In 2024, almost 19 million of us will choose elected officials to represent us at all three of these levels: 33 new members of the European Parliament (MEPs), 3,000 new mayors across Romania, 588 new members of the Romanian Parliament, and 1 new president.

So why is there fatigue, rather than campaign excitement? And are the Romanian and European contests functioning in opposition to each other—distracting citizens from the important issues in both sets of races—or are they mutually beneficial, because they’ll bring so many people to the polls?

Thus far, the current Romanian government seems to have abandoned meaningful debate about the issues the country faces. Projects are stagnating. There is no real strategy to deal with the Ukraine war at our border. There is no plan to modernize the Romanian economy in a digital era, or industry and agriculture in the era of green transition. Candidates merely praise the work of party colleagues, and criticize the opposition, avoiding concrete proposals or explanations of their positions. Flattering photographs on social media encourage us to vote for candidates, without giving us a reason why.

Even electoral debates are missing. Instead, politicians secure spots on popular television shows and list their achievements from a safe seat. In fact, the first and probably only real electoral debate between the Romanian candidates in the EU elections was organized by my NGO, Europuls,  and Democracy International, which took place at the recent Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy*.

The EU elections, meanwhile, will lead to the renewal of the European Parliament, the institution that adopts EU laws. They will also indirectly reshape the European Commission, the bureaucratic body that proposes EU laws.

According to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 74% of Romanians say they intend to vote in the EU elections, 19 percentage points more than those who said they intended to vote in 2019. It will be interesting to see whether the intention will translate into actual presence and whether the turnout will be higher than in 2019.

The decision to hold Romania’s local elections on the same day as EU elections sparked heated debate here. The ruling coalition has cited several reasons for the move: reducing administrative costs (though leaders have provided no figures to indicate any likely savings), keeping local constituents engaged and avoiding electoral fatigue over what would otherwise have been four rounds of elections, and even counteracting extremism. The opposition argues that merging elections is anti-democratic and undermines small parties’ chances.

In practice, the local contests seem to overshadow the EU elections, as EU parliament candidates campaign in their districts, and often promote candidates for local elections instead of talking about EU-level priorities.

Romanian citizens seem confused, disillusioned, and indifferent. Because they don’t know what distinguishes the people and parties on their ballot, the European elections here seem more like a popularity contest rather than a political one. That’s unfortunate because the story of this election is mainly one about the future of Romania as part of the European family—a family in which we have lived for nearly 20 years, and which makes our lives better every day.

An EU infusion of more than 60 billion euros into the Romanian economy financed essential reforms in our public administration and justice systems, as well as investments in roads, railways, schools, and hospitals. EU values of democracy, human rights, and rule of law have made us more inclusive and tolerant—a more modern society. Being part of the EU single market has increased our GDP. Romanians can travel and work throughout the EU; our goods, services, and money move around almost as freely as within a single country. EU membership means we have no cellular roaming costs or extra fees for credit and debit card purchases within the EU, full protection of our personal data, and a guaranteed four weeks of paid leave per year. We benefit from the unified emergency and health insurance systems for all 27 EU countries. We have enjoyed fast access to vaccines during the pandemic, great food quality standards, and the strictest environmental targets in the world.

Romanians are distracted from the high stakes these elections represent for us and for the whole European continent. Even now, 17 years after becoming an EU member state, our country doesn’t fully embrace its responsibility to the project.

With 33 seats in the European Parliament, Romania is the sixth most powerful country in the EU. Forty percent of Romania’s children live in poverty and social exclusion. By leaning in to the European project, we can rescue those kids by helping to erase social and economic disparities across EU regions and by helping the EU achieve economic and climate targets.

We can influence geopolitics, too. Strategically positioned on the Black Sea, sharing a border with Ukraine, and a NATO member, Romania could play a key role in resolving the war in Ukraine, and planning for that country’s reconstruction. Romania strongly promotes the rapid integration of our neighbor Moldova into the European Union. This is essential because the faster Moldova transitions toward the organization, the faster its citizens can escape poverty, and Russian threats to their freedom and resources.

