The Parthenon still stands all these centuries later, but Phidias’ work, which once adorned the building, is scattered between the Athens’ Acropolis Museum and the British Museum nearly 2,000 miles away.

It’s been more than 200 years since Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, obtained a royal Ottoman mandate to excavate near the Parthenon, document the sculptures, and “take away any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, or sculptures therein.” An international debate has raged ever since: Did Britain’s Lord Elgin, who was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Greece, have the legal right to remove the sculptures? Should the British Museum, the current home of the sculptures, yield to Greek demands for their return?

Recently, a line in a potential post-Brexit trade deal being drafted by Europe demanding that Britain “return unlawfully removed cultural objects to their countries of origin” has reignited the debate. It’s an issue that, much like Brexit itself, boils down to a question of “Leave” or “Remain.” But perhaps it’s also a question of who, in modern Europe, are the civilized Lapiths, and who are the barbaric Centaurs?

To understand the turns the discussion has taken, it’s helpful to go back to the sculptures’ beginning, 2,500 years ago, when the Athens city-state was at the height of its power and influence—Euripides and Sophocles were writing their great tragedies; Socrates was still young.

After a Persian invasion destroyed an older temple, Athens celebrated Greece’s victory by building the Parthenon in its place. Its name means “the virgin’s abode,” and the temple was dedicated to Athena, the virgin goddess of war and wisdom. Though a temple, it was not strictly a religious site and was used as a treasury.

The building featured hundreds of sculptures by Phidias, one of the greatest artists of Ancient Greece, whose figures tell stories of gods, celebrations, and battles. Phidias installed finely carved sculptures on multiple levels of the building: the most fully modeled were on its pediment, while the 92 highly sculpted friezes known as the metopes, sat right below the roof. Finally, the frieze, in low relief, lined the walls just above the temple’s inner columns.

Like the Centauromachy, some of the stories carved into the marble are allegorical. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the frieze contained exactly 192 horsemen, which was the number of Athenian warriors who died at the Battle of Marathon during the first Persian invasion of Greece.

Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreau, accompanied by his wife Anda and daughter Margarita visit the British Museum in London in 2000. Courtesy of Alastair Grant/Associated Press.

The beauty and detail of the sculptures are truly awe-inspiring—every fold of every peplos, the draping, sleeveless tunic favored by women of ancient Greece, is included; not even fingernails are neglected on a frieze that was mounted 30 feet above eye level. At the center of the temple stood a giant gold-plated statue of Athena herself, known as the Athena Parthenos. At some point, that sculpture disappeared from the temple and the historical record, its whereabouts unknown.

Over the millennia, the Parthenon has changed with times, states, and faiths. Around 450 A.D., it was rededicated to a different virgin saint, Mary of Nazareth, and next became a mosque after the Ottomans took Athens in the 15th century. When a Venetian shell hit the temple in 1687, during a war between the Turks and Venice, it became the temple we know now—a ruin.

That was how Elgin viewed it at the dawn of the 19th century, when, armed with his mandate from the royal Ottoman empire, he chiseled off and conveyed to England the sculptures, metopes, and friezes from the temple that would become known as the Parthenon Marbles.

It has since been the subject of fierce debate whether or not the hazy perimeters of the stunningly inexact document Elgin obtained allowed him to simply sift through the debris surrounding the Parthenon and collect any treasures that had already fallen from the building, or remove the works from the structure.

By contemporary standards, what happened at the Parthenon was deeply unethical. No major institution like the British Museum would today acquire artifacts from an occupied land under the permission of the invading force. But those who would return the sculptures see the question of lawfulness simply: “They were ‘stolen’ in that an alien Ottoman regime was in power at the time,” says Dame Janet Suzman, celebrated Shakespearean actress and chairperson of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

And this isn’t merely a modern interpretation of Elgin’s actions: Even in 1801 contemporary witnesses to the despoiling of the Acropolis were framing the situation as a tragedy. “Athena wept over her lost virginity,” one traveler wrote at the time.

In 1816, the British Museum bought the Marbles from Elgin. The Elgin Marbles, as they became known, became an instant phenomenon when they went on view the following year. Keats was observed gazing at them in an uninterruptible rapture, and wrote his famous sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” in response. The French Romantic Alphonse de Lamartine declared the Marbles “the most perfect poem ever written in stone on the surface of the earth.”

But they were also instantly controversial when they went on view—even in early 19th-century England, it was considered shocking for an ancient monument to be stripped of its adornments. Byron, Greece’s most famous foreign champion, was appalled, and dedicated five stanzas of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” to his outrage.

When Greece won its independence in 1832, the campaign for the Marbles’ return began in earnest.

The British Museum, would, in turn, begin to justify its possession of the marbles by positioning itself as preservers of the sculptures, which the Ottomans had taken to grinding up for limestone. More recently, the institution has gone on to argue that it sheltered and preserved the marbles from environmental damage as the Parthenon was subject to acid rain and other environmental pollutants.

But those who advocate for repatriation point to the shoddy record of British care for the marbles, starting with the two years some of the works spent at the bottom of the ocean when one of Elgin’s ships sank, and continuing through a 1930s effort to scrub them whiter-than-white with steel wool and household bleach. In 2014, Britain undermined its longstanding argument that the Marbles were too fragile to be moved by loaning them to a museum in St. Petersburg.

The controversy will not go away, especially at the British Museum’s Duveen Gallery, which attempts to help visitors envision the works as they were intended to be displayed. Here, it’s impossible to escape the fact that this is not the way these works were supposed to be displayed. The sculptures of the east pediment are arranged at one end of the rectangular gallery; the sculptures of the west at the other, while friezes and metopes line the walls in between at eye level. This attempt to emulate what was lost in stripping the stones from the Parthenon only underscores one of the most convincing arguments cited by those who would repatriate the Marbles to Athens: this art is intensely site-specific.

“This case is unique because the Parthenon itself is standing there,” says political sociologist and University of Virginia researcher Fiona Rose-Greenland. “So you have the idea that these things are actually ornaments for a structure that exists. It’s not like they were statues pulled out of the ash heap of some building that’s no longer there.”

The Duveen Gallery does contribute one major benefit to viewers—they’re no longer dozens of feet from the ground, as they were when they decorated the Parthenon. But Phidias explicitly carved the sculptures with this distance in mind; figures in the frieze were sculpted to account for the distorting perspective of eyes 35 feet below.

Though no one will ever again stand at the Parthenon and gaze up at the sculptures above, it would be possible for visitors to see the art closer to its birthplace. Partially in response to the British Museum’s long-held contention that Greece lacked a suitable home for the Marbles, the country in 2003 opened the Acropolis Museum, where the Parthenon sculptures owned by Greece are now displayed. The Parthenon itself is visible from the galleries of the Acropolis Museum, “an eye flicker [away] from the picture window in the dedicated Parthenon Gallery,” according to Suzman.

Visitors at Athens’ Acropolis Museum look at the vista to the ancient Temple of Parthenon. Courtesy of Petros Giannakouris/Associated Press.

Though a British government spokesperson recently said that returning the marbles is “not up for discussion as part” of the Brexit trade deal, there are precedents for similar returns of ancient art. In 2006, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to repatriate to Italy the Euphronios Krater, a terra cotta bowl that predates the Parthenon by approximately 100 years. The Krater may be the finest surviving example of ancient Greek pottery, and in 1972 the Met purchased it for more than one million dollars, a staggering amount at the time. But the bowl had been looted from an Italian tomb, and eventually the museum agreed to return it to Italy, in exchange for three lesser early vases.

Opponents of repatriation in the op-ed pages of the British press trot out the rather hoary argument that the return of the Marbles could lead to the gradual emptying of the world’s encyclopedic museums. The Rosetta Stone would follow the marbles out the doors of the British Museum shortly thereafter, then Berlin’s Neues Museum would be forced to ship its bust of Nefertiti back to Egypt. In fact, Egyptian wings the world over would be empty husks.

