Much the most interesting thing I've read recently on Brexit and the EU is this piece by Dominic Cummings, Head of the Vote Leave Campaign. The whole piece, which is very long, is well-worth reading closely. For my money, this is the most powerful defense of Brexit currently in print. More sophisticated and interesting than Boris Johnson's and Dan Hannan's stuff.
I
Among the many gems, the article contains an interesting approach to thinking about the EU. Too often, the case for or against European Integration (EI) is treated as if it were the same as the case for and against the EU. As I've written before, it is possible to be generally pro-EI but vehemently anti-EU. In other words, one can be in favour of the project of EI but against the current product of EI (i.e. the EU).
I have always been intensely irritated by the Habermasians, who like to bang on about the superior "problem-solving capacities" of transnational government compared to the nation-state. In theory, transnational government may indeed have these capacities. But that is not to say that the EU currently possesses them. Indeed, the EU is in many ways an unlovely and deeply dysfunctional system of government. (For a good discussion of the manifold failures of the EU and its inability to "error-correct," see the work of Giandomenico Majone.) I wouldn't go so far as Cummings, who calls the EU "a crap 1950s idea (Shipman, p. 38)." But he is right to recognize its lack of "error-correcting mechanisms."
Of course, supporters of the EU will be very reluctant to accept any suggestion that the EU is dysfunctional. "Compared to what?" they will ask. And that question does raise an important difficulty concerning the appropriate criteria of evaluation.
For an older generation of EU proponents, the criteria of evaluation didn't require much thought. We need only compare postwar Europe with prewar (especially Interwar) Europe. Now we have peace and prosperity, when before we had poverty and war. (Cummings, as we shall see, relies on a version of this argument himself.) The problem with this position is that it is not obvious that the EU remains crucial to the maintenance of postwar peace and prosperity. What worked in the 1950s and 60s might not work now.
Since we can't, I think, get anywhere by relying on this crude historical comparison to justify European Integration, we need:
(a) to come up with our own criteria of evaluation;
(b) figure out whether the EU in its current form meets them; and finally
(c) identify any alternative forms of government that might do a better job.
What is the point or purpose of any organized form of government?
At the most general level, the following seem important:
(i) Security--safeguards against internal and external threats
(ii) Wealth--a precondition of welfare
(iii) Maintenance of a particular way of life or set of ideas and principles. Examples include:
--(a) Nationalism. The nationalist idea in its refined form is that Britain constitutes an organic community, a unit of solidarity, a repository of inspiring values, and the possessor of an irreplaceable form of sovereign parliamentary democracy. (See here Ambrose Evans Pritchard, Frank Field, and Richard Tuck.) The nationalist idea, in its more vulgar form, is that Britain constitutes an ethnonational community whose purity and inherited way of life have been polluted by Johnny Foreigner, whether Muslim or Pole;
--(b) Liberal Cosmopolitanism.
--(c) Socialism.
One way of thinking about the campaign Brexit is that it involved a pitched ideological battle between Nationalists and Liberal Cosmopolitans about the ideal form of government in an era of globalization. (Socialists remained rather off-stage in the Brexit camplign--for the reasons why, see my piece, Liberals, Socialists and Brexit: The Challenge for British Labour).
But this is too simplistic, because even if one were a Liberal Cosmopolitan, it is not obvious that the EU is fit for purpose to deliver this or any other Way of Life. Indeed, the EU might conceivably be so flawed that it is less able to secure a LC way of life than a Europe of Nation-States. That's precisely where Cummings' argument (or at least this presentation of the argument) is interesting.
II
Read charitably, Cummings wants to argue that if you are on the side of free trade, scientific progress, and international cooperation--if you fear anti-liberal extremists, enemies of the Open Society--then you ought to be in favour of Brexit--even so-called "Hard Brexit." (I leave aside the question of whether Cummings, the Machiavellian political operative, can now honestly present himself as a proponent of an Open Society.)
As I understand Cummings chain of reasoning, at least as it bears on his case for Brexit, it goes like this:
(i) 1930s style protectionism is the greatest threat to our security and wealth; therefore
(ii) We need to maintain the conditions that sustain free trade;
(iii) Uncontrolled immigration is the greatest threat to these conditions, because it provokes a nationalist response from extremist forces;
(iv) Human Rights Laws that protect terrorists and serious criminals also undermine these conditions;
(v) In light of (iii) and (iv), we need to limit immigration. In short, unlimited migration erodes the conditions that sustain free trade;
(vi) Limiting Unskilled Immigration (and Increasing STEM migrants) requires Brexit--"Hard Brexit," to be precise;
(vii) A Post-Brexit UK will be better placed to convince Europe of the need to limit migration and, in doing so, save European free trade.
(viii) A Post-Brexit UK will be better placed to build (with other states) new institutions of international cooperation.
What should we make of this argument?
