The Euro-Atlantic union is our own. Our Greatness lies In it, not Out
By Ira Straus
Americans
and Britons have a common interest in avoiding a Brexit. I hope it will not be
taken amiss if, as an overseas citizen of the Anglo-American world, I discuss why
Americans see it that way. I wish to do so from the vantage point of our common
history and the vast inheritance we have jointly build over the centuries, not
merely from the standpoint of our immediate practical interests.
The Legitimacy, indeed Necessity, of American
Comment
It is easy,
to be sure, to take offense when a foreigner comments on an upcoming national
vote. I sometimes see Americans responding that way, too. People around the
world always comment on how we ought to vote. But we mostly take it for granted,
much as Britons did in the days of the Empire. The others have fair cause to
comment. They have an interest in how we vote -- usually, a constructive
interest in our getting things right. It is obvious in retrospect that
sometimes we should have listened to them more carefully.
America in
turn has a vital interest today in preserving the wider Euro-Atlantic union
that has been built around the dual cores of NATO and the EU, and this means we
have a strong interest in avoiding a Brexit. Just as we had a deep interest in
preserving a united Great Britain during the Scottish referendum, when we spoke
up for our mother country.
It is for
this reason that I request that the reader take this American comment in good
spirit, not as an intrusion but as an overseas extension of the national
dialogue.
The Larger
Question neglected in the Debate thus far
I do not
wish to focus here on the specific dangers that Brexit would pose to American and
British interests, serious though those are -- worse instability in trade and
finance, in a world economy already on the brink, with “unpredictable”
consequences (as they say in diplomatic parlance); a less Atlantic-oriented EU;
a renewed threat of Scottish secession; troubles for NATO... The former NATO
Secretaries-General were well-founded in their warning about Brexit’s
consequences; which is why they all joined in issuing the warning.
Nor do I
wish to dwell on the benefits that Brexit proponents hope for, other than to
remark on their regrettable lack of plausibility. If only a Brexit would make
it easier for Britain to manage an effective policy on non-EU migration! And if only a Brexit would enable Britain to
make more of its special relationship with America! But alas, it wouldn’t happen;
Britain has long since taken the special relationship as far as it can go, and
there is precious little to be added. We had a century after 1865 to build the
special relationship separately; the project reached its main limits already by
the early 1900s. Further progress ran into a brick wall: America felt it would
traduce its identity, derived from 1776, were it to reunite with Britain alone.
The way out, paradoxically, was through Europe. It was by adding in third
countries-- the Continental democracies -- that it proved possible to deepen
the Anglo-American relation in the decades after 1900. This was done in stages,
in Euro-Atlantic alliances after 1914, and in the series of Euro-Atlantic
structures built after 1947.The Anglo-American special relation has grown
further only by ceasing to be purely Anglo-American, and becoming instead the
informal core subsystem of the institutionalized Euro-American special
relation. And this is just what Brexit would undermine, sending Anglo-American
relations backwards not forward.
These
specific costs might, to be sure, be lumped together as “adjustment costs”, which
exist with every major change, particularly a break-up. Because of the high
adjustment costs of divorce, the starting assumption is always against it, in
the absence of compelling cause.
“Adjustment
costs” may be too dismissive a categorization for the specific costs in this
case -- the costs of divorce would be quite severe in this case -- but plenty
has already been said about these specifics on both sides of the debate. A
convenient summary is at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-claims-factbox-idUSKCN0Z01GM.
This leaves
me free to focus here instead on a larger question: Who are we AngloAmericans;
and what would we turn ourselves into, were the UK to exit the EU?
It is an
issue of national sentiment and identity, or “who we are”. It is high time that
we have a serious dialogue between the two sides on this issue.
Who are we AngloAmericans ?
Who are we?
And yes, we need to ask this for all of us, not solely for England. What would we
turn ourselves into, if we dismantled the Euro-Atlantic system at whose core we
stand, or part of it, or withdrew our role in it? It is this question that
makes me feel it is not only within my rights to comment on Brexit; it is a
kind of duty, as a member of the Anglo-American world.
