The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum: 4 reasons Progressives should reject Nationalism and choose Remain

The final week of Britain's EU referendum campaign has begun under a dark cloud. The death of West Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, allegedly in an act of Anders Breivik-esque murderous Far Right terrorism, has led to outcry over the tone of the debate - with particular concern regarding the Right's rhetoric on immigration.

It has been easy to think these things don't happen in the UK. People are shot in the street in America, bombs go off amongst civilians in the middle east, violent clashes between the police and the public happen on the continent - extremism may be a way of life for others, but not in Britain.

But it isn't true. Britain and Europe have their own long histories of extremism, all too easily encouraged and inflamed. Our own particular flavour of extremism in Europe is Nationalism. Here are our 4 reasons to reject Nationalism in favour of the EU and Internationalism.

I: The EU was an effort to bring a continent together...

The European Union, formerly the European Community, was founded as an effort to get Europe to think beyond National limitations - not to abandon ethnic, provincial or municipal differences to gentrification, but to accept difference, embrace it and build for the future using diversity as an advantage. It was an effort to try and think bigger and broader, to develop a broad view of humanity and how we might live in peace.

The founding tool of that effort was economics. Free Trade and a Common Market were the starting point. Caught between American competition and Soviet collectivism, Europe took a different path, a more cooperative approach - cooperation between government and industry, industry and workers, upon which base was built for a collection of negotiated minimum standards.

National interests have used their influence in European politics to hijack that agenda over recent years, with conservative austerians using the EU as a vehicle for their policies. Yet the foundation for international cooperation and solidarity remains - it just has to be taken back.

II: ...after Nationalism had nearly destroyed us

Before the efforts to bring the continent together, life in Europe was dominated by Nationalism. Europe's century of nationalism began for real in 1848, the "springtime of the peoples". Europe's progressives rose against their conservative monarchist elites, largely in peaceful protests at first, to demand constitutions and broad rights. Yet the progressive movement split.

Liberals and democrats, in their first expressions, split over their aims. The bourgeois liberals were too concerned about their propertied interests, and the Democrats, who embraced Nationalism as its populist rallying call, drove themselves apart along national lines - sectarian divisions appearing as the general democratic cause was swallowed  and patriotisms with competing interests were pitted against one another. The establishment put down its now divided opposition by force.

But that was not the end of the story of Nationalism. In Italy it found life: Mazzini used it as a rallying call to achieve the unity needed for liberation from foreign rule, then Cavour used it as the means to achieve the unity needed for consolidation under an Italian monarch. In Germany, Bismarck used it as the means to achieve the unity needed for the domination of Germany, central Europe and the continent.

The competing national interests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to escalation and fear - and then war. Millions died in the Great War, but Europe hadn't learned its lessons and fell back into its divisions. The internationalism of Keynes and his dire warnings of the consequences of letting national interests dominate, with their vindictive agendas, were ignored.

Then Nationalism found its untrammelled voice in fascism, appealing with foreign scapegoats and unifying symbols to a beaten down public, that was impoverished, starved and looking for someone to blame. In desperation and anger, empathy was the first casualty. The result was one of the worst catastrophes in human history.

III: Sectarianism has found a way to creep back in...

At no time has it been more important for progressives to start working to bring back international cooperation. Marine Le Pen, leader of France's Far Right Front National, has announced that she sees, with no irony whatsoever, a new "springtime of the people" emerging along with a renewal of patriotism.

Jonathan Freedland wrote for The Guardian of the extremist poison that has been poured into the public veins, but the reality is that Nationalism is something we have been recreationally dosing ourselves with for decades. Britain has, since the war, managed not to - mostly - do more than just casually dabble in Nationalism, mostly getting out the flags and national pride only for big sporting events or big occasions.

But slowly, this has allowed Nationalism to become not a political position but rather a given - something that people simply are and are expected to participate in. Even after it, finally, very nearly destroyed us all in the 1940s, it seems we still couldn't put the intoxicating brew down, even when we knew it was lethal. Nationalism is Europe's addiction, its sickness, and it is getting close to falling off the wagon again. The spread of the Far Right through France, Austria, Hungary, Poland, even in Germany and Italy, seemingly egged on by Putin in Russia, is alarming to see for any progressive.

IV: ...but the real solutions remain international

The European Union has been an attempt to get Europe thinking differently. Britain came late to the EU, but was a prime mover in things like the European Convention on Human Rights, from the very start, and along with Italy demanded the Regional Development Fund be set up when it entered the EU - investing in the poorest parts of Europe, by region rather than nation, to improve and equalise the standard of life.

