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| The Bridge at Mostar - after destruction |
I have been reading my friend David Wilson’s
autobiographical book Left Field.
For some years David, who founded the charity War Child, was Director of
the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar – and a significant portion of the book
revolves around his extraordinary work in the war-torn city. During the conflict, the ancient bridge
at Mostar became a symbol of all that went wrong – it had been built by the
Ottoman Turks, and was destroyed by Croat forces. Andras Riedlmayer has termed
the destruction an act of "killing memory", in which evidence of a
shared cultural heritage and peaceful co-existence were deliberately destroyed.
It’s a timely moment to recall the terror that resulted from
the break-up of the Yugoslavian Federation in the 1990s. Massacres, ethnic cleansing, a land
laid waste, a refugee crisis that gave a foretaste of today’s. Neighbour
turning on neighbour and friend on friend because of perceived differences in
ethnicity, religion or culture.
No-one would call Tito’s Yugoslavia an ideal polity – but the
nationalist mayhem that resulted from its dissolution showed humanity at its
worst. Refugees from that time tell us that things started to go wrong when
people began to say “Let’s segregate all the Muslims”. Right here - in modern Europe.
I am, of course, offering all this as a warning against June
23rd. If, as now
appears very possible, Britain votes to leave the EU, that will signal the triumph
of a dangerous fiction, called the nation state, over the undeniable truth of
common humanity. Britain’s retreat
into splendid isolation would almost certainly spell the end of the European
project: Marine Le Pen would demand a copycat referendum in France, and all
across the continent the forces of the radical right, already roused in their
paranoid, xenophobic response to the refugee crisis, would continue to assert
“national” identities and to close their borders against perceived “outsiders”
– desperate people who have already fled violence, persecution and the
devastation of their lands. I don’t believe Donald Tusk was exaggerating when he
said that this thing called Brexit could lead in time to the collapse of
Western civilization.
Much of the rhetoric of the Leave campaign has been about
how “we” need to assert control over “our” borders. Setting aside the fact that recent visits to airports and
stations suggest the UK borders are now more tightly controlled than they have
ever been – allow me to pose a more basic question here. Who are “we”? Just what group of people is it that is supposed to be
asserting some fundamental right to deny others access to a particular
territory and the cultural and social life that takes place within it? Just what is the identity that the curb
on immigration is supposed to protect?
What is the Britishness that will somehow be rejuvenated by the
abandonment of Europe, the retreat into splendid isolation?
Isolationist positions tend to be the prerogative of
imperial nations. Spain was a
closed society from the time of Philip II onwards, even though it also ruled
vast swathes of the globe. China
didn’t just become an isolated state under Mao Zedong – it had another five
centuries of it prior to that.
Today, an isolationist stance is also key to Donald Trump’s idea of
foreign policy: build a wall at your border, ban all Muslims, and make America
great again. Of course, such
isolation only goes in one direction – imperial powers isolate their
“homelands” from immigrants and foreign influences, at the same time as they
regard other territories as theirs to plunder for natural resources, cheap
labour, and holidays in the sun.
Perhaps this is why Boris Johnson and his coterie are so fond of evoking
the spirits of Churchill and Thatcher: what they are in fact attempting to do
is to place themselves in Britain’s imperialist tradition. Perhaps this is also
why, astonishingly, so many Black and Asian Britons, the descendants of
immigrants, appear to be flirting with a Leave vote: in a Fanonian style, they
have taken on the perceived identity of what was once the imperial ruler of
their ancestral homelands. They
don’t seem to have noticed that the age of Empire is long over.
Or is it? There
are, after all, territories within the United Kingdom that retain their links
to Westminster because of the imperial project. There’s been much speculation about the direction Scotland
might take in the event of a Leave vote: if Scotland votes overwhelmingly
Remain and England votes Leave, that will be yet further proof that these are
now two distinct countries. But
the bigger question is probably Northern Ireland. For some time now, the uneasy peace of the province has been
secured by an easing of the border with the Republic – a “United Kingdom”
outside the EU would not be able to sustain this. I remember very clearly John Hume, the great, unsung
architect of the current peace process, comparing his vision for the future of
the whole island of Ireland to the European model: a space in which it was
still perfectly possible for the French still to be French and the Germans
German – but impossible for them to be at war. He was emphatically right: no state of war has every existed
between EU members. Brexit is a
sure-fire way to overturn the comparative stability that has been achieved in
the Irish question. Who are “we” –
defending our “Britishness” – if the result of “our” action is to set in motion
a violent conflict on what is still legally “our” territory?
It could be like Bosnia. It really could.
I write this at the end of two intense, stimulating and
energising days in Brussels, where I have been part of the EU’s Structured Dialogue process around the role of Culture in the Refugee Crisis. People who have read this blog in the
past may recall that Border Crossings has also worked on EU policy before, as
part of the Platform for Intercultural Europe. The EU is often accused of being undemocratic – but never in
Britain have I encountered processes of consultation like these. In Britain, policy is made on the hoof
to suit the needs of the next sound-bite.
And this has to stop. It is
turning our democracy into an idiot’s circus. The referendum itself was a knee-jerk response to a few
electoral successes for UKIP – and what a sorry mess it has turned our to
be.
The EU is not perfect – of course it isn’t. I have, in my time, sat in a Brussels
office with a German accountant attempting to make sense of invoices in
Chinese, as a result of onerous accounting processes around EU funding. But Britain seems to have decided that
how well or badly something is managed is all that matters – to the point where
it matters more than the thing itself.
For some time now, Arts Council England has privileged the cult of
management over artistic vision – and a similar myopia is now filtering the gaze
we cast upon the EU. If something
has management failings, those can be sorted out – what we should be judging is
the idea itself. And the idea of
the EU is something humanitarian, welcoming, enabling, and peace-making. It is one of the hopes of humanity. We would be insane to throw it
away.
Insane, insane, insane.
