brexitannia

For all the millions of words written on Brexit, it’s rare to come across an original analysis, let alone one written with brio. Anthony Barnett’s Lure of Greatness therefore merits all the more attention. In many ways it represents a counterpart to Barnett’s book-length essay, Iron Britannia: War over the Falklands, first published as a special issue of nlr in 1982. This was a landmark study of the origins and significance of a war that had a determining influence over the subsequent course of British politics. It was in good part because of her victory in the South Atlantic that Thatcher won the 1983 election, which consolidated the hegemony of her ideas for decades afterwards. Barnett’s principal political commitment since then has been to the cause of constitutional reform and popular democracy. He was the founder and director of Charter 88 from 1988 until 1995; then, in another major creative initiative, launched the website openDemocracy in 2001. He was its editor-in-chief until 2007, and is still a frequent contributor.

Lure of Greatness, like Iron Britannia, sets out to grasp the meaning of a major political crisis during the time of its unfolding. (Indeed, at the moment of writing this review, it is still unknown what direction Brexit will finally take.) It is a detailed and highly polemical narrative of events as they developed, written both as political reportage and as an analysis of their underlying dynamics. Moreover, though a Remain voter himself, and solidly anti-Trump, Barnett sets out with a winning sympathy for the experience that led ‘the other side’ to vote as it did—sensing indeed, the fresh winds of democracy in their ballot-box revolts against a failing order. The book’s structure is multi-layered, rather like a Russian doll. An opening section proposes a parallel explanation for both Brexit and Trump as protests against the serial betrayals of public trust by us and uk political leaders, the ‘cbcs’—Clinton, Blair, Bush, Brown, Cameron, Clinton.

For Barnett the Iraq war, opposed by million-strong demonstrations, constituted a double breach of trust. First, the mainly liberal, middle-class (in the English sense) opponents of the war were not only ignored but were told lies about Saddam’s non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, the official casus belli. Second, the mainly working-class soldiers and their families were promised a quick victory, but instead found themselves mired in an unending series of military disasters. Barnett points out that over 2 million Americans have been sent to the greater Middle East in pursuit of these wars, their traumas in turn affecting the lives of millions more at home; these communities voted in high numbers for Trump as the self-proclaimed anti-war candidate, in contrast to Clinton. The third and fourth breaches were economic: the 2008 financial crisis belied the cbcs’ promise that neoliberal globalization would bring a golden age of prosperity—and, the final blow, the elites blatantly managed the ‘recovery’ to benefit themselves.

The book’s opening gambit is that this four-fold betrayal of public confidence—blatantly dishonest government, protracted military defeat, mass economic calamity, elite hyper-wealth and corruption—led to a loss of faith in the ruling order as a whole. Barnett borrows John Berger’s metaphor of an open prison to describe the ‘borderless jail of neoliberalism’: ‘Brexit and Trump are attempts at a mass breakout from the marketized incarceration of corporate democracy.’ He sees the European Union in its present form as one of the imprisoning apparatuses—becoming, with the European Council’s treatment of Greece, ‘the most highly organized example of making entire nation-states powerless’. Breakout, then, is understandable, and Barnett hails the ‘unbounded energy’ that propelled these blows against the system. Crucially, however, a ‘chauvinist element of the 1 per cent’ sensed the danger and opportunity of the moment. They took advantage of the withdrawal of support for the cbcs and exploited the growing popular discontent with a failing, corrupt and unaccountable system. They promised to restore greatness and prosperity by putting a protectionist America, or a global Britain, ‘first’. The ‘lure’ of Barnett’s title indicates what he sees as the element of delusion and fantasy in this development; his argument is that the justified dissatisfaction with the cbcs could yet find a more productive outlet, leading to a genuine transformation of the us and uk public spheres. In both countries, however, there has been a demonstrable failure to come to terms with the loss of world status and power—recent and strictly relative in the American case, longstanding for the uk. A democratic resolution will need to take the ‘national question’ on board.

