Lexit will only strengthen nationalism

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Nuit Debout banner reads "They have billons, we are millions", Place de la Republique, April, 2016, Paris. Bertrand Combaldieu / Press Association. All rights reserved.A row of left-wing
commentators have called for a Brexit recently, arguing that this
move would profoundly
reinvigorate democracy in the UK.

‘Reinvigorating’
sounds like spring, youth, detox and fun … so, who would not want to
participate in ‘reinvigorating democracy’?

And yet…. the problem
with the left-wing case for Brexit is that it remains utterly unclear why such
democratic change is predicated on Brexit.

Contrary to left-wing
advocates of Brexit, I believe that of all political crucial moments the
referendum of 23 June seems the most unlikely opportunity to re-invent
democracy. Whether they like it or not, left-wing Brexiters are in the same
boat as nationalists across Europe. Brexit already bears the enormous risk of
strengthening the UK’s and Europe’s nationalist and right-wing forces simply by
setting a precedent. More importantly, however, left-wing Brexiters will only
reinvigorate nationalism and not democracy because they are unable to identify
the acting subject of their political project.

The rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe is real

Left-wing Brexiters haughtily
dismiss the risk of Europe’s fascism as betrayal and ‘fear
mongering’. Yet, the danger is real. In last week’s Austrian presidential
elections the right-wing candidate missed victory by 0.6%. If last year’s
regional elections in France had been the first round of presidential
elections, Marine Le Pen would have been one of the ‘duel’ candidates of the
second round. In Germany where right-wing nationalist discourses have long been
taboo, the ‘Alliance for Germany’ has made a spectacular entry into several
federal state parliaments; currently, the same party would receive 11% in
federal parliamentary elections, hence becoming ‘king maker’ in
parliament.

The situation is the
same in almost every
single European country, from Sweden (13% for Sweden Democrats) and
Denmark (21% for Danish People Party) in the North, to Hungary (21% for Jobbik)
in the East and Greece (7% for Golden Dawn) in the South. The rise of
right-wing nationalist parties cannot be easily explained away with conspiracy
theories that this is all the elite manipulation of the masses; on the
contrary, it is one response to the same crisis of politics that also generated
the loss of confidence in the EU.

Tragedy and farce of history

Such crisis moments are
nothing new so a look at historical experience might help explain what is at
stake now.

History does not repeat
itself, that’s true, yet it is timely to remind democrats in Europe just how
much this situation looks like the final years of the Weimar Republic.
In the November 1932 elections, the NSDAP became the strongest party with 33.1%. Yet this alone did
not assure Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Crucially, all those political
groupings whose first objective was to disavow established parties and Weimar’s
democracy were complicit in his appointment; and that includes, indeed,
everyone, even left-wing parties and public intellectuals (Carl von
Ossietzky, Karl Kraus,
Kurt Tucholsky,
Bertolt Brecht
etc.).

Of course, they were
horrified by the Nazis and many were subsequently killed or exiled;
nevertheless, it needs to be remembered that in the early 1930s they did little
to save the Weimar Republic which they found inadequate in too many
ways: inegalitarian, bourgeois and capitalist, too removed from people’s real
concerns, corrupt and ridiculously bureaucratic. “Germany is the only country
where the lack of political competence is rewarded with the highest offices,”
commented Carl von Ossietzky with dismay at the elections in the 1920s.

The NSDAP’s rise to
power was the final stage of a popular disaffection with the Weimar Republic
mainly due to the dissociation of representative institutions and Germany’s
social structures. After the disaster of the First World War, the end of
monarchy and the economic turmoil of the 1920s, political parties and social
classes did not divide up neatly along party lines. Both sides of the
fundamental politics question ‘who gets what?’ were disputed as Germans were
desperately seeking Weimar’s demos. Communists tossed in the question of
whether workers were Germans or universal proletarians. Inversely, was the
bourgeoisie part of the people or its international enemy? Anti-Semites asked
if Jews could be part of ‘us’, and liberal Jews rejected the idea that
East-European orthodox Stedtl Jewry would be part of a civilized German
nation.‘Völkisch’ nationalists and historians argued whether Romanian-speaking
Swabians belonged to Germany, and if, indeed, language and culture was the
decisive criteria, then what about Austrians and Alsatians? Rhinelander
Catholics had serious doubts that Protestant Prussian Junkers were really part
of the German nation; and the Junkers themselves contended that they were the same
kind of Germans as their land labourers. 

The end of the Weimar
Republic is not a tale of nationalism as an external evil force; Nazism was
home grown. Yet it was in no way specific to Germany. The Weimar Republic died
because those who should have been its subject refused to recognize this
democracy as theirs, and everyone did so for their own good reason.

Representation and the national scale

The contemporary lack
(or loss) of confidence in the European Union is symptomatic of a crisis of
politics that resembles the Weimar experience. If the EU is singled out as
‘undemocratic’, then it is not because of its institutions. In fact,
constitutionally, the EU offers more
opportunities to participate in legislative processes than the UK.

