This is kinda interesting, but everybody's got some ethnonationals. Texas has ethnonationals and Texas doesn't even have a proper ethnicity.
*Everybody's got some kind of autarchic separatist thing going on, the problem is when you try to get away with it, and you belatedly realize how many guys you thought were "us" are actually somebody else. Looks like Brexitania is gonna get Brexit done, and this unsettled and feverish article is all about Scotland and Ireland.
*I wonder what the end game is for this, because of course this isn't England's imaginary psychotic malady, it's all over the place and they're just among the avant-garde of going for it. We're looking at some kinda globalization=of-balkanization, but even the Balkans can't break into teensy bits; two big chunks of them are in the EU, and the rest of 'em might be functionally Russian or Chinese by the end of the decade. "Take back control" in what kind of world, exactly? The Westphalian Order was never just national, it was always imperial.
*There's gonna be a decade of the twenty-twenties of watching this stuff play out, while also the landscapes are drowning and on fire. Feeling better about it own your head because you feel less passionately English this week, that's probably not gonna solve much.
They just don't wanna be European and they wanna be something else
There is a great lie peddled about the referendum: that it expressed the will of the British people. The pattern of voting showed up a colossal divergence between England, with its Welsh appendage, on the one hand, and Scotland and Northern Ireland on the other.
This was far more significant than any division between ‘metropolitan elites’ and ‘those left behind by globalisation’. Are there no elites in Edinburgh or Belfast? Is no one left behind in the Scottish or Irish hinterlands? Even if such a division is present across the UK, and indeed the whole of the Western world, and it plainly is, why only in England did it express itself as so powerful a revulsion from the EU?
To explain the referendum result as a ‘howl of pain at austerity’ is a pious flight from reality. It is to ignore, to cover over again, the wound, festering below the threshold of public consciousness for two generations, which the referendum opened up to the air.
Those who voted Leave in the referendum were not voting about globalisation or stagnating living standards or austerity and declining welfare payments, they were voting about the EU, and it is condescension to pretend otherwise. But they were not being asked by the Leave campaign to express a preference for a particular rationally argued and practically feasible economic and political alternative to membership of the EU – that is evident, for none was offered before the referendum and none has emerged since. They were being asked to express an emotion about membership, and the English, but not the Irish or Scots, felt so urgent a need to express it that they threw reason and practicality to the winds.
The emotion central to the Leave campaign was the fear of what is alien, and this trumped the Remainers’ Project Fear-of-wholly-foreseeable-damage. The true Project Fear was the Leave party’s unrelenting presentation of the EU as a lethal threat to national identity, indeed as the stranger and enemy who had already stolen it: give us back our country, they said, our sovereignty, our £350m a week, let us control our borders, let our population not be swamped by immigrants or our high streets by Polish shops – and to vote against the EU was to vote to recover what we had lost. The voting pattern, however, revealed that appeal to that emotion, and that vision of the EU, worked only in England.
Europhobia was shown by the referendum to be a specifically English psychosis...