But accomplishing all of this requires that we elect candidates that understand the world, as well as the EU agenda and how Romania could benefit from it. And we need responsible and informed citizens to elect them. As a Romanian citizen, I would like to ask our candidates for the European Parliament about these issues before going to the polls and casting my ballot. These are questions that will shape the EU agenda in upcoming years. I hope that, as of June 9, I and Romanian voters like me will get more insight into what our leaders are thinking when it comes to our future and our future role in the continent.

*Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews is a founder of Democracy International, and sits on the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy’s supervisory committee.

The post What Kind of European Future Do Romanians Want? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before the 19th century, most peoples, in most parts of the world, did not live in nations, but in those larger conglomerations of peoples we call loosely “empires”—or as they were often known, “universal monarchies.” Most of today’s nations are the creatures of imperial collapse: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Albania, Finland, Ireland, Sweden—not to mention the former settler populations in North and South America and the former colonies in Africa and Asia—all were once part of larger imperial groupings.

Before they became independent, few of the inhabitants of these places had any real sense of themselves as belonging to nations. They took their identity, instead, from what was known in many European languages as “small homelands:” families, tribes, villages, parishes, ethnic and religious communities, etc. Italy, for instance, only came into existence in 1871 after a prolonged series of wars, mostly against its former Austrian rulers and their allies. All that had previously existed had been a collection of duchies, principalities, and city-states sharing a common religion, a more or less common language, and a more or less imaginary common history in imperial Rome.

So when these places became nations, they were compelled to invent for themselves a collective identity, a past, and a role for the future. They also had to lay claim to political legitimacy. This they did through the principle now known as “indivisible sovereignty.” If the nation was, henceforth, to be the only legitimate unit of human association, then the nation’s power to make decisions concerning the fate of its citizens had to be, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “immortal…incommunicable and inseparable.”

A nation might be prepared to open its borders, share its resources with other nations, make and abide by international treaties, etc. But the decision to do these things had to rest with the nation alone. This is essentially what “self-determination” means; and “self-determination,” which Woodrow Wilson in 1918 called “the imperative principle for action” in the modern world order, has become the defining feature of the modern nation-state.

While this definition of nationalism seems inward-facing, in its earliest forms, it was also paradoxically cosmopolitan. These new nations—unlike the old empires—were liberal and democratic and did not look upon their demand for self-determination as a threat to, or threatening for, that of any other peoples. Giuseppe Mazzini—the theoretical architect of Italian nationalism and one of the most influential political writers (and activists) of the 19th century—forecast that the future would be made up of assemblies of nations, each sovereign and independent in its own right, but each living in harmony with all the others. The new “nationality” was, he insisted, no “bitter war on individualism,” nor was it intended “to foster a new sectarianism.” “Ours is not a national project,” he claimed, “but an international one.”

Not all, however, thought like this. In Germany, in particular, and under the influence of some followers of philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, an alternative vision emerged of the nation as the creation of a distinction between “friend and foe.” Nations, the neo-Hegelians insisted, were born out of conflict, and could only survive and prosper through conflict. Every nation, in order to become and to remain a nation, required an “other” against which to struggle.

To put it very crudely: If Mazzini’s nation was built upon some species of love, the neo-Hegelian one was built on hate. If the liberal, Mazzini nation aimed for international peace, the neo-Hegelian one could only flourish in war. And with this came most of the vices we currently associate with nationalism: xenophobia; bigotry; the contempt for other cultures, other religions, even other languages; and the belief that “we” are best and that “we” must always be first.

In Europe, the end of World War I, and the subsequent economic and political disorders, made versions of the neo-Hegelian brand of nationalism seem particularly attractive. As many—most notably Madeleine Albright—have pointed out, the similarities between the situation in the 1930s and the one we face today in many parts of the world can seem uncanny. The fault for every national malaise, from the economy to diminished political status, is laid on the international order—today we call it “globalization”—and on the remote indifferent “elites” who govern what the Italian Fascists sneeringly called “the individualistic liberal state.” The solution for every ill is believed to be to return power to the “people,” and not to the so-called “representatives” of the liberal state.

