Is
the EU “a Crap 1950s Idea?”
Dominic
Cummings, Disaster-Avoidance, and the Case for Leave
[Draft of an essay for Uta Staiger eds., Brexit and Beyond, UCL, forthcoming]
The Brexit campaigns of
2016—both Leave and Remain--were fought largely through the medium of simplicities,
delusions, and lies.[1] Neither campaign generated
much deep political thinking. The Leave campaign floated to victory on a
fantastical promise of ending immigration and returning Britain’s EU funds to
the NHS. The Remain campaign relied on no less fantastical projections of the ruinous
short-term economic costs of Brexit (the so-called “Project Fear”). Dominic
Cummings, Leader of the Vote Leave
Campaign, did more than anyone to focus the Campaign debate on bogus issues
like the NHS and the impending enlargement of the EU to include Turkey.
Nonetheless, in a series of writings authored after the referendum, Cummings has
produced an argument for Brexit that has drawn considerable attention and praise.
Cummings’s position is
worth considering for two reasons. First, it is useful to know what actual
arguments propelled some of the leading figures in the Campaign, especially
since they chose not to reveal those arguments at the time. Second, Cummings insists on moving beyond
vague ruminations on whether Brexit will succeed or fail. He thinks political argument must be based on
“precise quantitative predictions about well-formed questions.”[2] (Cummings is a big fan of
Philip Tetlock’s work on forecasting [Tetlock and Gardner 2015.) While Cummings’s own predictions are not, I
think, at all plausible; those who advocate Britain’s Re-entry into Europe—which
is now in all likelihood a generational project--would do well to follow the
form and spirit if not the actual content of his argument.
I
The
Science of Disaster-Avoidance
At the most general
level, Cummings’ case for Brexit rests on the probabilistic assessment that
leaving would improve the chances of “1) Britain contributing positively to the
world and 2) minimizing dangers…[including] Britain’s exposure to the problems
caused by the EU.” Viewed more specifically, Cummings’ argument proceeds along
three tracks. Track one takes the
Eurosceptics’ conventional ride through Brussels--that familiar wasteland, as
they see it, of failure, false promise, and dysfunction. The only distinctive
feature of this part of Cummings’s journey is the Hayekian-inspired claim that
the EU lacks the self-correcting mechanisms of the market and the experimental sciences.
For Cummings, the EU—“a crap 1950s idea,” as he calls it—is excessively
hierarchical and centralized, and as such lacks even the error-correcting
mechanisms of a national parliamentary government (Shipman 2016, 38). Quoting
the physicist David Deutsch, Cummings insists that “preserving the institutions
of error correction is more important than any policy.”
This part of Cummings’s
argument need not detain us. The idea that the EU is slow-moving and lacks rapid error-correcting mechanisms is a
plausible criticism to make. Scholars of the EU often make the same point. No
fundamental transformation in the EU can take place without a Treaty change,
which requires a unanimous decision of all member states. It’s also fair to say
that the EU is hierarchical, at least in the sense that its decisions are
top-down and taken without much direct democratic input. But it’s ludicrous to
attribute this problem to excessive centralization. Indeed, the principal
reason why the EU is so slow-moving is due to its highly decentralized and
consensual decision-making practices. The EU is such a feeble force in global
affairs, partly because it lacks the centralized political system of the other
Great Powers. Likewise, the EU has struggled with the Eurozone Crisis, because
it lacks the centralized tax and budgetary powers necessary to manage
successfully a Monetary Union. More generally, the concept of
“error-correction” in politics is more problematic than Cummings seems to
recognize. Where there is a clearly agreed aim, it is relatively
straightforward to identify an error—this is the case, for example, in computer
coding. But in politics, errors are
often only identifiable after the event, and even then, the attribution of
“error” remains controversial. Was the Iraq War an error? Was the creation of
the EMU an error? Will the UK’s exit from the EU prove to be an error? None of
these questions can be answered independently of a justification of our
political projects, a justification that will inevitably require an appeal to
contestable moral values (Morgan 2005).
