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(…) “The notion that a British nation-state can be created in
the 21st century is thus not conservative, but radical. British society stands
before a leap into an unexamined future.
Should Brexit take place, today's Brexiteers will be
tomorrow's agents of foreign empire. Some of them already are.
Europe has prevented the dissolution of the British Empire
from reaching the British Isles. Should Brexit take place, there will likely be
no Britain, since Scotland and Northern Ireland will depart, but rather an
England. This England will not have "exited" anything. English people
will continue to negotiate with the EU, from weakness rather than strength.
Brexiteers imagine that England will somehow revive a
British Empire. The options are indeed integration on the one hand and empire
on the other, but the empires in question are no longer British. The EU
insulates its citizens from the empires of today: China, America, Russia;
Amazon, Google, Facebook. Should Brexit take place, today's Brexiteers will be
tomorrow's agents of foreign empire. Some of them already are.”
By TIMOTHY
SNYDER 5/1/19, 4:02 AM CET
“Europe’s dangerous creation myth
In Western Europe, nationalism isn’t conservative — it’s
radical.”
OVOODOCORVO
|
Europe’s dangerous creation myth
In Western Europe, nationalism isn’t conservative — it’s
radical.
By TIMOTHY
SNYDER 5/1/19, 4:02 AM CET
Europeans are paying a price for believing in their own
myth. With the furies of Brexit and the future of the European Union up for
debate, proponents of the European project are burdened with a creation story
that bears little resemblance to historical fact.
Whether they are friends or enemies of the EU, Europeans
believe in the fable of the wise nation. According to this narrative, European
nation-states have a long and rich history. In particular, these nation-states
learned from World War II that war is bad, and so bound themselves together in
its aftermath in peaceful cooperation.
Friends of the European project like this fairy tale,
because it tells a story of learning and progress, and confers a sense of
superiority over Americans. But enemies of the EU like this narrative just as
much, because it suggests that the nation-state was always present and was the
agent that made decisions. If a nation-state chose to enter the EU, they
reason, it can choose at any moment to exit.
And yet the fable of the wise nation is false. The history
of the nation-state in Western and Central Europe is practically nonexistent;
in Eastern Europe, it is longer but hardly glorious. Nation-states in the
Balkans set the stage for World War I, and in its aftermath six new
nation-states were created in Eastern Europe, all of which had been removed
from the map by the middle of World War II.
By 1945, European powers had not learned that war is bad.
They kept fighting colonial wars until they lost them or were exhausted by
them. Remember Indochina, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt; Malaya, Kenya, Angola,
Guinea, Mozambique and the Spanish Sahara.
The modern European state was conceived as the core of an
empire. It has survived as an element of an integration project.
It wasn’t nation-states that kicked off the process of
European integration. It was fading empires, exhausted by their colonial
efforts.
It’s no accident that Germany took the lead in the process.
The country’s defeat in World War II was the beginning of the end of European
colonialism. And because Hitler's Reich was the first European power to
indisputably lose a colonial war — World War II, at its root, was a German
colonial war for land in Ukraine — post-war West Germany was the leading agent
of European integration.
Other Western powers soon followed. As keeping a hold on
their empires became too costly, they found European markets and a European
identity. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Europe withdrew from colonies to
find itself.
Finding oneself usually means forgetting everyone else, and
Europe was no exception. The fable of the wise nation displaced the history of
empire. Germans do not remember World War II as a colonial war for Ukraine, and
in this they are typical Europeans. Throughout Central and Western Europe, the
history of colonial atrocity and retreat is displaced by the more pleasant
after-story of treaties and peace.
Two French soldiers leave their foxhole during the Battle of
Dien Bien Phu, Indochina, 1954 | Keystone/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
The EU is the soft landing after empire. It has allowed
Europeans to cheat fate. Think of it: Societies that fought two World Wars and
lost far-flung empires have the world's highest standard of living. Usually the
collapse of empire means the collapse of civilization. Europe managed to do the
opposite: to preserve the reality and burnish the image of its civilization
despite the collapse of its empires.
It is often said that European integration permitted democracy
in Europe. This is true enough. But democracy for everyone subject to the power
of a given state is not possible for an empire.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the EU has created a framework
in which European states can exist. The modern European state was conceived as
the core of an empire. It has survived as an element of an integration project.
In most Western European cases, as in the United Kingdom, there has never been
a moment where a nation-state has had to make it on its own.
Until now, perhaps. The case for Brexit rests on the premise
that there is a British nation-state lying in wait, if you peel back the layers
of European integration and revert back to a previous state of “independence.”
Yet there has never been such a thing. The historical process of the loss of
empire coincided in time with the historical process of European integration,
creating the Britain that exists today.
The notion that a British nation-state can be created in the
21st century is thus not conservative, but radical. British society stands
before a leap into an unexamined future.
Should Brexit take place, today's Brexiteers will be
tomorrow's agents of foreign empire. Some of them already are.
Europe has prevented the dissolution of the British Empire
from reaching the British Isles. Should Brexit take place, there will likely be
no Britain, since Scotland and Northern Ireland will depart, but rather an
England. This England will not have "exited" anything. English people
will continue to negotiate with the EU, from weakness rather than strength.
Brexiteers imagine that England will somehow revive a
British Empire. The options are indeed integration on the one hand and empire
on the other, but the empires in question are no longer British. The EU
insulates its citizens from the empires of today: China, America, Russia;
Amazon, Google, Facebook. Should Brexit take place, today's Brexiteers will be
tomorrow's agents of foreign empire. Some of them already are.
The historical function of the EU is to gather together the
fragments of failed European empires. To forget this basic historical truth, as
Europeans — and Britons in particular — have managed to do, is to risk the very
form of life that they take for granted.
Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale
University. His most recent book is “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe,
America,” which has just been released in an updated paperback (Vintage, 2019).
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