Lessons From Brexit for Our American Friends
The British ‘Brexit’ referendum on whether or not to stay in the European Union highlights the perils of democratic and governmental decision making when there is no adequate prior collective strategic thinking and engagement. A strategy gap as vast as this leads to an equally large democracy gap via a dramatic impoverishment of the public debate. The result is that major implications are ignored altogether, and outcomes are likely in many cases to turn out to be the opposite of what voters thought they were choosing. This sad tale can be simply told.
Former Prime Minister David Cameron decided to hold a referendum on British membership of the European Union in order to placate the right wing of his Conservative party and stem the haemorrhaging of votes to the new UK Independent Party (UKIP) at a time when he thought he might lose the 2015 General Election. There was no need for a referendum because there had been no significant changes in the EU, and the UK was in the highly advantageous - indeed envious - position of being within the single market, but not in the Euro or in the Schengen ‘open border’ area. David Cameron assumed that he would win the referendum with ease as all the main political parties in Parliament were in favour of staying in the EU. So were the Trade Unions and the Bank of England including financial institutions, and most big business. He had already held a referendum on the British voting system in 2011 and on Scottish independence in 2014 – and got away with both of them.
But he lost the EU referendum - together with his premiership, and no doubt the overall judgement of history on his time in office. In a phenomenon recognizable across many countries - an alliance between affluent right wing ‘little Englanders’ and disaffected middle and lower income voters who felt that their standard of living and sense of identity had been eroded by globalization - especially since the 2008 crisis, cut across traditional party lines and confounded the experts. The issue of immigration came to symbolize this otherwise improbable alliance. Inflexible party political representative structures failed to pick up and respond to this growing disaffection – an enormous democratic deficit that underpinned all the others. Referenda on major single topics are dangerous, because they tend to become overall verdicts on governments and elites where accumulated resentments determine the outcome more than the issues ostensibly voted on.
But the most striking feature of the referendum process was the remarkable lack of adequate collective strategic thinking and public strategic engagement with the central issue itself. Instead of informed strategic debate in which the main implications are raised and the likely advantages and disadvantages are argued out, we were treated to private strategic planning within what rapidly became the two main ‘camps’ together with increasingly divisive and ill-tempered public strategic manipulation. Cheered on by the popular and partisan media - particularly on the ‘leave’ side (Daily Express headline – One and a Half Million Turks Heading This Way) - attempts by the ‘quality’ newspapers and the BBC to ‘balance’ the debate were drowned out as all the advantages were presented as being on one side and all the disadvantages on the other.
So it was that on June 24, 2016, we British lemmings woke up in the morning to discover that we had jumped off a cliff – and had not considered what would happen next. The Prime Minister resigned, the Labour Party was in turmoil, the Brexit leaders knifed each other in the back, and the leader of UKIP parachuted out saying that his ‘job was done’ (while retaining his large salary as a European Member of Parliament). The main implications had not been argued out. For example, towering over these was the existential question of the future of the UK itself now that (as predicted) Scotland and Northern Ireland had voted to stay in the EU. In our view this will lead to the break up of the UK as we have known it – an outcome on which 92% of the UK electorate (the UK minus Scotland) have so far had no vote at all. If so, ‘UKIP’ will have been shown from the outset to have been a contradiction in terms. In Ireland the re-activation of the border between Northern Ireland and Eire as the new border between the UK and the EU is likely to have a dangerous and unpredictably destabilizing effect on the delicately calibrated and balanced peace process. There had been no proper debate on difficult trade-offs such as those between continued open access to the single market and the demand for drastic constraints on the free movement of people, or between a lowering of tariffs and taxes in order to make Britain competitive outside the EU and demands for a severe curb on excessive profits for the rich and massive new public investment in which all would share. In the 2-5 year period of instability now widely expected, it is hard to see how the hitherto high levels of inward investment into the UK and relatively low levels of unemployment (the lowest in the EU) can be sustained. If they are not, then the electors of Sunderland, whose 60% vote to leave the EU was the first clear indication of the outcome on the evening of June 23, 2016, thinking that they were voting mainly on immigration, may have helped to call in doubt the future of their own chief employer – Nissan. Nobody knows what the eventual economic outcome will be. Perhaps with a lower pound, a reasonable industrial strategy, and a slice of luck in the complex negotiations ahead, although Britain may in the short term become poorer, it may succeed in the longer term in achieving a much needed rebalancing of its economy outside the EU. If things go wrong, however, as usual it will be the more vulnerable members of society who will suffer most.
These are examples of some of the wider issues that would have been raised by adequate strategic engagement, but went by default in the prevailing distortion, simplified reductionism, and mounting bitterness of the private strategic planning and public manipulation that replaced it. Political leaders, especially in the ‘leave’ camp, put personal ambition above arguing out implications. ‘Brexiteers’ had no plans for what would happen if they won. The main party political system, particularly in London, had lost touch with large sections of the electorate, so that instead of resentments being recognized early, taken seriously by the political establishment, argued out properly and as a result acted upon responsibly, they were ignored, suppressed, and allowed to fester.
What can our American friends learn from this? Far be it from British commentators to interfere in the US Presidential election, but the impression given on this side of the Atlantic is that so far the level of public discussion is not much higher in the US than it was in our own Brexit debate. Slogans like ‘we want our country back’ and ‘make America strong again’ seem to resonate powerfully with sections of the electorate, as did ‘take back control’ in the UK. But what do they mean? This is where only a capacity for genuine public strategic thinking and strategic engagement – where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there? What are the pros and cons of the various alternatives? – can adequately fill this debilitating and dangerous democracy gap.
For S-CAR readers we conclude with what we suggest are two lessons from all this for our conflict resolution (CR) field. First, in terms of principle, in chapter 18 of Contemporary Conflict Resolution (fourth edition 2016) we and Hugh Miall suggest that in intractable conflicts, traditional approaches should be enhanced by a prior strategic engagement capability that can access areas where so far CR cannot reach. We call this ‘extended conflict resolution.’ Here we suggest that this can also play a wider role in relation, not only to specific conflicts, but more generally to the promotion of the public ability to conduct collective strategic thinking so evidently lacking in the Brexit campaign. This carries further what have always been CR’s commitments to enlarging possibility space for creative futures, and to building capacity for second order social learning. These are the strategic prerequisites upon which democracy itself depends.
Second, in terms of substance, the Brexit debate in the UK released and exploited a nationalist little England outlook, which, by removing the UK from the EU, threatens to damage the future well-being of UK citizens - especially the young who voted decisively to stay in the EU - by restricting free movement, constraining cultural exchange, and choking creative research and development. British universities already fear that their work is suffering because of their impending exclusion from dynamic and collaborative European research funds and networks such as Horizon 2020. Although opposition to an ‘ever closer’ European Union and insistence on more stringent immigration controls are understandable and legitimate, it seems shaming that a self-proclaimed internationally responsible country can betray its allies and partners (having arrived late on the scene in the first place) and threaten what is, for all its faults, the greatest international institutional achievement of recent times for overcoming division, hatred, and violence in Europe with such ill-thought through insouciance. Leaving the EU might lead to wider and more open internationalism. But the evidence of heightened racism and xenophobia released by the campaign suggests otherwise. Membership in the EU conferred on the UK a role in cosmopolitan culture which is outward looking, inclusive, collaborative, and committed to peacebuilding – a set of values which we argue in Towards Cosmopolitan Conflict Resolution (chapter 11 of our book) is the normative essence of work in our field.