Plaque of The New Colossus poem by Emma Lazarus ("Mother of Exiles") in the museum inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Wikicommons/Melanzane1013. Some rights reserved.Here on the American side of the pond, the news of the
Brexit-decision sent me reeling backward to a lament written by the
British-American poet W.H. Auden in February, 1939:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
This is from Auden’s ode “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” his
contemporary, who’d written that the center cannot hold as the best lose all
conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. Glancing at
developments not only in the Brexit controversy but also in the American
presidential election as in Russia, China, and the Middle East, I did wonder if
the nightmare is returning.
But Anthony Barnett’s “Blimey, It Could Be Brexit!” has the
perhaps-paradoxical effect of reinforcing my conviction that “living nations” aren’t
condemned to “wait, each sequestered in its hate,” each erupting into a
“nationalist’ variant of racism, xenophobia, and imperialism. To the contrary,
national identities may remain more necessary to democracy than it pleases some
of us to believe.
Understood as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” or
as the late American historian Robert Wiebe’s “grand fictive families,” nations
are as essential as real families to nourishing democratic dispositions and
habits. Fail though they often do, we discard them at our peril.
Even Kant, the great universalist, hoped for a federation of
republics, warning that a one-world government would be a “soulless despotism.”
If the EU is to become a federation of real republics, not a despotism, its nations
must renew their democracies from the ground up. Before June 23, Anthony posed
that challenge starkly, and rightly, to a multi-national Britain and its often-avowedly
post-national left:
It is simple, and fundamental. A multi-national entity like the United
Kingdom whose constitution is uncodified is bound to be fundamentally
threatened by membership of a larger, multi-national entity that is dedicated
to codifying itself. If its membership continues, its constitution will
eventually be dissolved by it….
The Anglo-British have a long tradition of seeking to preserve their unique
constitutional arrangements. [Britain] prides itself in this combination of
flexibility and tradition that has ensured an unrivalled continuity….Britain
remains a purposive country, with an old constitution that seeks to encompass
new energies…
If Britain stays in, we face the prospect, over the coming decades, of
membership of the EU dissolving the bonds that have reproduced the UK’s
uncodified settlement; at the level of the nations, of rights, of legal
systems, of sovereignty, of parliament. The political caste are acutely aware
of this as it strikes at their existing powers and influence, hence their
various forms of ‘Euroscepticism’. Regular folk don’t have so much to lose but
instinctively – and rightly – the English know that if they want to stay
British in the old way they have to leave the EU.
Far from idealizing “the old way,” Anthony sees it as broken,
perhaps beyond repair, but he notes that democratic sovereignty has been reborn
in the past, bursting its aristocratic and imperialist casings. Has the Leave victory opened the path for a new
birth, amid and against what neoliberal, global capital has become? Anthony
shows that Brexit has posed that challenge to Britain
— to Scottish nationalism certainly, but to English national identity,
especially.
Democracies “act in
the name of universal principles which are then circumscribed within a particular
civic community,” explains the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib. “This is
the ‘Janus face of the modern nation,’ in the words of Jurgen Habermas,” the
German political philosopher who in the 1960s marveled at and praised what he
called the “constitutional patriotism” of Americans in the civil-rights and
anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, who resisted their state in the name
of their civic-republican nation.
Even when a liberal capitalist republic has a written
constitution like that of the United States, it depends on a critical mass of
its citizens to nourish and uphold democratic beliefs and virtues which neither
the liberal state nor markets nourish or defend – the liberal state because it
doesn’t judge among differing ways of life, and markets because their very
genius is to approach investors and consumers as narrowly self-interested
individuals, not citizens who might persuade one another to subordinate immediate
self-interest to achieving public goods in common that they cannot achieve
alone – and to achieve, in the process, larger “selves,” as well.
The critical role for national civic-culture is
explained in Robert Wiebe’s revelatory Who
We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism: “States, hovering like
crows over the nests that nations make, have… played on the sentiments of
ancestry, destiny, and sacred soil. Try though they might, however, they have
rarely inspired feelings of kin-connectedness, the core around which cultures
of nationalism have developed,” he wrote.
To nourish democratic dispositions and virtues in order to
remain free, a society has to assert itself against as well as within the state
hovering over it and, often, plundering it. When Margaret Thatcher, prime
minister of global capital, announced, “There is no society” and summoned
British nationalist sentiments as stimulants for investment, she seeded last
week’s Leave decision.
She may have supported European economic integration to
facilitate movements of global capital that she assumed the City of London
could master and guide. But, as Iain Martin noted in the Financial Times two days after the Brexit
vote, “in her final term she and her supporters realized that, in pushing successfully
for open markets in what later became the EU, she had sacrificed way too much
sovereignty and undermined democratic legitimacy.”
Nationalism need not — and cannot — say “No” to
multiplicity and trans-national cooperation any more than an individual family
can say “No” to its membership in a community that may be more fractious and
pluralist than some myths suggest. Anthony is right to hope that a healthier,
more democratic British civic-culture may yet contribute to a federation of
republics. He rekindles my own hopes, first, that the US can avoid the
equivalent of a Leave vote in an election of Donald Trump to its presidency,
and, second, even if it can’t, that such an election would force the rebirth of
a “constitutional patriotism” with sufficient national civic wellsprings to
draw from.
We had such wellsprings late in the nineteenth century,
thanks to an open frontier and burgeoning labor markets when Emma Lazarus
penned “The New Colossus,” the great civic-national poem whose final lines are
mounted on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and we revived such hopes
in the 1960s:
York Harbor:
Not like
the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our
sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and
her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep,
ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The European Union, too, has lifted its lamp beside a
golden door, at least intermittently; and I hope that Britain — America’s
political forebear in more ways than I can count – will continue to inspire
both us and Europe, to transcend ourselves by finding ourselves. Only if we can,
on both sides of the Atlantic, can we hope to follow W.H. Auden’s concluding
admonition, as Anthony is doing.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night
With your
unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice .
With
the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse.
Sing
of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In
the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start.
In
the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.