It is in global institutions like the British Museum, these advocates argue, that art achieves its true cosmopolitan promise. If art is for all peoples and all ages, then it’s most appropriate that it be showcased in museums featuring art made by all peoples during all ages, rather than segregated in far-flung state museums that serve narratives of glorious nationalistic pasts. Shortly after the Euphronios Krater was returned to Italy, a reporter for the New York Times noted that the bowl didn’t seem to attract many visitors in its new-old home. Is the Krater better served at the relatively little-known Cerveteri Museum where it now resides than it was at the Met, with its more than 6 million annual visitors?

But, “if really what we’re talking about is equal share for all, and a universal culture, then why isn’t there an old Dutch masters museum in Namibia?” asks Rose-Greenland, “Why isn’t the Art Institute of Chicago handing over its exquisite collection of French 19th-century watercolors to a Peruvian museum for a long-term loan?”

“Ownership necessarily betrays historical balances of power,” says James Cuno, art curator, historian, and president and CEO of the Getty Trust. But he argues that the fact that Western developed nations possess a disproportionate share of the world’s encyclopedic museums doesn’t mean that the idea of such museums is invalid. The cure isn’t fewer encyclopedic museums, but more of them, in more countries.

More problematic is another question raised by some supporters of global museums—that contemporary communities lack serious claims on objects built for and by people who lived centuries ago on the same patch of earth. The logic of this objection is that either art knows no age or national boundary, or it so grounded in its context that every other culture and era is equally without claim to it.

In his book Cosmpolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that parsing thousands of years of human creation into categories of “yours” and “mine” isn’t easy, particularly since it can hardly be argued that the ancients were creating art with any of us in mind. He points out that the Euphronios Krater, found in and returned to Italy, was actually a Greek bowl. “Patrimony, here,” he writes, “equals imperialism plus time.”

In the case of the Parthenon Marbles, however, the suggestion that contemporary Greek people are not the legitimate heirs of Ancient Greece has a very ugly history. Elgin himself remarked that “The Greeks of today do not deserve such wonderful works of antiquity,” and “[Modern Greeks] have nothing whatsoever in common with [Ancient Greeks]. He made this claim based on the idea, popularized by the 19th-century Austrian travel writer and theorist Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, that modern Greeks are descended from Slavs. “The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe,” he wrote in 1830. “Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple … [have] disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent.”

Though controversial from its inception and now debunked, Fallmerayer’s implicitly racist theory has appeared as recently as 2015 in the conservative German newspaper Die Welt, in an article in which the author argued that Greece was the perpetual demolisher of Eurozone order, from the early 19th century through austerity. He writes that Greeks are not “descendants of a Pericles or Socrates” but “a mixture of Slavs, Byzantines, and Albanians”—less worthy of a place in the European order, pretenders to admission to the EU. As if foretold in Phideas’s sculptures of the Centauromachy, the discussion has been reduced to an explicitly racist rumination on who inherits the title of civilization from the Ancient Greeks, and who is cast out as a barbarian.

The works of Phidias were completed in 432 B.C., but it might be argued that the Parthenon Marbles were created in 1687 when that shell turned the Parthenon into a husk and many of its adornments to dust. These were the sculptures that Elgin began excavating in 1801— and no one can argue that the 19th-century Greeks who watched the Parthenon defiled are unrelated to the Greeks today who clamor for their return.

The Parthenon Marbles as they are now are not the same art as the works Phidias painted and sculpted. Recreations of the works are almost jarring—their bright colors seem garish to contemporary eyes—accustomed as we are to the cool white scrubbed marble that western curators claimed showed the elegant simplicity of Ancient Greece. And of course, in the place of missing faces and limbs we project our own imaginings of the ancients, projections that have become part of the works themselves. As Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlof writes in The Sculptures of the Parthenon, “The ancient artifact naturally possesses a certain sublimity from the sheer passing of time, but also because it represents an unfilled and unfillable void.”

The post Why Is the British Museum Still Fighting to Keep the Parthenon’s Marble Sculptures?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am one of many in this long diaspora who still refers to Hawai‘i as “home.” And if you ask me what it means to be from Hawai‘i today, the question is tough to answer. It’s especially hard if you were influenced by the transformative period—sometimes referred to as the Hawaiian Renaissance—that began a little more than a decade after the arrival of U.S. statehood in 1959.

Members of the diaspora cling to a set of beliefs about our identity—as Hawaiʻi “locals” shaped by the islands where we were born in raised—that are increasingly removed from today’s realities.

I was born in Honolulu in 1965 to parents who had recently emigrated from Korea for graduate studies at the university. My family then lived in a dingy apartment in the headquarters of the Korean National Association (KNA) on Rooke Avenue. The Mediterranean Revival compound had once housed a prominent island Portuguese family, and some still knew it as the “Canavarro Castle.”

The KNA’s roots dated back to 1909, when exiled Koreans in Honolulu and San Francisco organized to raise funds and strategize for Korean independence from Japan. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KNA became a local community organization. By the time we were living there in the 1960s, the headquarters building had become a convening spot for occasional weekend festivities for local Koreans. Along with our family, a couple other units were rented to elderly former plantation laborers who had been among the first Korean immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s.

By the time I started kindergarten in 1970, my parents had divorced, and my mother, brother, and I had moved to another modest apartment, this one a low-rise walk-up in the Mōʻiliʻili area of Honolulu across the canal from the new high-rise hotels at Waikīkī.

I attended Ala Wai Elementary school, which was, then and now, a gateway for many families who had recently arrived from another country or state. I remember sometimes beginning our pickup football games with a raucous Samoan chant and seeing new kids arrive from places like Taiwan and Texas.

Yet the legacy of earlier agricultural immigrant waves from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Puerto Rico surrounded us. There was judo and sumo in the community center. For about a year, an ancient “manapua man” sold steamed pork buns from pails suspended from a wooden pole slung across his shoulders. His industrial age competitor sold his treats from a white Volkswagen beetle. When the original manapua man no longer made his rounds, the kids swore they had seen the VW manapua man run him down; it was a childish tall tale, but contained some truths about the force of modernity.

My walk home from school passed the ʻIolani School campus, where Sun Yat-sen, who eventually overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty to become the country’s first president, was graduated in 1882. (Sun had a brother in Honolulu who paid for his education.) My own brother and I liked to stop in at the 100th Infantry Battalion clubhouse to get a drink from their water fountain and gawk at the display case of World War II weapons, which, if my memory isn’t too hazy, contained a German water-cooled machine gun. We would learn later of the heroics of the Japanese-American soldiers and the role of returning veterans in democratizing Hawaiʻi’s politics and breaking down the caste-like plantation economy.

In the early 1970s, there was an idealized view of Hawaiʻi as a progressive, multicultural state that might be a model for a new, transpacific United States. At least, that was the pretty picture broadcast to millions on “Hawaii Five-O.” “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry said the multiracial crew of the S.S. Enterprise was inspired by what he saw in Hawaiʻi when he was based there as a pilot during the war. This “Paradise of the Pacific” image was pushed by the tourism industry and taught to us in school.

It was a flawed paradise. The rise of the upwardly mobile middle class was fueled by organized labor, federal defense, and infrastructure spending, and the growth of tourism. But many native Hawaiians were left behind economically, or actively displaced from their housing, by Americanization. Poverty and incarceration rates were alarming, and the indignity of suppressing the native language and culture would no longer be tolerated. Things fell apart.

