Democracy was first built on a lot of loose rock.

Can democracy now be rebuilt on that very same ground?

Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.

It was the most audacious and beautiful democratic event I’ve ever witnessed.

The Pnyx rises just west of the Acropolis. There, the ancient Athenian Ecclesia, consisting of local citizens mostly chosen by lot, gathered more than 100 generations ago to make all important government decisions. No assembly had met there since 322 B.C.E—until that warm early fall night.

This new People’s Assembly was open to anyone, unlike its ancient Athenian predecessor, which excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Indeed, the 92 attendees I counted were roughly split between men and women, and included people from more than 15 European countries, plus a few visitors from other continents.

But the transformational potential of this People’s Assembly goes far beyond inclusion. If its members can establish their assembly in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.

“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”

Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.

These wouldn’t be just the people of one city, or one province, or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.

But what truly sets apart the idea—and what would make it revolutionary—is its permanence.

Assemblies chosen by lotteries have become increasingly common around the world, especially in Europe and Japan. But almost all of these assemblies are temporary bodies. They are convened to answer some big question or reckon with some thorny problem. They meet for weeks or months or even a year or so. Then they issue their plan or recommendations—and dissolve.

The People’s Assembly would never go away. Certainly, its members would change frequently, often after just months, with a new lottery to refill posts. But it would become a permanent feature of the landscape, its own branch of government.

It also would signal that the age of the elected politician is fading. Politicians are already an unpopular group almost everywhere—corrupted, incompetent, ineffective. Democracy by lottery is appealing because it offers a model to allow citizens to check politicians, and perhaps one day to replace them.

A move away from elected politicians, and toward representatives selected by lottery, also would mean a greater diminishment of elections. Ironically, eliminating or reducing the frequency of elections might be a way to save democracy.

In many places, elections no longer reinforce democracy. They are too compromised—by diminishing social trust, by money in politics, by the outsized power of parties and interest groups. Their outcomes often lead to conflict, violence, even war. And elections are routinely used by authoritarians and dictators to gain popular legitimacy.

Which is why a successful, continent-wide People’s Assembly would likely inspire the creation of more such permanent bodies—at the national, provincial and local levels in Europe and elsewhere. In turn, the spread of such assemblies would require changes in political infrastructure, new modes of lobbying, and new kinds of technocratic agencies to support lottery-selected representatives.

How might government and democracy be different in an era of these assemblies? Camille Dobler, a veteran facilitator of assembly processes at the Paris-based Missions Publiques, answers that question in a word: “trans-localism.” By that, she means a fusion of transnational and local governance.

Which makes sense. Assemblies by lot, from those Athenians gathering 2,300 years ago to the new versions today, are fundamentally local tools. Because it’s easiest to assemble with your own neighbors. But in a deeply networked world facing planetary problems of climate and health and war, there is a need for transnational governance.

So, we are likely to see new networks of local and national assemblies that collaborate through transnational bodies, like the People’s Assembly. How such collaborations might best work is one of the most urgent governance questions of the future.

It’s easier to foresee the failure of current democratic structures than the journey to the next forms of democracy. There is so much to figure out—new systems, new demands on everyday people, new modes of collaboration.

So, the people and organizations behind the People’s Assembly have announced that they are embarking on a “Democratic Odyssey” to talk to people across Europe about how they want their assembly, and the future, to work. Next fall, they plan to return to Athens to reconvene the Assembly, and begin its formal work.

“We are ready to get our boots dirty,” Nicolaidis said while standing on that rocky hill.

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In June 1941, when German troops overran the country, Vilna was home to 55,000 Jewish residents and 12,000–15,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the spiritual and academic center of Holocaust remembrance, described Vilna before the Nazis arrived as “the spiritual centre of Eastern European Jewry, the centre of enlightenment and Jewish political life, of Jewish creativity and the experience of daily Jewish life, a community bursting with cultural and religious life, movements and parties, educational institutions, libraries and theatres; a community of rabbis and gifted Talmudic scholars, intellectuals, poets, authors, artists, craftspeople and educators.”

The Nazis, with the help of some Lithuanians, destroyed all that. In September 1941, they imprisoned the Jews of Vilna in two separate ghettoes.

The smaller, filled with Jews deemed incapable of work, was liquidated after six weeks, with 10,000 of its residents massacred at Ponary, a forest just outside the city. The 30,000 Jews imprisoned in the larger ghetto were kept alive, barely, and sent off to work in nearby labor camps until September 1943, when the second ghetto was closed. Some 8,000 ghetto residents too ill to work any longer were sent to be shot at Ponary or to the Sobibor death camp to be gassed; a few thousand of the stronger men and boys were transported to suffer and be worked to death in Estonian labor and concentration camps; the strongest of the women and girls were sent to labor camps in Latvia.

What happened in Vilna was just a microcosm of atrocities committed throughout Lithuania. By the war’s end, 90 percent of the country’s pre-war Jewish population of a quarter million had been murdered. While it was the Germans who pulled the triggers, they were aided and abetted at every step by local Lithuanians, who sought out the Jews or gave names and addresses to the Germans, who invaded their homes, stole their property, and marched the Jews to the killing fields where they would be shot, and who stayed behind to bury them in mass graves.

In traveling to Lithuania, I had hoped to find that, as in Rome, the past remained present in some way; that I would be able to experience it in its absence, soak in what had once been there and now survived in the ruins and the memorials. But the Vilna and Lithuania that I wanted to visit was no more. It had been cleared of its Jewish population. There were no Jews left in Butrimonys, the small village where my maternal grandmother’s family had come from, and only a few thousand in all of Lithuania.

Vilna had been replaced by Vilnius, which, now, in the third decade of the 21st century, had branded itself as one of the most attractive, tourist-friendly cities in Europe, with wondrous shopping opportunities, magnificent parks, a picturesque old city, world-class hotels and restaurants, and a thriving night life.

On my arrival and for the next several days, I wandered and was escorted through Vilnius and its outskirts in search of Vilna and some vestige of the Jews who had once lived there. I walked the broad pedestrian-friendly streets of the Vilnius Old Town, where I was staying, past small shops overstuffed with antiques, designer clothing, handicrafts, linens, books, and amber jewelry. Outside the Old Town, I visited the beautifully designed and overflowing malls and markets and fashion houses. And all the time, I thought about how this city had once been a center of Jewish life and learning, all of it now vanished—105 synagogues and prayer houses, six daily newspapers, and dozens of active, thriving theaters, libraries, museums, hospitals, schools, universities, institutes, and publishing houses.