The second track of Cummings’s
argument focuses on the idea that “leaving would improve the probability of…
making Britain the best place in the world for science and education.” Here it
is important to recall that Cummings worked in Whitehall as an advisor to the
Minister of Education and is the author of an ambitious project for educational
renewal (Cummings 2015). For Cummings, science and education are key evaluative
criteria. He predicts that a post-Brexit UK will achieve more, make a greater
scientific contribution to the world, once free of the EU’s legal and regulatory
regime.
One merit of this
argument is that it is sufficiently precise to generate a testable prediction.
Post-Brexit Britain will, if this prediction pans out, score higher on
objective criteria of scientific success at some specified date in the future
(2026?) than the Britain of 2016. Presumably the criteria will include such
factors as educational scores on the PISA surveys; citation-weighted research
publication rates; scientific prizes; global university rankings; and technological
patents.
The third track of
Cummings argument is the most interesting. Brexit, he argues, minimizes
dangers, especially the biggest danger of all: the danger that the free
movement of labour will spark a populist backlash that will threaten free
trade. As he puts this point:
[A] return to 1930s protectionism would be
disastrous, 2) the fastest route to this is continuing with no democratic control
over immigration or human rights policies for terrorists and other serious
criminals, therefore 3) the best practical policy is to reduce (for a while)
unskilled immigration and increase high
skills immigration particularly those with very hard skills in maths, physics
and computer science, 4) this requires getting out of the EU, 5) hopefully it
will prod the rest of Europe to limit immigration and therefore limit the
extremist forces that otherwise will try to rip down free trade.
This argument conjectures
a chain of events leading from “no [national] democratic control over
immigration,” a requirement of the EU’s Single Market, to the rise of extremist
forces demanding 1930s style protectionism, which Cummings rightly considers a
disaster. He wants to avoid this disaster by way of another conjecture: a chain
of events leading from “democratic control of unskilled labour”— high skill
labour would be unaffected—to a broader public tolerance of free trade.
Ideally, Cummings would like to see post-Brexit UK prompt the formation of “new
institutions for international cooperation to minimize the probability of
disasters.” He seems to think that post-Brexit UK is in better position to do
this than as a member of the EU.
While it is difficult to
argue against probabilistic wagers and counterfactual claims, there are significant
problems with both the second and third tracks of Cummings’s argument. The
claim that post-Brexit UK will be well-placed to experience a scientific
renaissance runs into a number of obvious difficulties. First, the UK already
does relatively well on national comparative measures of scientific progress (Scientific American, 2012). Second,
scholars have never been able to identify with any great confidence the
conditions likely to produce scientific progress (Taylor 2016). And third, the UK
government will have to ensure that the country remains (and is perceived to
remain) an attractive place for foreign STEM workers to come to study, live,
and work. It is very difficult to see how Brexit helps here, especially since
it diminishes the status of all workers coming from EU countries. Where once
these workers had a status grounded in the EU Constitution; now they will be in
the UK merely at the pleasure of Her Majesty’s Government (Morgan 2016).
Cummings wager that
Brexit would diminish the chances of an extreme form of protectionism emerging
in Britain has some initial plausibility. Certainly, UKIP has pretty much
collapsed; in the June 2017 election, the voters it had gained in earlier
elections largely fled back to the two major parties. But viewed more closely,
Cummings argument about Brexit as a means to avoiding protectionism and
increasing UK’s share of global trade is deeply problematic. Here we have to
weigh a probabilistic claim together with a preventative claim. How likely is
it that absent a reduction in unskilled immigration, the UK would face an anti-trade
backlash leading to 1930s protectionism? On the face of it, the UK is an
unlikely site for protectionism. No current political party—not even
UKIP—favours trade protection. Indeed, a
central argument of leading Tory thinkers is that post-Brexit the UK will enter
a “‘post geography trading world’
where we are much less restricted in having to find partners who are physically
close to us” (Fox 2016). Furthermore, opinion surveys suggest that UK
public opinion is among the most pro free-trade in the advanced industrial
world (Pew Survey, 2014). In short, 1930s-style protectionism seems like a rather
low probability threat. But even if we were to accept that it represents even a
low-level threat, there is little reason to think that ending low-skill
immigration offers an effective and efficient solution, especially since this
type of immigration is so essential in the hospitality, retail, health care, and
agricultural sectors of the UK economy (Consterdine, 2017). Cummings’s remedy is
not only unduly costly; it promises to be even more injurious than the
underlying ailment.
