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The global challenges Brexit won’t fix

23 June marks the first anniversary of the UK’s Brexit referendum. One year ago, the European Union was reeling. There were fears that the EU would start to unravel, with other countries being pushed by populism and euroscepticism into following Britain towards the exit door.

A year on, that fearful mood has evaporated. Elections in the Netherlands, France, and now the UK itself have shown an unmistakable popular rejection of eurosceptic forces. But that doesn’t mean Europe can look forward to what Winston Churchill once termed the ‘sunlit uplands’ of political and economic progress. The EU is far from resolving its accumulating problems, and we the people of Europe need to get real about the realities of tomorrow’s world.

To begin with the good news, it’s very encouraging that Dutch and then French voters rejected populists like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, respectively, who call for the EU’s demise. Until both elections this Spring, the tide of public opinion was feared to be running strongly in their favour.

With a fervent pro-European like Emmanuel Macron as France’s president, and with Angela Merkel set to win a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor in September, the way is open for the Franco-German ‘locomotive’ to be back on the rails and pulling the European project forward again.

Just as significant has been the UK’s June 2017 election result. Called by Tory Prime Minister Theresa May in the hopes of securing an electoral mandate for a ‘hard Brexit’, her humiliating loss of a House of Commons majority instead signals a much softer approach. If carefully handled by both Westminster and Brussels, Brexit’s damage on both sides of the English Channel could be greatly reduced. More than that, if the Brexit divorce is amicable enough it isn’t inconceivable that in the longer-term there might even be a reconciliation and a reaffirmation of the marriage vows.

Looking to the future, it makes sense to study the global picture. The stresses and strains of intra-European politics are naturally of immediate concern to EU policymakers and voters, but they obscure the wider picture. Europe as a whole is on a slippery slope; if it fails to address its deep-seated structural disadvantages it will be overtaken by its international competitors.

Vote Leave and Vote Remain posters in Pimlico, June 2016. by Philip Stevens. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A shortlist of Europe’s collective challenges looks like this:

  1. Europe is rapidly ageing, and shrinking. Within 25 years the ratio of retired pensioners to taxpaying workers will have gone from today’s 1:4 to 1:2. Its worryingly smaller workforce may conceivably be buttressed by artificial intelligence (AI), but the robots that might fill jobs don’t pay taxes or consume goods.
  2. The solution is more immigration. Some experts say 100 million newcomers are needed by mid-century to keep the active labour force stable. But that risks huge disruption and dangerous racial and religious tensions.
  3. The high-tech lead that Europeans, along with Americans, have long enjoyed is being eroded. Asian competition is strong, and China alone is set to overtake Europe on innovation and patented breakthroughs by 2023.
  4. Europe’s integration has guaranteed peace since World War II, but its security is increasingly threatened, not by Russia but by Arab volatility and Africa’s population explosion. NATO’s Cold War strategies won’t help.
  5. Today’s 1.2 billion Africans will number 2.5 billion by 2050. That threatens more armed conflicts on Europe’s doorstep because of food shortages and resource competition, and will lead to an unquenchable flow of economic migrants as well as refugees.

All these problems are just the tip of the bad news iceberg. Beneath the surface there’s the reality that EU governments have been refusing to acknowledge in plain terms that these problems exist. They have therefore shown little willingness to confront them collectively.

The UK’s response is contradictory. The EU’s failure to act more decisively on the world stage has arguably contributed to British voters’ dissatisfaction with ‘the European Union’. Yet at the same time Britain’s refusal to allow the EU to move forward on key issues like security, immigration, and more social justice has robbed the Union of much of its momentum.

Whatever the results of the increasingly uncertain Brexit process, it would be hard to argue that the UK will on its own be better equipped to confront these challenges. Equally, without the international perspective that Britain has often brought to EU policymaking, Brussels’ thinking on how to confront these threats risks being narrower and less global.

Rationally, the case for the Brexit negotiators on both sides to cool it and adopt less confrontational stances is overwhelming. Politically, and therefore emotionally, the outlook for that isn’t reassuring.

Featured image credit: europe mediterranean eu by KreativeHexenkueche. Public domain via Pixabay.

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