On my final day in Vilnius, I visited Ponary just outside the city, where, according to historian Timothy Snyder, 72,000 Jews had been shot, buried, and then, at the end of the war as the Soviets approached, had their corpses dug up by the Nazis and their local helpers and burned so that no trace of the atrocities committed there would remain. The scene I took in in 2019 was bucolic, with tamed forests, well-marked paths, and memorials along the way. One had to struggle with one’s imagination to link together the memorials to the dead with the still green, verdant parkland.

Having spent five years trying to distance myself from the horrors of the Holocaust in eastern Europe so that I could write my book and lead my life, I was now standing where the atrocities I had read and written about occurred. I had expected that the keynote of my visit to Vilna and Butrimonys, and Lithuania, then Latvia, would be an inescapable mourning. But I quickly learned how difficult, if not impossible, it is to mourn an absence.

I found myself grieving not only for those who had died in the past, but for the Jewish activists and educators who had done all they humanly could to resurrect the community that had been destroyed. At war’s end, a few thousand Lithuanian Jews who had escaped and survived the Holocaust—in the Soviet Union or in hiding, or who had fought as partisans in the forests—returned to Vilna. But their attempts to rebuild a Jewish community were thwarted by the Soviets, who feared any expression of ethnic pride or nationalism, other than reverence for the Soviet state and the Communist Party.

The Germans had murdered the Jewish people. The Soviets, through the 1950s and for the two decades that followed, engaged in another form of genocide, removing any remnant of the built community. Schools and shuls and libraries and theaters were destroyed or repurposed; the gravestones in the Jewish cemetery were removed, pounded into fragments, then used as building materials in the new brutalized, Sovietized streets and buildings.

By the early 1970s, increased Jewish immigration from Russia and Ukraine led to the expansion of the Jewish population to almost 20,000. But these migrants found it impossible to put down roots in the city and the country where so many of the previous generations of Jews had been murdered. When the establishment of an independent Lithuanian republic in 1991 enabled the Jews to abandon the Soviet bloc, they did so. Most migrated to the United States or to Israel, where they could be part of thriving, living Jewish communities.

For those who remained in what was now an independent Lithuania, there remained a glimmer of hope that the Jewish community, after five decades of occupation by the Germans and the Soviets, had a chance to finally be reborn. But it was not to be. Non-Jewish Lithuanians were more concerned with memorializing the suffering of their people under Soviet tyranny than they were in recognizing the destruction of the Jewish community by the Germans and atoning for the participation of some Lithuanians in the genocide.

There are today roughly 3,000 Jews still in Vilnius—many of them recent arrivals with no ancestral ties to the city. Those I met and talked with on my trip still held tight to their mission to revive a living Jewish community with cultural institutions, yeshivas, day schools, shuls, but I got the sense that they knew their cause was lost.

If a thriving Jewish community was out of reach in the present, there was among the Jewish activists I met, the hope that physical markers and memorials to the past might preserve the memory of the atrocities that had been committed in the vanished prewar city, that Vilnius’s and Lithuania’s school children might be educated about this stain in their national history, and reminded that their capital city had once been the capital city of Jewish thought and culture.

The Jewish activists are proud of the progress they’ve made since 1991—and the declaration of Lithuanian independence—in integrating the history of the Shoah in Vilna into the history of Vilnius and Lithuania, proud of the memorials that have been erected in the city and at the killing fields of Ponary, proud of and seizing on every opportunity to educate rising generations about the city’s Jewish past. Still, it is an uphill battle that they and other Jewish residents in eastern Europe are fighting. The inhabitants of today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, do not want to be reminded of the sins of their fathers and mothers, or of the atrocities they witnessed or participated in. They would rather not revisit the past or, to be more accurate, they would rather revisit a sanitized past where Lithuanians were the victims of violence, not the perpetrators.

As a historian, I try to bring the past back to life because it is a vital part of our present. We live in a continuum of time—the past is with us, embedded in our present, and we must recognize it as such. But that past is difficult to locate and resurrect. It is a foreign country that we can visit, but never inhabit, never speak the language, eat the foods, worship and live and love as the departed once did. No amount of effort on our part, as historians, can bring it back to life. All we can do is struggle to re-present that past in words and images.

This is what I tried to do in writing The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. I wanted to recapture this forgotten chapter in the history of World War II, the Cold War, and the Holocaust. I wanted to instruct present generations to the reality that the suffering of the victims of war did not end with the cessation of hostilities. I wanted to show how 1 million refugees, 250,000 of them Jewish Holocaust survivors, were, after the German surrender, trapped in displaced persons camps in Germany for three to five years because their homes and homelands had been destroyed and no nation on earth would accept them for resettlement.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Lithuania’s Vanished Center of Jewish Life appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Liechtenstein’s constitution of 1921 first established the principle that is still valid today: namely that the authority of the state is anchored in the Prince and the People. The demand was based on the growing democracy movement in Liechtenstein. With the new constitution of 1921, the tradition of the monarchy was continued, and at the same time, the power of the people was strengthened. Therefore, in the future and up to the present time, a consensus between the reigning prince and the people on relevant issues was necessary. This division of power has contributed to the stability of the political system and balanced political decisions.

The people gained significant rights in 1921. The prince could no longer unilaterally appoint the government, and he lost his three appointments to the then 15-member parliament (it now has 25 members). All members of parliament would be elected. Prior to 1921, the prince relied on foreign civil servants to run Liechtenstein. The new constitution, on contrary, mandated that government ministers be Liechtenstein citizens who were proposed by parliament and then appointed by the reigning prince.

Liechtenstein’s new direct democratic instruments included the popular initiative, which allowed the people to amend the constitution or laws by collecting signatures and putting their ideas to a vote. Another tool was the referendum against constitutional, legislative and financial decisions of parliament. Parliament also gained the power, on its own initiative, to submit decisions to the vote of the people. The people could also decide to dissolve parliament and thus trigger new elections.