More generally, Cummings’
belief that post-Brexit UK will be more open to foreign trade is as unfounded
as his hope that post-Brexit will inspire new forms of international
organization. Certainly in the short to medium term, the UK will face huge problems
resulting from the impact of quitting the Customs Union on the UK’s
supply-chains, most of which involve other EU countries. If the UK were to
trade under WTO rules and couldn’t negotiate new frictionless customs
arrangements, it is difficult to see how—given the way supply-chains work--the
UK could retain its domestic car industry, which is one of the largest sources
of UK manufacturing exports. The other big trade problem facing post-Brexit UK
is that the UK has very little power to force the EU to offer favorable trading
conditions. If the EU wishes to make
life difficult for the UK—say, by demanding close inspections of all UK
exports—the EU can and probably will. Partly for these reasons, most
macro-economic estimates of the effects of leaving the EU predict that Brexit
will have a significant trade-lowering and welfare-diminishing impact on the UK
economy. In sum, if the goal is to increase trade, Brexit seems like the wrong
way to do it.
III
What
Disasters Should We Worry About?
While there’s not much to
be said in favour of the actual content of Cummings’s argument, the general
form of his argument is quite sensible. Cummings is right to warn against the
vacuity of general claims that Brexit has succeeded or failed. He is right to recommend that political
argument take place in terms of probabilistic wagers and predictions. Cummings is also right to emphasize the
importance of identifying threats and thinking about institutions capable of
error correction and disaster-avoidance. Yet even with these admonitions in
mind, I think it is possible to reach a very different assessment about the merits
of Leaving the EU.
A threat might be
conceptualized as a harm multiplied by the probability of its occurrence. A disaster is a harm with very high costs,
whether material costs or value costs.
The notion of value costs is important.
Political communities stand for certain values—whether liberty,
democracy, justice, or whatever—and when those core moral values are lost, it might
be counted a disaster. Organized political communities guard against threats by
way of various preventative mechanisms. These mechanisms must be both effective
(i.e. they must work) and efficient (i.e. they must have low ancillary
costs). It is no good putting in place
preventative mechanisms that impose higher costs—whether material or moral—than
those posed by the underlying threat. A
surveillance society with unlimited police powers might be effective against
terrorism but it is inefficient, since it requires a sacrifice of some of our
core moral values.
With these distinctions
in mind, I want to suggest the following seven threats worth considering in the
context of Brexit.
(i)
The exclusion of the UK from the favorable
trade, security, and research opportunities enjoyed by other EU
member-states;
(ii)
The Break-Up of the UK as a Political
Community and the return of terrorism in Northern Ireland;
(iii)
Russian aggression in Eastern Europe;
(iv)
US isolationism and trade protectionism
leading to a collapse of the postwar international order;
(v)
Large-scale migration—tens of millions per
year--into Southern Europe;
(vi)
A major banking and debt crisis in Italy;
(vii)
Large scale domestic terrorism as a
consequence of the implosion of Middle Eastern and North African states and the
failure to integrate existing Islamic minority populations.
In contrast to the threat
of immigration-induced protectionism—the threat that led Cummings to embrace
Brexit—these threats are all costly and sufficiently probable to require preventative
measures. The first of these threats is
the most pressing, because it begs the question how the UK will negotiate a
favorable set of ties with the EU member states, once it is no longer an EU
member. The principal difficulty here is that the EU is likely to impose
additional costs on the UK to make it clear that membership has advantages, and
that the UK will find life worse outside rather than in. Depending on the nature of these costs, the
UK could see a sharp downturn in its economy.
