In the article linked above, Jacob Anderson makes a fourfold philosophical case for leaving the EU. I respond here to each of his points in turn.
1. ‘I don’t want a united Europe’
Jacob’s argument here is very simple: the only thing that unites Europe is ‘the legacy of Christendom’. Other things divide it – and since the principles of ever-closer union (and the attendant focus on the common currency, the common justice system, etc) are not derived from this shared legacy, they are all ‘unappealing and illogical’.
The obvious rejoinder to this is that the UK, by and large, shares economically and politically liberal values with the EU. Take the harmonisation of trading standards as an example here. We share(d) the EU’s regulatory standards because of our (liberal) economic conviction that smooth international trade can enhance the productive potential of economies and benefit us all by expanding our wealth and facilitating mutually beneficial trades. Given this shared conviction, harmonisation of standards makes good sense: the way to facilitate frictionless trade across borders is to ensure that the trade takes place with the same rules on all sides. In some ways, it’s like a sport – under the same rulebook, the team that does the best wins. This breaks down once we abandon a common rulebook and, perhaps to extend the metaphor beyond its usefulness, once we are all playing different sports, the mutually beneficial trades are quite hard to spot. An example from the field of political economy is limits on state aid. For firms competing across borders, structurally unequal monetary support from states (like production subsidies sustained for a long time) advantages firms from historically richer countries over those in lower-income countries with a smaller tax base. Provided that we do share these values (up for discussion – but, in Jacob’s typology, perhaps this falls into practical rather than philosophical concerns), union in some different spheres makes good sense.
Maybe our shared liberalism is derived from the legacy of Christendom. But I don’t think this is Jacob’s philosophical point – it seems that he deliberately chooses something that is irrelevant to the modern economic and political realities, to underline the case for leaving it.
2. ‘Why shouldn’t we desire sovereignty?’
Jacob decries in this section the disproportionate influence of ‘committees, abstruse institutions, and unelected leaders’ (I have added the Oxford comma out of my detest for its omission). The case he makes relies on the fact that repatriating powers from these places is a (philosophical) good, because of the difference between between democratic accountability at the national and supra-national levels. I think he risks underestimating the extent of bureaucratic influence on national policy. Because parliament simply does not have the resources (or the patience) publicly and extensively to scrutinise every detail of government policy (such as the extensive rulebooks distributed to DWP frontline staff to determine exactly what benefit and how much can be given to each claimant), these decisions are all made in the bureaucratic sphere, and may be dragged into the public eye only in periods of controversy or comprehensive reform. This level of policy is scrutinised bureaucratically rather than democratically, even at the national level. Thus, the philosophical benefit of repatriating bureaucratic powers of abstruse policy is not as clear as he seems to suggest – there is no inherent reason why repatriation reduces bureaucracy. It is important here that the claim Jacob makes (like the claim made by so many advocates of Brexit before and during the campaign) is not that we would like faceless British bureaucrats to make these decisions rather than faceless ones in Brussels – it is that democratisation is the fundamental agent of progress in this area. I question whether British processes need be any less abstruse and removed from the public eye than European ones.
The other point he makes here is a critique of the argument that sovereignty is illusory anyway, because of the primacy of the corporation and the international economy. ‘It’s a very strange philosophy’, apparently, ‘which says that because some things are out of our control, we may as well cede what could be in our control as well’. This remark is self-evidently true, but it rather misses the mark. The force which Colin Hill called ‘hyperglobalisation’ works by forcing governments to adopt capitalist-friendly policies by effectively holding their employment laws and regulatory frameworks to ransom. (Hill, incidentally, presents this constraint as being largely confected – just a modern manifestation of the reified ‘limits’ that economics seems to exert on government policy.) Enforced deregulation set by the hyperglobalist pressures does not circumscribe a set of policy areas over which a government retains discretion – it entrenches a way of thinking in all realms of economic and political policy that says that all policy must bow the knee to the interest of corporations, in order to prevent a capitalist exodus. The argument is not ‘we’ve lost some decision power to corporations, let’s give the rest away to a federation’, but rather ‘collectively, European states are at risk of our economic policy being predetermined on our behalf, so let’s federalise in order to call the corporations’ bluff’. In an economic and political union, the adoption of a common rulebook could (philosophically) prevent deregulatory races to the bottom in order to reassert the state’s power to rule over the economic realm.
3. ‘The EU is a glorified trading bloc.’
I agree. Much of what I have written above is premised on the idea that the fundamental utility of the European project is in aligning our economic interests through trade. The idea of European identity is as puzzling to me as it is to Jacob. This, however, does not undermine the EU’s economic functions – indeed, much of the philosophical case for being part of it needs the trading bloc function in order for it to make sense.
4. ‘The EU is not the guarantor of peace.’
Again, I’m quite willing to concede this point. One guarantor of peace is the wider adoption of common liberal political and economic paradigms (Jacob even lists the ‘proliferation of democracies’ as one of the contributing causal factors to the modern era of peace). It is this, I have argued above, that makes economic and political union in Europe make good philosophical sense.
Yikeiatry 