Inevitably, since the “people” are only ever a figment of the political imagination, restoring their power is believed to require a strongman who would not “represent” but—literally—“embody” them, just as he would also embody the nation: a Mussolini, or a Hitler; an Orbán, an Erdogan, or a Putin or a Trump. But strongmen, like the nation itself, can survive only so long as there exists the threat of an “other” for them to be strong with. And if this “other” does not exist, then, like the Jews in the 1930s or immigrants today, it has to be invented.

But history does not ever really repeat itself. The end of World War II led to the creation of a large number of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund, from the Arab League to the Organization of American States. The most far-reaching and ambitious of them all began in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community, and is now the European Union. Although these institutions are very different from one another, they are all based upon international treaties; and they all attempt to solve the one problem that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had also attempted, but so spectacularly failed to solve: how to put an end to war.

The international institutions still have not ended that great human scourge. The source of their weakness is that they are constituted of nation-states that are defined by their sovereignty. But international agreements require nations to be bound by international law, which means sharing sovereignty with other nations. This is a difficult juggling act.

Of course, the post-1945 order worked more or less effectively for a while. The long-awaited World War III never materialized. But the order worked only so long as the threat of war these international organizations had been created to avoid remained. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s removed the presence of what had been, even before 1945, the West’s single great “other.”

After 1990, as the threat of war receded, nations began to question the wisdom of having surrendered their sovereignty to bodies over which they have no unilateral control. The new nationalism which has arisen in the past three decades, therefore, found its neo-Hegelian “other” not in other nations, but in the international institutions themselves. People at the local and national levels saw the international order’s devotion to immigration, free trade, and open borders as, above all, a danger to their “indivisible sovereignty.”

This opposition to the concept of an “international community” is what unites all the new nationalist parties of the far right—and the far left—against the European Union. Hence Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s flouting of EU law; Britain’s suicidal attempt to “take back the country;” Turkish leader Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s rejection of any attempt on the part of the “international community” to limit his authority as an affront to his country’s sovereignty; and Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO, on the EU, and on virtually all international trade agreements. All, he argues, challenge the right of what he called recently “this Great Sovereign Nation” to act unilaterally. “Internationalism”—or, as it used to be called, “cosmopolitanism”—is the new enemy at the gates in all its forms, cultural, legal, racial, political, economic.

In a sense, this always has been so. Cosmopolitans have always despised nationalists, and nationalists have always hated cosmopolitans. But whereas liberal nationalism was an attempt by the world’s Mazzinis to replace cosmopolitanism with a new vibrant international order of nation-states, the new-old neo-Hegelian nationalism seeks simply to destroy it altogether. If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest.

Climate change, perhaps?

The post Why the ‘New Nationalism’ Can Only Flourish in Conflict appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

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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.

“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.

The post The Cure for Your #Regrexit Democratic Hangover appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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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On June 1, after more than five months of discussion with the Polish government elected in October 2015, the European Commission issued an opinion expressing its concerns over the new conservative government’s packing of the country’s constitutional tribunal and changes to the public broadcasting law.

Compared to Venezuela, which has suffered from a steady two-decade-long erosion of its democratic checks and balances, Poland’s peccadilloes are pretty small stuff. Since his assumption of the presidency in 1999, former president Hugo Chávez and then his handpicked successor Nicolas Maduro (elected with a slim 1.5 percent margin in 2013 after Chávez died from cancer), have diminished democratic institutions, politicized the state, harassed and imprisoned political opponents, and closed down independent media.

