Jun 25, 2016 12:45 AM
Why Britain Left
http://www.theatlantic.com/international...eu/488597/
EXCERPT: [...] The force that turned Britain away from the European Union was the greatest mass migration since perhaps the Anglo-Saxon invasion. 630,000 foreign nationals settled in Britain in the single year 2015. Britain’s population has grown from 57 million in 1990 to 65 million in 2015, despite a native birth rate that’s now below replacement. On Britain’s present course, the population would top 70 million within another decade, half of that growth immigration-driven.
British population growth is not generally perceived to benefit British-born people. Migration stresses schools, hospitals, and above all, housing. The median house price in London already amounts to 12 times the median local salary. Rich migrants outbid British buyers for the best properties; poor migrants are willing to crowd more densely into a dwelling than British-born people are accustomed to tolerating.
This migration has been driven both by British membership in the European Union and by Britain’s own policy: The flow of immigration to the U.K. is almost exactly evenly divided between EU and non-EU immigration. And more is to come, from both sources: Much of the huge surge of Middle Eastern and North African migrants to continental Europe since 2013 seems certain to arrive in Britain; as Prime Minister David Cameron likes to point out, Britain has created more jobs since 2010 than all the rest of the EU combined.
The June 23 vote represents a huge popular rebellion against a future in which British people feel increasingly crowded within—and even crowded out of—their own country: More than 200,000 British-born people leave the U.K. every year for brighter futures abroad, in Australia above all, the United States in second place.
Now the American question:
By uncanny coincidence, EU referendum day in the U.K. coincided with the U.S. Supreme Court decision that halts President Obama’s program of executive amnesty for young illegal immigrants and their parents, an estimated 5 million people. American policymakers—like their U.K. and EU counterparts—have taken for granted that an open global economy implies (and even requires) the mass migration of people. Yet this same mass migration is generating populist, nativist reactions that threaten that same open economy: The anti-EU vote in the U.K., the Donald Trump campaign for president in the United States.
Is it possible that leaders and elites had it all wrong? If they’re to save the open global economy, maybe they need to protect their populations better against globalization’s most unwelcome consequences—of which mass migration is the very least welcome of them all?
If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants, with uncountable millions more to come. Merkel’s catastrophically negative example is...
Britain Brexits. Good
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/d...exit-good/
EXCERPT: [...] I had generally hoped that the Leave side would win. This, simply because a Leave victory would be a strong repudiation of the elites, and in particular the unaccountable internationalists in Brussels. As I type this, I’m watching a British political analyst on CNN describe this as a stunning discrediting of the experts, all of whom thought Remain would win. Christiane Amanpour has been kind of losing it.
[...] This is a staggering judgment on the arrogance of the international political, economic, and media elites in general, and of the Eurocrats in Brussels in particular. Here’s Tim Stanley, writing in the Telegraph:
I’ve just watched Christiane Amanpour very nearly spontaneously combust [...] while interviewing UKIP politician Ray Finch. [...] O Fortuna, truly you have spun the wheel justly this time...
Out with globalism, in with nationalism
http://www.theatlantic.com/international...re/488612/
EXCERPT: In 2005, Mark Leonard published a book called "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century". The moment was ripe for such an argument. The European Union had just embarked on the greatest expansion in its history, welcoming 10 new members, and headlines heralded the sprouting of “a European identity” and the emergence of a “United States of Europe.” Heck, Greece even admitted that it had fudged economic data in its zeal to join the European currency union.
In the book, Leonard took issue with the notion that China or India could soon eclipse America as a world power. “Those countries suffer from the same problems as the United States: they are large, nationalistic nation states in an era of globalisation,” he wrote. “The European Union is leading a revolutionary transformation of the nature of power that in just 50 years has transformed a continent from total war to perpetual peace. By building a network of power—that binds states together with a market, common institutions, and international law—rather than a hierarchical nation-state, it is increasingly writing the rules for the 21st Century.”
On Friday morning, shortly after Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union, Leonard struck a starkly different tone. For the EU, Britain’s exit, or “Brexit,” risks “reinforcing a cycle of disintegration,” he wrote. “Member states like Poland and Hungary, as well as opposition parties like Marine Le Pen’s Front National [in France], could launch copy-cat moves. … If other crises—a euro [currency] crisis, a Schengen [passport-free movement] crisis, a Trump presidency—get layered on top of Brexit, there is a real danger of collapse.”
How, in just 10 years, did we go from the European Century to European Collapse? Leonard, the London-based director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is one of the closest and most thoughtful observers of Britain’s complex relationship with Europe. On Friday, after a sleepless night of tracking the knife-edge vote, he spoke with me about what went wrong with the European project, what’s behind Britain’s exit, and what comes next.
