The Problem for the Rest of Europe

The Brexit vote übermorgen is, as the folks at National Review point out, a way to finally shake free of some of the more unfortunate developments that the European Union has presented to the British people. Their reasoning is as ironclad as Callmedave's promise, and there can be little doubt that, as Michael Gove would put it, there would be no reason to join such a monster if the referendum was on to join rather than to stay.

Your correspondent mentally agrees. But he cannot heartily agree. Were he a subject of the crown, he would vote for Brexit. It is clearly best for Britain (Make Britain Great Again? OK, maybe that's not what we mean....), but it's Our Man in Brno, not Leeds or Oxbridge or Whatevershire or wherever Jürgen Klopp is. On the continent, it's good to have someone not just to look to as an abstract example, but to see them in your camp. Parties like ODS in the Czech Republic and PiS in Poland (maybe even more than ODS) need the Tories -- the flagship of the ECR group.

Sure, there's an "official" European Parliament aspect to this (though ECR has long been the bee in the bonnet of the usual four continental groups of post-Christian Christian Democrats, post-democratic Social Democrats, post-liberalism Liberals, and posteverything Greens), but there are also important less formal reasons for this. The Tories serve as an example for many parties in first-generation democracies. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe take cues about the roles of the state and society not just from the corporatists in Germany or Sweden, or the populists in Greece, but from the actions, the actors, and the stage on which they play in the UK. And while they read the news about the US or Australia or Japan, they see in the UK something "European," if only to make "those folks" more like "who WE are."

These feelings are reciprocated and honored by small-c conservatives in the UK and elsewhere; in the US, at least, it is the Right that is looks to men like Lech Wałęsa (a union guy!) and Václav Havel (a hippie playwright!) for inspiration about the way the state should serve society, rather than the opposite. To leave the heirs of such thinkers hanging is not unthinkable -- indeed, it is perfectly thinkable -- but it is unnerving. And any conservative, being such,should be unnerved by such a change.

I Can't Help But Feel....

1. that this story is somehow philosophically related to this story.

2. that it might be time to spark up the blog again, for a variety of reasons.