In 2004 Chávez and the Chavista-dominated National Assembly expanded the supreme court from 20 to 32 judges, packing it with partisan jurists. Lower courts have suffered the same fate. Opposition mayors and local governments found their funds cut and the creation of parallel pro-Chávez offices showered with resources from the once-flush (back when oil prices were high) federal government. Independent media were shuttered for trumped up reasons or passed to mysterious pro-government owners in inflated buyouts. Independent journalists and political opposition leaders have been harassed and attacked by the government and by state-created private militias, such as La Piedrita, los Tupamaros, Simón Bolívar y Alexis Vive. In 2014, the sexual assault of a university student sparked national protests that led to more than 40 deaths, the arrest of more than 200 opposition politicians and well-documented charges of arbitrary detentions and torture by state security forces.

There appeared a slight ray of hope in December 2015 when the unified opposition bloc—defying a biased electoral system—won what appeared to be a supermajority of two-thirds of the National Assembly.

The hope, though, was short lived. Before the new legislature could be seated, the pro-government electoral commission refused to accept the victories of the deputies from Amazonas province (three of whom were opposition and one Chavista), alleging pre-electoral violations, thus denying the opposition its super majority. And since the new legislature has been sworn in, the reduced opposition majority has seen its bills rejected by the supreme court and the executive branch, including a bill to provide amnesty to political prisoners and one for a presidential recall referendum.

Today, there are more than 100 political prisoners in Venezuelan jails, including one of the leading opposition figures, Leopoldo López, who was indicted for sending “subliminal messages”—yes, you read that right—to supporters allegedly inciting them to violence. López has since been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. At the same time, the economy is in shambles, with GDP expected to contract by more than 7 percent this year and inflation expected to hit four digits.

The only constitutional means of resolving the country’s deep polarization and the unpopularity of the government is a recall referendum triggered by 20 percent of voters. Earlier this year, citizens collected several million signatures requesting such a referendum. The effort, though, has been mocked by the president and vice president and the decision of whether to allow citizens to continue to collect more signatures is in the hands of the solidly pro-government electoral commission (the Comision National Electoral—CNE).

Venezuela’s slide into authoritarianism has elicited hardly a collective peep from the region’s many multilateral organizations, almost all of them purporting to defend democracy and human rights. In fact, Latin America and the Caribbean may have the distinction of being the most heavily networked, multilateralized, summit-oriented region in the world. There’s the 70-year-old Organization of American States (OAS) and its Inter-American system of human rights, the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR), and the more recent creations of the Union of South American Republics (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)—all of which count Venezuela as a member, and are supposedly committed to defending and protecting democracy and human rights.

There were two reasons for the muted response to Venezuela’s drift away from democratic rule. First, all of those hemispheric democracy clauses are couched in a traditional respect for national sovereignty and an aversion to intervention in the affairs of other countries. When there were any rumblings of concern over the situation in Venezuela or the need for credible election monitors, Chávez, Maduro, and their allies in the region immediately raised the flag of national sovereignty and accused critics of being interventionists doing the bidding of the gringos. Unfortunately, the long history of U.S. interference in the region and a misstep by the Bush administration to embrace an anti-Chávez coup in 2002 gave the Venezuelan government fertile ground for those fevered conspiracy claims.

Luis Almagro during his inauguration as OAS Secretary General in 2015.

But it wasn’t always this way. Not long ago the OAS established a series of unambiguous resolutions to safeguard democracy on the continent. The first, Resolution 1080, adopted in 1991, committed the organization to convene its permanent council in the event of an interruption of the constitutional order (read: a coup) for a country’s possible suspension from the organization, and the imposition of sanctions by the other member states. The OAS has acted on this resolution in Haiti (1991), Peru (1992), Guatemala (1993), and Paraguay (1996).

Over time it became clear that the greatest threat to democracy was no longer the old bugaboo of military golpes but the erosion of democracy from within—of elected presidents steamrolling the checks and balances of power, intimidating free media, and shutting out opponents. In response, in 2001 the OAS approved the Democratic Charter, recommitting the regional body to the same steps as Resolution 1080, but this time defining democracy as representative democracy and detailing the set of transgressions, such as an attack on freedoms of the press, that violated representative democracy.

