Brexit: History strikes back at the European Union as Africa naps

Brexit: History strikes back at the European Union as Africa naps

Wednesday, June 29, 2016 8:02 pm


 David Cameron: British Prime minister

David Cameron: British Prime minister

By Ademola Araoye

The divisive decision on the June 23 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom with 48 percent of voters wanting to stay within the European Union and 52 percent wanting to leave the Union has elicited global consternation and plunged the British establishment into some pandemonium. In the aftermath of the exit vote, with acrimonious finger and counter finger pointing, the British Labour party that ideologically should defend the common interests of workers all across Europe and the world, seems to be imploding. The leadership is accused of tepid engagement to assure a resounding and historic defeat against the “Leave” vote. With the provinces and the margins in deafening denunciations of the invasion of the island by Eastern Europeans and with national loss of control over immigration, full throttled puritan leftist ideological articulations presented clear challenges.

At the same time, Prime Minister David Cameron canvassing a stay vote said he had held nothing back and was absolutely clear about his belief that Britain is stronger, safer and better off inside the European Union. His renegotiated terms with the EU did not save the day leading an emotional resignation. Cameron’s conservative party that drove him into a premature gamble for a referendum to defuse the pressure from Eurosceptics in its ranks may have won. But Brexit, it seems, is going to be only a devastating phyric victory and only in the short term. The future belongs to youthful Britishers. Hopefully, Africa’s youth would audit Africa’s dolorous circumstances and courageously tease some constructive lessons from the contemporary saga of Europe. It is the hope that Africa would distil the right lessons from Brexit by consolidating its preeminent structural weaknesses, contrived by the same European powers who are bonding, into a credible global presence rather than the narrow and partisan conveniences of further factionalization. With 56 states with 1.6 billion people, Africa’s post-independence and post-liberation construction is very the antithesis of European political post modernism that is founded on the emergence of pervasive hyphenated identity across Europe’s nationalities.

There are many complexities to Brexit. The outcome revealed a national dilemma regarding protecting the integrity and the sanctity of puritan British identity or waking to up the millennial challenge that identities across Europe had become irretrievably hyphenated. The more profound is the global implication of Brexit for the evolution of Westphalian statehood and the emergence of the post-Modern state. The rise of the post Modern state in Europe merely followed the law of unintended consequences with no force able to control this historical transformation of conventional statehood that the Franco-German 1950 Coal and Steel treaty had unleashed. The European Coal and Steel Community was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to “make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible”[3] which was to be achieved by regional integration, of which the ECSC was the first step. It was formally signed as the Treaty of Paris in 1951.

It began the rehabilitation of defeated Germany while providing France some dignity after a humiliating surrender to the Nazis. The evolution of the modern Westphalian state in the rise of the post-modern state has generated tensions in the various nations impacted. It is these tensions that have been expressed in simmering divisions across many lines in Great Britain: cosmopolitanism versus provincialism, Euro-British youth at the beginning of a new millennium versus unadulterated Britons fixated in old identities and their insular sensibilities, Scotland versus old England, absolute sovereignty against relative sovereignty; all reflecting a broken national solidarity and consensus around critical and immediate national questions. British national social capital has been disrupted, but paradoxically at the same time is demonstrating its historic resilience. The outcome of Brexit reflects a sluggish adaption of Great Britain to these profound rapid developments driving the transformation of statehood.

Only the most faithless would think these a mortal blow to Britain. It would smack of abysmal understanding of history and gross underestimation of British ingenuity, a pitiful appreciation of the creativity of small British islanders who conquered the world.

In the Brexit vote, Britain kept faith with its national spirit of ancient aloofness from the European interior and its land mass, although it could as well be perceived as a national chase for its old and recalcitrant ghost. For in the final analysis, the imperative that initiated the Franco-German Coal and Steel in 1953 was driven by considerations for security in Europe. The treaty was to assuage the fears of especially France by providing avenues to monitor the production and use to which the residue of the fallen Reich in West German steel would be put.