As Barnett explains in his final ‘post-conclusion’, Lure of Greatness was initially conceived as a book about Brexit, but the election of Trump widened his project’s agenda, leading him to describe the two events as linked aspects of a wider upsurge of right-wing revolt. Within this framing, however, the core of the work—its middle 240 pages, out of 350—is centred largely on the uk. There are many continuities here with the theses Barnett set out in Iron Britannia. Central to his analysis of the Brexit vote is the argument that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a multinational state in the midst of a process of reconfiguration, and that its components are subject to different dynamics. In place of the usual four, Barnett claims there are five parts to the uk: Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, London and ‘England-without-London’. Of these, Scotland, Northern Ireland and London, with a combined population of nearly 16 million, voted overwhelmingly for Remain. Set against them, England-without-London—by far the largest of the five, with a population of 46 million—voted Leave by a decisive majority and swung the outcome. ‘It was this England that carried the day.’

What’s the matter with England? Barnett argues that being the first nation to industrialize gave England a ‘first-mover’ advantage: as its overseas empire expanded, other countries had to mobilize their resources to defend themselves against it, forging modern nation-state identities for themselves in the process. The English had no need to forge a nationalism to defend themselves against others. Instead, they recruited their immediate island neighbours into what became a joint project: the British, not the English, empire. Once the empire ended, the other component parts of the uk found ways to move on, via their own civic nationalisms, crystallized in the devolved sub-national parliaments. England could not. It remained trapped, in Barnett’s vivid imagery, like a shrinking, soft-bodied crustacean stuck within the increasingly ill-fitting British exoskeleton, committed to Westminster and Whitehall, the institutions of the uk state—a neo-imperial indulgence that is also a refusal of a more modest English civic-national future.

This line of argument is close to that of Tom Nairn, Barnett’s comrade-in-arms on issues of nationality. Nairn has also argued that it is the absence of political representation of English civic identity that is responsible for the persisting strength of anti-European opinion in England, leading to the Brexit vote. In Barnett’s view, England-Britain’s continuing neo-imperial pretensions are incompatible with membership of the eu. If the separate civic-national identities of the British Isles were all given their full constitutional expression, the English might come to recognize and accept their diminished position in the modern world. He wants the country’s citizens to reconceive of themselves more modestly, as English Europeans, and its leaders to abandon their neo-imperial delusions and take up—for the first time—a creative and cooperative role within the eu.

Barnett names the ideology that has governed post-yet-neo-imperial Britain as ‘Churchillism’, a legacy of the ambiguous national consensus forged during the Second World War. It preserved the forms of empire, its domestic institutions and the simulacrum of the Commonwealth overseas, even as the reality of global power was replaced by subordination to Washington. The delusional neo-imperial aspects of Churchillism were reinvigorated by Thatcher’s Falklands campaign, as Barnett memorably argued in Iron Britannia. Blair’s liberal-imperialist foreign policy, undertaken in transparent fealty to the United States, was a further version of this mentality. Its failures—in Afghanistan, Iraq and all the wars that have followed—added to the sense of betrayed popular trust that in Barnett’s view helped bring about the Brexit victory in the eu referendum. But Churchillism also played a part in the very feebleness and lack of conviction of the official Remain campaign, epitomized in Cameron’s instrumental and implicitly negative view of Europe.

A second strand of Barnett’s argument concerns the question of democracy. Lure of Greatness suggests that another reason why the Brexit campaign succeeded was because Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral processes are so deficient: the high turnout for the 2016 eu referendum—72 per cent, in contrast to 66 per cent in the 2015 general election—showed the vote offered a form of political expression to people who felt this had been previously denied to them. (The issue of national identity had led to an even higher turnout of 85 per cent in the 2014 Scottish referendum.) As with Trump, Brexit voters experienced ‘the sheer thrill of agency’. If Britain had a more representative electoral system—pr was high on the list of Charter 88’s demands—political outcomes might have been different, he suggests. The same can of course be said of the us, with its disproportional representation of state populations in the Senate, its pervasive gerrymandering of electoral districts, the corruptions of campaign finance and so forth.

