Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming Full and Equal Suffrage from the Political Cartel

BREXIT AND DEMOCRACY

Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel

by Gerry Dorrian

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Copyright Gerry Dorrian 2017

Researched and written by Gerry Dorrian

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ISBN 978-1-9997560-0-0

Picture credits:

Chapter 3: First use of The European Union; Image of a page from Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe by Charles-Irenée Castel de Saint-Pierre (1713), courtesy of Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Chapter 5: Anschluss referendum ballot-paper, public domain (Germany).

The graphic in Chapter 15 explains the cover image.

Table of contents

Preface

Quotes

Introduction

Part 1: Antecedents of the European integration Process

Chapter 1: Unity as foundational myth

Chapter 2: The Franco-Prussian War

Chapter 3: War and fascism

Chapter 4: Supra-national pan-Germanism

Chapter 5: Totalitarian convergence

Chapter 6: Heidegger’s diaspora

Part 2: European integration in re-action: the closed society and its beneficiaries

Chapter 7: The return of convergence

Chapter 8: British entry to the Common Market

Chapter 9: Currency and convergence

Chapter 10: Towards catastrophe via crisis

Chapter 11: The UK political cartel tightens

Chapter 12: Was the 2005 general election rigged?

Chapter 13: The road to referendum

Chapter 14: The EU referendum: tragedy and backlash

Chapter 15: The relationship between democracy and fascism

Footnotes

Bibliography

Preface

This tract has come out of some five years of investigating the state of democracy in Britain in particular and Europe in general, after I started analysing general election figures and found an anomaly for 2005. I have written on this before and, if anybody has bought Brexit and Democracy specifically to find out more about this issue, you could go straight to Chapter 12, Was the 2005 general election rigged? Or if you would like more contextual information, you could start at Chapter 11, The UK political cartel tightens or even Chapter 10, Towards catastrophe via crisis.

I have written Brexit and Democracy to be either read through or dipped into. There’s a lot of philosophy in Chapter 6, Heidegger’s diaspora, so you might decide to skip it, but you might find trying to tackle it helps you understand the European integration process and related British politics, especially as far as authenticity and inauthenticity is concerned.

If you like reading footnotes, which in this work are only references to other works, please bear with my repetition of some references as, this being an ebook, I realise not everybody might want to work their way up a chain of op cits before returning to their previous position in the text.

Whatever your views on European integration, I hope you find Brexit and Democracy a useful resource. But, more than that, I hope you enjoy it.

Gerry Dorrian

Cambridge, June 2017

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Quotes

It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.

John Stuart Mill, 1861 [1]

I know that you [English] have the art of sticking to the form, and more than the form, of the old traditions while starting them in new directions. While becoming an extremely democratic country, you have kept the form, and more than the form, of an hereditary aristocracy and an hereditary monarchy. It may be that even if your constitution becomes more dictatorial you will preserve the form, and something more than the form, of the parliamentary system.

Élie Halévy, 1934 [2]

Europe finds itself still divided and indeed has never advanced beyond the unity achieved by the legions of the Roman Empire. It has vigorously resisted the attempts made successively by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler to achieve unity by force…Certainly Europe was never, since ancient Greek thinkers first conceived it as a continent and tried to map it, either culturally homogenous or politically one.

W Gordon East, 1962 [3]

There is no chance of a possible EU democracy because there is no European people, no demos. No demos, no democracy – quite simple.

Karlheinz Nunreither, 2000 [4]

The whole European integration experiment, from the Coal and Steel Community on, has been a political wolf dressed in economic sheep’s clothing.

Willem H Buiter, 2010 [5]

Membership of the EU makes Britain literally un-governable, in the sense that no administration elected by the people can govern the country.

Steve Hilton, 2015 [6]

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Introduction

Was the 2005 general election rigged?

Since this is a tract about the opposition between democracy and the anti-democratic practices of European integration, let me put that another way. Once the European Constitution had floundered and sunk, were some British politicians so determined to steer the country to a point where a treaty – the Lisbon Treaty – would cement EU countries into a superstate, that they found it expedient to ensure that democracy would be unable to interfere with that process?

