The uk’s surprise 52:48 vote to leave the European Union in the 23 June 2016 referendum has sent the country, for the first time in its history, stumbling onto a new foreign-policy course against the wishes of its ruling class, not to mention its intelligentsia and much of its youth. It also represents a signal defeat for the eu, a reversal of the Union’s sixty-year run of expansion and integration. In London, the immediate response was at once solipsistic and civilizational, the event cast in epochal terms. ‘After the initial numbed shock has come sadness, alarm and, at times, despair’, wrote Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. ‘The saddest of hours,’ agreed Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, for whom the vote was ‘probably the most disastrous single event in British history since the Second World War.’ For Timothy Garton Ash, it was ‘a body blow to the West, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies.’ Facebook, in one account, had become a Wailing Wall, where nightmares of xenophobia reigned—Britons having ‘voted to make foreigner-hunting legal, if not an actual duty.’ Popular responses on the Continent were more sanguine; only a third of Germans and a quarter of the French were at all unhappy about Brexit.footnote¹

The prevailing explanation, as heads have cooled, is that Cameron lost his gamble on the referendum because he underestimated the ressentiment of globalization’s losers. Though other factors were involved, the Brexit vote was above all ‘a revolt against globalization’ for Philip Stephens in the Financial Times. For the Economist, it revealed ‘a sharply polarized country, with a metropolitan elite that likes globalization and an angry working class that does not’—‘Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has been the anti-globalists’ biggest prize’. As such, it was part of the same phenomenon as support for Trump: on both sides of the Atlantic, voters were revolting against the same economic policies, opined Lawrence Summers. For the ft, ‘Trump and Brexit feed off the same anger’.footnote² The political lesson was boiled down to immigration. ‘The Brexit vote gave us a very clear message, that we couldn’t allow freedom of movement to continue as it had done hitherto’, Theresa May announced, ten days before she replaced Cameron as Prime Minister. A chorus of New Labour voices agreed. From farther left, Paul Mason concurred: ‘Free movement is over.’footnote³

Immigration was a central theme in the referendum, and that globalization creates ‘winners and losers’, as the euphemism has it, is beyond dispute. Yet the globalization thesis as it stands is inadequate as an explanation. For one thing, ‘globalization’—or ‘openness’, as the Economist now prefers to say—bleaches out the crisis-ridden turbulence of contemporary capitalism; a vote held during the equally ‘open’ bubble years could have had a different outcome. For another, it conceals important differences between, say, British, German, Polish and Italian growth models. It is also suspiciously self-serving: neither the decisions of the eu’s political leaders nor the course set by uk rulers comes in for scrutiny—just as in the us version, the ‘globalization’s losers’ explanation for Trump’s support absolves the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton from criticism. Analytically, globalization is an inadequate proxy for European integration, which in some respects runs against it: the eu represents a regional concentration of wealth and power, outstripping the us in gdp and population, while holding open the possibility of a multi-polar world, in contrast to the ‘flat earth’ of unipolar globalization—even if it is today a secondary empire to Washington’s. Finally, the globalization thesis misses the ways in which the Brexit referendum was shaped by contingent decisions, responding to a narrow party-political logic, which interacted with sharpening social and economic polarizations across the European continent. Between solipsisms and global abstractions, mid-range conceptual tools may be more useful for a proportionate understanding of the uk’s vote and the outcomes both for Britain and for Europe; nationalisms, classes, political parties and inter-state relations are all in play.

Party alignments, national identities and class conflict were very differently configured when the country joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Class struggles were at their height, with militant miners, engineering workers and Clydeside shipbuilders setting the temper of the times, against a backdrop of recession and inflation. In Northern Ireland, English soldiers confronted the civil-rights movement. For Heath’s Conservative government, battling to impose wage controls, eec entry offered a path to liberal modernization, a new sense of purpose. For Labour, trying to rally its troops in the aftermath of its dismal 1964–70 experience in office, opposing a ‘sell-out’ to Brussels was an easy option, even if Wilson’s government had pursued entry itself in the 1960s. Analysing this conjuncture in a special number of New Left Review, Tom Nairn contrasted Britain’s position as sick man of Europe to investment-led French modernization and German industrial growth. The exception was the uk’s financial sector: having cornered the business for offshore-dollar trades, the City of London enjoyed, as the Economist then put it, a ‘giant-pigmy relationship’ to Europe’s capital markets, its stock exchange worth as much as those of the six eec member states put together.footnote⁴