What is questioned is
the EU’s capacity to ‘truly’ represent the European demos. Brexiters deny this
and reclaim their own: ‘we’, ‘I’ or ‘us’ want to decide and make politics, to
tackle the challenges ahead. They demand a reduction in ‘scale’ to bring
politics close to home (particularly well expressed in the juxtaposed movement
words of the leave campaign: ‘Leave! Take back!’). This is Lee Jones’ plea. Its
emotiveness, however, eludes the question of exactly who ‘we’ are. And yet,
this is a crucial question: Who is the subject of that reinvigorated democracy?

Brexiters argue that
Brexit would bring democracy back home and give back to local actors the power
to undertake truly democratic projects. But who those local actors are, who
they represent, and whether this implied representation is warranted remains
very obscure. The underlying assumption is that the crisis of representative
democracy is simply a matter of spatial distance.

The crisis of politics is not a matter of spatial
distance

The crisis of
representative democracy is a matter of socio-political, and cultural distance:
a crisis of identification. The causes for the dissociation of citizens and
representation are manifold and not reducible to neoliberal governance.
Enormous social transformations have dissolved those collective identities and
social hierarchies which shaped the party political structure of European
democracies. These social transformations do not only involve the neoliberal
dismantling and financialisation of the welfare state and public services, but
also the accompanying shift from manufacturing, mining and agriculture to
service industries, the introduction of new forms of production and
organization, the participation of women in the workforce and the resulting
changes in gender roles and families, the rise of ‘alter’ politics like queer
or post-colonial politics, changes in education, the heightened mobility of
European and global populations, the inversed age pyramid, the rising awareness
and urgency of global environmental problems, and the changed nature of
knowledge and communication.

Consequently, nations
and social classes are not the ‘self-identifying
collectivities marked by a common purpose and same sort of ethos’ any more.
Societies have become infinitely more differentiated and ‘intelligible
only as the result of aggregation and the overlapping of particularities’. For
the nation state the consequence is, as Simon Tormey says, that
 ‘[…] we are left with an increasingly random assortment of individuals
sharing territory, not community’.

The crisis of
representative democracy is, indeed, a crisis of representation in its double
sense of delegation of decision-making power and of the interpretation of the
citizen’s persona. Citizens more and more often do not wish to delegate their
participation but want to act themselves; the tides of large social movements
like Attack, the World Social Forums, Occupy or the current Nuit Debout
movement in Paris clearly show that complexification, social individualization
and political pluralisation have not resulted in apathy.

Most people find it
increasingly difficult to identify with any of the established political
parties, politicians and other political organizations like labour unions,
whether on local, national or European level. Political identities are not any
more those IKEA flatpacks of class politics; rather political identities have
become more fluid, diverse, multidimensional and, also, more globalized.
Political identities often transcend predefined geographical spaces with
citizens engaging in acts of political solidarity with communities in far-away
places or addressing problems of transnational scale.

The missing democratic subject of the national scale

Given this complexity,
fluidity and globality, who is comprised in the left-wing Brexiters’ ‘national
scale’? Is the subject of national scale democracy the ethnic Briton (and then
the English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, too?), the people who live in
Great-Britain no matter what their original national belonging, only those
people who think they belong (how will we know?), or those people who are
affected by the political decisions taken whether they reside in Great Britain
or not, those who contribute constructively to the politics of national scale
(and then what does that mean)?

The left-wing project
of national rescaling needs to answer these questions beyond simply rejecting
the EU representational mechanisms.

As Pierre Rosanvallon so
concisely puts it:

“One of the most
important transformations in our societies reside in the fact that the ’mode of
production’ of generality has been transformed. Traditional regimes of
generality were conceived in a unitary and aggregate sense […] while
present-day generality more often has to be understood as rooted in the partial
parallelism of singularities”.

People’s political and
social choices are not made in two-dimensional hierarchies anymore but in three-dimensional,
variable, movable and multiple spaces that might or might not include the
national scale.

This makes politics so
much more disorderly, erratic, singularized, glocalized and multifaceted. The
attractiveness of right-wing parties resides in their capacity to seemingly
reduce this multiplicity by replacing it with a simple binary: in or out.
They, indeed, rescale complexity to linear two-dimensionality. Being defined in
opposition to the transnational and globalizing political project of European
integration, the left-wing project of ‘rescaling’ does not look any different.

There is, certainly,
much wrong with the EU. Without doubt, there are still many emancipatory
struggles to fight in Europe. Clearly, the project of European federalism is ill-designed
to respond to the crisis of politics. Yet, although the geometrics of politics
have changed, these changes do not follow the linear patterns of the old
nation-state’s socio-political structures. Although the identity crisis of the
EU shows that recalibration of identity and politics is in order, it is not
national rescaling that will reinvigorate democracy; particularly not if the
rescalers are not able to positively identify the democratic subject.

National rescaling can
only reinvigorate nationalism, that’s all.  So, if we want to re-create
spaces for democratic innovation and participation we have to widen our horizon
not diminish it.