By the mid-1970s, open revolt against Americanization and displacement had begun. The actions were both entirely peaceful and undeniably forceful. In Kalama Valley on Oʻahu, farmers refused to leave their leased lands to make way for residential real estate development. Activists began regular landings on Kahoʻolawe island to protest its use by the Navy as a bombing range. Hundreds of homeless native Hawaiians cleaned up the land around the Sand Island garbage dump to build a fishing village.

The physical protests and reclamations of land produced mixed results. Kalama Valley was turned into an expensive suburb in spite of the farmers’ protests. The Sand Island residents were evicted, their homes bulldozed. But military use of Kahoʻolawe ceased.

More important, these actions raised Hawaiian consciousness and galvanized a sophisticated critical mass of native leadership well-versed in law and public organizing. On a parallel course, a Hawaiian renaissance in language, culture, and the arts largely succeeded in establishing a distinctive regional identity.

By the late ‘70s, as I entered my teens, there was growing talk of Hawaiian sovereignty.

By the late 1980s, when I finished college in Los Angeles, Hawaiian sovereignty was still building momentum; today it is inseparable from any substantial discussion of Hawaiʻi’s political future.

At the same time, the high cost of living, especially for housing, meant many in my generation could not afford to make a life on the islands. The trend continues today, even more intensely. New homes on Oʻahu are routinely priced in the seven figures, and luxury condominium units actually sell in the eight figures. The market resembles that of California, where few can afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents settled in the 1960s or 1970s. Hawaiʻi continues to have negative net migration with the rest of the United States. Most newcomers are whites from other parts of the continental United States. So many native Hawaiians have left that the numbers of native Hawaiians on the U.S. continent far outnumber those in Hawaiʻi.

So what does it mean to be of Hawaiʻi today? The answer lies in an ongoing dispute over whether native Hawaiian ancestry is a requisite to being a Hawaiian.

For those without native blood, there has often been a belief that if you held certain values, or ate certain foods, or spoke the Hawaiian language to some degree and pidgin English fluently, you were “local.” In his 1986 book Kū Kanaka, George Kanahele noted that one answer given to the question, “Who and what is a Hawaiian?” was “someone who eats palu (a relish made of the head or stomach of a fish, mixed with kukui nut, garlic, and chili peppers).” Kanahele himself held that any Hawaiʻi resident with a “true understanding of the values of Hawaiian culture” was a Hawaiian.

But today’s demographic and economic trends in Hawai‘i are making that identity obsolete. The “locals” are dying or leaving.

What is then left? One answer comes from the diaspora itself, which is defining the values of Hawai‘i culture, even though they don’t actually live in Hawai‘i. Thanks to the diaspora, you can now find multiple hula hālau (schools teaching the ancient Hawaiian dance form) in several U.S. metro areas. Numerous Facebook groups for Hawaiʻi expats exist to answer questions like, “Where can I get luau leaf in Seattle?”

But such extensions of Hawai‘i identity to the continental U.S. don’t solve the tough questions that face the state. Can Hawaiʻi exist as a place where more children will grow up to move elsewhere than remain? Will the pattern of large-scale local and native out-migration become permanent?

Or will this large and ongoing diaspora inspire a backlash at home? Will those left in Hawai‘i seek to protect themselves in ways that force a dramatic upheaval in the demography and economy of the islands? For example, could native Hawaiians respond to the outflow of their friends, and the arrival of American strangers, by seeking some form of political sovereignty—including independence from the United States itself? And would such a rupture bring Hawai‘i locals and other members of the diaspora home?

George Kanahele, in that 1986 book, noted that the Hawaiian cultural resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s was tied to similar U.S. and global movements. The population outflow of Hawaiʻi today is also tied to broader U.S. and global trends.

Oʻahu shares its stratospheric housing costs with cities from Vancouver to Tokyo to Auckland, all of which have seen backlashes from locals displaced by wealthy new arrivals. Mass homelessness and stubborn wage stagnation are fueling frustration and reassessment in Honolulu and in other U.S. cities. Will Hawaiʻi’s still-distinctive culture yield homegrown solutions, like its current and innovative homelessness project? Or will Hawaiʻi be the first to act on a Brexit-like rejection of the American status quo?

The paths of Hawaiʻi’s people at home and abroad could well become a case study in the long-term viability of statehood and citizenship for many nations.

The post What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Local’ in Hawai‘i? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The heart of the problem is that Brits have been told, before the June 2016 referendum and after, that Brexit is about exiting the European Union. That’s true, but it leaves out the bigger, more difficult part of the story. Brexit is also about setting up a border with the EU.

The brutal truth is that erecting a real border between the U.K. and the EU is nearly impossible. This truth explains why the United Kingdom keeps losing at Brexit and why it never will find an effective approach for leaving the EU.

For nearly two years now, the U.K. government has pursued Brexit negotiations under a fundamentally false premise: that everything is on the table and every element of departing the EU can be worked out. Clinging to the meaningless mantra that “Brexit means Brexit,” Prime Minister Theresa May has approached EU negotiators as if on equal footing, suggesting that the U.K. will leave the EU and both parties must simply reach an agreement on how to accomplish the separation.

Big issues like the rights of EU member states’ citizens in the U.K., the U.K. contribution to the EU’s current budget, the continued jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the U.K. during the transition period, and the structure of the negotiations themselves—with the U.K. pressing to talk about a new trade deal before the “exit” terms were established—all have been treated as open matters to be settled.

During the process to date, the U.K. has behaved as if it had leverage. Last year, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson smartly told EU leaders that they could “go whistle” (i.e., get lost) if they expected the U.K. to pay a large divorce bill.

But time has revealed that these tactics and maneuvers rise out of a kind of delusion. The U.K. has caved on all major issues so far, and the EU has gotten everything it wants. EU citizens in the U.K. will have rights, the U.K. will pay a hefty sum to the EU, and the CJEU will maintain jurisdiction in the transition period. And the U.K. has conceded that the terms of the divorce, including a payment, must be settled before the elements of a new relationship are explored.

As negotiations veer further afield from what the U.K. wants, chaos within the government and legislative branches has increased in volume and intensity. Deep rifts are splitting the Tory party. Government officials seem to take opposing stances every other day. The Labour Party appears fractured and confused. And no one knows what Prime Minister May really wants.

This has happened because of a failure to recognize the magnitude of establishing a border. That failure goes back to the Brexit campaigners who, ahead of the referendum in which voters chose to leave, decided not to reckon with reality.

Put simply, the political and economic difficulties for the U.K. of constructing a border with the EU are almost insurmountable. As such, the situation is akin to someone making preparations to embark on a train trip whose destination remains unknown. Should you pack for hot or cold weather? For the mountains or the beach? Under such circumstances, the ability to strategize, plan, and set priorities is greatly diminished.

What makes it nearly impossible to create a new border for purposes of trade and regulation? Let’s start by recalling what the EU is fundamentally about. The EU is first and foremost a common market: a free trade area (for goods, workers, services, and capital) with a common external tariff (CET). The free-trade area means that everything within the EU can circulate freely across the member states. This has been accomplished by the removal of internal tariff barriers and a massive effort at regulatory harmonization in countless policy areas. The CET regime means that everything coming into the EU is subject to the same tariff restrictions no matter which member state imports it.

The U.K. has been part of this regulatory and economic body for more than four decades, joining after realizing it did not want to be left out. Leaving now is hard to fathom and will be harder to do, for both political and economic reasons.

The political challenges relate primarily to Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Irish question is the most pressing at the moment, due to the question of where the border, including the CET boundary, should be. A border between Northern Ireland and Ireland is unacceptable to the Irish, Northern Irish (including Sinn Fein), and the U.K. itself.

But it would also be madness to put the border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., given that the former is part of the latter. For one thing, it would mean that the U.K. is not fully out of the EU, since Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU. For another, it would separate Northern Ireland—in tariff but also, critically, regulatory terms—from the rest of the U.K., which remains unacceptable to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, on whose support May depends. The logistics associated with managing that border would present another extraordinarily complicated challenge. There is, in effect, no place to put the Irish border.