The
English-speaking peoples have had two great international imperatives in the
course of their history: first freedom through separation, then leadership of the
free through integration.
The older,
separatist imperative is emphasized in our popular history books, with great
panache; it comes at heroic formative moments of our countries, moments when
our identity was sealed with a line of blood. But the integrationist imperative
has become the actual one before us in modern times, when we live in a world
where we are no longer a beleaguered fringe but are at the very core of the
world order. And it too has been sealed in blood, though in ways less popularly
remarked; the blood has not been used as effectively for identity-mapping as
the earlier battles, but we have all been blood brothers as allies in defending
each other in two world wars and a cold war, when rivers of blood have been
spilt that made our national separation wars look like mere skirmishes, and
when all our liberties have been at risk in a degree never even imagined in our
formative years.
What made
separateness a valid imperative for us in early modern times? A long but
essentially temporary historical conjuncture: the fact that we developed modern
liberty faster than the rest of the European world, apart from minor exceptions
such as the Dutch. (To be sure, it was an imperative that many Brits thought we
Americans carried too far even in those centuries, when we used it to break apart
the British Empire in 1776. They have told us it cost us the Civil War of the
1860s, contrasting with their own peaceful abolition of slavery in their Empire
in the 1830s. They have blamed our revolution for inspiring the French
Revolution, bringing an end to the era of the liberal reformative
enlightenment, leaving in its place a 200-year civil war on the European
continent between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. They have
credited our isolationism with twice tempting Germany into world war. And those
were the arguable costs -- rather plausibly argued costs -- of a break-up for
which there was a significant justification, far greater than the justifications
for Brexit.)
What gives
us today the imperative of integration? A development that we have reason to
hope will be enduring, not just another conjuncture: the fact that we have
become the leaders of the leading sector of the world. The world has changed profoundly
since the early days when we needed to emphasize separation. Liberal democracy
has spread across Europe and made major inroads worldwide. By 1830, all of
northwestern Europe was under liberal, quasi-democratic regimes, alongside the
Anglo-American world; Michael Doyle and other scholars say that a “democratic
peace” began at that time in that space. Later, most of the rest of Europe made
it there, too. And with America’s population growth, the Anglo-American world itself
has changed from a periphery of European power to the center of European and
global power.
This is
what has reversed the imperative facing our countries: from separation from
Europe, to leadership of Europe; from balance of forces, to integration of
forces as the main principle of that leadership.
The new
imperative was understood slowly. It took a long bitter twentieth century for
us to shift our premises from separatism to leadership and integration. It is
an achievement to be built on.
Britain, Greater Britain, and the Euro-Atlantic System
“If two
small islands are by courtesy styled ‘Great’,” -- so wrote Sir Charles Dilke in
1868 – “America, Australia, India, must form a Greater Britain.” And the Greater
Britain, held Dilke, was the seat of England’s future greatness: “Britain in
her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the
seas.”
Where is that
Greater Britain today? It has morphed, a bit unexpectedly, into an organized
Euro-Atlantic world. Despite losing its colonies, it has gained additional
major industrial democracies as an organic part of its system. These
democracies have been gathered together into a confederacy, one more sustainable
than the Empire ever was.
Just as
surely as England’s future in 1868 lay in the Greater Britain of Dilke’s time,
so today England’s future lies in its role in the updated Greater Britain of
the Euro-Atlantic system. England continues to play a pivotal role in
maintaining the cohesion of this system, while the organizing core-power role has
shifted west to America, already by the late 1800s the geographical center of
the population of the old Greater Britain.
The old Greater
Britain was the ballast that enabled the Pax Britannica to endure a century.
The new Greater Britain -- which is also a Greater America and a Greater Europe
-- is the cornerstone of the world order of today.
This is the
key consideration for understanding what makes us unique and “great”. It is not
that we are the most uniquely perfect liberal democracies in the world; by now
that way of government has successfully spread to many other countries, and declamations
over which one is most perfect have a petty aspect. Rather, it is that we are
the leaders and core powers of this very set of modern liberal democracies.