The people of Liechtenstein have used these tools frequently. More than 100 popular votes have been held at the national level in the past century. And there has never been a restriction of these democratic rights. On the contrary, new rights have been added and the hurdles for using the tools have gradually been lowered. In 1992, the direct democratic instruments were expanded to permit the holding of a referendum on international treaties. The people were then able to vote on whether Liechtenstein could join the European Economic Area (EEA).

Within the princely house, according to the family statute, succession is governed by the principle of male primogeniture, i.e. the eldest son of the reigning prince is the designated successor. Reigning Prince Hans-Adam II and the hereditary prince are among those who also use direct democracy. In 2003, they triggered a popular initiative to revise the constitution which met with clear approval at the ballot box. This already shows that the princely house and Prince Hans-Adam II cannot be committed to a purely passive role in politics.

Among other things, this constitutional revision of 2003 introduced new direct democratic procedures. Thus, the people can express their distrust of the reigning prince in a referendum, although it is then up to the male members of the princely house entitled to vote to decide whether any measures should be taken against the reigning prince. In extreme cases, he can be deposed. The people also have the right under the constitution to take an initiative to abolish the monarchy. If this were ever approved by a majority at the ballot box, parliament would be charged with drawing up a republican draft constitution. In the end, the people would decide whether the existing constitution should continue to be valid, or if the Republican constitution should be adopted, or an additional draft constitution submitted by the reigning prince.

However, as long as the existing constitution is in force, the reigning prince retains far-reaching powers, including the right to dismiss the Government. In everyday political life, the prince maintains the right to veto legal and financial decisions; laws and treaties cannot achieve full force without his consent. The strong position of the monarchy enjoys great support among the population, as it is seen as an important pillar of Liechtenstein’s success and stability.

This therefore requires communication, and the development of consensus, between the people or the elected representatives and the reigning prince. It is rare for the prince to refuse to sanction an act of the parliament or the voters. The only time the prince overruled the people after a referendum vote came in 1961, when they approved a hunting law the prince opposed. However, the prince can often get what he wants merely by threatening the veto. A refusal to sanction was announced in a referendum on the liberalization of abortion in 2011 and in a popular initiative to limit the prince’s veto right in 2012. Both proposals failed at the ballot box, however, and the veto was unnecessary.

The Liechtenstein political system has managed to combine, creatively, the contradictory elements of representative democracy, direct democracy, and monarchy. The veto power of the prince and the people—together with control mechanism based on the rule of law and the binding nature of treaties (such as the European Convention on Human Rights)—ensures broadly supported and balanced decisions. The Liechtenstein system has produced very high levels of acceptance of political decisions and a high degree of satisfaction with the political system itself, as numerous surveys show.

As a result, the monarchy itself, as only one part of the government, is generally held in high esteem. The country’s enormous economic upswing since the 1940s has helped reinforce the good feeling. In Liechtenstein, the widespread view is that anchoring state power both in the reigning prince and in the people is not to the disadvantage of either side, but rather to their mutual advantage.

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Democratically, of course. But saying that is only a start to answering a complicated and difficult question.

And it’s an urgent question, because recently there has been an increase in the number of movements for national self-determination and secession. Worldwide, between 1994-2017, I found 55 referendums registered, from Catalonia to Scotland, New Zealand to the Falklands, from Quebec to Iraqi Kurdistan. Most involved not full independence but rather a change in the political status of a state, or a separation or an integration of territory within an existing state. Whether such votes make sure that every voice is heard and ease difficult changes, or whether the votes tip countries towards more conflict and even violence, depends a great deal on the process around separation, and how democratic it truly is.

There are long-standing rules and processes for splitting up. The right to self-determination, as a collective right of peoples, is enshrined in all kinds of international covenants. But such secessions, or decisions to combine with another state or seek a different status internationally, cannot be unilateral under current international law. There must be a process.

There are, surprisingly, three possible methods to reconfigure one’s state—of which a referendum, or popular vote, is one, but is not required. The other two methods for applying the right of self-determination, as outlined by the International Court of Justice, include the election of an assembly of representatives entitled to such a decision, or a decision by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

As a scholar living in South Tyrol, a part of Northern Italy with a strong independence movement, I’ve made a study of self-determination efforts around the world. And I’ve become convinced that popular referendums should be a requirement when it comes to enshrining the constitution of a new sovereign state, or beginning secession or integration within a state. Referendums should also be required for changes in the political status of part of a state’s territory (such as autonomy or other forms of power sharing).

Popular votes offer a chance for participation to each legal inhabitant of a concerned area, making the plan that arises democratic, representative, and legitimate enough to have force.

But a referendum in and of itself is no guarantee of legitimacy. The world has seen many informal referendums organized in a unilateral way, outside of democratic negotiation and unregulated by constitutional processes. Territorial entities that seek to secede this way almost never gain international recognition, and they can sow international conflict as well.

For the nations of the world, the question is how to hold such votes in ways that produce accurate results that have legitimacy and don’t provoke deeper conflict or war. This is a tricky business, since most independent countries in their constitutions do not allow the right for secession of a part of their territory and thus do not provide for the right to hold referendums on such issues.

International law also doesn’t offer much in the way of specific guidance about how to hold such referendums. And the details can be complicated, in part because international law has been designed to recognize conflicting interests. The most important United Nations covenants, such as the Friendly Relations Act of 1970, recognize both the right of states to defend the integrity of their territory and the right to self-determination of peoples within an existing state.

Since 1994, many of the calls for self-determination have come from inside Europe, and their outcomes demonstrate the potential and perils of these movements. Currently, there are movements afoot in South Tyrol, in Flanders (now part of Belgium), in Greenland (Denmark), in the Basque Country, in the Republika Srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the eastern part of Ukraine (Donbass), and in Catalonia.

Troublingly, in three European regions, secession has de facto already happened, but not by constitutional methods, but rather with violent means with military support from neighboring countries or “kin states”: Northern Cyprus in 1974, now the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, in Transnistria in 1994, formerly a part of Moldova, and in 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, part of the Ukraine, later annexed by Russia after the March 2014 referendum on self-determination, an illegal act in terms of constitutional and international law.