Without defending the
claim here, I will merely assert that the EU—either in roughly its current
institutional form or in a more politically-integrated federal union—offers better
prevention against these threats than does either a post-Brexit UK or a Europe
of sovereign nation-states (Morgan 2016). That claim, however, immediately
invites the following nationalist rejoinder: You speak of core moral values, but surely one of our most important core
moral values is “the nation”-- whether understood as a distinctive
historical-cultural identity or as a self-governing people –which is endangered
in the EU in its current form and would be obliterated in a more centralized
Federal Europe. This nationalist rejoinder draws some of its force from a
willingness to concede that Brexit might have significant material costs. Nigel
Farage voices a version of this nationalist rejoinder, when he claims that
ending low-skill immigration is worth paying an economic cost (Farage 2014). But
there are more sensible social democratic and radical democratic versions of
this nationalist argument too (Kymlicka 2016; Tuck 2016). These arguments raise
then the question: Does it make sense to invoke the seven disasters above, when
for the nationalist the greatest disaster of all is the loss or disappearance
of the nation? Cummings’ own position on nationalism remains ambiguous. On the one hand, he seems to think that the most
likely “branching history” will yield positive outcomes for both the UK and Europe.
But he also recognizes—as we shall see—that Brexit leaves the UK in a worse-off
position and the Europe in a better position. Cummings is certainly no Farage-style
xenophobe, nor even much of a nationalist at all. If greater openness to foreign scientists were
to change British national identity, one suspects that Cummings would view this
as a positive.
In some ways, any talk of
nationhood poses an even greater problem for Remainers/Re-Entryists than it
does for Leavers, which is one reason why the Remain campaign didn’t have much
to say on the topic. Going forward, Re-Entryists will not be able to maintain
this reticence. Broadly stated, there are three possible positions that Remainers/Re-Entryists
might take on nationhood:
(i)
British
nationalism involves a commitment to Britain as a
multi-national composite kingdom, which has historically been open to
immigrants from the former Empire and now from the EU. The Remainers/Re-Entryists
who favour this conception of nationhood see no contradiction between the UK
and the European Union, although they favour an intergovernmental Europe—i.e. a
Europe where the nation-states remain firmly in control—rather than a Federal
Europe or European Superstate (Bellamy 2017). This preference is grounded, at
least in part, on the realization that a more Federal Europe would pose a
genuine threat to their conception of British nationhood which typically
involves attributing high value to parliamentary sovereignty.
(ii)
Post-nationalism
involves a repudiation of the very idea of nationhood. For the post-nationalist, nationhood has no
value. Only individuals and
groups—understood as collections of individuals—have value. Post-nationalists typically fear that the
nation forces unity and uniformity, where neither is necessary for a stable
social order. Individuals can pay taxes,
support a welfare state, and even enlist in the army without the need of the
emotional appeal of nationalism. The
dream of post-nationalists is a Europe without either nations or nationalism
(Morgan 2005, Ch. 5).
(iii)
European
nationalism repudiates both the nation-state and
post-nationalism. Against the former, European nationalism seeks a unifying
myth or way of life that transcends any of Europe’s particular nation-states;
against the latter, European nationalism seeks something more than an
agglomeration of individuals living in a Zollverein.
For Europe to transcend the nationalism of the nation-state, a powerful myth
would be necessary. The most plausible option would be for Europe to present
itself as the embodiment and defender of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty,
truth, and reason. In doing so, Europe would be defining itself in terms of a
specific ethical ideal— the equal rights of all individuals to lead a life free
of despotism and superstition. Unlike post-nationalism, however, European
nationalism would present this agenda as the official way of life of Europe,
the basis of its unity (Morgan 2011).