More: We
have organized these democracies into a cohesive grouping. It is by far the
largest and strongest cohesive grouping extant in the world; its membership is
made manifest in OECD with over 60% of the world economy and an even greater
share of global military power. The organized unity of the industrial
democracies is what makes them the core power of the world order: the point of
reference for its functioning and the anchor of its stability.
This unity
was built with tremendous labors, spanning 150 years. Dilke’s Greater Britain
began to take clearer shape in the 1890s, when diplomats painstakingly brought
a century of Anglo-American hostility to a close; the two powers became friends
and de facto allies again. The democratic peace thereby also matured: from a
tenuous empirical fact of non-war among countries that often still acted as
adversaries who still feared mutual war, it grew into a consciously organized
strategic unity among the core democratic powers, US and UK, albeit without
formal joint institutions. Henry Adams called this informal union an “Atlantic
System”; he projected that it was destined to draw France into the “combine”, and
was already doing so, and in the next stage would draw in Germany, then finally
Russia, securing world peace. And he hoped this would happen soon, lest instead
there be a century of wars.
As we know,
the wars came first instead. The lack of institutionalization of the Atlantic
grouping made it harder, not easier, to integrate Germany in a solid way: there
were no joint structures to fill in for the fact of Germany’s lesser sharing of
the historical heritage of the original Western democracies. A world war ensued
instead; it brought Communism to Russia whence came further assaults on the
world order; the defeat of Germany and arrival of democracy in that country
were not enough to integrate it with the West, leaving the chaos of events to
push Germany back again into a hostile dictatorship; whence another world war.
The lessons of this bitter experience led to the institutionalization of the
Atlantic System after 1945, alongside the institutionalization of the global
system in the UN. This was a second stage of the maturing of the modified Greater
Britain. It succeeded where the earlier informal Atlantic system had failed: it
integrated Germany and established a concrete, extendable democratic peace.
This concrete space today spans all of Europe save Russia (which however also
hoped to join it after 1989 and may yet some day), and crosses the Pacific as
well to integrate the modernized countries of Confucian heritage.
The
integration succeeded this time around primarily because America pushed idealistically
for it. America had the size to be able to afford to take risks for
integration, and it found inspiration in the federalist tradition that underlay
the formation of its own Union. It in turn owed its size and strength to this
tradition of federal unification; a tradition inspired in no small part by the
Anglo-Scottish Union and its intellectual progeny, the Scottish Enlightenment. Federalism
was the other side of the coin of our tradition of separation, and the greater
side: the side in which we built a new expansive union in our freedom. It was
our solution to the very real risk that our independence would lead us straight
into a tailspin of fragmentation. It laid the grounds for our fitness in the
1900s when the time came for changing tack internationally, from the old spirit
of isolationism to the new imperative of integration. But our new orientation
ever remained, in America as in England, vulnerable in face of the strength of our
other entrenched tradition, separatism.
The
integration after 1945 succeeded not only because of institutionalization. It
succeeded because American diplomats pushed for a two-tiered union, part
European Union part Atlantic Community, not just a pure Atlantic Community.
They were realistic about what integration was feasible: with Americans still
very much attached to their own independence, and too big to unite as equals
with European countries, much of the integration had to be subcontracted to a
European subsystem. Thus the “Euro-Atlantic system”, as it came to be called.
America was
willing, after the terrible costs and risks of the two world wars, to go as far
as becoming deeply embedded in Europe as a military ally, and further, organizing
a fair measure of economic and diplomatic cooperation in the Atlantic (and
Pacific) space. But, unlike Europeans, it was not willing to become embedded in
apolitical-economic union. American officials accepted this reality; on the
Atlantic level they build NATO and OECD, while on the European level they
empowered the national leaders, through the Marshall Plan, to start acting on
their own repeated calls for a deeper union. Britain had an in-between situation:
similar to European powers in size and location, but still with a Channel and a
history of separate freedom. It developed a limited membership in the European
project, replete with opt-outs.