The Scottish situation has unique dynamics but is fundamentally similar. The Scots, while part of the U.K., cannot imagine being outside of the EU. Yet severing Scotland from the U.K. is not something that a majority of Scots, or Brits, want to do.

On the economic side, the harsh reality is that the U.K. cannot afford to erect a new border anywhere when it comes to the EU. It is too dependent on the EU market to turn away from it. To avoid harrowing effects on its economy, the U.K. will need to stay aligned with the EU’s regulatory frameworks (currently amounting to around 50 percent of all national legislation in any one member state) and retain an essentially tariff-free relationship. And, for all this to be possible, the U.K. will have to accept, in effect, a CET or otherwise pay the EU a heavy fee for not following it.

Alternative scenarios are hard to contemplate. The only thing the U.K. must decide is whether it wishes to retain some control over EU law (by staying within the EU) or not. Since Brexit means leaving the EU, the U.K. looks as if it is headed for an unenviable arrangement wherein it will be intimately connected to the EU but will have no control over its trajectory.

As it turned out, on May 8 the House of Lords voted on precisely this question. It was framed as a vote on whether to follow “The Norway Model,” which involves acceptance of all EU laws, paying a hefty fee for access to its market to the tune of billions of euros every year, and accepting judiciary oversight to ensure compliance. Norway follows this framework as part of the arrangement known as the European Economic Area (EAA), to which Iceland and Liechtenstein also belong. Of course, it also means that Norway has zero control over the direction of the EU regulatory regime with which it must comply.

The House of Lords’ “yes” vote forced a forthcoming vote in the House of Commons on the Norway Model. A similar vote in the lower house would set Parliament on a collision course with May’s government. All this is a far cry from a clean break with the EU. It is the opposite, and is, in fact worse than being an EU member: continued participation, meaning no border—this time with loss of control.

It is time for reality to sink in and for the U.K. government and British people to accept the truth: A clean, pure Brexit is simply a mirage. The U.K. will remain deeply connected to the EU and should therefore remain a member of that organization if it wishes to retain some control over the relationship. Hubris, the vestiges of imperial superiority, and false promises brought the Brexit idea about and have muddied the path forward. Honesty and decisiveness can clarify the next steps.

The post “Brexit Means Brexit” Is a Meaningless Mantra appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nation-centric programs have gained considerable support recently, particularly from older people. In the United States, in election after election, the Republican Party has enjoyed higher support from older voters (ages 65 and above). About 53 percent of this group voted for Republicans in 2016, but only 37 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 29) joined them.

The young and the old are not only spread differently across the political spectrum, but in certain cases, they also seem to be moving away from each other. In the United Kingdom, young voters traditionally leaned toward the Labour Party, and older voters toward Conservatives, but, until recently, these differences remained small. In 2010, for example, younger voters were almost evenly split, while older ones favored the Conservatives by 13 points. By last year, however, the political spectrum was much more polarized. In general elections, Conservatives had a three-point lead in the overall national average. Young voters favored Labour by 51 points above that average, while those over 65 favored Conservatives by 32 points more than the average.

A year earlier, the Brexit referendum exhibited a similarly stark contrast, when only a quarter of British youth (ages 18 to 24) voted for the “leave” camp. In comparison, six out of 10 seniors (ages 65 plus) wanted to leave. It appears that a rising nationalist sentiment in British society, which peaked during the Brexit referendum, has deepened the age-based polarization of the “progressive” and “conservative” continuum.

These observations raise fundamental questions. Why are older populations more prone to nationalism? And how can political strategists take this tendency into consideration?

In explaining nationalist tendencies among the old, it can be tempting to resort to cognitive factors. For instance, “making our country great again” could sound like a good idea to those whose health, energy, and sex drive peaked decades ago, when, coincidentally, nations were not as integrated or diversely populated. Thus, nostalgia for the good old days might result from voters confusing the public and personal aspects of the past.

Nevertheless, we can’t dismiss the possibility that people are making rational choices, even when those choices do not seem intuitive at first sight. In this case, the relationship between age and nationalism may have something to do with how people deal with risk. Older people are commonly known to be more risk-averse than the young. A recent study provides convincing evidence for this hypothesis. By using self-reported risk attitudes of a large sample of individuals over years, the study shows that willingness to take risks decreases over the course of life. This reduction is equivalent to a 2.5 percent diversion from stock-market investments, which are considered risky, to safe assets even in the absence of financial advice. Such an age-driven increase in risk aversion could be explained by biological changes or behavioral adaptation to a shorter lifespan ahead and a longer one behind.

Either way, when nationalism favors the familiar landscape of the past—an asset that is owned disproportionately by the old—and dismisses the uncharted waters of an ever more integrated and diverse world in the future, which comes with unfamiliar faces and change, the outcome is predictable. It could be that the old embrace a more nationalistic position than the young solely because they are risk-averse.

Because nationalist rhetoric often objects to free trade and migration, we should also consider the possibility that nationalist bias among senior citizens stems from economic preferences that change with age. For instance, the old consume more services like long-term care, while the young consume more goods like smartphones. Therefore, the higher the share of old people in the population, the higher the demand for services which cannot be imported, and the lower the demand for goods that can.

In a previous study, my colleagues and I tried to explain how this variation in taste could translate into a more protectionist trade policy in an aging society. When demographic aging boosts demand for services, which cannot be imported, some domestic firms could cease producing other goods and start providing services, while others might move overseas where demand for their goods remains strong. This shift could be particularly large if trade barriers are low, because those who move overseas could still freely ship back their products to their home market.

Moving out of one’s country and closer to a larger overseas market becomes more appealing for a company if it doesn’t have to give up its domestic market. However, if the aging country imposed high tariffs on imports, smartphone producers might be more inclined to stay where they were. In addition, because an aging society would import fewer smartphones than young societies, high tariffs would not hurt consumers as much. Therefore, temptations to introduce “fair” trade policies, such as higher tariffs, may sound more appealing in an aging society, at least in the short-term.

The good news is that cognitive factors, risk aversion, and economic preferences are not always aligned with each other to drive a nationalist attitude in old people. Many services consumed by old people, such as healthcare and long-term care, rely heavily on immigrants in advanced economies, including the United States and U.K. The access to affordable health care, in this case, presents an economic rationale that could work against favoring a monoculture society.

Similarly, conservative risk aversion is not always pro-nation, strictly speaking. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, older voters were strongly against secession, including 67 percent of those aged over 70, and 59.5 percent of those between 60 and 69. Even without a rigorous study, it is not difficult to see risk aversion working against a nationalist sentiment in this case. Considering Scottish secession, the “uncharted waters” argument applies to independence after a prolonged period of unity.

Although some drivers of nationalism may eventually cancel each other out, a bumpy road lies ahead. The next few decades will bring an even higher proportion of older people in the most advanced economies, including all member states of the European Union and the United States. These countries constitute the engines of globalization and the core members of the democratic world. If not managed well, the demographic dynamics of their aging populations could introduce unilateral policies that will have harmful long-term effects.

Nationalism and opposition to free trade do not exist in a vacuum. When one country erects barriers, other countries will respond similarly. When a trade war is triggered, the aging country will be hurt more than its partner. While some firms may come back home, the losses from paying more for imports and earning less from exports are likely to be much greater than gains.

Similarly, the drive toward isolationism could be detrimental to political institutions. This recent wave of nationalism has already coincided with a decline in democracy around the globe. The Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which measures the state of democracy in 167 countries by using 60 indicators, has registered a worldwide deterioration in the past few years. The worst decline in global democracy in years was reported in 2017: Not a single region of the world observed an improvement. The regression in advanced economies has been particularly notable; the overlap between the rise of nationalistic agendas and democratic degradation is evident.

