Beyond Brexit

In the summer of 1993, when I was 21, I moved from the United Kingdom to the United States. Political to my bones, I was, in part, fleeing what I saw as British provincialism: the Margaret Thatcher era’s nostalgia for empire and glory, kitted out in the grimier, football-hooligan realities of post-imperial decline.

And then, somehow, things changed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the country found a way to integrate, almost despite itself, into much of the goings-on of the European Union. For those who grew up during these years, British Europeanism wasn’t just one of many possible worlds; in the minds of the young it simply was the world.

Except that it turns out it wasn’t. For many older, less affluent, less educated Brits, all of that opportunity was an illusion: it gave them a paper right to travel and work anywhere, while in practice they felt it simply meant they were competing for jobs with millions of newly arrived migrants from poorer parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. It gave them economic growth rates that masked vast income disparities. It provided a real estate boom that left those in the provinces living in dilapidated housing far from London, and those trying to buy into London real estate having to compete with global investors who pushed prices up beyond all reason.

And so, when they were told that a vote to leave the EU, to divorce the country from the Brussels bureaucracy, to strike out alone and separate out from the messy economic and political struggles between EU member states, would be a disaster, a majority of British voters essentially shrugged, said “up yours” and voted against all of the multicultural, multiracial, large-scale immigration implications of the union. Their vote will, inevitably, be the fault line around which British and European politics will be arranged for years to come.

I have been in London since shortly after the Brexit vote. In those short weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned and Theresa May has taken his place. The pound has sunk nearly 15 percent in value against the dollar. The opposition Labour Party is in utter disarray. The governing Tory Party is also fractured. The fiercely nationalist UK Independence Party is basking in Brexit. A country that a few weeks ago was economically wedded to the 27 other member states of the European Union is now preparing for a years-long, and acrimonious, set of negotiations with a “them” that until last month was an “us” about everything from trade relations and the sharing of criminal justice data to immigration.

Britain has long prided itself on the extraordinary durability of its governing classes. London is a wondrous cultural hub. And that won’t change anytime soon. But the country as a whole suddenly seems small again, vulnerable, lost in the fogs of its own contrariness.