It was by nature
a jerry-rigged structure, like a split-level house, but that is no count
against it. The inconsistencies of Euro-Atlanticism have been far less than
those suffered in its absence. And
Britain, as an intermediary between the Atlantic and European levels, has
played a special role in moderating its inconsistencies, keeping them
manageable.
It is a special case of a basic point of all international relations
theory, brought out well by the English School of Butterfield and Wight and Hinsley,
which I should acknowledge having imbibed from my teachers Watson and Bull: Every
system of international relations is by nature contradictory, as is national
sovereignty itself; every structure for international society and cooperation is
meant to reduce these inconsistencies, in part by absorbing them into itself.
This raises the inconsistencies to a higher structural plane, making them
usually less damaging, but an easy target for nationalist attack, seeking to
raze the structure to the ground and restore an imagined simplicity of
sovereignty.
The Euro-Atlantic system is just such a structure. It is the one that
has done the most to reduce the inconsistencies in international affairs,
ending the cycle of European-world wars that plagued not only the early 1900s
but all of modern times since the 1500s. It is well worth its troubles.
The system
grew deliberately but pragmatically -- and cumulatively. It extended far beyond
the English-speaking countries, yet it grandfathered in the old Greater Britain
at its core. Its membership kept growing, organically, as modernization and
liberal democracy kept spreading; it kept apace in this way with the economic
growth of countries not yet in its orbit. It maintained and even extended its
global share; it repeatedly confuted the never-ending forecasts of a decline of
the West. Its intellectual forebears -- and an impressive lot they were, Hakluyt,
Pownall, Franklin, Adams, Dilke, Fiske,
Seeley, Mahan, Stead ,another Adams, Curtis , Lothian, Streit --
forecast the opposite of decline; they projected an ongoing growth, as long as
unity would hold, and warned of a decline only if unity were to be sundered. Thus
far they have consistently proved right. They put no final limit on this growth;
rather, as the years went on, they began to think the Western community might
keep expanding indefinitely, until it could someday encompass the global
community. This remains a real possibility, distant though it looks from any
near vantage point. Were such a day to arrive, Greater Britain would have
evolved into the entire world.
Is it worth
giving this up, for a moment of feeling proud and putting down the EU?
Britain’s global Greatness today: its strength and fragility
Fortunately,
as we have seen, the revamped Greater Britain long ago ceased to be a mere
verbal expression. It is a reality concretized in a series of joint
institutions. This was what made the difference between success and failure --
catastrophic failures from 1914 to 1945, historically transformative successes
(with the usual real-life admixture of blunders and complaints) since 1947.
This was
possible in turn because the earlierGreater Britain of the U.K. and U.S. had shared
far more than language: they shared an evolved way of government and society.
It is a way from which other countries have taken much, to the point of coming also
to share in most of it, first in Europe, next in the industrialized Asian democracies,
more gradually elsewhere.
Our free
society developed through a dual lineage, both national and European: common
law and Magna Carta and Parliament, and also Greece and Rome, Christendom and
Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. These pan-European developments
played a central part in Britain’s evolution as a modern society. They also
gave the Continental countries a base for catching up with Anglo-American
democracy more readily and thoroughly than other regions of the world.
It used to
make for a proud Imperial fantasy to say that the countries of the Empire could
be “regenerated” more easily than the countries of the Continent, but history
proved otherwise. It still makes for nationalist reveries to speak of an Anglo-sphere
instead of a Euro-sphere, but the reality of the British Empire is that it was
always one of the European global empires. The rest of Europe was always closer
in nature to Britain than was the Empire. The Greater Britain was always a part
of a Greater Europe.
For
centuries, however, this Greater Europe was rendered contradictory by the division
of its core, with mutual conflicts and wars among its national powers inside
Europe. It was rendered potentially consistent only late in the day, by the
integration of its core after 1945 -- just when most of its periphery was
falling away from it. The congealing of the core of the Greater Europe into a
joint enterprise, designed as Euro-Atlanticism, was a tremendous development, of
as great a historical import as the loss of its periphery.