Barnett rightly points to the malign influence of the press in shaping the debate, and approvingly quotes Peter Oborne’s analysis in The Rise of Political Lying (2005) and The Triumph of the Political Class (2007). Nevertheless, he sees the referendum as an instance of the democratic process in action. He extends this analysis to the aftermath of the vote, writing jubilantly that Members of Parliament had decided that ‘the plebiscite’s democratic nature had a greater authority than their own’. He extrapolates: ‘The result is that a new sovereign, the People, has arisen, and is now regarded as senior to the old one: Parliament. Unless “the People” changes its mind, the Commons and Lords—both with Remain majorities—must obey and vote to leave the eu. In fact and in spirit the referendum drove a stake through the heart of parliamentary sovereignty.’ In line with this, Barnett himself has called in openDemocracy for a second referendum, though arguing that this should not be seen as cancelling the first.

There are some continuities between Barnett’s long advocacy of democratic renewal and the arguments espoused in the Nairn–Anderson theses published in nlr from 1964. One of their central arguments concerned the incompleteness of a bourgeois revolution in Britain, leaving archaic monarchical and aristocratic forms still extant in the (unwritten) British Constitution—the Crown in Parliament, the mummery and traditionalism of parliamentary procedures, the persistence of a non-elected House of Lords. The current difficulties of the House of Commons in asserting its will over the Brexit decision, even where a majority of mps reject the Government’s view, show that these issues remain pertinent. Whether Parliament has an effective say may depend on a procedural decision by the Speaker of the House, and the Crown may yet have a role, in this unreformed Constitution, in determining if there is to be a dissolution of Parliament and a fresh election.

Another of those theses which retains its relevance for Barnett concerns the incorporation and subordination of Labour within this governing system. The most powerful passage in Iron Britannia was perhaps the spelling-out of Labour leader Michael Foot’s warmongering role in the run-up to the Falklands, taunting Thatcher to turn her words into military actions. ‘By speaking thus’, Barnett concluded, ‘Foot made himself the voice of the House of Commons that day. He was the spokesperson for its fervid assent to the expedition.’ Barnett’s noting of the collusions and continuities between Blair’s and Thatcher’s regimes, and his arguments with Labour over its refusal of crucial democratic reforms, continue elements of this important critique. Lure of Greatness welcomes the explosion of popular enthusiasm that swept Corbyn to the summit of the party, but condemns him for being locked into the mindset of British Labourism—integrating Labour politics into the existing Westminster set-up, rather than mounting a challenge to it: ‘It does not matter that he is a left-wing version. The framework is a confinement.’

‘Eventually Brexit will collapse’, Lure of Greatness confidently concludes. Once Britain’s separate nations, England especially, have recovered, they can ‘put their admirable qualities’ to good use, in collaboration with their neighbours—‘for the road back to our European identity lies through England gaining its independence and therefore the confidence to share power.’ Though Trump and Brexit were both products of neoliberalism, they have defied its core assertion that elected governments must always be subordinate to globalization. That in itself may be of some significance, Barnett suggests, in the battles of the coming decade over how neoliberalism will be replaced.

A rich read, always lively and interesting, Lure of Greatness deserves a place on every Brexit bookshelf. It is written to a considerable degree in the form of political narrative and commentary, drawing heavily on press and internet-accessed reports, interspersed with ideas and analysis drawn from less ephemeral sources, including Barnett’s own past work. The book is consistently engaging, but this method can make it hard to follow its key analytical arguments, or to locate their theoretical bases. There is a good deal on the political figures central to the narrative, much of it very perceptive, though on occasion somewhat personalized; Barnett’s composite characterization of the political elite as the cbcs is at best a shorthand for the massive edifice of the liberal establishment (nor is there any explanation for the missing ‘O’). But there is much here to nourish critical engagement. How should Barnett’s central arguments be assessed?

Barnett’s initial explanation of the revolts of 2016 in terms of a four-fold betrayal of trust by this establishment is suggestive. It is, however, difficult to substantiate. Interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of votes of this kind are often subjective. In the uk case, millions of people voted in the Brexit referendum for innumerable reasons, which reflected many lines of division. It is likely, for example, that most of those who marched against the Iraq War were Remainers, not Leavers, and had little sympathy for the Brexit campaign. The actual referendum outcome was decided by a margin of only 4 per cent, and it is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which it would have been reversed. What is of deep and lasting significance was the absolute size of the Brexit vote. Even if Leave had narrowly lost, the issue of Europe would have remained divisive and destabilizing, as it has been in Britain for decades.

