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the great collapse: Anti-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside Parliament, in Westminster, central London on Saturday. In the wake of Britain's choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence. nyt
Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?
Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.
Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in West Asia are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.
Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.
Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.
Now Britain symbolises the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the EU weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict – even as nationalism is surging again.
“It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H Daalder, a former US representative to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”
The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the IMF.
Even as European leaders held a flurry of meetings Saturday to weigh a response to Britain’s departure, President Xi Jinping of China welcomed President Vladimir Putin of Russia to Beijing for a brief state visit. More than China, Russia is an outlier to the US-led international system, and Putin — at best a wary partner of China, which itself has severe economic challenges — in recent years has worked to divide and destabilise Europe.
“Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian. “The unhappy English have delivered a body blow to the West, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies to which England has in the past contributed so much.”
The end of Pax Americana is not a new theme. Predictions of US decline were rampant after the global economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, amid parallel predictions of the dawning of a new Chinese century.
But the US economy steadily recovered, if imperfectly, while China has unnerved many of its Asian neighbours with a newly aggressive foreign policy. Chinese overreach opened a path for renewed US engagement in Asia, the fastest-growing region in the world, as President Barack Obama called for a “pivot” to Asia.
Analysts disagree on whether this pivot signalled a declining US interest in European affairs and contributed to the Continent’s current problems. Part of the Obama administration’s rationale was to extricate the US from decades of costly involvement in West Asia at a time when that region was in upheaval.
There, the breakdown of the postwar political order has been more fundamental and violent than in Europe. The uprisings of the Arab Spring erupted from widespread frustrations with stagnant, autocratic politics and economic lethargy. But these rebellions failed to yield stable governments, and the borders drawn by Europeans a century ago in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been rendered largely irrelevant.
“Here, we have hyper-centralised, homogeneous, authoritarian states which, when facing these transformations, just exploded,” Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut said.
Curbing refugee flow
And those explosions were not contained within West Asia. Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilising Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically.
Before the refugee crisis, the EU was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than one million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilising event in Europe’s recent history.
European countries erected border fences despite the bloc’s system of open internal borders. Populist parties raged against immigrants. Britain was relatively insulated, yet British politicians campaigning to leave the EU depicted an island under siege, mixing the very different issue of immigration from other EU states with the perceived threat from an influx of poor Muslims.
This anti-immigrant strain twinned with the economic anxieties of many Britons who felt left out of the global economy to drive support for the country going its own way.
In the wake of Britain’s choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence.
Germany, though, has been reluctant to play a diplomatic and military role commensurate with its economic heft. Ever mindful of its Nazi past, Germany often wraps its policies in the mantle of Europe and has developed a pacifist instinct that is a poor fit with the expectations that it must now lead.
“There is no point beating about the bush,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said on Friday. Europe has reached “a turning point” and “more and more often, we encounter basic doubts” about ever-greater union.
Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders and ideologies around the globe.
Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration. Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in West Asia are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism. China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous. Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.
Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining as never before to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.
Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security and economic prosperity.
Now Britain symbolises the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the EU weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy. It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict – even as nationalism is surging again.
“It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H Daalder, a former US representative to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”
The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the IMF.
Even as European leaders held a flurry of meetings Saturday to weigh a response to Britain’s departure, President Xi Jinping of China welcomed President Vladimir Putin of Russia to Beijing for a brief state visit. More than China, Russia is an outlier to the US-led international system, and Putin — at best a wary partner of China, which itself has severe economic challenges — in recent years has worked to divide and destabilise Europe.
“Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian. “The unhappy English have delivered a body blow to the West, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies to which England has in the past contributed so much.”
The end of Pax Americana is not a new theme. Predictions of US decline were rampant after the global economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, amid parallel predictions of the dawning of a new Chinese century.
But the US economy steadily recovered, if imperfectly, while China has unnerved many of its Asian neighbours with a newly aggressive foreign policy. Chinese overreach opened a path for renewed US engagement in Asia, the fastest-growing region in the world, as President Barack Obama called for a “pivot” to Asia.
Analysts disagree on whether this pivot signalled a declining US interest in European affairs and contributed to the Continent’s current problems. Part of the Obama administration’s rationale was to extricate the US from decades of costly involvement in West Asia at a time when that region was in upheaval.
There, the breakdown of the postwar political order has been more fundamental and violent than in Europe. The uprisings of the Arab Spring erupted from widespread frustrations with stagnant, autocratic politics and economic lethargy. But these rebellions failed to yield stable governments, and the borders drawn by Europeans a century ago in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been rendered largely irrelevant.
“Here, we have hyper-centralised, homogeneous, authoritarian states which, when facing these transformations, just exploded,” Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut said.
Curbing refugee flow
And those explosions were not contained within West Asia. Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilising Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically.
Before the refugee crisis, the EU was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than one million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilising event in Europe’s recent history.
European countries erected border fences despite the bloc’s system of open internal borders. Populist parties raged against immigrants. Britain was relatively insulated, yet British politicians campaigning to leave the EU depicted an island under siege, mixing the very different issue of immigration from other EU states with the perceived threat from an influx of poor Muslims.
This anti-immigrant strain twinned with the economic anxieties of many Britons who felt left out of the global economy to drive support for the country going its own way.
In the wake of Britain’s choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence.
Germany, though, has been reluctant to play a diplomatic and military role commensurate with its economic heft. Ever mindful of its Nazi past, Germany often wraps its policies in the mantle of Europe and has developed a pacifist instinct that is a poor fit with the expectations that it must now lead.
“There is no point beating about the bush,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said on Friday. Europe has reached “a turning point” and “more and more often, we encounter basic doubts” about ever-greater union.
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