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Shed no tears, Brexit will be worth it for Britain

It has freedom to return to democratic protection, popular rule and local autonomy

On Wednesday, Britain's Prime Minister, Theresa May, delivered a letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, informing him that after 44 years of membership, her nation is leaving the European Union. Approximately two years later, after negotiating the terms of that departure, the union will lose at a stroke "an eighth of its population, a sixth of its GDP, half its nuclear-arms cache and a seat on the UN Security Council," as Susan Watkins, the editor of New Left Review, noted recently.
Watkins is a "Lexiteer," as left-wing supporters of 'Brexit' like me are known. We were hardly a significant force among the 52 per cent of Britons who voted to leave in the referendum of June 23. But we were an influence. A counterweight to the anti-immigrant fear mongering of the former leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, Lexiteers argued a left-wing, democratic and internationalist case for Brexit. The position was expressed crisply by Perry Anderson, the former longtime editor of New Left Review: "The EU is now widely seen for what it has become: an oligarchic structure, riddled with corruption, built on a denial of any sort of popular sovereignty, enforcing a bitter economic regime of privilege for the few and duress for the many."
Although Lexiteers have little patience for the national nihilism of "Davos Man," the globalist elite, we are no xenophobes. We voted Leave because we believe it is essential to preserve the two things we value most: a democratic political system and a social-democratic society. We fear that the European Union's authoritarian project of neoliberal integration is a breeding ground for the far right. By sealing off so much policy, including the imposition of long-term austerity measures and mass immigration, from the democratic process, the union has broken the contract between mainstream national politicians and their voters. This has opened the door to right-wing populists who claim to represent "the people," already angry at austerity, against the immigrant.
It was the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual architect of neoliberalism, who called in 1939 for "interstate federalism" in Europe to prevent voters from using democracy to interfere with the operation of the free market. Simply put, as Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission (the union's executive body), did: "There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties."
The union's structures and treaties are designed accordingly. The European Commission is appointed, not elected, and it is proudly unaccountable to any electorate. "We don't change our position according to elections" was how the commission's vice president Jyrki Katainen greeted the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece in 2015.
The European Parliament is not a real parliament. It is not a legislature; its deputies neither offer manifestoes nor carry out the ideas they propose to voters. Elections in improbably large constituencies, with pitifully low turnouts, change nothing. As a Parliament staff member said at the European Research Seminar at the London School of Economics, "The only people who listen to M.E.P.s are the interpreters," referring to the members of the Parliament.
The European Council, an intergovernmental body where decisive legislative power actually lies, especially for Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, comprises member countries' heads of state, who generally meet just four times a year. They are not directly elected by the inhabitants of the nations whose fate they decide. As for the union principle of "subsidiarity," a supposed preference for decentralised governance, it is ignored in all practical matters.
Another key institution of the neoliberal union is the European Central Bank. Unelected and unaccountable, the bank's governors are committed by treaty to favor deflation over growth, to prohibit state aid to stricken industries and to enforce austerity measures. Likewise, the single currency acts as an economic chokehold on entire regions of Europe, which can neither devalue their currency (as sovereign nations can) to become competitive nor grow their way out of stagnation because they are forced by austerity to shrink their economy.
It has been a colossal error by Davos left-wingers to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.
Right now, the left in Europe is playing by someone else's rule book in a rigged game. One part of each nation, the winners, have been "using the globalised world as their extended playing field," as Professor Streeck put it. One, if not the only, meaning of Brexit is that, having lost faith in glib promises of a globalization for all, the other part of the nation - the losers, the shutout and the disdained - have decided, in desperation, to make a sovereign gesture: to change the rules by returning to nation-state politics in order to have a go at levelling things out. They are "seeking refuge," in Professor Streeck's words, in "democratic protection, popular rule, local autonomy, collective goods and egalitarian traditions."
Rather than leave the field to the nativist right, some of us on the democratic left are going with them.
Alan Johnson is the editor of the online journal, Fathom.