De facto it also happened in the so-called People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, a still-open conflict. In the 1990s, two formerly autonomous regions of Georgia split away (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), and also the area now known as Artsakh split from Azerbaijan. Of course, all those entities held referendums—many of dubious democratic quality—recording huge majorities in favor of secession. But all of those self-declared republics failed to gain international recognition.

All these bad examples should not sour us on the power of a democratic referendum. Such votes can be done well. Take Scotland and its vote on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014. The process there demonstrated democratic maturity and gave the verdict legitimacy. One lesson is that democratic negotiation may be more important than law or precedent when it comes to constructing such a popular vote.

The British government, after negotiations and consultations with the Scottish government and Parliament, agreed to hold a popular referendum on the sovereignty of Scotland, although no U.K. constitutional law provides for such a right of a member country of the U.K.

In September 2014, 55.3 percent of Scottish voters rejected the option of secession. That verdict didn’t end the controversy entirely—after the Brexit vote in June 2016, the Scottish National Party announced it would push for a new referendum on independence—but the healthy debate settled the question for a time, and left participants on both sides satisfied with the vote. (You may wonder about Brexit, but I don’t consider it here because it belongs in a different category, since it is about an entire country leaving a union based on politics and trade.)

The first step to a democratic vote is establishing a procedure for it. Creating processes that have time to be established, and providing time for consideration, can reduce the risks of such votes. Take the recent November 4, 2018 vote in New Caledonia on self-determination. New Caledonia, in Oceania, is one of the autonomous overseas territories of France. The vote was conducted under a 1998 accord, called Nouméa, that gave New Caledonia the right to decide freely whether to keep being a part of France as an autonomous entity or become an independent country. So, when the vote was conducted 20 years later, there were no questions about its legitimacy. Other French overseas territories also had used the means of referendums to determine their political status. This fall, New Caledonians voted against independence in a peaceful, legitimate vote.

But without procedure, you may have conflict, even in a democratic society.

Some countries bar such votes, causing themselves considerable trouble. The Spanish Constitution, for example, does not allow its autonomous communities to hold referendums on secession; unlike in the U.K., the constitution stresses the indivisibility of the state and considers democratic efforts for self-determination of smaller nations inside Spain as attacks on the legal constitutional order or even as acts of rebellion. For this reason, the nation’s Supreme Court banned the Basque Country in 2008 from holding a referendum on declaring a different political status; and, as a result, conflict on that subject remains.

And in 2017, after the referendum on independence of Catalonia, the president and the government of Catalonia were persecuted under penal law for having organized such a referendum. While a slight majority of Catalan voters voted yes to independence, and the independence movement was peaceful and democratic, there was no mutually agreed process. And so the result was declared illegal and invalid by Madrid. Protests followed, and the conflict became more serious. Sooner or later a new referendum will need to be held that is fair and correct under constitutional and international law—as the Catalans have this fundamental right and deserve this democratic opportunity. The 2014 referendum in Scotland may serve as a shining example.

Ultimately, studying how states acquire self-determination has led me to a simple, but slightly paradoxical conclusion: The best path to splitting up your country begins with coming together to agree on the rules of a referendum.

That’s because the kind of procedure established for self-determination sets the course for future relationships—both between the independence-seeking territory and the state it seeks to leave, and between those two entities and the rest of the world.

The post Do Successful Secession Movements Have to Be Democratic? 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.

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When Louis XVI, the king deposed by the French Revolution, climbed onto the scaffold to face his execution in 1793, the first thing on his mind was probably not the thousands of contraband caricatures of him that had started to circulate before his fall from grace. But such revolutionary mockery was central in swaying public opinion, and these cartoons almost certainly helped to seal his fate.

A century later, when Irish folk musicians wanted to spread a political message through their songs, they wrote witty laments on the sorrows of their troubled country, often at the expense of their hated British colonizers.

Move on another century, to any Communist regime behind the Iron Curtain, and it was commonplace to tell jokes ridiculing aberrations and excesses of the ruling regimes. Even the party faithful, in private, would swap their favorites—not knowing that their backstage laughs helped to put the last nails in the coffin of the Soviet empire.

This struggle between those who respect convention and those who transgress it not only shaped the course of European political history, it also created space for the development of certain brands of satire that yielded some of the continent’s wittiest cultural exports. In the United Kingdom, criticism of the stuffy upper classes gave rise to a humor shaped by absurdity, sarcasm, and self-deprecation that lives on in the tradition of comedies like Monty Python and Mr. Bean. In France, the pre-revolutionary counterculture launched a tradition of satirical drawings that the French still chuckle at today, whether it be the daily front-page cartoon that continues to appear on the front pages of the wide-circulation paper Le Monde or the cartoons seen in the more specialized weekly scandal sheets like Le Canard Enchainé or Charlie Hebdo. In Scandinavia, the predominant style—known as galghumor, or gallows humor—still showcases a wit as dark as the long northern winter.

Just as these specific senses of humor can explain what defines these European nations, it can also help explain what binds them together. Charles de Gaulle once famously asked, “How can anyone govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese”? He was talking about the difficulty of finding consensus within a single country, but his point can be taken even further—how do you make a common political culture on a continent which features so many different traditions and sensitivities, including those found in their humor? That’s been a pressing question since World War II, when Europeans began attempting to form an ever-closer union of countries, cheeses, and even transnational jokes.

By far the dominant cross-country humor on the continent involves each of the countries lampooning their neighbors, serving up biting jabs tailored to each nation’s faults. The French depict the Belgians as simple-minded, the Spanish seem arrogant to the Portuguese, the Irish reckon Brits are all repressed, while Swedes portray the Norwegians as a bunch of oil-rich rednecks. In central and eastern Europe, the Estonians mock the hard-drinking Finns, the Slovaks make jokes about the overconfident Czechs, the Macedonians laugh at supposedly corrupt Greeks, and the Ukrainians make fun of the filthy rich but impolite Russians.