For Britain to be the first tumbling rock that begins the Nationalist landslide would a sad state of affairs, with its long history - though blotted with the meanness and selfishness of colonialism - of reaching out to the world internationally. It would also mean the country had turned a blind eye to its real problems.

The situation in Britain is fairly clear: chronic underinvestment, in key areas, by more than twenty years of Westminster government - an effect exacerbated under austerity - have led to a perceived pressure in the form of competition for work and competition for housing. Migrants are scapegoated, but the real solution is proper government investment, in training to end skills mismatches, in supporting newer and smaller businesses, in building homes - a pattern that is replicated right across Europe.

At the European level too can we see the need for an international perspective. The damage to the environment, that knows no borders, nor major corporations dodging tax while pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom on wages and rights, again unbound by borders, will be tackled at the national level. Yet 'foreigners' and the European Union, itself an organisation that invests, are being made the scapegoats to hide Westminster's failings.

What do progressives want from politics?

The progressive solutions to Britain's problems are shared with the progressive solutions to Europe's problems - we have more in common than divides us. Establishments disconnected from reality and democracy, wealth hoarding corporations and a need to start reimagining how we think about work, wages and economics.

Justice and Liberty - Equality - Democracy - Progress on all of these fronts - these are the things that progressives ask for. All of these things take time, effort and a consensus to construct. A long struggle to build and reform. In just years, or even just days, these efforts can be torn down. But they take decades and even centuries to construct.

Progressives may have been left out of this referendum, as the sides pitched a presently Centre-Right status quo versus the Far Right's Nationalist dream. But the progressive stance is clear: don't walk away from everything we've worked together to build - stay and fight for it, and keep building.

This is Part 4 of  a  four part series, "The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum" - click here to go to the introductory hub

When the Centre is discredited only the Right benefits - the Left has no shortcuts, it has to build and engage to move forward

The advance of the far right Front National in France has given rise to fears for the future of European Unity. Photograph: France and EU-flag, somewhere in Dunkerque by Sebastian Fuss (License) (Cropped & Flipped)

Earlier this week, Marine Le Pen's Front National (FN) took a, sadly not entirely unexpected, lead in the first round of the French regional elections (Chrisafis, 2015). While by no means emphatic, with 28% of the vote, to 27% for the Centre-Right Republicans and 23% for the Centre-Left Socialists, the Far-Right party nonetheless holds a lead that is no joke - thanks to the majority bonus awarded to the leading party in each region.

It will be a cold comfort to progressives that Front National's success has been largely laid at the feet of the parties of the Centre (Nougayrede, 2015). The rise of FN has been described seen as the product of the failures of the parties of the political centre. Those parties are struggling, discredited by their failure to address France's long term problem of unemployment and the impact, and narrow rewards, of globalisation.

The transformist Centre parties, with their "conservative and social democratic modes of liberalism", have come to be seen as a 'complacent', 'insulated' and elite 'caste', and having laid the foundations for themselves to be supplanted by the Far-Right's more emotive and simplistic alternatives (Behr, 2015).

"No two countries have exactly analogous politics, but common threads run across Europe. The unifying dynamic appears to be the interaction of financial insecurity and the cultural detachment of governing elites from the governed... politicians of the technocratic centre are perceived as a caste apart, professionally complacent, insulated by hoarded privilege from the anxiety provoked in electorates by economic turbulence and abrupt demographic change..."

The fact that the Far-Right sit now on the doorstep of the establishment, so close to power in one of Europe's largest and most influential countries, has sparked fears of what the Centre's failure will entail for the broader European project (Betancour, 2015). The European system, a symbol of the time and effort required to build progressive institutions that break down borders and bring people together, was decades in the making - but appears now to be only years in the unravelling.

What is notable is that, as the Centre has collapsed, only the Right has really benefited. Meanwhile the Left has made few, if any, gains. In fact, in France, FN have largely made their initial inroads into the traditional heartlands of the Centre-Left Socialists (Nardelli, 2015). So the big questions for progressives are: Why? And, what can be done?

In France, the first steps taken in response by the scrambling Centre were to close ranks (Willsher, 2015). France returns to the polls for the second round today and in districts where Socialists trail in third place, the party has withdrawn candidates - falling back on tactical voting to ensure the victory of the least worst alternative (Chrisafis, 2015{2}). It also made the remarkable, though unrequited, suggestion of forming a Republican Front - uniting Centre-Left and Centre-Right - to hold back the rise of Front National.

From the perspective of those on the Left, it might be a lot easier to pour scorn on such a project than to become embroiled with discredited establishment's attempts to save their own necks. Yet becoming involved is precisely what some have proposed.