This joint
enterprise is the true bearer of the heritage of Greater Britain. It is the
living continuation of the national project of Great Britain; the mighty river
into whose waters the streams of Great Britain have flowed. Through it, the deepest
hopes of Britain live on.
The deepest
hopes of any society are its original hopes and its ultimate hopes: its
original hopes for indefinite continuation of its people and their evolving
achievements, its ultimate hopes for someday securely embedding its
achievements in humanity at large. Britain’s deepest hopes do live on today.
They live on in the Euro-Atlantic union and in all its future prospects. They
could not live on outside of this.
All of the
joint institutions of this Euro-Atlantic system -- the OEEC of the Marshall
Plan, its children NATO and the ECSC, their heirs and supplements OECD, EU,
NPA, and G7, and a host of lesser ones -- have been important for the success
of the system: for realizing the hopes of their member countries, after
traditional national power politics had failed those hopes and brought them to
the edge of ruin. Two of the institutions, NATO and the EU, are indispensable.
At the same
time, the institutions are all fragile. None of them can draw on the deep
resources of national patriotism. Therein lies the balance of hope and fear.
Britain
lies still today near the core of this system, not just as the birthing country
of America, but as the bridge between the European and Atlantic levels of the
system. Its inherent special relation with America, keeping America together
with Europe; its membership in the EU, keeping Europe together with America and
the Atlantic: it is a linchpin of the system on both fronts. De Gaulle said
Britain would be a Trojan Horse for the Americans in the EU. Putting to the
side the paranoid imagery, the fact is that Britain plays an indispensable role
as a mediator of the system on multiple levels. The cohesion of the system
would slacken without it, and would risk collapsing altogether.
That is the
context within which we need to see the meaning of a potential British
withdrawal from the EU. It would leave a gaping hole in the Western edifice.
From Greatness to Tailspin?
No island
is just an island. Britain is part of a vast Euro-Atlantic Main. Its greatness
is bound up in the main to which it has done so much to birth.
A Brexit
would no doubt be accompanied by enthusiastic nationalistic declamations, but
it would leave the actual Britain diminished globally. Even the local Union of
Britain and Scotland would be at risk. The issue of Scottish independence would
come up again, sooner or later making it to another referendum. The processes
in Northern Ireland would be negatively impacted, no one knows how much. The
“great” could go out of Great Britain itself, leaving only an inner Britain of
England and Wales. And even that inner core could unexpectedly come into
question, in such a fundamentally deteriorated situation.
That is how
tailspins proceed. Brexit would begin a potentially fatal cycle of narrowing of
perspectives.
The
narrowing of perspectives would be contagious. The EU would be the first place
of contagion, likely sending the Union into a further tailspin. EU exit is
already becoming fashionable in several countries. Brexit would legitimize it.
The ghosts of the old nationalist Europe could return sooner than people have
imagined.
No one
knows how far this tailspin would go, either. Contagion is itself contagious,
in a chaos event. The reason quarantines are used for diseases is because
diseases are a form of chaos, and chaos metastasizes at a geometrical pace,
feeding upon itself and leapfrogging over boundaries. Chaos easily becomes a
fashion, and it is the easiest of fashions to spread; there are messy
conditions everywhere, and disaffected people ever ready to take up the torch.
The synergies of chaos work effortlessly; its elements always fit together for
making more chaos, with no need for a neat fit among them. Vast, venerable
realities can be dissolved overnight when chaos gathers momentum. One has to
expect the unexpected in a chaos event. Thus, again, the “unpredictability” of
the consequences.
America would
be an early place for the mood of chaos to spread. In this presidential
election year, it would be greatly influenced by the nationalistic trend of a
Brexit.