The late heroics of Charles De Gaul could not erase the national humiliation of France’s ignominous swift defeat by the Nazi war machine. The political multiplier spill-over effect propelled into an incipient post-modern state constituted by the European Union. It was thus natural for Germany and France to lead continental Europe. Half way inside, Britain remained was a foot in the door and indeed a powerful insider. But Britain remained committed to the United States across the Atlantic, while playing its regional politics within its half-hearted engagement in the European Union.

In the longitudinal sweep of history, Brexit merely represents a momentary blip on the evolutionary trajectory of the Westphalian modern state to its post-modern station. From this perspective, the brouhaha around Brexit is quite surprising and even if only natural. In the post-modern character of the European Union, an interactive dynamic is seen at play between states and their societies. In essence, conventional frameworks and structures for political organization, are being transformed through increasing derogation of the powers of sovereignty. The post-modern state has evolved into a distinct class from among a select group of elite modern states. Yet not all modern states can be said to be enthusiastic about acquiring post-modern characteristics. This is what again the leave vote in the Brexit referendum is repudiating. The United States of America, for example, long protected by natural buffers that were only shattered by the Pearl Harbour invasions and consequently with a penchant of being inward looking, is a close approximation of the modern state.

The United States is deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to supra national institutions that would derogate from its sovereign attributes. This is despite its rank as the preeminent power, if not an outright hegemon in the post-Cold War era and in the new millennium. Great Britain, closer to the European mass, in its quandary is located halfway between an entrenched modern state and a post-modern one. France and Germany would come closest as representations of the post-modern state. Thus, when an evolutionary perspective is employed in analyzing the internal contents of states, including entrenched national attitudes adopted by each state member of the global system to a number of developments in relation to the evolved global society, a more complex view of the vote on Brexit emerges.

A whole shift in global political culture is seen to be at work. This political culture shift is driven by a general culture shift in advanced industrial society involving, among other transformations, redefinition of identities through the expansion of narrow nationalities in some modern state. Ronald Inglehart posits that during the past few decades, economic, technological, and socio political changes have been gradually transforming the cultures of advanced industrial societies in profoundly important ways. The cultural change is reshaping the social basis of political conflict, transforming the vision of society as to what constitutes the appropriate political goals of society and government. The values of Western publics and society have been shifting from an overwhelming emphasis on material wellbeing and physical security toward greater emphasis on the quality of life.

Buhari and Cameron

Buhari and Cameron


One of the profound implications of these changes is that it no longer seems self-evident that the expansion of state authority constitutes progress. Indeed, a large proportion of the public in advanced industrial society is coming to have sufficient interest and understanding of national and international politics to participate in decision making at this level. The elite challenging, in contradistinction to elite directed, style of politics of the mass public gives the public an increasingly important role in making specific decisions, not just a choice between two or more sets of decision makers.

These have important consequences for relations between state and society and the internal processes and character of the state. Ultimately, the shift in attitudes, values, and behaviour of the publics of advanced industrial society remains a critical element in directing the evolution of the modern Westphalian state. For Britain these developments are too many within a very short period of time.

Variation in the speed of adaptation in itself is a source of the differentiation in the kinds of state. The sources of variation in states are partly traceable to their antecedents. In general, states that are historically parts of the original Westphalian cluster, mainly European states, have continued to evolve based on constant adaptation to the emerging challenges of the inter-state environment. The instigation in Europe were the devastations of World War I and II. The continuous evolution of the modern state remains unabated. This is exemplified by the European Union. Great Britain’s decision in Brexit reflects its reluctance to lose control associated with loss of absolute sovereignty. Scotland rejection of Brexit reflects its internal desire to whittle down the control of London over its affairs. The youth rejection of Brexit illustrates the youthful embrace of a continental identity along with their British heritage. Just like Great Britain, paradoxically, the great success of the United States as a modern state partly militates against the adoption of psychological impulses that would drive its transformation to the post-modernist era.

The Marshal Plan in Europe, the building of islands of capitalist havens in far-flung South East Asia helped to lay the foundations of a global economic process that has forced the redefining of the normative principles of international trade. The United Nations in codifying new principles that should govern relations between the state and its citizens, including group and minority rights, underlined the emergence of universal standards in an evolved international society.

