It’s safe to say that last week was a good one for the Remain camp, thanks in large part to the endorsement from President Barack Obama. Despite what people in online conservative echo chambers may believe, Obama remains fairly popular in Britain and his opposition to Brexit may well count for something.
His tactic was to play on our fear of what might happen if we leave. And while leaving the EU is seen as a largely small-c conservative idea, favoured by older and less educated voters, it is paradoxically fear (that most conservative of emotions) which is driving support for Remain.
Most voting Remain are scared, according to a poll for the @thefabians writes @JamesDMorris https://t.co/i9hBBGydGP pic.twitter.com/f2bX78f0JU
— Red Box (@timesredbox) April 22, 2016
A small number of us are more frightened by the medium and long-term consequences of an unstable super-state, as they have usually ended badly in the past. But by and large, Project Fear seems to be working. In fact the EU referendum is now following a predictable path set out by the Scottish vote of 2014, in which a largely passionless unionist campaign won on economic arguments.
But as Sebastian Payne has pointed out in the FT, the pro-EU cause recognises its lack of passion as a real weakness. So where is the pro-EU passion for Europe? Where is the love of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the Flemish masters, the German enlightenment, Chartres cathedral, Goethe, Beethoven and Cervantes? Pro-Europeans seem strangely devoid of emotion when it comes to Europe.
This is curious. After all, pro-European passion might win round British eurosceptics who do still feel a strong sense of European identity, despite being anti-EU. For the EU to succeed in the long term, it still needs a strong sense of identity. It can’t just be bound together by economic arguments. As Rory Sutherland wrote in The Spectator last year:
Most Eurosceptics find it distasteful when the case for remaining in the EU is framed in purely economic terms. In any case, economic arguments will inevitably favour greater centralisation, since the cult of economics is obsessed with the theory of ‘economies of scale’ (a doctrine which has been used to justify many corporate mergers, even though all evidence suggests these mostly fail). The late Elinor Ostrom showed that the human reality is more complex than this. Human organisation is naturally polycentric — think of ancient universities, which are divided into both faculties and colleges, or the way the military is structured. Some things are better centralised; other things aren’t. In city police departments, it makes sense to centralise specialisms such as forensics, but for all the supposed economies of scale, things get worse if you combine separate police precincts into larger, anonymous units, where group cohesion breaks down. In part, unity within a group is driven by rivalry with nearby groups. This can be found in nation states.
Personally I was saddened that the unionists in Scotland made almost no patriotic case for keeping the United Kingdom together. When arguments were made, as with JK Rowling’s letter, they were entirely for economic or logistical reasons (she did not even mentioned ‘Britain’). Where ‘patriotic’ arguments were made, they were in reality ideological, such as the idea that non-Tories from Scotland and England should stick together in a UK defined by centre-left values. But any state which has to hold itself together by a set of ideological beliefs, rather than a common sense of belonging, is on borrowed time.
When countries are joined together successfully, they need to have something that binds them, such as a common language, religion and empire. And to keep that going, some sort of common identity needs to be built on and mythologised. It is no surprise that religious communes last on average three times as long as secular ones. The EU may have been built on the idea that nationalism is bad, but it has also failed to present a viable alternative to it.
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