Given these grim trends, three lessons emerge from the discussion so far. First, more effort needs to be devoted to understanding the deep connections between demographic change and political inclination. Second, policymakers need to anticipate these trends. In many countries, an aging population can block any policy that does not have significant support from it. Thus, policymakers should carefully analyze the decision-making processes of various demographic groups to understand what it would take to gain their support.

Third, communication is important, but it needs to address reality on the ground. The short-termism of nationalist programs should be communicated clearly to all citizens: One may wish to cut in line while others wait, but when everybody does so, nobody gets to eat the cake.

As the emerging class of politicians and their nationalist agendas have shown, the use of a centrist approach across economic and political spectrums does not always work. A “free trade benefits everyone” message will hardly resonate with a person who lost her job a few years before retirement.

In fact, the mainstream message on free trade needs to be changed, emphasizing that it is beneficial overall but only works for everyone when those gains are redistributed, suggesting that the economy needs more redistribution, not less. Coming from the left side of the political spectrum, this message has been somewhat suppressed, but again, the centrist position—one tilted against this kind of redistribution—misses the chance to address reality on the ground and the effects of globalization on voters.

Blind commitment to a centrist approach can backfire with aging populations, who are already prone to finding a nationalist program appealing. Mapping out policy responses that take into account the multiple drivers of political attitude is a daunting challenge, but one that is essential for developing a sensible strategy. Politicians who ignore demographic trends do so at their peril.

The post Why Older Voters Are Prone to Nationalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In an epic act of self-harm, Britain has voted to leave the European Union. The British people have voted to sever ties with their largest trading partner, ending freedom of movement and trade between Britain and mainland Europe. This means I have to put stickers on my car.

The stickers are for my headlights because the lights of British cars are angled to point away from oncoming traffic: that is, to the right. In Europe, where they drive on the right, my British headlights will blind passing drivers. Applying reflective stickers on my lights will change me from a pariah to a law-abiding citizen of the EU.

And that is important because, with our baby and possessions, my wife and I are about to drive off the Channel Tunnel train, on which we are currently rattling from England to France, and onto a European road. We are a new thing: Brexpats. We are leaving Britain in the hopes of finding a new home in Germany. But it’s not a sure thing that they will take us. As the U.K. prepares to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, under terms nobody can predict, the clock is ticking for us to establish ourselves in Europe as firmly as possible.

I wonder how my small family will survive the turning of these great gears of history. We are British, though, so we don’t mention our anxiety directly. We prefer to reveal it through overreactions to minor difficulties.

“You might prefer me to do the first leg of the driving in France,” says my wife from the passenger seat. “It’s terrifying.”

I’m a new driver.

My wife explains: “When you come out of the train, you go round this funny roundabout thing, and suddenly you’re on the wrong side of the road.” The baby starts to cry. “It’s okay, sweetie darling,” coos my wife.

The baby begins to bellow. My wife opens her door and clambers into the back seat. I peel off the sticker and peer at the offending British bulb.

“In the diagram the light is flat, but in real life it has a really slanty case!” I fret.

“Just bung it on, we’re slowing down.”

I bung it on.

The train stops. The doors open. The car in front starts its engine. I crumple up the instructions and look at my wife in the back seat. The baby is casually chewing her nipple.

“I thought you were going to negotiate the terrifying roundabout?” I protest.

“You’ll have to get on with it!” she shouts and slams the door.

Cringing and flinching, I creep the car over the clanging threshold of the train-shed. Some chatting officials look far too nonchalant for their own good. They have no idea; I’m a new driver. I’m going to crash out of panic on the roundabout of terror, with my baby in the back!

This move is going to be a disaster.

I’ve almost got my eyes closed … but no roundabout appears. Just straight road, and a breezy reminder: REMEMBER TO DRIVE ON THE RIGHT. Turning left for the first time, I remember to cross the traffic rather than drive into it. My lights have been corrected; I’m blinding no one. I’m flooded with optimism.

This move is going to be a great success.

After the rigmarole of traversing Britain’s moat, the drive to Berlin is basically one road through four countries. The French A16 becomes the Belgian E40; the Belgian E34 becomes the Dutch A67, which becomes the German A40. As I drive from one country to the next, I find myself lazily judging the people by the quality of their roads:

French roads are badly kept and not at all as nice as British ones. They have weeds and illegible, faded signs. This makes the French an irresponsible people.

The Belgian roads are much smarter. This makes the Belgians a smart people. We drive through Flanders and past lots of World War I battlefields. The Belgians are steeped in trenches, misery, and needless death. The Belgians are soulful.

The Dutch roads are clean, much like the Belgian ones. Lots of places ending in “-hoven,” which makes me think of Beethoven. The Dutch are a musical people. And windmills—old ones that make you think of clogs. The Dutch are a wooden people.

I find these thoughts deeply disturbing. I reassure myself that suspicion of foreigners is an intrinsic part of being human. But I can’t help feeling an uneasy connection to those of my British compatriots who voted for Brexit—millions of them—because they didn’t like the idea of foreigners coming to Britain to live and work.

I am dealing with my fear of the strange by making instant, comforting judgments. I am revealing in myself the very attitudes that have led me to flee Brexit, as I am fleeing it.

Brexit forced me to decide that I am a European before I’m a Brit. I made that choice because I am inspired by, and want to contribute to, the cooperative spirit of the European Union. It’s that spirit of cooperation in which I want my daughter to flourish. Which is why we are on the road to Germany, and why my wife and I hope to establish ourselves in German life as much as possible before March 29, 2019. At that point, we may well have no claim to live in Germany, since we will no longer be citizens of the EU. We will have to argue for our continued residency there. Because we are both freelance, it will be difficult to cite jobs or job offers in our favor. We are likely to be deported back to the U.K.

The mainstream, right-wing British press characterize people such as myself, who embrace the EU and wish the U.K. to remain a member, as “remoaners,” “saboteurs,” “enemies of the people,” and “traitors.” The irony of being a migrant from anti-migrant Brexit Britain is matched only by the irony of being dragged back there by the very people whose views make me persona non grata.

When faced with the suspicious questioning of right-leaning friends and relatives, I have a convenient excuse for moving to Germany: My wife is an opera singer. Britain has five major opera houses, whereas the German-speaking world has closer to 85.

However, I’m not moving just to support her (as much as I like to claim that in arguments). I have been desolated by the architects of Brexit. I am infuriated by the short-sightedness of my countrymen, whose prejudice allowed them to be hoodwinked, and who will suffer hardship as a direct result.

Yet my fierce desire that Britain remain an open, tolerant, and prosperous country gives me a deep sense of shame as I leave it. “All evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing.” This idea has been plaguing me. I never feel more defined by my Britishness than when I am abroad, so being in Germany only makes me more painfully conscious of it. I want to coin a new term to describe my bitter situation: “Brexpatriotism.” But what’s patriotic about abandoning your country to criminals? Can I cast myself as one of these “good men” as I do nothing?

As I run from the field to stand on the sidelines, I have to acknowledge that I’m not necessarily putting myself in a less precarious position than I had been in Britain. Angela Merkel has yet to form a coalition in the face of a resurgence of the far-right in Germany. Running is no real strategy: That’s why Brexpatriotism is an illusion, and just another attempt at self-comfort.

I’m escaping to Europe, for a year at least. Perhaps, if my plucky Nissan and I are dragged back to my car crash of a homeland, I’ll have enough fire in my belly to join the fight.