An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows....
http://www.theatlantic.com/international...eu/488597/
EXCERPT: [...] The force that turned Britain away from the European Union was the greatest mass migration since perhaps the Anglo-Saxon invasion. 630,000 foreign nationals settled in Britain in the single year 2015. Britain’s population has grown from 57 million in 1990 to 65 million in 2015, despite a native birth rate that’s now below replacement. On Britain’s present course, the population would top 70 million within another decade, half of that growth immigration-driven.
British population growth is not generally perceived to benefit British-born people. Migration stresses schools, hospitals, and above all, housing. The median house price in London already amounts to 12 times the median local salary. Rich migrants outbid British buyers for the best properties; poor migrants are willing to crowd more densely into a dwelling than British-born people are accustomed to tolerating.
This migration has been driven both by British membership in the European Union and by Britain’s own policy: The flow of immigration to the U.K. is almost exactly evenly divided between EU and non-EU immigration. And more is to come, from both sources: Much of the huge surge of Middle Eastern and North African migrants to continental Europe since 2013 seems certain to arrive in Britain; as Prime Minister David Cameron likes to point out, Britain has created more jobs since 2010 than all the rest of the EU combined.
The June 23 vote represents a huge popular rebellion against a future in which British people feel increasingly crowded within—and even crowded out of—their own country: More than 200,000 British-born people leave the U.K. every year for brighter futures abroad, in Australia above all, the United States in second place.
Now the American question:
By uncanny coincidence, EU referendum day in the U.K. coincided with the U.S. Supreme Court decision that halts President Obama’s program of executive amnesty for young illegal immigrants and their parents, an estimated 5 million people. American policymakers—like their U.K. and EU counterparts—have taken for granted that an open global economy implies (and even requires) the mass migration of people. Yet this same mass migration is generating populist, nativist reactions that threaten that same open economy: The anti-EU vote in the U.K., the Donald Trump campaign for president in the United States.
Is it possible that leaders and elites had it all wrong? If they’re to save the open global economy, maybe they need to protect their populations better against globalization’s most unwelcome consequences—of which mass migration is the very least welcome of them all?
If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants, with uncountable millions more to come. Merkel’s catastrophically negative example is...
Britain Brexits. Good
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/d...exit-good/
EXCERPT: [...] I had generally hoped that the Leave side would win. This, simply because a Leave victory would be a strong repudiation of the elites, and in particular the unaccountable internationalists in Brussels. As I type this, I’m watching a British political analyst on CNN describe this as a stunning discrediting of the experts, all of whom thought Remain would win. Christiane Amanpour has been kind of losing it.
[...] This is a staggering judgment on the arrogance of the international political, economic, and media elites in general, and of the Eurocrats in Brussels in particular. Here’s Tim Stanley, writing in the Telegraph:
Quote:It’s impossible to overstate how remarkable this victory is. Twenty years ago, Euroscepticism was a backbench Tory rebellion and a political cult. It was a dispute located firmly on the Right with little appeal to Labour voters. It took Ukip to drag it into the centre of political life – given momentum by the issue of immigration – and slowly it has emerged as a lightning rod for anti-establishment activism.
I’ve just watched Christiane Amanpour very nearly spontaneously combust [...] while interviewing UKIP politician Ray Finch. [...] O Fortuna, truly you have spun the wheel justly this time...
Out with globalism, in with nationalism
http://www.theatlantic.com/international...re/488612/
EXCERPT: In 2005, Mark Leonard published a book called "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century". The moment was ripe for such an argument. The European Union had just embarked on the greatest expansion in its history, welcoming 10 new members, and headlines heralded the sprouting of “a European identity” and the emergence of a “United States of Europe.” Heck, Greece even admitted that it had fudged economic data in its zeal to join the European currency union.
In the book, Leonard took issue with the notion that China or India could soon eclipse America as a world power. “Those countries suffer from the same problems as the United States: they are large, nationalistic nation states in an era of globalisation,” he wrote. “The European Union is leading a revolutionary transformation of the nature of power that in just 50 years has transformed a continent from total war to perpetual peace. By building a network of power—that binds states together with a market, common institutions, and international law—rather than a hierarchical nation-state, it is increasingly writing the rules for the 21st Century.”
On Friday morning, shortly after Britain’s shock vote to leave the European Union, Leonard struck a starkly different tone. For the EU, Britain’s exit, or “Brexit,” risks “reinforcing a cycle of disintegration,” he wrote. “Member states like Poland and Hungary, as well as opposition parties like Marine Le Pen’s Front National [in France], could launch copy-cat moves. … If other crises—a euro [currency] crisis, a Schengen [passport-free movement] crisis, a Trump presidency—get layered on top of Brexit, there is a real danger of collapse.”
How, in just 10 years, did we go from the European Century to European Collapse? Leonard, the London-based director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is one of the closest and most thoughtful observers of Britain’s complex relationship with Europe. On Friday, after a sleepless night of tracking the knife-edge vote, he spoke with me about what went wrong with the European project, what’s behind Britain’s exit, and what comes next.
An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows....