The EU Never Made Hearts Beat Fast in Europe

[Purveyor]

JUNE 28, 2016 4:06 PM EDT
By Noah Smith

Financial markets are still trying to make sense of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and almost everyone is wringing their hands over what it all means -- popular anger at elites, an eruption of racism and xenophobia, the collapse of the liberal world order, the resurgence of English nationalism.

The uncomfortable truth is that it’s probably all of the above, and more. Like swings in the stock market, big events such as Brexit rarely have just one dominant cause -- people had many reasons for voting to leave. But I’d like to add one more explanation to the mix, one that I think is being under-emphasized: Europe’s failure to build a pan-European nationalism.

I’ve been a skeptic of the EU since 2005. That was the year that French voters rejected the EU draft constitution in a referendum. Dutch voters followed suit in their own referendum just days later.

That constitution was an incremental step -- it wouldn’t have given the EU a chief executive or a unified military, but it would have moved the union toward greater military cooperation and centralized policy-making. That France and the Netherlands -- traditionally two of the most pro-integration countries -- rebelled at this mild, incremental step seemed to me like a strong indication that the union was in big trouble. As in the recent Brexit vote, politicians and the media urged the populace to accept the constitution, but the people didn’t listen.

The elites went ahead and implemented most of the constitution’s provisions anyway, without popular approval, with the Treaty of Lisbon. But from that point on, it seemed to me that the writing was on the wall -- the people of European nations weren't comfortable merging into one large nation-state.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-28/the-eu-never-made-hearts-beat-fast-in-europe

[mpcamb]

1. But it gave them a common currency and an ease of trade that didn't exist before.