Internationally, the catalyst for the uk’s entry was Nixon’s declaration of the fiat-dollar system; for France, the strategic leader of the Six, America’s move towards ‘economic nationalism’ needed to be met by an autonomous European alternative, for which the City would provide ballast. De Gaulle, with his implacable ‘Non’ to uk entry, had departed the stage. In May 1971, Pompidou gave Heath the green light. While Labour railed at the threat to British parliamentary sovereignty, the Tory party conference—‘backwoods squires, retired businessmen, flogging colonels, flower-hatted ladies from the Women’s Institutes—united in frenzied applause for Heath’s historic “success” in Brussels.’footnote⁵ For English elites, Europe seemed to promise not only a pathway out of economic and diplomatic decline, but escape from the claustrophobic sense of ‘frustration and littleness’ felt by an ex-imperialist class. At the same time, Nairn argued that the British left was wrong to regard the European Community as ‘more capitalist’ than its own society. That the eec was the product and servant of the European capitalist system went without saying, but it should be treated in the same fashion as, say, the agricultural revolution or industrialization—an aspect of capitalist development with contradictory features, both cruel and progressive, rather than a pathological one, like fascism or ultra-imperialism: ‘We know the eec is intended to strengthen the sinews and world-position of European capitalism and its ruling classes. We don’t know whether or how it may also strengthen the position and enlarge the real possibilities of the European working classes.’footnote⁶

The contrasts with 2016 are stark enough. The Europe of the Six, with its finely calibrated cultural and economic equilibria, hedged by the ‘enabling constraints’ of the Cold War, has been replaced by a skewed pyramid of 27 highly unequal states, wielding disproportionate powers, of whom a majority have their monetary policy set externally by a non-accountable central bank. The level of funding that had been allocated to Ireland and the poorer Mediterranean states in the 1980s was pared back when it came to integrating the ex-Comecon countries. In 2004, Polish median wages were only 25 per cent of those in the uk, Germany or France.footnote⁷ The transnational sinews of working-class solidarity were stronger in the 1930s—or even in the 1860s, at the time of the First International—than within the 500-million strong eu. Meanwhile the claim that it ‘kept the peace in Europe’, under nato’s armour-plating, was qualified not just by its continuing history of colonial warfare and military occupation (Britain in Ireland, France in Algeria, Turkey in Cyprus, Four Powers in Germany) and its active role in the bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia, but by the part played by European arms and meddling in the widening arc of devastation that now surrounds it: Ukraine, the Balkans, southeast Turkey, Mesopotamia, Yemen, Libya, Mali and a broad swathe of the Sahel.

Beneath the eu’s overarching institutions, nationally determined growth models have worsened its imbalances. Faced with rising competition from China, Germany fought to retain its high-end industrial export sector, at the expense of wage growth and domestic consumption, while Italy’s smaller manufacturing firms struggled to stay afloat. Spain, Greece and Ireland relied on credit-driven expansion, the ex-Comecon states on supplying a cheap pool of non-unionized labour and lax environmental controls. As for the uk: once Thatcherism and recession had broken its unions, shut its mines and shipyards and dismantled its smoke-stack industries, the focus fell on pumping up its external trade in financial and business services to cater to the globalization bubble. Higher than average female labour-force participation in the expanding service sector increased demand for cheap, low-end labour, met by workers from the Subcontinent and, after 2004, from Eastern Europe. As a special reward for ‘New Europe’ countries that backed the invasion of Iraq, Blair offered immediate access to uk jobs, overriding agreements for a slower phase-in. When median wages began to stagnate at around the same time, while upper incomes and house prices continued to soar, domestic consumption was propped up by household loans and tax credits.