In explaining the peculiar effects of Europe within uk politics, Lure of Greatness is on stronger ground. About the role of ‘Churchillian’ imaginaries—fantasies of national grandeur and lost imperial sovereignty—Barnett is right. On this count, Lure of Greatness is well titled. It may be worth recalling that Richard Wollheim deployed the idea of a ‘lure’ in his 1988 essay, ‘Crime, Punishment and “Pale Criminality”’, to argue that capital punishment, far from constituting a deterrent to murder, rather constituted a ‘lure’ or an unconscious point of attraction to those who might be drawn to its dramatization of death. Yet how convincing is Barnett’s proposal for an English civic-national legislature as a solution to post-imperial pathologies? There is some truth in his argument about the continuing elision—and confusion—between the ideas of Englishness and Britishness. But national sentiments when they find expression can be more or less xenophobic. Since political opinion in England has always been more conservative than in Scotland and Wales, and has become even more so with the deindustrialization and weakening of the North, it is hard to see how a majority in England would now be persuaded to accept such a reduced view of their national standing. (Had a federal system been established earlier, before English national sentiment had been displaced onto a hatred of Europe, matters might have been different.) Nevertheless, Barnett is right to interpret nationalist populism as, in part, a response to the experience of relative decline—downward mobility in its collective form; and it is the English, of all the peoples within the British Isles, who seem to have the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with this reality.

There are elements of both exhilaration and anxiety in Barnett’s view of the 2016 votes as an attempted ‘mass breakout’ from neoliberalism—‘you can’t understand either American or British politics without cheering on the desire to leave the open prison of the globalized order’—even if the escape is being led by ‘mafias, crooks, would-be dictators, demagogues and their shyster newspapers and websites’. Significant as these issues are, there is a question of how far understandings that focus on issues of democratic practice and procedure are sufficient to explain these crises. It seems to me one should not be too quick to celebrate the kind of popular mobilization and self-expression which was effected by the Trump vote or the referendum. Barnett cheers the triumph of the latter over parliamentary sovereignty, but what does this really signify? How can the act of will signalled by a referendum result be combined with the responsibility of political parties and their representatives in Parliament to act according to their own manifestos—especially if the consequences of implementation turn out to be significantly different from those which were anticipated when the referendum took place? Parliament is liable to be discredited both if it reneges on its original large vote to uphold the referendum result, and if its members act contrary to their beliefs about what its effects will be. This is why arguments for citizens’ assemblies which could allow some process of deliberation and reconciliation to take place have some force.

There is a broader international dimension to these issues which Lure of Greatness scarcely considers, despite its valuable project of comparing ‘England’s Brexit and America’s Trump’. The larger phenomenon is the widespread rise of right-wing nationalist-populist movements: in Brazil, the election of Bolsonaro; in Germany, the rise of the afd; in Italy, the electoral victory of the Lega and the Five Stars Movement; in France, the strength of Marine Le Pen’s following; in Sweden, the advance of the Sweden Democrats; and in Austria, that of the Freedom Party. Other instances could be added. There is more going on in all this than the specificities of Britain and the United States and the deficits of their democratic systems can account for. What more inclusive explanations might be offered?

As Barnett acknowledges, the most fundamental cause of this move to the right lies in the crisis of a neoliberal system whose full dominance lasted from 1989 until the financial crisis of 2008. As long as this system was still producing economic growth, even if of a highly unequal kind, its political regimes retained enough legitimacy to maintain their hegemonies. With the financial crisis, and the stagnation and austerity that followed it, this legitimacy was lost—in particular among those left behind during the period of growth, who felt disparaged and humiliated by the prosperity from which they were excluded. The unexpected development was that it was nationalists and populists of the right, not in most instances the left, who were most able to mobilize the discontents of the disadvantaged. In the 2018 Congressional elections, Democrats often did better in districts populated by wealthier voters than in those inhabited by the poorer and less well-educated, whom the Democrats have traditionally sought to represent. The deficiencies of the European Union, arising from the failure of its left parties to create an inclusive model of development for its disparate elements, also play a part in this situation.

