conditions of globalisation. Of course, the argument about building a sustained democratic order across the institutions of the EU needs to be translated into a popular idiom, and that isn’t going to be easily done from where the debate about Europe in the UK presently starts. But this is without doubt the challenge and it is the responsibility of democratic politicians to find ways of rising to it.

Habermas provides the critical clue. We can’t produce our own Habermas in time, but we don’t need to: this is after all a European issue and he is, like us, a European. We can read Habermas in translation; we can think hard about his analysis and draw the obvious conclusions; above all, we can and must press our political leaders and most influential commentators to do the same and then urge them to frame the whole ‘Remain’ campaign in accordance with the call for a renewed European-level democracy demanded by Habermas.