A
nationalist America in turn could send NATO into a tailspin. Writers have
noticed some local problems for NATO from a Brexit: an independent Scotland
could deny NATO nuclear visiting rights; Orthodox Greece could leave the EU and
NATO and align with Orthodox Russia; other countries could join suit. But there
is yet to be considered the impact on American thinking: the potentiality for
fostering an American mood of junking its own alliance system, an American
equivalent for Britain junking Europe. Hints of this are already being given,
as yet only as a bargaining threat. In an actual bargaining process, when dis-unification
is the trend outside the room, the threat of separation easily turns into the
reality.
This is the
other reason why I feel it is a kind of duty of mine to comment on Britain’s
referendum options. A vote for Brexit would affect American thinking and policy
in ways that Britain would surely not like.
Our Historic
Prospects in the Balance
If Brexit
is rejected and the Euro-Atlantic system avoids major visible decline in the
coming year, the system is likely to continue to hold America’s support, no
matter who is elected President here. The wave of nationalistic sentiment that
is sweeping my country would pass.
But if the
Euro-Atlantic system begins cracking, in this moment of its historical
vulnerability -- and Brexit would be a major structural crack -- this would
lend an aura of realism to the go-it-alone tide in America. It would favor the
candidate who speaks in the strongest nationalistic language; and it would bend
the policies of the country away from Europe, no matter which candidate
ultimately wins.
The belief in
the obsolescence of the Western system is widespread in America. It is fed
constantly from both ends: by Right isolationists and unilateralists, and by
Left journalists and academics. Both sets, Left and Right, use the language of
1776, playing powerfully on America’s separatist impulses. NATO has been called
obsolete every year since 1989 by major media commentators; more often called
obsolete, in fact, than its relevance has been pointed out. It is said
repeatedly that America could save money, and lots of it at that, by
jettisoning its allies. The reality is quite opposite; NATO is a net boon for
U.S. finances, without even speaking of how Europe had cost us far more without
NATO, prior to 1949, than it has since. But few indeed are those who know this.
The myth that American finances are drained by NATO is one that goes
uncontroverted, to be taken up by a Trump, and equally by his opposite numbers
on the Left. Among elites, this myth is sometimes found useful, as a means of
delivering a threat to exert pressure on Europe to spend more on defense. It risks
becoming a game of chicken when conditions are unstable.
There is a
real chance, 50-50, that America will elect Trump. This need not be a problem
in itself for Europeans; the election of Reagan was met with similarly derision
and prophecies of doom, but turned out well. Nevertheless, there are risks; and
there would be much indeed to fear from it, if Brexit were to set a
disintegrative international stage as context for his election.
Brexit
would, first, further increase the likelihood of Trump getting elected: it
would discredit the foreign policy of his opponent, make her establishment
credentials look useless or worse, and lend credibility to his nationalistic lines,
making them sound very much in tune with reality. It would then proceed to
increase the likelihood of a Trump presidency turning out harmful
internationally.
The effects
of a Trump presidency would depend heavily on whether the Euro-Atlantic system is
holding or disintegrating. If the system were holding when he came into office,
Trump would presumably work to make his mark within the system, as he has
indicated, not against it. He talks of being a rebuilder, and of wanting to
build it bigger and better, like the buildings that bear his name. But if the Euro-Atlantic
system were collapsing, Trump could easily slip into the simple nationalistic, pull-out-of-NATO
posture that journalists have attributed to him -- not entirely accurately, but
it is a fair enough representation of the emotive trend in his rhetoric. He has
said that he would threaten withdrawal, as part of the bargaining process; in a
post-Brexit mood of spreading nationalism, the instinct of the public would
shift toward demanding too much and proceeding with withdrawal. And American
withdrawal would -- unlike a Scottish withdrawal -- spell the end of NATO.
The end of
NATO would in turn undermine what would be left of the EU. It would pull out
the main cornerstone that has underpinned the EC/EU since its beginning: the
cornerstone of NATO’s strategic unity, achieved by unifying its nations’ military
plans and integrating their forces and training. NATO is what ended the long
history of separate national military plans and conflicting national global strategies.
