There is a growing chorus of disenchantment with Europe and populist parties are preaching anti-European slogans across the member states. Today’s British referendum on European Union (EU) membership is only the most extreme manifestation of that disaffection. Whatever the outcome, the turmoil surrounding popular attitudes toward Europe is not going to end. The reason is a lack of vision.
Tag / Political Communication
The Implications of Opting Out
The referendum campaign on whether Great Britain should remain a member state of the European Union (EU) or leave is in full swing. Campaigners for Britain to ‘remain’, including Prime Minister David Cameron, insist that the British government has successfully renegotiated its relationship with the EU. Those who want Britain to ‘leave’ insist that the opt-outs Cameron won are insignificant and untrustworthy; whatever the British government may say, the bureaucrats in Brussels are plotting a ‘super state’ that will usurp British sovereignty.
The UK Referendum is a Bad Idea; Voting to Leave Would Make It Worse
The British referendum is based on (at least) two bad ideas. The first is that the popular legitimacy of a referendum can restore the sovereignty of the British parliament. The Leave campaign believes they can take power from Brussels and give it back to Westminster. That is a fantasy. The British parliament will be more constrained and less effective if the UK leaves. The second bad idea is that referendums are more democratic than acts of parliament (which is the kind of decision that brought Great Britain this far in its relationship with Europe). By giving the people the chance to speak their mind on a yes-or-no (in-or-out, remain-or-leave) question, we can discover what they really want. That is not how people work. Real people prefer trial and error. Real people also like to delegate responsibility for making complicated decisions. This matters because the two bad ideas combine to make the worst of all possible worlds. Britons who vote to Leave will discover that they have made a terrible mistake only to learn that there is no easy way to fix it.
Britain’s New Relationship with Europe
The European Council has delivered an agreement on Britain’s new relationship with the European Union. The agreement acknowledges that the British government has no obligation to engage in further political integration, it recognizes that not every country will adopt the euro as a common currency, it strikes a balance between the need for common rules and the desire for national autonomy in the area of financial market supervision, it stresses the importance of effective regulation for competitiveness, and it introduces a mechanism to phase in the benefits that accrue to workers who move from one member state to the next. These concessions become effective once the British government informs the European Council of the United Kingdom’s commitment ‘to remain a member of the European Union’. The challenge now is for British Prime Minister David Cameron to win the ‘yes’ campaign. At least, that is what it says in the post-summit script. The agreement may just be enough for the British people to play along.
Austerity and Anti-Politics
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi gave an interview to the Financial Times shortly before Christmas to criticize the impact that successive waves of austerity are having on political stability in southern Europe. The interview had particular resonance in the aftermath of the Spanish national elections. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was in many ways Europe’s ‘best’ student in terms of economic policymaking. Rajoy not only narrowly escaped the doom loop that tied the fate of the Spanish government to the solvency of its banks, but he also avoided the indignity of falling under official European economic tutelage. He has not always does as told by his European counterparts but his government is often held us as a model of successful macroeconomic adjustment and fiscal consolidation in the face of crisis. His ‘reward’ has been a splintering of the Spanish electorate and a hung parliament. For Renzi, the fate of his ‘friend Mariano’ is an inevitable consequence of Europe’s obsession with austerity.
Europe’s Banking Union: ‘Failing Forward’?
Between the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, tensions within the single market, and anti-European political extremism, the European Union appears on the surface to be failing. This isn’t quite true though. Every time Europe faces a setback, it tends to make progress in response. This progress is usually only partial (or incomplete), but it is enough to lay the foundations for more comprehensive solutions to emerge in the future. What looks like failure is actually ‘failing forward’, a dynamic that Dan Kelemen, Sophie Meunier and I examined in a recent article in Comparative Political Studies. The latest incarnation of this concept is the recent developments – or lack thereof – at the December 2015 European Council summit, which was supposed to shore up European financial markets by pushing ahead with the construction of common institutions to safeguard European banks.
Europe’s Controversial Single Market
When critics want to explain why the European Union (EU) is in crisis, they usually point to the euro or the Schengen Agreement. These are areas of vital national sovereignty, they argue. A government without a currency cannot preserve its national competitiveness and has no status as a lender of last resort. A government that cannot monitor its borders cannot stem the flow of illegal workers, criminals, and terrorists. There is merit to both of these arguments but they miss the deeper point. Europe’s problems do not originate in money or migrants; they stem from the single market.
The Power of Language
Ideas matter in politics and public policy. Sometimes, however, language matters more. To see this, you only need to think about the distinction between the idea you have in your head and the interpretation it gets when you try to explain it to someone else. Now get them to say it to someone else, and so on. The people who hear you first-hand can repeat what you have said almost verbatim and yet the meaning is distorted, if not immediately then quickly as it passes down the line. The simplest idea – simply expressed – is no match for the telephone game. Hence the goal in political communication is to choose language that has predictable reverberations. The power lies not so much in the words themselves as in the underlying pattern they create through repetition. The message is coded in memes.
Erik Jones 