Problem was, the lines are fuzzy, and it has been difficult to determine at what point measures that diminish the independence of media or the judiciary should trigger collective action. The Charter’s target transgressions lacked the clarity of a coup, and the OAS, as a body of presidentially-appointed ambassadors, tends to favor executives. Indeed, until now the Charter has only been invoked in cases of the removal of presidents. This is made all the more difficult by OAS rules and tradition that the body’s decisions need to be made, if not unanimously, then by consensus—meaning that any government that may be sympathetic or tied to a rogue elected president could effectively veto any concerted regional action.

The emergence of leftist governments across the region in the aughts, elected after Chávez in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere on the continent, also added a solid bloc of support for Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” government within the OAS and other multinational bodies. Whether through ideological affinity with Chávez’s self proclaimed 21st Century government or a deep-seated resistance to anything that appeared to be pro-American interventionism, this new crop of left-of-center governments turned a blind eye to the transgressions of the Venezuelan government. At the same time, through an oil-giveaway program to the energy-strapped countries of the Caribbean and Central American, the Venezuelan government has bought for itself a loyal bloc of opponents to any efforts to punish the regime for its autocratic transgressions. The few tepid efforts to raise a debate over human rights violations in Venezuela were effectively stymied by Venezuela’s Caribbean client states and allies, ranging from the Dominican Republic to Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Lucia and every country in between in the Caribbean Basin—each of them, by the way with one vote in the Permanent Council giving the bloc 18 votes.

The regional consensus that led to Resolution 1080 and the Democratic Charter has frayed, due to a weak definition of representative democracy, ideological feuds, and greed. Nothing meaningful has ever been done by the OAS to raise concerns about the democratic deterioration in Venezuela.

That is until now. Political changes throughout the region—the election of a conservative president in Argentina eager to redirect his country’s foreign policy away from Caracas and closer to Washington, as well as the crisis within Brazil’s ruling Labor Party—have undercut regional support, and tolerance, for Venezuela’s anti-democratic antics. At the OAS, meanwhile, a more aggressive Secretary General, Uruguay’s former foreign minister Luis Almagro, has also begun to speak out. In the lead up to Venezuela’s 2015 legislative elections, Almagro raised his voice over allegations of voter intimidation and vote-buying. His concerns provoked the usual name-calling by Maduro (who referred to him as “trash”), but helped turn global attention to the pre-electoral violations occurring and may very well have ensured a relatively balanced ensuing electoral process.

The OAS leader hasn’t backed down since. Last month, Almagro complained about the escalation of state violence in Venezuela and the growing possibility that the government was going to thwart the recall referendum. Maduro responded with the usual vitriol, accusing the OAS Secretary General of being an agent of the CIA, provoking from Almagro a surprisingly sharp open letter that not only opened with the direct, undiplomatic statement “I am not a CIA agent,” but also accused Maduro of attempting to deny “the people that [referendum] vote,” making him “just another petty dictator, like so many this hemisphere has had.”

In this public and not-so-diplomatic spat, Almagro exercised his authority under Article 20 of the Democratic Charter to convene the permanent council to consider sanctioning Venezuela for its anti-democratic actions. Almagro, in sharp contrast to his immediate predecessors leading the OAS, had aggressively asserted his power to invoke the Charter. This week, the organization’s Permanent Council will hold a long-overdue discussion on the state of democracy in Venezuela, but any further action will need to overcome the still solid bloc of Venezuela’s allies in the region (such as Bolivia and Ecuador), and the institutional quirk that requires full consensus on any action.

Will regional shifts and the leadership of a clearly strong-willed (and possibly thin-skinned) secretary general be enough to finally force a course reversal to shore up the hemisphere’s collective commitment to democracy, and to do something about Venezuela’s downward spiral? Whatever the outcome of the OAS Permanent Council’s discussions this week, the damage has already been done. Nearly 20 years of Chavismo have left Venezuela on the brink of becoming a failed state, home to one of the worst economies in the world; armed forces deeply involved in narcotics trafficking; federal, state, and local governments effectively gutted; and a deeply polarized population.