If
one accepts that nations and nationalism are in large measure social
constructs—albeit social constructs that are powerful forces for both good and
evil—then British nationalism, post-nationalism and European nationalism
represent options rather than givens. Ideally, the option chosen must be
tailored to the tasks that Europeans currently face. If I’m right both in my account of the seven threats
above and in my claim that these threats are best handled by a more
politically-integrated Europe, then Europe needs to embrace either a form of
post-nationalism or European nationalism.
There is little to be gained, I think, in hiding the implications of the
need for more integration on the nation and nationalism. If you value a closed ethnocultural
conception of nationhood, fear foreigners as a pollutant of the national
spirit, and are willing to endure each and everyone of the seven disasters
outlined above, then you would be right to think that the EU is “a crap 1950s
idea.” I suspect, however, that most people will be able and willing to rationally
assess the costs of these disasters and modify their value
commitments—including commitments to an outmoded conception of nationhood. To those people, the EU will be seen as an
excellent idea.
In his latest thoughts of the topic, Cummings himself acknowledges that “in some possible branches of the future, Leaving will be an error” (Green 2017). A number of newspapers misinterpreted these remarks as an admission by Cummings that he had been wrong to support "Vote Leave." It would be more accurate to recognize that “branching histories” are part and parcel of Cummings’ probabilistic approach to major policy decisions (Armstrong 2017). There are always multiple possible branches that history can take. It has always been his probabilistic wager that Brexit would initiate a branch of history that would yield positive outcomes for both the UK and Europe. He still thinks that on the balance of probabilities, the most likely branching history is one with positive rather than negative outcomes. In reaching this conclusion, Cummings seems to place a lot of weight on the claim that the UK political-administrative state is dysfunctional: neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats are fit for purpose. Brexit is an external shock that provides an opportunity to shift the UK on to a path which yields gains to science, education, productivity, and international cooperation. It is not clear here, however, why Cummings thinks that this opportunity is any more likely to yield a successful rather than a disastrous outcome. Indeed, if his bleak assessments of the UK political-administrative state are accurate, it seems more probable that the state will bungle Brexit and—cut free from the constraints of EU laws and practices, not to mention the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union—ruin the national economy. British nationalists will certainly find cold comfort in Cummings’ tweet that “leaving increases EUR's overall ability to adapt more effectively to an uncertain world & increases probability of good branches happening (Green 2017).” One paradoxical feature of these latest remarks is that they point to a possible branch of the future where the UK comes out of Brexit very much worse off, while the EU comes out—partly because of Brexit—more adaptable, more unified, and altogether better off. This opens up a rather alarming prospect (at least for British nationalists) where the UK is mired in domestic wrangles over how best to manage its future outside of the EU, while the EU, now freed of the dead weight of the UK, becomes a dynamic and successful global power. Perhaps it is no great surprise that Cummings didn’t say much about this particular “branching history” while running “Vote Leave.”
In his latest thoughts of the topic, Cummings himself acknowledges that “in some possible branches of the future, Leaving will be an error” (Green 2017). A number of newspapers misinterpreted these remarks as an admission by Cummings that he had been wrong to support "Vote Leave." It would be more accurate to recognize that “branching histories” are part and parcel of Cummings’ probabilistic approach to major policy decisions (Armstrong 2017). There are always multiple possible branches that history can take. It has always been his probabilistic wager that Brexit would initiate a branch of history that would yield positive outcomes for both the UK and Europe. He still thinks that on the balance of probabilities, the most likely branching history is one with positive rather than negative outcomes. In reaching this conclusion, Cummings seems to place a lot of weight on the claim that the UK political-administrative state is dysfunctional: neither the politicians nor the bureaucrats are fit for purpose. Brexit is an external shock that provides an opportunity to shift the UK on to a path which yields gains to science, education, productivity, and international cooperation. It is not clear here, however, why Cummings thinks that this opportunity is any more likely to yield a successful rather than a disastrous outcome. Indeed, if his bleak assessments of the UK political-administrative state are accurate, it seems more probable that the state will bungle Brexit and—cut free from the constraints of EU laws and practices, not to mention the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union—ruin the national economy. British nationalists will certainly find cold comfort in Cummings’ tweet that “leaving increases EUR's overall ability to adapt more effectively to an uncertain world & increases probability of good branches happening (Green 2017).” One paradoxical feature of these latest remarks is that they point to a possible branch of the future where the UK comes out of Brexit very much worse off, while the EU comes out—partly because of Brexit—more adaptable, more unified, and altogether better off. This opens up a rather alarming prospect (at least for British nationalists) where the UK is mired in domestic wrangles over how best to manage its future outside of the EU, while the EU, now freed of the dead weight of the UK, becomes a dynamic and successful global power. Perhaps it is no great surprise that Cummings didn’t say much about this particular “branching history” while running “Vote Leave.”