You might worry that that these comedic insults would threaten to divide the continent, but really this humor has evolved to bring it closer together. Rather than signaling aggression or propagating ethnic stereotypes, these jokes seem to diminish rather than heighten hostility. In fact, researchers have argued that such humor can help communities to positively interact by reinforcing a common identity (we can laugh at the same thing!) while acknowledging diversity. While Europeans all like a good joke—particularly at someone else’s expense—most of the tellers don’t really buy these caricatures. When Swedes ask in jest why the library closed in Oslo, and answer “because someone stole the book,” they do so more as a good-natured nod to the traditional rivalry between fellow Scandinavians than out of a literal belief in their intellectual superiority. As in a good friendship, a little mischief with those dear to you is worth a thousand “I love you’s.” In this sense, a brotherly sense of humor between countries is the best that could have happened to Europe’s community and sense of self.

We’ve already seen the ways in which these jokes and caricatures have evolved as Europe has integrated, counterbalancing the seriousness of the political process and ushering in more friendly perspectives. After Ireland became independent in 1921, for example, the Irish jokes made by the former British colonizers became taboo. Over time the jabs didn’t go away, but they did change, and now they come across more like a kind of teasing between friendly neighbors. Today the Irishman is more often than not depicted as jovial, if cheeky, bon vivant. The Irish give as good as they get too, using their legendary Celtic wit to poke fun back at the mainlanders. “What’s the English definition of a thrill? Having an After Eight [mint] at 7:30.”

The same applies to Polish jokes. In the mid-1990s, jokes about the post-Soviet Poles started making their first appearance in German TV shows and sketches. The Iron Curtain had just fallen, and Germany began to remember and re-engage with its neighbors to the east. The recognition through humor was only the first step to closer relations—Germany strongly supported Poland’s bid to join the European Union family, which it eventually did in 2004. And, of course, the German jibes at their neighbors to the east were more than matched. Poles have an extensive catalogue of jokes about the infamously humorless Germans.

In this way, humor has been just as important in modern European history—a path for Europeans to embrace their national identities even as they surrender some of their sovereignty to the greater Union. And, as things are shaping up, it looks like it will continue to be an outlet for fellow Europeans to bond over their shared project, including some of its recent misadventures.

Speaking of which, do you know the capital of Greece? It’s about $12. And wasn’t it refreshing to see England leave Europe via referendum, as opposed to the usual, via penalty kicks?

The post In Europe, Good Wisecracks Make Good Neighbors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is first a matter of migration: Several waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th century—first from France, Italy, and Portugal, and then from Morocco, the Congo Republic, and Algeria—have shaped the population. It is secondly a matter of structure, since Brussels and the Capital Region stand apart by design from the other parts of Belgium, which is a federal constitutional monarchy. (Yes, Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy).

Finally, it is that Brussels is defined by its international aspirations. Educated and professional European people like me have come to study and live and work around the various European institutions based here. Europe may still be just an idea elsewhere, but it is a reality here—with the consulting firms, the NGOs, lobbyists, and those who work in branches of the European Union itself. Those who come here to network and pursue internships (as I did) were committed to the international idea of Europe, and wanted to make a life and career that was explicitly European.

But European ideals and identity have long been under pressure. And to be in Brussels has started to mean feeling under attack—even before the terrorist attacks on the airport and the Metro last month.

As the economic crisis and the European dogma of austerity kicked in at the end of the last decade, the Brussels’ vibe changed. Daily life here started to be punctuated by a sense of emergency, expressed through visible and endless European summits. Those summits also occasioned more protests in Brussels—protests against austerity, against the big proposed trade deal between Europe and the United States. Right here in Brussels you could see the gap between Europe and its citizens widening as the protests went on and on. I could feel the European Union coming apart here before it got noticed elsewhere.

This unhappy reality has slowly crowded out the things I’ve loved about Brussels. This city had a special magic that came with being so international and yet so small, at human-scale. It’s hard to feel lost in Brussels—the buildings are not so tall, the distances not so far. It was a nice little melting pot of people from very different places living closely together.

I first felt in love with the place when I was a child and came here every summer to visit some of my parents’ friends. My memories of those times are full of comics like Tintin or the cowboy Lucky Luke. I remember the only statue that does not seem boring to kids: the Manneken Pis´–and the flower carpets that are created on the Grand Place in august.

Later, when I returned to Brussels as a young adult student, my appreciation deepened. I discovered the numerous festivals, exhibitions, bars, concerts, cultural events, and beers of Brussels. I loved the place’s multiculturalism—go to a bar and you will hear at least 10 different languages being spoken. No one is a stranger in Brussels because everybody is! The hardest kind of person to meet here is someone from Brussels (or a Brusseleir).

The recession and austerity didn’t end that, but it diminished the space and time for exchange. Then the menace and danger arrived last year. The first tension arrived with news of the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, on January 7, 2015. Ever since then, military personnel have been deployed in front of the European Institution buildings.

A deeper feeling of insecurity in Brussels started with the attacks last November in Paris. The alert level was then raised to the maximum (level 4) and military people started filling Brussels’ roads and squares. For the first time in my life, I saw tanks and military personnel in my city. For the first few days after the Paris attacks, Brussels turned into a ghost town—a city I didn’t recognize. The bars, the restaurants and the theaters where deserted.

Daily life started to change in little ways. People started to go to work by car rather than taking public transportation. Patrols by the police became so frequent that they were seen as reassuring, and eventually normal. Every two days we could hear new police raids in Brussels’ neighborhoods. Our lives seemed newly connected to the news, the latest information about the potential French and Belgium cells working with ISIS.

The conversation was strange. There was an overload of information about threats, and Brussels seemed somehow less European. We spoke more of the impact of violence and danger on our lifestyle, and less about the fact that the perpetrators had come from here, from our international city. Indeed, the authors of the attacks were almost always presented as strangers and not as children of our European society. They were described as marginal people and we did not try to understand their actions. The Brussels I loved had seemed so committed to understanding different people, of different backgrounds and languages!

I found myself wishing for more conversation. I thought we should ask ourselves about the lack of hope in the European future and the growing dissatisfaction with European politicians. I wanted to know how people and civil society could play a role in defining our common future. How could young Europeans leave behind everything they have here, in the capital of Europe, and adopt an ISIS message, rather than building their own future with us?

All of the changes last year established a feeling of being under threat. There was a collective sense that something bad was going to happen. When the terrorist attacks came, they were not unexpected.