Ultimately, it will be Venezuela’s neighbors that will have to deal with the inevitable chaotic aftermath of this period. But imagine what could have been if they, like the EU’s actions regarding Poland, had started challenging Venezuela early on over its rule-of-law distress signals.

It may or may not be too late to shore up Venezuela’s democracy, but there is still time to renew this hemisphere’s commitment to democratic principles and set limits on flagrantly undemocratic and destabilizing behavior in the future.

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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.

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The “yes” vote won by a sizable margin—67 percent “yes” to 33 percent “no”—but the referendum was itself a sign of persistent problems in the U.K.-Europe relationship. Last month, following another shift in power, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron announced a second referendum, to be held in June. The British government is recommending that the U.K. should remain within the EU, but some politicians, organizations, and everyday citizens are making the case that the nation should stand on its own.

What would the U.K. look like if a Brexit actually happened? How would people’s lives change—and how would European countries treat their newly distanced neighbor? In advance of a March 10 Zócalo/Democracy International event “What Does Britain Owe Europe?”, we asked four experts on Britain’s place in Europe: How would the U.K. be different if it left the European Union?

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In November 1990, Margaret Thatcher had been the Conservative Party’s leader for 15 years and had never lost a general election. Indeed, as her strongest supporters never tired of pointing out, she’d won three of them on the trot since her first victory in 1979. Getting rid of the Iron Lady half way through the parliament, they argued, was madness. There must, therefore, be an ulterior motive. That motive, as they saw it, was Europe.

The Tories had always been ambivalent about the U.K.’s participation in the European integration project. It was their government, reflecting centuries of British imperial thinking about not getting mired in continental affairs, which had shown no interest in joining the original six member states when they created the European Economic Community back in 1957. And although it was a Conservative government that belatedly signed the U.K. up to the project in 1973—mainly to gain greater access to growing European markets—many MPs and activists remained unconvinced. To them, the economic gains could never compensate for the inevitable sacrifice of the country’s sovereignty and the loss of its cultural identity as an English-speaking island nation.

Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party two years after the U.K. joined the EEC, in 1975—a year in which the country held its first referendum on membership and one in which she played an active part in persuading the country to vote yes to Europe, believing like most of her colleagues and the vast majority of businesses (especially big businesses) that the U.K. would otherwise kiss goodbye to a continent’s worth of economic opportunities. She was a powerful advocate in part because she herself hailed from precisely the kind of provincial, “middle-England,” “Main Street” middle class which, with its belief in Britain’s innate superiority and its hatred of anything which smacked of waste, was innately suspicious of a project that involved increased cooperation with foreigners and was already a byword for boondoggles.

As the U.K.’s prime minister after 1979, her initial doubts about Europe, however, seemed to be confined to what she regarded as Britain’s outsized contribution to the European Community’s budget. The result became the substantial (and symbolic) rebate which she—half Boudica, half Britannia—famously forced out of her fellow heads of government in 1984.

Two years after that, however, Thatcher signed the Single European Act—a treaty which made serious moves towards a truly free market in the EC. As such, it was very much in keeping with her economic philosophy. But there was a price to pay: The U.K., like other member states, surrendered its right to veto any European legislation it didn’t like in favor of a complicated system of qualified majority voting. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, regret soon set in, particularly when it became obvious to Thatcher that other countries wanted to move much further than she was prepared to contemplate towards a federal multinational entity, complete with supposedly progressive social and labor market policies (such as the setting of maximum hours for workers). These struck Thatcher as nothing less than an attempt to reintroduce socialism into Britain by the back door. Worse, Thatcher considered these same countries’ clamor for a single currency as completely out of the question—the loss of the pound sterling would amount to a surrender, a negation of national sovereignty.

