When US President Barack Obama arrives in Britain tomorrow he will have a busy itinerary ahead of him, from wishing the Queen a happy 90th to talks with UK Prime Minister David Cameron about Syria and Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). But, as the presumptive leader of the free world, he regards one task above all others as his paramount responsibility on this trip: to dissuade British voters from leaving the European Union.
You can tell that the Brexiteers fear Obama because Boris Johnson has pre-emptively rubbished his intervention as “nakedly hypocritical”. As the mayor of London sees it, Americans are deeply opposed to the surrender of sovereignty and self-determination to supranational organisations such as the international criminal court. Why, then, should Britain be sanguine about unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats?
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, he even muttered darkly about the past intrusions of the CIA in Europe’s destiny — sounding, just for a moment, like David Icke as imagined by PG Wodehouse. On Sunday Ian Botham was sent out to bat for Brexit in anticipation of Obama’s visit. The president’s endorsement of Britain’s membership of the EU is already making headlines. The challenge for Britain Stronger in Europe — officially designated last week as the lead remain campaign — is to harness, exploit and maintain the energy that Obama brings to their cause. All the available data suggests that this race is, for now, extremely close, and will be decided to a considerable extent by the respective campaigns’ ability to influence turnout.
Vote Leave — the official pro-Brexit campaign — has failed conspicuously to match the remainers’ list of supportive senior politicians, world leaders, economic organisations and businesses. In 1975, when Britain’s role in Europe was last subjected to a referendum, that wall of establishment opinion was enough to settle the matter. Not so in 2016. In the early 21st century we have become ever more suspicious of elites, of professions and defenders of any status quo.
The original Facebook slogan — “Move fast and break things” — captures the disruptive spirit of the age. And that spirit is personified by nobody better than Johnson himself, the anti-politician who puts the fun into fundamental change. But as Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, argue in an essay — reported on recently by Fortune — our swooning passion for disruption and aggressive innovation has blinded us to the less exciting but equally important “maintainers”: the people who keep systems running and operate the infrastructure that makes swashbuckling experimentation possible.
The EU lacks the glamour and rollercoaster excitement of the digital era. But it is a structure that, for all its flaws, puts 28 member states around a table and provides institutional infrastructure for the world’s largest single market, population mobility, cooperation on law and order, environmental collaboration, and much else. This is precisely what Vinsel and Russell call “maintenance”, the framework that even the most dynamic nations, businesses and communities require to achieve anything. It is no accident that in 2014, Facebook changed its mantra to “Move Fast with Stable Infra”.
Of course, it is hard to be passionate about “stable infra”; hard, but not impossible. Though Jeremy Corbyn’s declaration in support of Britain’s membership of the EU was front-page news, David Miliband’s intervention last week was more significant as an exemplar of the urgency and impatience that has been missing from the remainers’ rhetoric. Too often dismissed as a chilly technocrat, the former foreign secretary struck precisely the right tone of anger, alarm and indignation. “My message is simple,” he said. “Unilateral political disarmament is not a joke or a jape.” A vote to leave, he continued, would “strengthen Putin”, “weaken the West”, and “make it harder to deliver effective aid to the poor, or curb global emissions, or crack down on rogue actors”.
Such speeches are routinely dismissed by the Brexiteers as the work of “Project Fear”. And they may be — but so what? To those on the remain side of the fence, the notion of leaving the EU is authentically frightening, for the reasons Miliband cited. They are anxious about the likely economic consequences. They are fretful about the probable diminution of Britain’s global status. They are fearful that Brexit would embroil this country in a decade of mindbendingly complex intergovernmental negotiations. They do not share the touching faith of the leavers that Britain, released from the Euro-yoke, will sail off like an Elizabethan galleon to sovereign glory.
Vote Leave’s core promise is that Brexit would enable us to “take back control”. But would it? The age of disruption is also the age of interdependence. More than at any moment in human history, we depend upon one another and act in tandem with our peers. There is a difference between control and isolation, but the two are perilously easy to confuse. To adapt the lyrics of Me and Bobby McGee, freedom can be another word for nothing left to lose. Is that really a prize worth fighting for?
Post-imperial Britain has prospered by positioning itself advantageously in the messy but necessary latticework of supranational cooperation. Late to the European table thanks to De Gaulle’s non, we have nurtured what the current US president (even when critical of Cameron over Libya) has called the “special and essential relationship” between America and the UK. Few nations are as clubbable and essential to the G8, as well as a permanent member of the UN security council, the beating heart of the Commonwealth, and one of the world’s great pivots.
Though they would never admit it, the Brexiteers are declinists. Their spiritual ancestor is not former PM Margaret Thatcher but Enoch Powell, who regarded empire’s end as a cue for Britain to accept a smaller role on the world stage and opposed mass immigration. But there is no future in this longing to secede. This week, the most powerful man in the world will remind us that what makes Britain great is not a yearning for separateness, but precisely the opposite.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Matthew d’Ancona is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition.