Those attacks came at places that helped make Brussels the international city with which I fell in love—the airport and in the metro station Maelbeek, near the European Commission and Council. I felt clueless and woozy on March 22 as I passed in front of the European parliament. I asked myself, Does any of this make any sense?

I found myself remembering a slogan that was chanted at a lot of protests in recent years: “Your wars, our dead.” But whose wars are we living through nowadays and for what purpose?

In the days since, I’ve had the unpleasant sense of being accustomed to this new way of life here, to the military uniforms and tanks on the streets, to attacks, to the dead, to the new Brussels.

After the Paris attacks, President Obama said that French youth would have to deal with a new reality of terrorism that American young people learned some years ago. I hope this is not true. I want Brussels to rediscover its joy and gentleness. I want to live together here with my fellow strangers. The more different, the better!

The post Even Before Terror Struck, Brussels Was Under Attack appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2012, in the first Breivik v. State, he was convicted of mass murder and terrorism and sent to prison for the maximum sentence allowed under Norwegian law—21 years. But Norway is not done with him. Or, more accurately, he is not done with Norway. This time, Breivik came to court to sue the state for “violations of his human rights.”

For our own sanity, those of us living in Scandinavian countries with generally trustful relations between people and well-functioning economies and welfare states have wanted to move on from the brutality of attacks like Breivik’s. But every so often there comes an event—the bombings in Brussels this week, for example—that punctures our sense of security. For me, the return of the devil was one of them.

It is ironic that Breivik sued the Norwegian government, when families of the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks have long considered filing their own suits against the state for failing to protect the children and more generally failing to protect its own citizens. The families of the victims have not had the energy to follow up before the courts, and they’ve been trying to get back to the lives they led before the July 22 attacks.

But certainly so many things changed with Breivik’s appearance on that clear and sunny summer day in 2011 in this otherwise fortunate corner of the world. Many people described it as a horror movie because it felt so surreal—the sight of Breivik dressed in a police uniform he tailored himself, contradicting the good intentions and camaraderie most Norwegians put their faith in, massacring the brightest of the next generation. This is why he has come to embody the devil himself here.

His actions made us realize how ill-prepared we were to deal with this type of evil. When Breivik set off the car bomb in Oslo, only four police officers—out of thousands—were on duty. In downtown Oslo, no obstacles prevented the terrorist from parking his car at the unguarded entry door to the government headquarters. He had plenty of time to drive to Utøya Island and conduct a manhunt against the children attending the Norwegian Labor Party summer camp. Neither a helicopter nor a boat could be organized in advance to stop Breivik’s massacre.

At the time of the attack, I myself was celebrating my daughter’s 13th birthday in the Swedish countryside. This peaceful scene was interrupted by a call from my editor at the Swiss Broadcasting Company, where I am the northern European correspondent. “Something strange is happening in Oslo,” she said. And then, for many weeks, I was plunged into a disturbing underworld seething with anti-government, anti-immigrant anger and violence that we hadn’t seen until it boiled over.

During the first iteration of Breivik v. State in 2012, I sat through the 10-week-long criminal proceedings at the Oslo Court. To me, his propaganda was as ridiculous as his frightening actions. Breivik said he was fighting to prevent the downfall of Western civilization at the hands of a Muslim takeover. “This country is my prison,” he said. His only regret, stated before the sentencing, was, “I did not succeed in killing even more of those people.” When Breivik got his life sentence on August 24, 2012, I felt relieved. But I did not feel relaxed; I knew that at some point he—or another kind of Breivik—would be back.

Breivik himself came back earlier than expected. His challenge against the state interested me because I think all of us, in the aftermath of his actions and sentencing, have wondered whether we have treated him according to the values we hold dear, even if his actions went beyond the limits of reason. Is it possible to deal fairly with a monster?

During the last four years, Breivik has basically been in his own prison, as he is deemed to be a danger to others and others are seen as a danger to him. A team of 49 people (including a doctor, a priest and gym coach) is taking care of him. He occupies three rooms: a sleeping room with ensuite shower, a study room with books and a typewriter (Breivik is an accredited student at Oslo University), and a private gym. Breiviks receives about 2,500 letters a year, many of them very long and requiring translation from Russian and other languages. Norwegian taxpayers have picked up the bills for damaged government ministries, new prison construction, lawyers, and translation, which have cost them more than a billion dollars so far.

To get to Skien, the former industrial hotspot that houses Breivik’s prison and the site of his most recent trial, I took a three-hour train ride from Oslo across beautiful fjords, along lakes, and through deep forests At the lower end of the famous Telemark Canal, I caught a taxi for the half-hour trip to the Skien High Security Prison. The distance from the original location of his crime felt like an important symbol to the people of Oslo: ”We keep him away from you.”

Skien Prison certainly felt like a prison: It had high walls, barbed wire, and control towers. However, there was a certain human touch to it, as all the guards I met were very friendly and welcoming. The sign outside the prison door noted it was a kriminalomsorgen, a ”care center” for criminals. After having suffered from and contributed to the extensive inhumanties of World War II, Norway developed a humane penal code, based on the idea that all wrongdoings can be corrected and every person should have a second chance for a decent life.

The prison’s sports hall had been turned into a courtroom for the four-day-proceeding. I could tell that when Breivik walked in, neatly dressed and with a fully shaved skull, he was enjoying being back in the spotlight. I found myself just a few meters behind this man, who by appearance and voice could be any person you might meet on the streets of the wealthy western parts of Oslo, where Breivik grew up. However, it soon became clear how different Breivik was from those people. He started by offering a Hitler greeting to the auditorium and then said to judge Helen Andenæs Sekulic,”I am the secretary general of the Nordic State Party.” A political party that exists only in his shaven head.

Skien Prison—a Norwegian kriminalomsorgen—converted its sports hall into a makeshift courtroom for the most recent proceedings of Breivik v. State.

In his three-hour long statement, Breivik compared himself to Hitler, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln as “leaders who were ready for violent action when deemed necessary.” He asked the court to relax his prison regimen so he could more easily interact with fascist supporters around the world. The horror movie that unfolded after the attacks was taking a turn towards a farce. Here was a 37-year old terrorist, asking for compassion from a world he had savaged, turning the goodwill of the Norwegian people against them. And he didn’t see the irony.