The post Why “Brexpat” Brits Like Me Are on the Road to Germany appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s that got to do with Brexit? More than you’d think. When Britain voted early this summer to leave the European Union and go it alone, a large number of those who voted to leave did so explicitly because of concerns over immigration. Tensions ran high in the days surrounding the vote. Immediately following the result of the referendum, police all over the country noted a rise in racial hate crimes. Reports flooded in of foreigners being spat at and snarled at on Britain’s streets, and told to go back to where they came from. This hatred of other people, of those viewed as non-Britons, escalated on the night in late August when a gang of English youths murdered 40-year old Polish immigrant Arkadiusz Jóźwik as he was eating pizza in Harlow, just south of London, in what is widely suspected to be a hate crime. Perhaps most notoriously, on 16 June, a week shy of the vote, a man shouting “Britain first” shot and stabbed Jo Cox, a young Labour Member of Parliament. When he was asked in court a few days later to state his name, he replied: “My name is death to traitors. Freedom for Britain.”

Back on this side of the Atlantic, it’s been reported that supporters at Trump rallies have sometimes cried not just for jailing Hillary Clinton, but also for killing her. Trump’s own veiled threat of “Second Amendment” action at a rally in North Carolina in early August had many wondering whether he was inciting potential armed violence. Last year after a campaign rally in Alabama where several white Trump supporters assaulted a Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted the candidate’s speech, Trump responded on Fox News, “Maybe [the activist] should have been roughed up.” In March in St. Louis, Trump claimed “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick protestors out of campaign stops] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” And the list goes on. And on.

In both campaigns—the U.S. presidential bid and the U.K.’s European referendum—the movement of people from nation to nation, and the economic consequences of that movement, has played an outsized role. Whether it’s Trump complaining about Latinos or Syrian refugees, or the Leave campaign’s poster showing a seemingly unending line of dark-skinned migrants under the headline “Breaking Point” (a poster ironically released the same day Jo Cox lost her life), it’s once more acceptable to speak openly and disparagingly of immigrants, refugees, and of others who don’t “belong”–those who don’t look, or sound, or seem like a particular conception of what makes “us” as nations.

Trump visited Scotland (which voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the European Union) the day after the U.K.’s June referendum. He said there were “great similarities” between the vote and his campaign, including that “people want to take their country back” and “they don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country.” His words echo not only those of the haters, but also of the woman who is now Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May. Just a year ago when she was Home Secretary and in charge of immigration policy, she declared at the annual Conservative Party conference that “millions” of people wanted to come to Britain, and that their presence would doom the economy, drive wages down, expand the criminal classes, and make it impossible to build a cohesive society. The speech was pure Trump (albeit delivered in complete sentences), though it was given at a time when few in the U.S. believed Trump could be a serious contender. In both countries, interestingly, the foreign-born residents—41 million in the U.S. and 8 million in Britain—amount to some 13 percent of the total population.

In both countries, this type of rhetoric reveals a regression in recent years that has brought open statements of intolerance and bigotry back into mainstream discussion, often in the name of freedom of expression. Hatred of difference has a long and always ugly history. It was only after 1945, with the horrors of Nazism fresh in people’s minds that derogatory commentary—whether about people of different backgrounds or religions, women, those with disabilities, or migrants—began to retreat from open conversation. Slowly but surely, it became less and less acceptable to make casual anti-Semitic, racist, or sexist comments in public. Instead, such expressions moved to the periphery, the province of fringe organizations and privately expressed antipathy.

But the pushback against migration in much of the industrialized world, fanned by manipulative politicians scapegoating outsiders for all societal woes, has allowed this bigoted talk to return to our political landscape in recent years. Trump and his counterparts around the world couch their blunt rhetoric, which often involves the denigration of difference, in the message that freedom lies in the ability to speak the unspeakable, and that political correctness has made us skirt around real problems and real frustrations that we ignore at our peril. For Brexit supporters, for those who stump for Trump, and for white supremacists and the Alt-Right, diversity has become the favored whipping post. And it’s not just speechifying. The murders of Jóźwik and Cox in the U.K. and the violence at Trump rallies are a painful testament to the dangers of this new manifestation of discontent. Just last week a Conservative MP asked his Parliamentary colleagues how Britain could be made great again, echoing not only Trump’s campaign slogan but a speech delivered in 1950 by a young Margaret Thatcher.

The night before the referendum last June, Nigel Farage, leader of the ultranationalist U.K. Independent Party (UKIP) and a major architect of the Leave campaign, stated in a speech that his opponents had “lost faith in their country.” When Trump, as he will surely do, invokes his “Make America Great Again” slogan the night before our own election, we can only hope that his strikingly similar sentiments don’t seal this country’s fate for the coming years too. Brexit and Trump share values that have ignited a new era of hatred and intolerance—which neither side of the Atlantic can afford.

The post Brexit Is Spelled T-R-U-M-P in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The groundwork for the Brexit debacle was laid the previous summer when Europe crushed the progressive pro-European SYRIZA government elected in Greece in January 2015. Most Britons were not directly engaged with the Greek trauma. Many surely looked askance at the Greek leaders. But they must have noticed how Europe talked down to the Greeks, how European Commissioners scolded the Greek officials for their supposed lack of fiscal rectitude, and then imperiously dictated terms for any debt restructuring. The British public witnessed how the European Union made the rebellious country into an example, so that no one else would ever be tempted to follow the same path.

If the submission of Greece to the political will of the EU and its bankers helped set the tone for European disharmony, the Leave campaign won by turning the British referendum into an ugly expression of English nativism, feeding on the frustrations of a deeply unequal nation and concerns about the EU dictating migration policy to member states. Americans can surely relate, both to the ugly nativism and to some of its underlying causes.

Fellow academics and media pundits spend a lot of time decrying the public’s embrace of destructive, so-called “populist” politics. But we should be spending more time evaluating just how out of touch our technocratic elites have become these days. These elites have only themselves to blame for the fact that people are looking for options, and often landing on unsavory ones.

That the Leave campaign could prevail testifies to the high-handed incompetence of the establishments on both sides of the English Channel. Remain ran a campaign based on fear (of recessions and other bad things that happen when you aren’t prudent in the eyes of bond markets), condescension and bean-counting, as though Britons cared only about the growth rate and the pound. And the Remain leaders seemed to believe that such figures as Barack Obama, George Soros, Christine Lagarde, a list of ten Nobel-prize-winning economists or the research department of the International Monetary Fund carried weight with the British working class.

So far, since the vote, the economic effects of the vote have been more muted than initially expected. And the political effects will be rather protracted: New Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that formal divorce negotiations won’t start with Brussels until March 2017, with the United Kingdom expected to actually leave the Union in 2019. Meanwhile, markets have settled down and British life has continued normally, undermining the scare campaign waged against a Brexit last spring.

Over time, however, as they apply to the United Kingdom, the structures of EU law, regulation, fiscal transfers, open commerce, open borders, and human rights built over four decades will start eroding. Exactly how this will happen—by what process of negotiation, with what retribution from the spurned powers in Brussels and Berlin, by what combination of slow change and abrupt acts, with what consequences for the Union of Scotland to England—is clearly unknown to the new pro-Leave Tory government.

And Europe’s crisis of confidence will likely continue spreading across Europe: In Holland and France, but also in Spain and Italy, as well as in Germany, Finland, and the East. If nativist populism can rise in Britain, it can rise anywhere.

And if Britain can exit, so can anyone; neither the EU nor the Euro is irrevocable. And most likely, since the apocalyptic predictions of economic collapse that preceded the Brexit referendum will not come true, such warnings will be even less credible when heard the next time.

The European Union has sowed the wind. It may reap the whirlwind. Unless it moves, and quickly, not merely to assert a hollow “unity” but to deliver a democratic, accountable, and realistic New Deal—or something very much like it—for all Europeans. Technocratic elites have to stop bemoaning the ignorance of voters in their countries—be it in Greece, the UK, or closer to home—and start looking at their ineffective and out-of-touch policies that are triggering the “populist” backlash.