III
My principal objection--although one I will not expand on here--concerns Cumming's unstated premise that Immigration is not a basic right, but merely a policy goal that can and ought to be constrained by other policy goals. While I won't argue the point here, I think freedom of movement is a basic right--a human right, if you will--that flows out of our core interest in personal freedom. Upping sticks and moving--whether to escape persecution and poverty or just for the hell of it-- is one of the most valuable dimensions of our freedom. No liberal worthy of the name can be against freedom of movement. Now this isn't to say that migrants must immediately be granted the same welfare rights as the long-standing population. Nor does it entail any endorsement of the current EU laws and practices concerning welfare eligibility. There are a whole host of tricky moral, legal, and political questions to be addressed here. (See the recent contrasting works by Joseph Carens and David Miller.)
Cummings would doubtless dismiss my commitment to FOM as itself a form of extremism--a value commitment not shared by the ordinary voter he encounters in his focus groups. I will leave hanging here this disagreement. Suffice it to say: the fact that my value commitments are not widely shared--that they wouldn't convince anyone in a focus-group--doesn't mean I am wrong to defend them. I doubt anti-slavery arguments focus-grouped that well in Alabama in the C19.
My secondary objection concerns the likely consequences of the UK imposing immigration controls and pursuing (or being forced into) "Hard Brexit" (i.e. outside both the Single Market and the Customs Union). Cummings makes a bold probabilistic wager that immigration controls will diminish the electoral appeal of anti-trade ethnonational extremists (vulgar nationalist Kippers and the like); and that a post-Brexit UK can renegotiate new institutions of international cooperation. He also believes that Brexit positions Britain well (or at least better than now) for scientific and educational progress. In short, Cummings identifies four expected gains from Brexit--(i) scientific progress (Britain becomes "the best place in the world for science"); (ii) education; (iii) free trade; and (iv) new forms of international cooperation.
If this probabilistic wager proves right, then his case for Brexit will have been vindicated.
Given Cummings emphasis in his various blog-posts about the need for rigorous testing of social and political predictions (like me, Cummings is a fan of Tetlock's work on counterfactuals and forecasting), it is surprising how little he does in explaining how to measure (and in what time frame?) the expected pay-offs of this probabilistic wager.
Presumably the measure is to be gauged in terms of:
(i) Britain's greater scientific achievements--measured by patents, journal citations, awards, university rankings;
(ii) Educational gains (measured by, say, the Pisa study) both pre and post Brexit;
(iii) Free trade (measured by an increase in trade as a percentage of GDP); and
(iv) New (and presumably better) forms of international cooperation. (This is the hardest to define, but presumably these new forms of cooperation will enhance the security and wealth of the relevant parties--parties that will include not merely Britain and European states but also the wider international community.)
If that's the how, what about "the when"?
The changes set in motion by Brexit will take a very long time to have any effect. Cummings sometimes speaks of Brexit as if it is likely to shock the British political system into more effective action. But given institutional inertia, it is unrealistic to expect rapid changes. Any positive effects will appear over decades rather than the next year or so. In the meantime, it seems we are likely to be doomed to rancorous debates about whether things are getting better or worse.
While Cummings comes across as a revolutionary who wants to "spark big changes in the fundamental wiring" of government, this line of argument coexists with the fear that the EU is dangerous in its current form. On this view, Brexit is animated by prudence, a worry that the present institutional system is set up to fail--presumably because its half-arsed globalism leads to uncontrolled flows of migrants that will eventually excite xenophobes into 1930s-style movements of anti-liberal protectionism. Cummings' proposals are designed to ward off these looming threats.
In the gulf that looms between Cummings the revolutionary and Cummings the prescient conservative* (more on this below), there exists the current institutional set-up: the EU, warts and all.
And at this point, one has to ask:
Assuming we accept Cumming's policy goals (scientific progress; educational improvements; free trade; and international cooperation); is he right to think that we need Brexit to attain them? Should we follow him in thinking that we need to junk the postwar European international order ("a crap 1950's idea") before it destroys everything we value about our open society? Can Britain, standing alone, outside of the EU, reform itself and rescue Europe with a new international order?
In order to answer any of these question in the affirmative I fear we would have to believe a number--certainly more than Alice's six--of impossible things. For all his hard-headed realism, Cumming's case for Brexit is less a probabilistic wager than a crazy bet-the-house gamble on a long-shot nag no one's heard of.
Let me list a few of the things that could go wrong:
1. The best foreign researchers flee from Britain's universities, because Britain is no longer in international research networks;
2. The best foreign students go elsewhere--Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands--which are more accommodating to their foreigner status;
3. Unskilled foreign labour is driven out; while the domestic labour force is unwilling or unable to fill the gap: the agriculture, hospitality and health care sectors lurch into crisis;
4. Post-Brexit Britain becomes insular and xenophobic; the best and the brightest decamp for more progressive and stimulating environments;
5. Post-Brexit Europe turns nasty and excludes Britain from its markets by making crafty use of non-tariff barriers;
6. Britain loses enough of its financial service industry to hurt its economy and force public expenditure cuts;
7. The US and the EU cooperate economically and militarily at Britain's expense;
8. Brexit causes Europe to implode in such a way that the world ends up in a situation resembling the 1930s.
9. The effort to impose a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic coupled with the exit from the ECHR leads to the reawakening of violent Irish Republicanism.