The EU would never have been possible without this underpinning. Were NATO to
disappear, some Europeans would no doubt rush to push for filling in this gap
with a military union on the EU level, but all the trends would be in the
opposite direction. And European military union never succeeded in the past,
when circumstances were much more propitious -- not even when America was
demanding it of Europe.
That is
what a tailspin looks like. It is no fanciful nightmare. It is a realistic
nightmare.
America and
Britain would both be diminished by Brexit. We would be diminished in our very
essence: in the sum total of what we have made of ourselves over the course of
our history. We would be diminished in the leadership role the Euro-Atlantic
construct has given us in the world. We would be diminished in our prospects in
the world. We would be diminished in our national futures.
This
overall damage must be counted on top of the specific damages Brexit would do
us. America’s professional diplomats would no doubt work hard -- Trump himself has
hinted at this -- to limit some of the specific damages, but they could not
stop the overall damage from being considerable.
We should
not underestimate the risk that the damage would prove catastrophic, despite all
efforts to contain it. Western unity is unusually fragile today: fragile popularly
in face of resurgent nationalism, fragile on the ideological level in media and
academia, fragile financially in face of the economic downturn and weak
recovery, fragile strategically in face of fifteen years of failures to deal
effectively with Islamist terrorism. This fragility spells multiple
susceptibilities to being sent into a tailspin. It is another part of what is
meant when people speak of “unpredictable consequences” from Brexit.
The West
has faced still worse dangers in the past, to be sure. It faced German
nationalism and American isolationism in the 1930s, when the Atlantic alliance was
subterranean; it only barely got back up to its feet to meet the challenge
before it was too late, and at a terrible price. It would be foolhardy to feel
confident and underestimate the risks before us today.
In today’s
conditions, it is all too easy for disintegration to feed on itself. The ripple
waves of a Brexit could unravel piece by piece the entire edifice of Western
unity that our countries have built over the course of the last 150 years, at
cost of much blood and treasure.
An unraveling
of the West would in turn take down the entire global order with it. The
unified Western world is still the only cohesive core of the world order,
despite the much discussed rise of the rest.
Ideologues on the Left might welcome its collapse, and so might some on
the Right; but in the actual non-Western world, there would be no gain from
Western disintegration, only a spread of chaos. We have seen this movie play
out before: Germans a century ago prophesied a “decline of the West” and
imagined in it the warrant for their own national glory, but only got from it a
path to their final destruction as a separate sovereign nation.
Our true
greatness is embedded in the structures for unity we have built up with our
neighbors -- the countries that have become most like us. Reversion to
geopolitical competition among these countries would be suicidal, but it is not
impossible. It happened with Germany in the interwar years. The tit-for-tat of
national self-assertion against each other, and next the nationalist
ideological argumentation against each other, usually develops in gradual
stages, but it feeds quite naturally on itself once it gets going. It was in
fact the normal fate of our countries for many centuries, in the absence of
serious joint international structures. It is our modern joint structures --
the serious one like the EU and NATO -- that stand between us and that fate.
It is much
hoped over here in America that these dangers will fade into the mist after
June 23, and the Euro-Atlantic world will breathe a sigh of relief with the EU
reaffirmed. We breathed such a sigh of relief the morning after the Scottish
referendum, like a nightmare had lifted. We mean too much to each other, to be
able to pretend not to care about these matters. And we have built too much
that is worth preserving over the long course of our history, to watch much of
it get thrown out overnight in a fit of irritation.
Ira Straus, PhD, is U.S. Coordinator of the
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO (1992 to present), and Chair of
the Center for War/Peace Studies. Both are independent policy analysis
organizations. In the 1980s he was Executive Director of the Association to
Unite the Democracies. He has taught international relations at universities in
the US and (as a Fulbright professor) in Moscow, Russia. He studied under and
worked with the late Adam Watson CMG, formerly of the Foreign Office, later
secretary of the English Committee on International Relations Theory; and
studied a term at Oxford under the late Professor Hedley Bull. The opinions
expressed here are solely his responsibility.