Across the world Anglophilia is giving way to Anglobemusement
The confidence vote in the prime minister is the latest event to cause a reassessment
Dec 12, 2018
THIRTY MONTHS after the British voted to leave the European Union, the country’s cultural divisions are more entrenched than ever. Politicians may have promised to bring the country back together and metropolitan journalists may have made grand tours of Leave-voting Britain to find out what the natives were thinking. But the result of two years of hand-wringing has been to confirm the two sides’ low opinions of each other. Remainers continue to regard Leavers as stump-toothed xenophobes. Leave-voters still see Remainers as hoity-toity snobs.
Yet even if Brexit has frozen thinking at home, it has unfrozen it abroad. Before Brexit a striking number of foreigners had a benign view of Britain. The British might seem a bit difficult at first—stand-offish and addicted to odd things like monarchy and Marmite—but they were fundamentally sensible. They were pragmatic and trade-minded people: a nation of shopkeepers, in Napoleon’s phrase. They were conservative and sensible, not the sort to take leaps in the dark. For all the talk of “fog in the Channel, Europe isolated”, they were champions of global openness.
This view has been shattered by Brexit. Foreigners increasingly talk about Britain in the way they would talk about an admired relative who has gone stark raving bonkers. Whenever this columnist travels abroad he is besieged with questions: what is going on with the country I love? Whatever happened to its pragmatism and common sense? Are you deranged? These remarks reveal a profound sense of loss. It is not just that Europe is losing a close partner. It is that the world is losing a particular version of Britain. Brexit Britain is becoming less like its sensible self and more like the worst sort of foreign country, chaotic and headstrong.
The first thing foreigners focus on is the sheer chaos of it all. “Isle of madness” is one headline from Der Spiegel. “A Shakespearean tragedy” is another from La Tribune. There is some merriment about bizarre procedures, like the struggle this week between a Labour MP and various flunkeys in tights over the parliamentary mace. But there is also genuine worry that chaos will lead to catastrophe, with Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal.
The second thing is the amateurism. Britain was thought to have a Rolls-Royce government. This reputation was so solid that the EU’s Brexit negotiators initially wondered if the incompetence of their British counterparts was a clever ruse to lull foreigners into a false sense of security. No longer: it turns out that the Rolls-Royce is more of a Morris Minor. European politicians puzzle over how a fellow member of their tribe could begin the Brexit talks without a plan, or appoint an addlepated popinjay such as David Davis to act as chief negotiator.
Then there is the eccentricity of so many of the players. Many foreign observers instinctively shared Walter Bagehot’s view that Britain was divided between an “efficient” branch, led by the government, and a “dignified” branch, represented by the monarch (even if in their view the operative “d” word was not “dignified” but “deranged”). Britain could afford to be such an endearingly odd place, with its bloated royal family and tub-thumping tabloids, because it had a genius for putting sensible people in charge of the things that mattered. Today the general view abroad is that this formula has malfunctioned. The circus acts and charlatans have taken over, in the form of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the sensible people have been locked up in the Tower of London.
Britain is hardly alone in its problems. America is paralysed, France is in flames and even sensible Sweden cannot form a government. Britain also continues to enjoy some of the greatest reserves of soft power in the world. Yet this only underlines the tragedy of Brexit. Britain is missing a golden opportunity to rally the West behind a liberal vision of the future that sees the EU as a building block of a free-trading world order, rather than as a post-national state. The northern Europeans, Britain’s closest allies in the EU, are particularly worried about Brexit, on the grounds that it will strengthen the Franco-German axis and shift the balance of power to southern Europe. Polls suggest that Brexit is already sapping Britain’s soft power. The country’s problems are unleashing an unpleasant strain of Anglophobia. A German comedian, Dietmar Wischmeyer, demands that, rather than waiting for the British to get their act together, the EU should simply “throw them out” on the grounds that they are “the purulent appendix of the continent”.
Britain hasn’t even succeeded in turning itself into the leader of the opposition to Europe’s technocratic elite. In the aftermath of the referendum some conservatives in Europe hailed Brexit as a glorious example of British exceptionalism, showing that the British alone had the courage to stand up for common sense and democracy in a Europe hijacked by federalist fanatics. This view was always weakened by the fact that it attracted some dubious supporters, such as Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, and Steve Bannon, an architect of Trumpism. It has now been completely sidelined by its habit of tripping over its own feet. The likes of Ms Le Pen have dropped their flirtation with “Frexit”. One of Brexit’s many ironies is that it has raised the reputation of the Brussels bureaucracy to heights not seen for decades.
Found in translation
The biggest worry is not that the world’s view of Britain is changing. It is that this darker view of Britain is more realistic than the previous one. The Brexit vote could almost have been designed to reveal long-festering problems with the country: an elite educational system that puts too much emphasis on confidence and bluff and not enough on expertise; a political system that selects its leaders from a self-involved Oxbridge clique; a London-focused society that habitually ignores the worries of the vast mass of British people; and a Conservative Party that promotes so many pompous mediocrities. The reason Brexit is doing so much damage is not just that it is a mistake. It is a reckoning.
From The Economist
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