It was at that point, at least according to her diehard supporters in the Conservative Party, that her less “Euroskeptic” Cabinet colleagues chose to stab her in the back. They had previously strong-armed her, despite her doubts, into locking the pound sterling into what amounted to a nascent currency union, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM); but she insisted that there was no going further.

Supposedly convinced that they could no longer work with a prime minister only barely on-board and bad-mouthing her own government’s economic and foreign policy, her Cabinet colleagues took advantage of Tory MPs’ mounting panic about the party’s dire opinion poll ratings to ditch her in favor of a less fervently “Euroskeptic” leader. From that moment on, the Conservatives’ long-standing ambivalence about Europe—an ambivalence Thatcher had in some ways always embodied—became a full-blown schism. It has continued to destabilize the party since.

Promising to keep the country “at the very heart of Europe,” Thatcher’s less strident successor as both party leader and prime minister, John Major, helped negotiate the 1991 Maastricht Treaty which, notwithstanding the opt-out he secured allowing the U.K. to avoid signing up to the single currency, turned the European Community (EC) into the European Union (EU)—a step on the road, according to skeptics, to a “federal superstate.” Thatcher, free from the constraints of office, shared their analysis but kept her powder dry—until the 1992 general election, when Major managed to win an unprecedented fourth consecutive term for the Conservatives. That was when his luck, and her patience, finally ran out.

Within months of the 1992 election, the pound sterling, which had come under pressure from speculators convinced (quite rightly) that it was overpriced relative to other currencies in the ERM, was forced out of the system, resulting in a humiliating devaluation, economic dislocation, and the sudden loss of the Tories’ lead over the opposition Labor Party. Thatcher (now in the House of Lords) then chose to make it increasingly obvious that she was deeply disappointed in her successor, and that she herself would never have signed Maastricht. Those Tory MPs who considered themselves keepers of the Thatcherite flame immediately took their icon at her word and made the Treaty’s ratification process, and many other parliamentary votes on matters European, an absolute misery for Major.

After the 1997 election, during which Major’s Conservatives were roundly beaten by Labor’s Tony Blair, they needed to choose a new leader. Thatcher eventually made her support for one of several Euroskeptic candidates public, not least because she was determined, like all of her ardent fans in the parliamentary party, to do whatever she could to prevent a “Europhile” candidate carrying on from where Major left off. She, and they, got what they wanted, and although the winner, William Hague, proved a huge disappointment in electoral terms, he (and the two equally Thatcherite and equally unsuccessful Tories who succeeded him) moved the party farther and farther in a Euroskeptic direction. By the time the current Conservative leader, David Cameron, took over in 2005, the die was well and truly cast.

Cameron wanted to bring the Tories back into the center ground of British politics but at the same time he needed to keep the Thatcherites on board. The obvious way to do this was to maintain the party’s antipathy towards Brussels and all its works. The party went into the 2010 election promising that any further transfer of power to Brussels would automatically trigger a referendum, and that he would see how the U.K. might “repatriate” some of the powers that had previously been transferred to the EU.

Once in government after May 2010, Cameron hoped that the honoring of these promises would be enough to enable him to “turn down the volume” on Europe. How wrong he was. Appeasement rarely succeeds—as, ironically enough, Thatcher herself could have told him. Euroskeptics now made up the vast bulk of the parliamentary Conservative Party and wanted more of the kind of Brussels-bashing the Iron Lady had provided back in the day, not least because they were worried about losing support to the increasingly popular, ultra-skeptical United Kingdom Independence Party. Accordingly, a couple of months before Thatcher died in April 2013, Cameron finally promised his party and the country an in-out referendum on the U.K.’s membership in the EU.

And now Cameron is stuck trying to pull off the tricky balancing act, which Thatcher only managed at the height of her powers, of being simultaneously critical and supportive of the U.K.’s membership of the EU. Thatcher, having cast her long shadow on the Tories’ handling of the European issue for decades, would doubtless have been pleased at the arrival of a milestone vote. Whether her acolytes will get the result they firmly believe she would have wanted remains to be seen.

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