This is shifting the locus of moral accountability from the nation to the international society accompanied by the development of supra national institutions that have challenged traditional notions of the extensive latitude associated with the sovereign powers of the modern state. The dynamic of the international society, technological advances in communications and the consequences of the globalization process, perceived by various domestic interests groups as both positive and negative, have eroded the underpinnings of national economies and national societies and fostered the development of transnational coalitions seeking to advance or even impede the threat to perceived threats.

The rapid rise of transnational communities and coalitions defined by limited interests, the workings of supra national judicial institutions, transnational economic conglomerates with their global complexes and linkages, supra national legislative chambers and others have been the consequences of a culture shift with seismic impact on the nature of the inter-state system and the axioms undergirding its operations. By 1957, the collaboration by France and the Federal Republic of Germany in coal and steel production was laying the humble foundation for the post-modern state. It is now concretely expressed in European Union and its supra national institutions. The institutions of the Union derogate significantly from traditional understandings and practice of domestic sovereignty. Post-modern states are welded together by a dense network of evolved transnational social capital linking their national societies. Civil society and the private sector have become actively interested in international rules, which have also become the subject of increased media attention.

A network of causes, based on shared values that bind civil society across state boundaries and that enhance interests in international rules that regulate these causes drive a new transnational political process that assure the acceptance by their states the new principles that undermine old notions of sovereignty associated with the modern state. The states accept that international law has emerged as a regular feature of modern political life. Notions of sovereignty have changed with growing interdependence such that to claim that states are as sovereign as they were fifty years ago is to ignore reality. The extent of interdependence caused by the avalanche of international law means that states are constrained by international obligations over an increasingly wide range of actions.

By the 1950s there existed an embryonic global constitutional order, with rules that remain in place-albeit rather shakily in some cases-to this day. And the rules, once adopted take on a logic and a life of their own. This has led to historic transformations and geo-political revolution of historic dimensions expressed in the emergence of a New Europe which has all the symbolic apparatus of a unified political entity. In the world of the post-modern states, the preeminence of the sovereignty of the state and the associated outpouring of patriotism expected of its citizens is an oddity as their societies work hard to move away from nationalistic tendencies and toward a supranational union that eviscerates borders and traditional national rivalries. Thus, the evolving governing principles of the post-modern state system appear to be breaking new ground and instituting new inter subjective understandings and grundnorms in society as well as with the post modern state.

Africa

Africa

These new organizing principles are radically altering the character of the state, its society and the nature of the international system, especially the post-modern state, within this heterogeneous international and inter-state system. The cumulative impact of the increasing alteration of the character of the post-modern state, and its increasing differentiation from entrenched modern state as the two kinds of states interact closely in the international arena, has been a pervasive misunderstanding and a climate of mistrust. This climate has continued to erode friendship among allies and led to smoldering resentment. The close juxtaposition and interaction between two genres of states with differing worldview, policies, philosophies, axiomatic understandings and standard operating procedures has thus created tensions in the operations of the inter-state system.

As a result of the evolution of universal moral standards and the emergence of an international community conscious of itself as such, in contradistinction from the aggregation of states that earlier constituted the international community, states neither enjoy the unquestionable right to the recourse to violence as an instrument of internal coercion, nor, more importantly, in its relations with other states. Indeed, it is unconceivable that some states, mostly post modern states, would even go to war with each other. The existence of an international community, built around transnational convergences in ideas, values, principles and interests and the complex transnational communal linkages that these relationships have spawned, has altered the very nature and character of international society. Morality has acquired critical salience in the conduct of international affairs. In the world of post modern states, it has rendered obsolete the instrument of war to regulate relations between constituent members of the system.

Post modern states abjure unilateral pursuit of military campaigns. While the decision to go to war still remains the prerogative of each state, it has become the responsibility of a larger community to legitimize such decisions as a new norm of the emerging new system of post modern states. A state cannot simply just go to war as the international community has insisted on forging a new kind of approach to the use of power in world politics. In the emerging post modern dispensation, the incidence of war among post-modern states is perceived as more a breakdown of the workings of the inter-state system than the continuation of politics by other means. The incidence of war among post-modern states would be an aberration and not an expectation as conceived within the modern state system.