In an article based on a lecture he gave in 2013, before his adventure into political economics as Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis argued that only the Right ever benefits from breakdown and disorder (Varoufakis, 2015).

"If my prognosis is correct, and we are not facing just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome, the question that arises for radicals is this: should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come."

What Varoufakis touches upon is that progressive politics depends upon building things - like a free and open civic space, or the infrastructure for broadly available healthcare and welfare. These things that cannot be easily made or remade, but are all too easy to tear down. In contrast, social or institutional breakdown benefits the Right because it drives itself with simpler, emotive, even instinctual, constructs. Traditionalism, moralism, nationalism: these have the advantage of being old and familiar, and already deeply rooted in the identity of the audience.

For Varoufakis, when the Centre fails, the Left needs to acknowledge its weakness and take up the task of responsible government - including propping up elements of the old establishment, in order to save past progress and to have something left to reform.

"Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative."

Alexis Tsipras, Radical Left Prime Minister of Greece, has described any politician setting foot upon that road as needing to be pragmatic about what can be accomplished in government (from Horvat, 2013).

"I believe that today 'radical' is to try to be able to take responsibility for the people, to not be afraid of that, and at the same time to maintain in the democratic road, in the democratic way. To take the power for the people and to give it back to the people."

Yet Tsipras' approach, this pragmatic radicalism, has its critics. On the one hand, it plays an exhausting game with democratic institutions that can be easily become fatigued (Patrikarakos, 2015). On the other, buying into the game in order to achieve practical things comes with a risk of succumbing to its pressures and ultimately conforming (Anthony, 2015). Another concern with Tsipras' pragmatic approach, is that the line of thinking can very easily lead to the temptations of Blairism.

Just this week, Tony Blair himself took to the pages of The Spectator to offer a defence of the 'Blairist' approach (Perraudin, 2015). He was quick to point out the 'flaw' in his critics' thinking.

"In particular, significant elements of the Party saw the process of governing with all its compromises, pragmatism and embrace of changing times as implicit betrayal of our principles."

Blair's defence of his direction focusses tightly, as his defenders and successors often do, on being willing to make 'hard choices' in order to be in power - placing value on "aspiring to govern" over being a "fringe protest" (Blair, 2015).

Yet that attitude also features a dangerous obsession with basing practical politics in "reality". On the face of it, this is a call for rational politics, taking the world as what it is rather than the utopia you might wish it to be - to base policy, and the political moves used to achieve them, on the 'reality' of the world as you find it. The trouble is that, beneath the surface of this approach, what it really means is engaging in a deceitful game of playing on, and to, often incomplete or outright wrong public perceptions (Jones, 2015).

For those who feel New Labour wandered too far to the political Right, a big part of the problem was that they had become anchored to 'reality', largely purveyed by a conservative media, and played to popular prejudice in search of an easy route to power. In the process simply turning the Centre and Left into a vehicle for the popular conservatisms of the moment.

The danger of that course is, however, that if you keep playing to conservative perceptions you are only going to reinforce them. The result will be more citizens who interpret the world through conservative perceptions, and so make their decisions accordingly - ultimately making it more difficult to propose progressive policies in the future.

European politics, and in particular politics in France, have seen an expansion of this problem. Technocrats have spent decades quietly implementing the rules and regulations to bring about European unity - at least in the technical sense. Yet they have spent too little time on the engagement, debate and education in the civic space that promotes and spreads the values behind them, and creates the 'values consciousness' amongst the public that parallels institutions and builds a bridge between them.

In the UK, the Liberal Democrats stand as a cautionary tale. The Lib Dems spent decades rebuilding, offering a progressive alternative but where brought low in just five years when they failed to meet the expectations of their supporters - decades in the recruiting - trying to meet the popular expectations of a 'party of government'.

In order to build a lasting progressive politics, there needs to be a long term, concerted social project - for hearts and, particularly, minds - that develops and promotes a form of compassionate, rational, government (Clark, 2015). Progressive parties have to be engaged with the political tasks of spreading ideas and changing minds required for the construction of a progressive social consciousness.

To that end, simply sneaking into power by pretending to be conservative isn't enough, and it never will be. That doesn't mean that the Left shouldn't seek to be practical, like Varoufakis suggests, and, as in France today, be willing to be practical in its compromises with the Centre and the establishment to prevent much worse outcomes.

But the Left has to be about more than just words. It needs to act as well, to actively live its values and promote their means and purposes. Progressives cannot be afraid to govern, but they cannot sacrifice the necessary work for easy access to power. There is no trade off to be made. Trying to do the former without the latter will only lead to failure, compounding more failures to come.