I could go on. But if I had to attach probabilities and place bets on one or more of my negative scenarios over Cumming's positive scenarios--well, I fancy my chances.
IV
*Addendum #1:
My friend Helen Thompson (Cambridge) has suggested to me that there is more to Cumming's "prescient conservative" case for Brexit than my comment above allows.
As she puts it: "if in Cummings' terms you start from what happens to Britain and believe that constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of movement in the absence of democratic consent to it is damaging to free trade prospects then conservative prudence requires the issue to be addressed in that there is a quite possible far worse outcome down the road by not allowing some restrictions on FoM now."
Viewed more closely, some of these claims strike me as odd.
Is 1930s-style protectionism really our greatest threat?
Cummings seems to share here a fear of those on the Left who worry that modern western societies are teetering on the abyss of populist authoritarianism--even fascism. (For some skepticism on this worry, see Sherry Berman's article in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs.) If the current lot of extremists ever came to power--think FN, Lega Nord/M5S--they would enact protectionist policies and we can kiss the Open Society goodbye. Cummings believes we can defeat these extremists by marshaling our forces behind the banner of "Free Trade," while throwing them off the protectionist scent by giving them "Controlled Immigration."
Not to be too nit-picky. But the terms "free trade" and "protectionism" are so vague as to be close to meaningless. If by "free trade," we mean tariff free trade, WTO members already trade with each other in a very low tariff environment; EU member states trade in a no-tariff environment. But that isn't to say that states--even EU member states--do not practice various forms of protectionism--government contracts, for example, are rarely fully open to foreign companies; the professions protect themselves by recognizing only national qualifications etc. New trade deals (CETA; TTP) are now exceptionally complex and controversial, because they have to penetrate deeply into the various ways that governments, semi-private institutions (like utilities), and the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, accountants, even notary publics) are regulated. The terms (or even a continuum) free-trade/protectionist can't do much to capture this complexity.
Yet even setting this complexity aside, the suggestion that absent controlled immigration, the British public will embrace protectionism...well, it's hard to see the worry here. Take a look at the following table (a Pew Survey which records views as of 2014):
People in Britain--if not in France, US, Japan and Italy--do not seem to worry much about trade. They hardly seem very likely to embrace protectionism anytime soon. And if that's the case, then it is hard to sympathize with Cummings' argument for "Controlled Immigration." He's offering a controversial solution--one that requires a major rupture in the postwar space-time continuum--for a problem that doesn't exist.
This is not to say that Europe doesn't face grave dangers. But Brits embracing protectionism doesn't register on the dial. And if that's the case Cummings' prescient conservativism is misdirected.
Is 1930s-style protectionism really our greatest threat?
Cummings seems to share here a fear of those on the Left who worry that modern western societies are teetering on the abyss of populist authoritarianism--even fascism. (For some skepticism on this worry, see Sherry Berman's article in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs.) If the current lot of extremists ever came to power--think FN, Lega Nord/M5S--they would enact protectionist policies and we can kiss the Open Society goodbye. Cummings believes we can defeat these extremists by marshaling our forces behind the banner of "Free Trade," while throwing them off the protectionist scent by giving them "Controlled Immigration."
Not to be too nit-picky. But the terms "free trade" and "protectionism" are so vague as to be close to meaningless. If by "free trade," we mean tariff free trade, WTO members already trade with each other in a very low tariff environment; EU member states trade in a no-tariff environment. But that isn't to say that states--even EU member states--do not practice various forms of protectionism--government contracts, for example, are rarely fully open to foreign companies; the professions protect themselves by recognizing only national qualifications etc. New trade deals (CETA; TTP) are now exceptionally complex and controversial, because they have to penetrate deeply into the various ways that governments, semi-private institutions (like utilities), and the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, accountants, even notary publics) are regulated. The terms (or even a continuum) free-trade/protectionist can't do much to capture this complexity.
Yet even setting this complexity aside, the suggestion that absent controlled immigration, the British public will embrace protectionism...well, it's hard to see the worry here. Take a look at the following table (a Pew Survey which records views as of 2014):
People in Britain--if not in France, US, Japan and Italy--do not seem to worry much about trade. They hardly seem very likely to embrace protectionism anytime soon. And if that's the case, then it is hard to sympathize with Cummings' argument for "Controlled Immigration." He's offering a controversial solution--one that requires a major rupture in the postwar space-time continuum--for a problem that doesn't exist.
This is not to say that Europe doesn't face grave dangers. But Brits embracing protectionism doesn't register on the dial. And if that's the case Cummings' prescient conservativism is misdirected.