The post How the EU’s Greek Tragedy Became a British Farce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t think of “a Brexit” as a vote to leave a larger political or economic union. (California isn’t about to leave the U.S.—though a Trump presidency would sure stir a movement for Calexit). Brexit is better understood as a special kind of ballot measure—a plebiscite. Plebiscites are placed on the ballot not by civic or interest groups to advance a cause but by powerful politicians to serve their own political needs.

And plebiscites—to put it bluntly—are cursed. The term comes from the Latin pleb-, the common people, and scitum, decree. But given the way it’s played out, these days it may as well mean “backfire.”

The plebiscite curse—a phrase I first heard from political scientists studying direct democracy globally—describes a tendency of plebiscites to blow up in the faces of the powerful people who pursue them. There are hundreds of examples around the world. Among the most famous was Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet’s 1988 plebiscite to extend his constitutional power; clever dissidents exploited the opening to beat the plebiscite and end his hold on power (a campaign brilliantly portrayed in the 2012 Oscar-nominated film, No).

The British Brexit was a classic of the plebiscite curse. Here, the self-cursed politician was Prime Minister David Cameron, who wanted his country to remain in the European Union but put the Brexit question to the voters in order to quiet, once and for all, the anti-EU voices within his own party. He assumed that after wresting some pro-British concessions from the EU, he could win the vote, and put the Tories’ longstanding Hamlet-like “to be or not to be European” debate to rest. Instead, the British voters decided to leave—and the U.K. lost its way in the world, and Cameron lost his job as prime minister.

This should all sound vaguely familiar to Californians. Our elected officials have long put measures on the ballot—and been hurt by their defeat or hamstrung by the unintended consequences of victory. The biggest and most recent example of the plebiscite curse here was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2005 special election for four ballot initiatives of his own making. All four lost, and he only saved his governorship by repudiating his own effort and replacing his top advisors. Governors going back a century—including Ronald Reagan, who distanced himself from his own failed budget reform Proposition 1 in 1973 by saying he himself hadn’t understood it—have been damaged by their own cursed plebiscites.

And while similar outcomes are seen in other states and countries that permit ballot measures, no place has been as frequently or deeply cursed as California. One reason: our state is the only place where a law made by ballot initiative can’t be changed except by another vote of the people—forcing even plebiscite-averse politicians to go to the ballot.

Indeed, California’s inflexible form of direct democracy—and a good part of the famously dysfunctional and wickedly complicated systems for budgeting, taxation and regulation that direct democracy has spawned—is itself a plebiscite curse. In 1911, Gov. Hiram Johnson held a massive plebiscite—with 23 measures on one special election ballot—to alter the constitution, introducing the initiative and referendum process. It didn’t take long for Johnson to rue his own creation—he was badly weakened by a defeat of his own 1915 plebiscite to make state elected offices nonpartisan.

This year, the November ballot is getting criticism for its excessive length—17 statewide ballot measures—but we should pay extra attention to the handful of these that amount to plebiscites, the ones placed on the ballot by elected officials who seek advantage in calling on the people to deliver their desired results, instead of relying on the power of their offices.

Gov. Brown has his own plebiscitary initiative on the ballot. It would liberalize sentencing laws, but it’s risky, and not just because it might keep more dangerous people on the streets. With crime up a bit in California and public safety a bigger concern nationally, Republicans (including San Diego’s ambitious mayor Kevin Faulconer, who is leading the campaign against the Brown measure) might defeat it and cripple the governor’s larger efforts to reduce the state’s prison population and boost programs to better re-integrate former prisoners into California communities.

Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor, is taking on the plebiscite curse even more forcefully with two initiatives—one to tighten gun controls and the other to legalize marijuana. He’s using both measures to show leadership and gain popularity as part of his nascent campaign to succeed Brown as governor in 2018.

But his gun control measure is resented by some Democratic legislators who are pursuing similar measures in the Capitol. And the possibility of a greater curse is real. If marijuana legalization creates social problems, Newsom will be blamed. And if Newsom’s two plebiscites lose, it could badly damage his candidacy—and his career.

The legislature also has put two measures on the ballot that should count as plebiscites—one loosening restrictions on bilingual education, and an advisory measure calling for repeal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. If they are defeated, they could hurt movements for language-immersion schools and for campaign finance reform.

The dangers of plebiscites go beyond the risks to politicians and their causes. When powerful elected officials use the ballot for their own devices, they can raise serious questions about the credibility of our democracy. Attorney General Kamala Harris has faced criticism for writing favorable ballot titles and expediting legal reviews of plebiscites put forth by the governor and other allies. In another eyebrow-raising move, the California Supreme Court, whose chief justice has been pressing for more funding for the courts, recently allowed the governor’s sentencing plebiscite to make this year’s ballot despite alterations to the measure that have delayed previous ballot initiatives. It would seem direct democracy can be more direct for insiders.

As the Brexit vote in Britain reminds us, when the leadership of a state or country loses credibility, great and risky political earthquakes can result. From Europe to California, the plebiscite is a curse that can feed on itself.

The post California’s Coming Election Has More in Common With Brexit Than You Think appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Even though I voted to leave,” said one regretful voter, “This morning I woke up and the reality hit me … If I had the opportunity to vote again, it would be to stay.”

Had Britain refrained from holding a referendum, it would not have experienced #Regrexit. But referenda, initiatives, and ballot measures are a permanent part of many modern democracies. These processes have a powerful appeal to voters, who want a direct say, and to public officials, who sometimes want to duck difficult decisions.

Fortunately, a system has been developed that can improve direct democratic elections. This electoral reform helps a small body of citizens think through complex issues on the ballot, then share their findings with their peers before they take a momentous vote. Before the next ballot gets printed, Britain and other nations would be wise to study this process, which has been practiced in the western United States since 2010.

Consider the experience of a voter my research team interviewed in Colorado. After voting early in that state’s 2014 election, this individual read a neutral statement about a statewide proposition. She was surprised to discover numerous exemptions to the proposed genetically modified food labeling law. She frowned and said, “I wish I would have read this before I voted. Wow!” When the interviewer asked her to explain, she replied, “Because I would have voted differently.”

What this Colorado voter held in her hands was a one-page statement written by fellow state residents. The model for this experiment was the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, which began in 2010.

Every even-numbered year, the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission convenes a panel of 20 to 24 randomly selected citizens to deliberate on a ballot measure. After three to five days of hearing from expert witnesses, meeting in small groups, and weighing rival claims about a proposed policy, the panel writes a citizens’ statement. This page appears in the official voters’ pamphlet, which the Oregon Secretary of State distributes to every registered voter.

With support from the National Science Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and others, my colleagues and I have studied this process for six years. Through 17 reports and articles, we have shown what the review commission can add to direct democracy—and how that could alter the character of referenda like Brexit.

Review panels have performed quite well as critical readers of ballot measures. Citizens who take part in reviews have the luxury of time. Over several days, review panels sift through the arguments for and against a proposal. Participants often have the chance to select additional expert witnesses from a list provided by staff, and their small group discussions delve into details campaigns often hope to avoid.

Consider any topic on which you have strong preferences. Perhaps you view yourself as “tough on crime.” Does that mean you support any legislation that aims to improve public safety? What if the law was so poorly written that it could have disastrous unintended consequences?

A 2010 review panel in Oregon asked itself that question when weighing an initiative that would have imposed tough minimum sentences on repeat sex offenders. On closer inspection, it became clear that the law could put older teenagers behind bars for 20 years if they “sexted” underage peers more than once. This and other flaws swayed even the most conservative review panelists, and they wrote a scathing critique of the proposed law. A survey experiment showed that those who read the review panel’s statements turned sharply against the proposal. Cross-sectional statewide polling showed a similar result. The net effect was insufficient to defeat what had been a wildly popular measure, but the initiative’s support took a steep decline after the review was published.