NOTES
Armstrong, Kenneth A. (2017), “Branching Histories and the Error
of Brexit,” https://brexittime.com/2017/07/04/branching-histories-and-the-error-of-brexit/
Armstrong, Kenneth A. (2017), Brexit Time Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, Kenneth A. (2017), Brexit Time Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bellamy, Richard
(2017), “A European Republic of Sovereign States: Sovereignty,
republicanism and the European Union,” European
Journal of Political Theory, 16 (2): 188-209
Consterdine, Erica
(2017), “What Britain’s Post-Brexit Immigration Policy Could Look Like,”
Cummings, Dominic (2016), “On the referendum #21: branching histories of
the 2016 Referendum and the frogs before the storm,”
https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/
Cummings, Dominic (2017), “On
the referendum #23, a year after victory,”
https://dominiccummings.com/2017/06/23/on-the-referendum-23-a-year-after-victory-a-change-of-perspective-is-worth-80-iq-points-how-to-capture-the-heavens/
Farage, Nigel (2014) “I’d rather be poorer with fewer migrants,” Daily Telegraph, January 7, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10555158/Id-rather-be-poorer-with-fewer-migrants-Farage-says.html
Fox, Liam (2016), “Free Trade Speech,”
September 29
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/liam-foxs-free-trade-speech
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/liam-foxs-free-trade-speech
Green, David
Allen (2017) Jack of Kent Blog: http://jackofkent.com/2017/07/in-some-possible-branches-of-the-future-leaving-will-be-an-error-an-exchange-about-brexit-with-dominic-cummings/
Kymlicka
Will (2015), “Solidarity in Diverse Societies: beyond neoliberal
multiculturalism and welfare chauvinism,” Comparative
Migration Studies 3:17, https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s40878-015-0017-4?site=comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com
Morgan, Glyn
(2005), The Idea of a European Superstate,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Morgan, Glyn (2011),
“Europe, Europeanism, and European Nationalism,” European Political Science 10: 4, pp. 501-507
Morgan, Glyn (2016), Liberals, Socialists, and Brexit:
The Challenge for British Labour,” ABC
Religion and Ethics, June 22, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/06/22/4486618.htm
Pew Survey (2014), “Faith and Skepticism about Trade,”
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/09/16/faith-and-skepticism-about-trade-foreign-investment/trade-08/
Scientific
America (2012), “Best Countries in Science,”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-science-best-countries-science-scorecard/
Shipman, Tim (2016) All
Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s
Political Class, London: William Collins.
Taylor,
Zachary (2016), The Politics of Innovation: Why some Countries are
better than others at Science and Technology, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Tetlock, Philip and Dan
Gardner (2015), Superforecasting: The Art
and Science of Prediction, New York: Crown.
Tuck, Richard (2016), “The Left Case for
Brexit,” Dissent Magazine, June 6, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/left-case-brexit
[1]. For the best account of the internal operations
of the campaigns, see Shipman (2016).
[2]. All quotes in the text are to Cummings
(2016).
