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Another way to think about Brexit (this Brexit) is that it’s a grand experiment in conceptual time travel or perhaps even the creation of an alternative reality.
It is a turning back of the clocks. But not to the actual past (because that’s not possible) and also not to the past (because the desired past did not exist) but to one single element of this notional past.
The capacity for national independence. By which we mean not independence by being sovereign (after all we’re all both sovereign and not sovereign) but independence in the sense of being able to make decisions unilaterally but without any multilateral consequences.
Leaving the transition period with or without a deal on Jan 1 is a good example. It is almost inconceivable that any country would choose to entirely change their terms of trade with their closest trading partner from one day to the next.
And yet here we are. And why? Because while there may be some attention paid to ‘road bumps’ etc, the belief is that this huge decision will have no material long term consequences.
The belief and the desire (the desire is very strong) is that nation states do, can and should act unilaterally. So fervent is this desire that it blinds its adherents to the actual nature of the world.
You do not have to have studied international relations or have done any academic work at all to understand that the world exists in a dynamic set of complex relationships that combine elements of self interest and interdependence.
There is no unfettered and consequence free unilateralism. Not for you and me. Not for corporates. Not for governments. Not for nation states. Not for anyone or anything.
The Wire provides a great (and wonderfully humanistic) metaphor. The drug dealers are motivated by self interest. It’s a tough world. Only the ruthless survive.
But they exist in a symbiotic relationship with the police. If drug dealing wasn’t illegal it wouldn’t be so be so lucrative. And a disturbance (an unbalancing of the order) in one realm or another can have dramatic consequences in the other.
The statue debate is the reverse metaphor. Statue supporters (not all of them, obviously) have an association so intense with statues that they see them as actually factually representative not just of the past but the static continuation of the past to the present.