Would British voters have bothered to read a review if one had been conducted before the Brexit vote? If so, would it have altered the result? One can’t know the answer to such hypotheticals, but the most likely result hinges on how the review’s statement would have been distributed. The key to Oregon’s success is the Secretary of State including the citizens’ statement in the official voter guide, which every registered voter receives by mail. In effect, Oregon has a well-advertised mass mailing sent to each voter on behalf of the review.

Survey evidence in Oregon suggests that in a typical election, a majority of voters become familiar with the review before they vote. Most of those aware of the citizens’ statement choose to read it, and doing so dramatically increases their knowledge on the factual issues relevant to the ballot propositions. Reading the statement also can cause voters to reconsider the values at stake for such a vote, and it can shift the end result of the election by a few percentage points. In elections as close as Brexit, a review can change the outcome.

Oregon voters turn to the review statements in search of reliable information and argument. Here, the fact that the review statements are written by fellow citizens is the key. As with the citizens’ assemblies held in Canada and, more recently, in the UK, small random samples can do what the larger public cannot. These “minipublics” act as a kind of trustee that deliberates on behalf of a wider public, then shares what it learns.

What happens when policy advocates disagree? Review panels haven’t always been able to resolve such disputes, but they often do. A 2012 Oregon Review panel weighed a proposal to remove a corporate tax loophole and provide funding for schools. Review panelists were sympathetic to this idea, but they heard testimony explaining that the promised result might not come to pass. After getting clarification from experts inside and outside government, they unanimously found that new tax revenues “are not guaranteed” to increase primary education funding because the state legislature retains discretion over how it spends the state’s funds. In other words, “this ballot measure earmarks” a new revenue stream for education, but it doesn’t “prevent the redirecting of current funding resources to other non-education budgets.”

Imagine how, in Brexit, this kind of clarification might have helped refute the Vote Leave’s deceptive claim that Britain spends £350 million in public funds per week on the European Union that could flow back into the National Health Service. As the Oregon panel did in 2012, a Brexit review would have affirmed that the removal of money from one bucket does not mean it goes into a preferred second bucket. One can only speculate as to how such insight might have factored into a citizens’ statement on Brexit, but the one certainty is that a well-distributed review would have made for more informed decisions, which probably means less regret.

In the long term, more deliberative democratic elections could have a profound indirect effect. If the review and similar reforms help voters reject bad choices at the ballot box, they may force governments to act directly on questions they would rather avoid. A more reflective public might come to recognize that good governments can make what are initially unpopular choices, so long as leaders can provide strong justifications in the course of a vigorous public debate. After all, direct democratic processes were designed not to replace governments, but to improve them.

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Britain’s long association with imperialism was a major undercurrent in the campaign to leave the EU. Disregarding the realities spelled out by economists and others as to the impact of a leave vote, the Leave campaign emphasized what Britain might once again become, if freed from what they described as the yoke imposed by the EU. (You could practically hear the strains of “Rule, Britannia!” in the background). The Leave campaign was a potent reminder of how imperial politics have long played out in Britain, the self-declared guardian of individual freedom bent on a civilizing imperial mission in the rest of the world.

The U.K. Independence Party’s notorious poster showing long lines of migrants allegedly clamoring to enter the country conjured a mythic colonizing era: a time when Britain controlled the regions from which today’s would-be migrants have fled, when Britain “ruled the waves,” when Britain truly was “Great.” That the migrant worker in the U.K. does the jobs that these voters don’t want and won’t do was lost in the dream of imperial greatness.

But what, realistically, would a return to empire look like almost two decades into the 21st century? After all, it’s obvious there can be no return to imperial conquest or dominance for Britain. But the Brexit dream worked precisely because it was steeped in nostalgia and regret for a past that many ‘Leavers’ believe should never have been abandoned in the first place.

The front page of the Sun newspaper reporting on the EU referendum on a news stand in London on June 23.

The Leave campaign’s appeal to patriotic imperialism was inevitable; it has long been used by those in power to rein in a fractious working class, and to conjure associations with white skin and nationalism. National pride in Britain has repeatedly rested on misty remembrances of the glory days of empire, a vision already riven with the easy racism now rapidly re-emerging in an impossibly divided Britain. With a vote as close as we saw in the referendum (52 percent leave, 48 percent remain), the substantial divides in British society can only get worse.

Britain’s relationship to the EU itself—and its predecessor, the European Common Market— is rooted in its own imperial legacy. After initially opting not to join the EU in the late 1950s, Britain changed its mind and launched what became an increasingly desperate campaign to gain entry. The French leader Charles de Gaulle twice vetoed Britain’s application (in 1961 and again in 1967) for membership, largely on the grounds that its principal ties were more imperial than European. And Commonwealth leaders around the world did not look kindly on Britain’s bid for European recognition, fearing that it would diminish Britain’s commitment to trading relations with their countries.

It would be 1973, and after a change in French leadership, before Britain would be granted admission. Two years later, a referendum on whether Britain should continue its association with Europe was met with resounding approval—more than 67 percent, with a turnout approaching 65 percent.

The 1975 referendum took place as the empire was disintegrating and the greater part of Britain’s former colonial possessions had been lost. In light of this immense change, Britons overwhelmingly saw Europe as offering, in effect, a realistic alternative to what they understood to be a loss of power, economic prowess, and British dignity.

The reason empire mattered in 2016 is precisely why it didn’t 41 years earlier—remaking Britain in the image of imperial greatness was far more persuasive at a moment when it could be clothed in a nostalgic post-colonial glow than at a time when colonies were disappearing at a clip.

Demonstrators opposing Britain’s exit from the EU hold a protest in London on June 25.

How different were the issues in 1975 from those that have dominated in 2016? The Leave campaign, 41 years ago and now, was an odd mix of far-right and radical left concerns. In 1975, the British Communist Party and the white supremacist National Front, as well as the Scottish National Party and their Welsh counterpart Plaid Cymru, opposed membership as did about a third of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s cabinet. (Only the radical shift in attitudes among the Scottish National Party, now firmly pro-Europe, has changed much since in this roster of opponents.) Back then, the arguments for leaving Europe were not so different from the arguments heard in recent months: national concerns about the loss of British identity and sovereignty to critiques of an over-weaning capitalist bloc in Europe. In 1975 and again in 2016 the vote was cast in the shadow of de-industrialization, unstable employment outlooks, and a vocal anti-immigration lobby.

Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, began as pro-European but became increasingly unhappy about the direction of the EU. Only two years after she signed the Single European Act, designed to make European laws and policies more uniform, she expressed concern over a European super-state dominating local needs. Her ideas were increasingly rooted in a nostalgic idea of Britain’s former imperial greatness even as she implemented often-ruthless programs of economic modernization. In the campaign she waged in the Falkland Islands off Argentina in 1982, a vision of glorious imperial Britain stamping out foreign despotism and corruption captured the public imagination and helped immensely in securing her re-election in 1983, even against the backdrop of relentless working-class immiseration. With most of the empire now gone, the business of yearning revival could begin in earnest. Under Thatcher, Britons were urged to admire and revive Victorian values and imperial dreams.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Thatcher years saw the final episode in the dismantling of Britain’s once vast empire (the last territories in southern Africa, most of the Caribbean, pockets in the Pacific and, of course, the agreement to return Hong Kong to Chinese rule), this idea of restoring the ‘great’ in Great Britain was, and remains, a potent propaganda move.

Across England the theme heard most often in the past few weeks has been that an independent sovereign Britain could once more be great. Of course, that has been the battle cry of right-wing politicians and demagogues since the early 20th century. It was the message of pro-imperial politicians when Germany’s rise threatened British power in the early 1900s. It was again the message when migration from former colonies became substantial after 1945, giving rise to increasingly draconian immigration laws. And it was at the core of the success of the Leave campaign last week.

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