Due to the deep roots of both democracy and forces opposing democracy in Britain and European countries this is far from the first issue I will examine, but it is the issue on which this work hinges.

As the quote from Elie Halévy in the preceding section indicates, a feudal society which evolves into a democracy can still retain the outward appearances of feudalism, such as a monarchy and an aristocratic hierarchy. Likewise, a democratic society that degrades into post-democratic practices like political cartelisation and deliberative democracy can still retain the appurtenances of democracy such as elections and a Parliament; a post-democratic society can keep its visible processes looking something like democracy. When one civilisation dies the next inhabits its shell like a hermit crab, so that the outward appearance does not always give away what resides within.

In Britain’s case the degradation of democracy is not necessarily terminal. We were ruled by a political cartel which had Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat wings which was first cracked in 2012 by what I will call the Rotherham incident. Then in 2015 a fresh democratic infusion arrived in the House of Commons in the shape of fifty-six Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs, occasioning an avalanche of democracy which saw the EU membership referendum first promised in 2004, a change of Prime Minister and a snap general election. The SNP seem at present to be considering entering a new iteration of the political cartel minus the Conservative Party, but time will tell.

The anti-democracy protests which followed the Brexit victory were instructive in that they evinced a lack of basic democratic literacy among many who saw themselves as not being subject to the basic law of full and equal suffrage, the principle summed up by Jeremy Bentham as everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one. This is the only principle on which full and equal suffrage – everybody having an equal vote – can work, and it is the principle that was embedded into British politics when Clement Attlee’s Labour government enacted the Representation of the People Act 1948.

A desire to undo the Brexit victory seems to stem from a yearning after the foundational myth of European unity which in reality pertained for little more than a generation over a thousand years ago. Councils in subsequent centuries such as the Peace of Augsberg and the Peace of Westphalia simply attempted to restore some sort of order as regions individuated towards nation-states. After the Terreur was used to close down a sort of democracy brought in by the French Revolution, the desire among statespeople and philosophers for a prelapsarian unity became more urgent, hence the demand by Louis de Bonald for a terrible and salutary crisis to bring Europe together again.

Even after three decades of such crises tortured Enlightenment civilisation to death on the battlefields of Europe, the founders of the postwar European integration process, inhabiting the husk of Enlightenment civilisation, relied on leveraging crises to bring their dream about in the teeth of Europe’s democracies. However, the obscene manner of Enlightenment civilisation’s death and the deaths of tens of millions of people in war, desease and genocide, ensured that the Enlightenment’s legacy is full and equal suffrage: a demand that every citizen who might suffer as a result of the state’s deeds or misdeeds has a say in the running of that state equal to every other citizen.

I wish to show that the rise of jackboots fascism in the first half of the twentieth century was no accident: fascism arose as a relational opposite to the democracy it was created to strangle. I also wish to demonstrate that later means to subvert democracy in the form of full and equal suffrage, from trans-generational Gramscian strategies to cartelisation, deliberative democracy and epistocracy, are delivered in soft shoes and rounded edges but are no less fascistic.

However the political cartel might reformulate, we need to capitalise on the avalanche of democracy that started in 2015 and ride it back to a level ground for all, where each citizen has an equal vote because each citizen, although endowed with a different set of skills from each other citizen, has an equal capacity to suffer from the misdeeds of statespeople who have grown contemptuous of the ballot-box.

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Part 1

Antecedents of the European integration process

Chapter 1: Unity as foundational myth

Integration of countries both within and outwith Europe has long been seen as desirable in some quarters as a return to a foundational myth of a united Europe and world, and equally as long viewed with suspicion in others for that reason.

The 1555 Peace of Augsberg broke the Papacy’s supranational hegemony with the principle of cujus regio, ejus religio [1] – a nation’s ruler would choose whether the nation’s faith was Catholicism or the Augsburg Confession (Lutheranism) – and started the momentum that would lead to the philosophy of national sovereignty and the reality of the nation state. However, the Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to a century of religious wars throughout Europe after the Reformation, is fixed in the popular imagination as the starting-point of the modern nation-state [2].