But I understood more of what was at stake when I talked to the father of one of the girls killed on Utöya during a break in the trial. He, and other relatives and survivors, came because they wanted to know that they would be safe from this man.

Breivik proved to be worst witness for his own case against the Norwegian state. He verified the shocking fact that yes, there are human beings who are so inhuman that they never ever should be released again. So, when the devil himself got back into his handcuffs on day four of this trial, I was again relieved—the rule of law in Norway was working as it was supposed to. But I was also depressed because I couldn’t recognize anything familiar in this fellow human being.

I lost my way after I passed one of the exit checkpoints, ending up in the prison kitchen. There, a smiling cook offered me some fresh coffee and directions for how to get out of the prison. I was so glad to find my way back to a society where there is enough humanity and the ability to learn how to deal with the worst among us.

The post A Mass Murderer Is Testing the Limits of Scandinavian Goodwill appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Barcelona is a great place to have a kid. Max is in his first year of free preschool offered at the same primary school he’ll attend to age 12, before heading to one of the public high schools and maybe the $1,500-a-year public university. Add a park every two blocks and free public health care and you have paradise for raising children. Which is what makes it odd that hardly anyone is having any. Anyone except foreigners.

When we’re not crocodiles, I am American and my wife is from here, from a Catalan town 40 miles outside of Barcelona. Among her local friends, she is the rare one who’s had a child. Among Max’s friends—the other three-year-olds at Diputacio—our binational marriage seems like a trend. About a quarter of his 26-child class seems to have a similar story: a Catalana mother, and one parent from elsewhere in Europe, Africa, South Asia, or the Americas. At least in our school, children with one parent from abroad appear to outnumber classical migrant families.

This caught my eye because Spanish fertility is at historically low levels. Earlier this year, the local census figures showed that women of my wife’s generation—the generation just hitting 40—have so far had the fewest children per capita of any Spanish generation since the 1870s. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical service, Spain has the second-lowest birth rate on the continent. For every four women in Spain there are just five kids. My wife’s mother had three children, which was almost exactly the average for 1975, when four women gave birth to 11 kids.

Fertility matters for a lot of wonky reasons—who will pay the pensions? But, lately the conversation in Europe has been less about intergenerational economics than about politics. The trope, flatly racist, is that foreigners come and they breed like an invasive species, imposing foreign cultural norms and draining the public service budgets. The discussion feeds a lot of European paranoia (and increasingly American, too) that lives around the intersection of biology and borders, in which everything from abroad is framed as potentially viral: poverty, extremism, Zika, Ebola. My work as a journalist has me accustomed to hearing these accusations around the edges of refugee camps in Calais, France, and along a border wall dividing the EU from Morocco. But when I come home from those places, I’ve also seen the start of a more hopeful discussion about Europe’s future, by walking into Max’s school.

I am not a demographer. Numbers on European migration are easy to get, but a sense of how many newcomers end up starting families with locals is a bit too esoteric a number to nail down, so far.

But I see my family fitting into some kind of change. Our social life has broken down by national as well as procreative lines—and that’s turned out to be the same line. Like many new parents, Max’s arrival has meant new relationships with parents of kids of the same age, and more often then not one of them is from outside Spain and usually outside Europe. Our Catalan friends, meanwhile, are the ones we need to get a babysitter to see; they don’t have kids, so they go out later. When we recently saw an old university friend of my wife’s for lunch with her new beau, Max did have a playmate his age there. The beau was from Argentina, and has a small son.

What has happened here? My wife is part of a baby boom generation that has faced a historical whipsaw, from excessive optimism and sudden affluence to a failure of confidence in Europe and a sudden loss of security. When Franco, that crusty old Spanish fascist, died in 1975, my wife’s mother and her friends could finally join the 20th century. They had large families. Those kids grew up in an era of social reconstruction and torrid economic expansion. Jobs were easy to find, and growth seemed inevitable. In the 1990s, people ascribed falling birth rates in Spain to an embrace of modernity and prosperity.

But by the early 2000s, that boom overheated. Spain’s young men left high school to work as builders. In 2004, a young man could make $40,000 a year swinging a hammer, double what his father earned.

Compared to the men, the women stayed in school, targeting secure jobs in the public sector. Career counselors would tell new college grads to earn the equivalent of tenure within about a decade, and in many cases such new opportunities for women delayed childbirth. A 30-year-old woman could then settle down with her future assured. When my wife and I met in 2006, she was working for the government as a librarian, patiently acquiring “points” toward her tenure.

Three years later—about the time we started thinking about kids—the bubble had popped. Spanish unemployment soared to Depression-level numbers: 50 percent for under-25s. All those guys who’d dropped out of school had neither jobs nor degrees. My wife and her friends were the age their mothers were when Franco died and the Spanish miracle began; now they were going to watch it unravel.

As the crisis dragged on, the future failed to materialize. Unemployment was still nearly 30 percent in 2012. If you were single, you had to be very lucky to meet a man or woman capable of being an equal partner in the family’s financial or emotional stability.

Max came along when the crisis was nearly five years old. We weren’t necessarily more optimistic than most Catalans, but you can’t always let macroeconomics dictate your life. Plus, mixed marriages like ours do have the advantage of a hedged, diversified bet. Our family would live in Barcelona, but I would not be solely dependent upon the local economy—I am able to work for clients abroad.

I do not believe my wife married me in 2009 for my blue passport, or agreed to have a child with me in 2012 for it. Nor did I marry her for the free health care or automatic residency in the rest of Europe. But I can certainly report that we married with the understanding that her passport gave us access to European social services, and mine gave us access to the United States and its economy.

We’re betting that being binational will be an advantage in the future. Where my New York grandparents went out of their way not to teach me any of the Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish they spoke, we are insisting Max speak Catalan, English, and Spanish. Rather than encourage him to have a national identity, we are encouraging him to have a transnational one. He’ll need to find stability for himself over and around borders.

I also want him to be able to see both his homes with a foreigner’s optimism. When his mother complains that ticket prices for Spanish trains have soared 200 percent, I want him to marvel, as I do, at how well they work anyway. Spain, even in its lowest moments, still feels like a miracle to me, with its low crime rate, healthy diet, and long, generally happy lives. And I hope he has a European’s fascination with American indifference to obstacles, the can-do culture that feels like a cliché to me, but is clearly part of my makeup.

