Brexit Is The End Of The New World Order As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

The left couldn’t be more perturbed about the UK’s exit from the European Union this morning. President of the European Council Donald Tusk blustered, “That’ll have consequences, and I don’t believe other countries will be encouraged to follow that dangerous path.” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called Brexit a “bad day for Europe.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was “sad for the United Kingdom.” Paul Krugman of The New York Times complained:

It seems clear that the European project – the whole effort to promote peace and growing political union through economic integration – is in deep, deep trouble. Brexit is probably just the beginning, as populist/separatist/xenophobic movements gain influence across the continent.

The common takeaway from the left seems to be that Britain’s reversion to nationalism represents the rise of ethnic xenophobia and foreign policy isolationism. That’s largely because the left sees nationalism itself as an incurable evil. They believe, as Hannah Arendt once wrote, that “tribal nationalism…denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” But they don’t see that not all nationalism is tribal – nationalism can also be civilizational. That is why Britain once embraced the EU, but now rejects it.

The EU was formed in the aftermath of World War II with the intent never to plunge the continent into war again – but it was also formed in opposition to the Soviet bloc threat in the East. It came into existence as part of the same movement that created NATO. In other words, Europeans decided that they required a common civilization to oppose another brutal civilization springing from the USSR. The culmination of the EU’s power came with the reunification of Germany as the Cold War ended.

Then, as the European Union website acknowledges, the EU was totally redefined: it became a “Europe without frontiers.” The EU implemented freedom of travel, the completion of the Single Market, and the creation of the Euro. In 2012, the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize as it redistributed wealth and opened its borders to Muslim refugees.

But no coalition can remain long once its underlying purpose has faded. British civilization had the same interests as the EU so long as the Soviet Union had to be fought; when the EU decided not to unify against the threat of Russian expansionism or Islamic terrorism – and even considered adding Turkey to the EU, which might have made sense in the anti-Soviet days, but made zero sense after the USSR’s destruction – the EU no longer made sense. Instead, its institutional weaknesses, once glossed over in favor of common interests, became the focal point of its existence: useless regulations, insipid financial policy, anti-democratic bureaucracies, immigration policy aimed at changing the civilizational demographics of a once-great Western force.

And so Britain left.

That should be no more controversial than the dissolution of the Whig Party after the rise of the Republican Party – it’s simply what happens when the founding principles of an organization fade away, and all that’s left of the organization is its structure. Nothing unifies the EU other than an internationalist leftism that ignores civilizational differences of all sorts. Civilizations seek to preserve themselves in the face of threats. British civilization is now seeking to preserve itself in the face of suicidal international leftism.

That doesn’t mean that Brexit doesn’t carry risks. The British population could decide in favor of isolationism economically and in terms of common defense, for example. But Brexit doesn’t have to foreshadow such action. The New York Times’ dire warning that “the collective imagination leads to dark places” seems rather hollow in light of their support for the same mass immigration policies and bureaucratic nonsense that has made Europe a darker place. Free trade and defense of Western civilization remain guiding principles in the UK. That’s perhaps the best reason for the UK to leave the EU – the latter no longer seems to be a moving force for the EU or the international left that runs it.