It’s no accident, I believe, that in 1642, shortly before Westphalia and building on the Reformation notion of each person in an independent relation to their god, Descartes published his Meditations, containing his personal declaration of independence: his cogito, I think therefore I am. [3] No longer was each person defined solely by the station in life they were born into and society’s expectations of their prospects, but also by the fact that each individual was endowed with a sentience that usually needed schooling to develop, but which was emergent from them by virtue of their human-ness. The cogito, which emerged in the crucible of Renaissance philosophy as church-centred Medieval philosophy collapsed under its own petrified weight, was largely responsible for the founding of the school of Modern philosophy, [4] and under the growing momentum of personal freedom democracy under full and equal suffrage became a serious aspiration, being finally achieved in the UK when Clement Attlee’s Labour government outlawed plural voting with the Representation of the People Act 1948. But, as I will show later, it is no accident that Europe was convulsed by a wave of fascism in the decades preceding the achievement of this milestone, as ruling classes and corporations felt the threat of the light of democracy shining upon them, a light they are at this moment trying to extinguish.

Benedict de Spinoza wrote in 1677, while democracy was still an aspiration, that the individual transferred his or her sovereignty to the majority of a democratic society, [5] in a democratic twist on his and Descarte’s contemporary Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that society was a collective of automata, individuality not being part of Hobbes’ agenda, that constituted an artificial man which had ceded its sovereignty to the ruler or ruling body, called by Hobbes the Leviathan. [6] In 1916, the majoritarian principle of democracy was still seen as the gold standard, and still is by many; the phenomenologist Max Scheler asserted that the majority constructed the necessary legal fiction of the common will, as the majority comes closest to the ideal of "the fortuitously identical volitional content of all as individuals". [7] By this time Enlightenment civilisation had entered its death struggles, but it was those struggles, lasting from 1914-1945, that would ensure full and equal suffrage was the Enlightenment’s legacy, because politicians could no longer run from the principle that anybody who might suffer from the deeds or misdeeds of their state had a right to a say in the direction of that state equal to everybody else’s say.

The attribution of sundering a perceived primordial European unity to the Peace of Westphalia can be put down to Montesquieu, who wrote The Spirit of Laws to mark the centenary of the 1648 agreement. In this he calls for one single state, of which all the societies of earth are members, [8] reflecting a nostalgia for a peaceful, unified world which never existed in the first place. Showing the longevity of the idea, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey, who had seen fierce fighting in Italy during the Second World War, yearned in the immediate postwar period for a single community throughout the world [9] long before John Lennon imagined it, and long before British Prime Minister Tony Blair enactioned his vision of a post-Westphalian international liberalism. [10]

An exceptionalism pertaining to England, in particular among the British lands, was recognised by the supranational power of the time, the Church, when Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to Canterbury to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons even as the Church’s secular hegemony collapsed with the disintegration of the Roman Empire’s power in 596AD. [11] With the central power recovered, this exceptionalism empowered William the Conqueror to write to Gregory VII in 1075 to inform him that just as his predecessors, the Saxon kings, had not done fealty to the pontiff, neither would he. [12] In the twelfth century English kings found themselves under increasing pressure from a Church that was grabbing ever more temporal powers and consolidating them centrally, [13] so much so that Pope Honorius III would try to force England and France into closer union in 1216-1217, while the French Prince Louis was in the course of invading England and being defeated; this was not because Honorius cared about the English or French nations or their inhabitants, but because he was putting together the Fifth Crusade. [14]

I am critiquing the centralised structure of the Catholic Church in its quondam role as a supranational power, not the Holy See in its contemporary incarnation as a religious institution, and it would be interesting to learn about the historical exceptionalism of other countries presently under the supranational yoke of the European Union, as I am showing that of the British nation I currently live in. What I wish to show is that European – or further – union is a foundational myth that in reality existed for less than fifty years, in the form of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire in western and central Europe.

In 800 Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor and by his death the Empire comprised most of Western and some of Eastern Europe, but the unified empire only lasted another generation. Charlemagne’s heir, Louis the Pious, died in 840, and the latter’s heir, Louis the German, split the empire three ways in 843 between himself and his two