I’d like to think that as Max moves on from his crocodile phase, the EU will move on from these vicious discussions about borders, migrants, and viruses. Someday there will be enough Maxes in the schools to make the borders—and the arguments—less meaningful.

The post My Transnational Son Has a Passport to Optimism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the surface, this would seem to be a simple yes-or-no question. But what exactly are voters supposed to take into consideration when casting their votes? What does the European Union mean to them? And what exactly does “remaining” or “leaving” even mean, in the context of the U.K.’s ties to the continent? Those were some of the themes explored last night at a Zócalo/Democracy International event entitled “What Does Britain Owe Europe?” at the Royal Institution in London.

Sewell Chan, an international editor for The New York Times and the moderator for the evening, kicked off the discussion by asking the panelists to try pinning down the meaning of the referendum: “What is this debate really about? Is it about money, migrants, identity, sovereignty, democracy, football, or something else?”

Stephen Booth, co-director of Open Europe, a think tank that has not taken a position on the referendum, pointed out that if the debate begins to be more about certain issues than others, the side likely to win also changes. If the referendum debate revolves mostly around immigration policy, then the “Leave” EU campaign has an advantage. But if it’s more focused on the economy, then the “Remain” side has an advantage. Both sides are trying to foment fear around the uncertainties of each other’s position.

Booth said that no matter the individual issue affected by EU membership, “What I think it’s really about is trade-offs. It’s about what degree of interdependence are we comfortable with, what degree of shared sovereignty are we comfortable with?”

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has been talking about his strategy with the EU in a way that doesn’t help clarify the question for the public. Strangely, Cameron hasn’t led his campaign or talking points with the most important overarching concession he recently obtained from his fellow European heads of state: an exemption from embracing the notion of the “ever closer union” the EU has long professed to be.

That, Booth said, “should’ve been the philosophical debate we’re having and how does everything else fit into that?” It’s long been clear that Britain is not going to adopt the euro or agree to the shared-border Schengen agreement that governs core continental EU members, and Booth thinks that the government could be doing a better job of reconciling this reality with the possibility of still being an important EU member, deriving benefits from access to its single market.

For Damian Chalmers, a professor of EU law at the London School of Economics, the referendum is broadly about “What does the European Union do for us?”

For better or worse, he pointed out, EU law makes up one-seventh of British law, and these statutes have revolutionized laws affecting everything from the environment to workplace discrimination, financial services and broadcasting. So the three questions the British public must answer about the EU are: Does it provide the sort of market support that British citizens like? Is the EU sufficiently democratic? And do the British have a more mobile, cosmopolitan outlook or a more immobile, rooted one?

This question of national identity is key, said Laura Cram, professor of European politics and director of the Neuropolitics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh. There is a huge portion of Britons that feel anxious because of issues such as migration, and it’s important for campaigners on both sides to empathize with those concerns. “There is … a sense within certain parts of the community that their cultural identity is under threat,” she said. “I think we underestimate that at our peril.”

Gerald Häfner, who was a Green Party member of the German and European Parliaments and one of the founders of Democracy International, pointed out that Germans think that it is “strange” that Britain is having an identity crisis about its relationship to Europe. Germans, probably because they lost the war and feel a great deal of guilt for starting it, see no alternative to a future in which “we want to live in Europe with all other European nations as friends.”

In Germany, he notes, a large majority says they need a common Europe. “And no one could imagine a Europe without Great Britain,” Häfner said.

And yet, at the same time, the entity known as “Europe” is having its own identity crisis, Häfner said. What should be decided at the national level and what should be decided at a level beyond the nation-state? And how can ordinary citizens feel more connected to the decisions that the European Union makes when so many of the decisions right now seem to be made by civil servants?

“I think we should make an end to that very complicated, top-down Europe,” he said. That would involve making fewer decisions at the level that applies to all of Europe, and then, for the important ones that remain, instituting conventions of elected officials who can get together to discuss the ideas and vote on them, so that people feel as if they have some say in the process.

Back in Britain, another issue that makes the referendum vote so thorny is that it’s hard for voters to know what the real consequences of a Brexit might be.

Booth pointed out that most analysts agree that leaving the EU would be disruptive in the short term. “But how long that goes on for, we don’t know,” he said. In the long run, “our view is that [the Brexit] could be either positive or negative, but not by a large margin each way.” It all depends on the terms of the divorce settlement between the EU and U.K., and whether the British embrace an accelerated globalization and engagement with the rest of the world once freed of the EU, or, conversely a “Little England” isolationist posture.

But one aspect of British politics that a “Leave” vote would certainly affect is the question of Scottish independence, said Cram. A 2014 referendum on whether Scotland would leave Great Britain failed, but if Britain chose to leave the EU, “it’s undoubtedly clear that there would be a strong sense amongst within those in Scotland that there is a possibility for another referendum” on Scottish independence. The Scotts, the argument goes, deeply value their EU membership, partly as a counterweight to English hegemony within the U.K.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, a member from the audience raised the question of whether the euro is destroying the European Union, noting that his previous support for the EU had diminished over time with all the troubles afflicting the euro currency, and the extent to which those troubles seem to have hijacked the EU agenda in recent years.

Booth agreed that Europe’s conflicted ideas about what should be required for true EU inclusion is muddying the waters when it comes to U.K. participation. If, as recent summits suggest, the EU is all about the shared currency and how the migrant crisis threatens the Schengen Convention governing border controls, then the U.K. won’t feel very included because it has excused itself from both of those agreements.

But if the main questions for EU discussion include how the single market can be made more efficient and deepened, and how the EU can become a stronger geopolitical player in the world, then the U.K. definitely has a role.

“If the EU continues to focus the vast majority of its energy on Schengen and the euro zone, it’s hard for Britain to know where it stands,” Booth said.

On this note, Häfner conceded that it isn’t only the British public that needs to reflect on what Europe means to them. People across the continent need to do so, too, with an eye towards making the Union more democratic and less remote, for all its citizens.

The post The U.K. Has Already Opted Out of the ‘Ever Closer Union’ With Europe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.