War has become an aberration and the military machinery of powerful states have been deployed ostensibly more for humanitarian intervention in troubled states than to prosecute conventional hostilities between powerful state actors. In general, there is revulsion to war and a commitment to the pacific resolution of differences in the affairs of states. Ninety per cent of Spanish citizens rejected the invasion of Iraq in 2003 led by the Bush administration of the United States, although the Spanish government failed to respect the wishes of its people. In spite of strenuous manipulation of intelligence in respect of the acquisition of chemical weapons by Iraq, only 50% of Britons supported British participation in the war in Iraq. But Prime Minister Tony Blair committed Britain to the war anyway. In the international community, mainly in the European Union with a possible exception of France, there would appear to be preference for alternative instruments, including sanctions, to force compliance by states.

The end of the cold war also had a catalytic impact on the post modernization process of some elite states by freeing the allies of the leading modern state to pursue new political directions that went in opposite directions from those of the hegemonic power. This, in turn, has infused a certain momentum to the globalization process as small states in the orbit of the old COMECOM were sucked into the expanding reach of the economic frontiers of Western Europe. Many of them ended up in England fuelling anti-immigrant sentiments.

The phenomenon of a post-modern state can thus be interpreted as an unfolding process and the wholesale shifting of political culture at the global level. It may also be seen as a further evolution of the Westphalian state system as the modern state begins a certain long decline. This development has entailed the subversion of the axiomatic foundations of the modern state and has accentuated the redefinition, through expansion of nation state identities, that include the progressive breaking down of institutional barriers that had resulted from national, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities. In its place are new institutions of post modern states that recognize the differences but that also transform them into powerful elements of a transnational new political community.

This has been followed by the institutionalization of universalizing norms and values, including the growth of international society and the increasing legitimation of international law and institutions to enforce those laws. The impact of these post-modern features on the state has been the increasing repudiation of the foundational principles undergirding the modern state and the rise of the supranational political entity.

The overall strategic canvass is complicated. Some experts have meanwhile suggested that Britain cutting itself free from the sclerotic EU would free it to use the freedoms that it wins by leaving the union to build better relationships with the rising markets, with the Commonwealth. The suggestion is made that the EU is not getting stronger. The EU is perceived getting weaker. Schengen is falling apart and countries are increasingly looking to themselves. Common values in Europe are falling apart. So in the EU that the Brits are thinking about leaving—because ostensibly it is so incredibly overbearing—those things are eroding. Europe doesn’t stand for what it used to. More profoundly and paradoxically, Great Britain had to leave because the European Union was betraying the very values of the supra-national, democratic identity that Europe took on.

Europe had failed in many ways in its boldest and courageous experiment that advanced industrial democracies have ever embarked upon. European governments moving away from rule of law, moving away from an independent judiciary exemplified by Hungary, in Poland, in Greece. You see it with the rise of populism in many of the larger European economies as well. A risk analyst, Ian Bremer, for example, notes that the Commonwealth is extraordinarily important to Britain for Britain to invest and assert its autonomy more. He proposes that the new freedoms acquired by Britain hugely important as evidenced in the Five Eyes agreement on cyber, which has been very helpful to the United States as well. He emphasizes Britain’s ability to develop a stronger relationship with a country like India, given its ties, and it should be doing so much more.

Because India is a rising country, a vibrant democracy and is finally starting to get governance in place. Right now the best relationship India has in the world is with Japan. Britain should not be happy about that. Britain should have been doing everything possible to get in that position; as opposed to China, where the Brits are never going to be able to compete with the Germans. The Germans will always have a better relationship with China than Britain. Britain is the closest ally to the United States and as demonstrated by the duo of tony Blair and George Bush ultimately stick together whatever the world says.

The British have a more formidable history of military accomplishment and do not depend on their ex colonies for strategic engagement at the global level. Some reckon it is a close rival to Germany for the leadership of Europe. However, Great Britain has historically not planted its spirit in Europe. The leadership of Europe is mundane for Africa. Each European power protects its interests on the continent without reference to Brussels.