Downward mobility and relative decline have given rise to deep anger and resentment. In these circumstances, ‘objects’—or in another idiom ‘others’—are sought, upon whom such resentment can be projected. It is in understanding these mechanisms that psychoanalytic forms of social explanation have their greatest purchase. Memories of better times, real or imagined, are conjured up as retrospective utopias. ‘Making America Great Again’ and ‘Taking Back Control’ are the current versions of this in the us and Britain. Columns of impoverished refugees in Central America, or small boats carrying desperate asylum-seekers across the English Channel, are in these conditions constructed as national emergencies or ‘serious incidents’. Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) gives a sympathetic account of conversations with Republican (and sometimes Trump) supporters in the American South, who feel that, despite their good citizenship, they have been pushed aside in the American competition for advancement, by other groups (‘minorities’) more favoured by privileged political elites.

Neoliberalism has encountered its crisis because of the unequal nature of its model of development, in which financialized forms of capital have become detached from responsibilities to employees, communities or states, and are committed only to the accumulation of profits for stockholders and investors. What the post-war Fordist settlement demonstrated was that goods and services can only be produced for profit if there are consumers who can afford to purchase them—and, indeed, if there is also a functioning state apparatus capable of protecting their economic well-being. It is because living standards have been static or declining for large swathes of the population, since well before the financial crisis, that resentments against the dominant system have grown as they have. Centre-left parties were largely complicit with, or active supporters of, the development of this marketized system, and have therefore lost much of their capacity to represent popular majorities.

Migration has been a principal focus of conservative populist resentment, but this is not only because of migrants’ role in the familiar socio-psychological mechanisms of projection and scapegoating. Migration to Europe from the Middle East is the direct outcome of the disruption of the entire region caused by the international arm of neoliberalism, the liberal-imperialist interventionism of the Western powers. But there is another operative factor: the demography of the advanced Western economies is such that they have ageing, and thus inherently static or falling, populations. Continued economic growth and development cannot be sustained without the inward migration of younger people—indeed, of people willing to endure sacrifices for the sake of the future prosperity of themselves or their children. This is something which many indigenous inhabitants, accustomed to a relatively high standard of living and to social protection, are not inclined to do. This situation produces friction and competition between existing and migrant populations, which fuel populist movements. The understanding and management of these processes, which relate to the development of the regions from which migrants come as well as the metropolises of the West, have stretched the capacities of established Western governments to breaking point; Merkel only barely survived her decision to admit a million refugees to Germany.

In Nervous States (2018), William Davies draws attention to another dimension of this crisis, highly relevant to the practices of democracy Barnett discusses. There has been a dethronement of abstract conceptions of reason and rationality as a containing framework of social existence in modern societies, Davies argues. Emotions and their expression, issues of identity and meaning, have greater salience, while the authority of experts whose legitimacy arises from their mastery of reasons and facts has diminished. The attack by Trump on ‘fake news’—his demand that people should trust his Tweets rather than the New York Times—is a symptom of this. All this is not quite as new as Davies suggests—Iron Britannia described the subjugation of reason by feeling throughout the entire Falklands episode, and Nazism was nothing if not an expression of collective resentment and hatred. But nevertheless, the rise of social media and the forms of destructive communication which they have licensed, is a significant development. Davies points out that one of the attractions of war for citizens is the sense of meaning and recognized feeling which attaches to it—the dead in war, unlike the less visible but numerous casualties of peace, are at least commemorated and celebrated for their sacrifices.

The rise of social media, and the possibilities they create of infinite kinds of lateral communication between members of societies, poses crucial questions for the future of democracy. We know how these media can and are being captured by powerful agencies, whose object is to accumulate capital and power through operating the machinery of a consumer culture. We know how they can be used for political mobilization, by movements of the left like those of Sanders or Corbyn, as well as by those of the right. What we do not know is what the larger outcome of this massive socio-technical development will be. Can it become a resource for a general enfranchisement, for the establishment of the educated democracy that was the central vision of Raymond Williams? Or, on the other hand, will it be the means for the destruction of all forms of legitimate authority and connectedness, for the surveillance and manipulation of divided and atomized populations, in the service of the privileged? Lure of Greatness describes a moment in this perilous social transition and offers a valuable understanding of how we have got to where we now are.