In all these, the lessons for Africa is clear. Whether Great Britain stays in the European Union or not, Africa, as currently constructed, stands no chance to gain any profound benefits from Britain or up its economic relations with the EU-just crumbles as usual. Only five African states, namely Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt , Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa each houses more than 5% of Africa’s population. 43 per cent of Africa’s population is concentrated in these five states. Twenty-six African states or 38 per cent have a population of less than 5 million. 26 per cent of African states have a population of less than 2 million. Nine states representing 16 per cent of states in Africa have a population of less than a million. Finally, 30 states each have less than one percent of the total population of the continent. In total, these 30 states constituting 54 per cent of states have just less than 11 per cent of the total population of the continent. This is not a configuration that aspires to great things in the international arena, with autonomous Britain or the European Union.

Brexit would not impact the resolution of the stalled trade negotiations between Europe and Africa. Last year both celebrated the 10th anniversary of the start of negotiations over economic partnership agreements (EPAs) that seem to have gone nowhere. The negotiations have been disappointing. Of the 77 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries negotiating with the EU, only 36 finalized an agreement, of which only 18 are in Africa. Africa has made some good choices by focusing on its own domestic economic dynamics, prioritizing deeper regional economic integration and increased intra-Africa trade – a logical step and one which Europe itself has followed since the 1950s. Yet, Europe is still the main trade, development and investment partner of most African countries, with Africa serving only as crucial source of hard and soft commodities for Europe, and in particular of strategic metals and minerals, essential for its high-tech and green-tech industries. Despite ongoing regional integration processes in the Africa, barriers to intra-regional trade remain a challenge for the economies in West Africa.

Regional trade lags behind compared to trade with developed and emerging countries outside Africa. West Africa’s exports to the EU consist mainly of fuels and food products. West Africa’s imports from the EU consist of fuels, food products, machinery, and chemicals and pharmaceutical products. This trade pattern is reflective of the skewed interaction and dependency and offers Africa no long term capacity for real development. Africa’s political construction is a major fundamental constrain in advancing the socio economic and political emancipation of the continent.

Meanwhile, Britain may or may not deploy new energies to strengthen its relations with the common wealth. If it does, that would be merely symbolic for Africa, which is what Africans thrive in (LOOK AT Nigeria’s parameters for appointing Ambassadors!!!) Britain has not cultivated the kind of leverage nor built the neither infrastructure nor the legal framework of deepened neo—dependence that should enable it to dictate the direction of internal policy in its neo-colonial relationships with ex colonies the way France has. On the contrary, France is nothing without its African holdings in the world. Much of the projection of its power has been in theaters in weak and poor third world countries. France is powerful when coupled with Germany- the real pivot of European security. Portugal is even worse of in its dependence on its colony, Angola and less so on Brazil.

The Brexit lesson for Africa is simple. Africa should begin to fold up its many unviable states that have undoubtedly proven an immovable impediment to Africa’s progress. In the same manner that Europe jettisoned narrow nationalisms after two disastrous wars, the most recurring decimals in Africa’s continental torment post-slavery, post –apartheid and settler oppression, post –colonial subjugation, post-state failures, post-Ebola, post- Mediterranean catastrophes have been internal divisions on identities, more sub identities and more sub identities and deleterious cleavages since time immemorial. Without such a massive consolidation of its little political spaces, Africa cannot exploit new openings to advance its legitimate cause to promote the welfare of black humanity.

The only benefits of Brexit then may probably be for the many blacks in the Diaspora who may be able to better compete for janitorial and cleaning jobs in England as competitors from Eastern Europe who have saturated that sector lose their privileged status as preferred hands than blacks. Many Africans, so-called black Britticos, therefore voted affirmatively for Brexit.

Ademola Araoye is a former Nigerian diplomat and a retired official of the United Nations. Currently a Visiting Professor associated with the SARCHi chair on African Diplomacy and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, Araoye is author of critically acclaimed books including Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth and Sources of Conflict in the Post-Colonial African State. He is a regular contributor to TheNEWS magazine


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