France’s burkini psychodrama and the “Anglo-Saxons”

Protest at the French embassy, London, August 25th
(photo credit: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)

[update below] [2nd update below]

It is now mid September and the burkini brouhaha, which had France in a state of hysteria the entire month of August, has yet to abate. The story doesn’t end, in large part because it’s about much more than the burkini. The brouhaha over this banal article of clothing is merely the latest installment in the never-ending obsession in France over the visibility of Islam and public display of religious identity by a minority of French Muslims—and with the very real threat of terrorism by Muslims fueling public fear and anxiety, and offering irresistible temptations for demagogic politicians to capitalize on this.

The reaction outside of France as to what’s happening here is also attracting attention, notably the New York Times article of September 2nd that gave voice to hijab-wearing Muslim women in France and Belgium, and that the Times had the excellent idea to translate into French, guaranteeing that it would be widely read in France. And it was, getting under a lot of peoples’ skins in the process, including that of PM Manuel Valls—a warrior for laïcité de combat who wants the burkini banned—who felt compelled to respond to the NYT, penning a piece in Le Huffington Post (September 5th)—translated into English under the title “In France, women are free“—which, in turn, provoked a rejoinder from the NYT but also from Le Monde, which referred to Valls’s “charge bancale” (shaky accusation) against the Times.

Then, last Tuesday, Libération’s Brussels correspondant Jean Quatremer unleashed a diatribe on his Libé blog against the reaction of the “Anglo-Saxons” to the burkini affair, “Burkini, voile: les racines religieuses des leçons de ‘tolérance’ anglo-saxonne,” which was followed on Wednesday morning by France Inter’s political analyst Thomas Legrand, whose daily political editorial was consecrated to the apparent “Anglo-Saxon” incomprehension of French-style laïcité: “Laïcité, la France et les Etats-Unis ne se comprennent pas.” (Oh, how nice it would be if the French could cease talking about “les Anglo-Saxons,” of reflexively throwing the United States and Great Britain—two countries that differ on a myriad of domains—into the same sack, and then seeing them as a repoussoir…).

Now Messrs. Quatremer and Legrand so happen to be among my favorite French journalists and for many years now: Quatremer for his excellent reporting on the European Union, plus other things (e.g. he was one of the first journalists to call out DSK for his unacceptable behavior toward women and denounce the omertà of his colleagues in the media on the matter); Legrand for his brilliant analyses of French politics, with which I am in full agreement 98.5% of the time. I listen to his three-minute “édito politique” every weekday morning at 7:45, and if I’m still in my beauty sleep at that moment, I catch up with it on the France Inter web site. When it comes to analyzing French politics, Legrand is the best. Point barre. These two gentlemen are my heros in French journalism. So understand my dismay in reading/listening to their above mentioned back-to-back commentaries, which were quite simply awful. Legrand’s was the worst I’ve ever heard by him and Quatremer’s was ten times worse than that. It was a disaster. As we are Facebook friends, I informed him on his comments thread last Wednesday that he was “à côté de la plaque,” “[qu’il s’est trompé] de A à Z,” and that I would take apart his piece point by point. We had a good exchange—he didn’t seem ruffled by my bad humor (though some of his FB friends were)—with me promising to respond to him at length on my blog, and him saying he looked forward to that (je lui ai dit que j’allais le faire en français, même si ça me prendrais plus de temps, mais il m’a dit qu’il n’y avait pas de problème si j’écrivais en anglais, donc j’ai mélangé les deux).

So here it is, followed by my critique of Legrand’s editorial. N.B. I write here in a fraternal spirit, as my admiration for these two gentlemen and their journalism is in no way diminished by their commentaries on this one question.

M. Quatremer writes: 

Ne nous y trompons pas : le débat va bien au-delà de la place de la religion musulmane (dans sa version islamiste) en France, les critiques étant tout aussi virulentes à l’égard de la politique française à l’égard des sectes, aucun Anglo-saxon ne comprenant pourquoi l’Église de scientologie, pour ne citer qu’elle, n’est pas reconnue comme une Église comme une autre.

M. Quatremer, you are laboring under some misconceptions here. En effet, ce que vous dites est sans fondement. First, on the Church of Scientology, with which I have been personally familiar since precisely 1973 (as Scientologists used to proselytize in public in my Chicago suburb and, in my adolescent naïveté, I would engage them in conversation): I have never—not once, ever, not a single time in my now long life—heard about an American—let alone met one—who considered the Scientologists to be anything other than a bizarre cult (en français, une secte bizarre). I guarantee you that no American who is not him or herself a Scientologist—or maybe a friend of Tom Cruise or John Travolta—considers this “church” to be a legitimate religion comme les autres. Everyone views it as a cult (une secte). When I tell my American students in Paris—niveau bac+2, en France pour un semestre d’études—about the French campaign against the Scientologists—which I have occasion to do when teaching the subject of laïcité à la française—not one expresses disapproval of the French attitude. And they all think the Scientologists are a weird cult.

So why are the Scientologists considered a religion in the US and with the US government scolding the French and Germans for their anti-Scientology campaigns? There’s a story to this. First, the one organ of the American state that may formally accord the status of a religion to a group claiming this what it is is the Internal Revenue Service (le fisc fédéral). Organized religions (les cultes) in the US have tax-exempt status, which only the IRS can accord. From the founding of the Church of Scientology until 1993, the IRS rejected the Scientologists’ repeated requests for tax-exempt status, insisting—correctly—that this so-called church was in reality a profit-making enterprise. So what the Scientologists—who are not nice people—did was to initiate an underhanded campaign of intimidation against the agents of the IRS who were handling the Scientology dossier. Ils ont lancé une guerre d’usure contre le fisc. And as the Scientologists had a lot of money—with all the Hollywood stars and other rich people they had succeeded in indoctrinating—they could and did intimidate the press and anyone else who stood in their way, via lawsuits and outright personal harassment (and engaging highly-paid lawyers when hit with lawsuits themselves). Pour avoir la paix, the IRS, in 1993, threw in the towel—il a jeté l’éponge—and gave the Scientologists the tax-exemption they had sought (it is also possible—and this is pure speculation on my part—that there may have been some quiet lobbying of the Clinton administration by personalities in the motion picture industry toward this end, with Hollywood having had close ties to both Clinton’s entourage and the Scientologists; for more on all this, see the lengthy 1997 enquête in The New York Times).

The second part of the story is the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which was cooked up by the Republican-controlled Congress of the time, enacted with a veto-proof majority, and signed into law by President Clinton. The Act made the promotion of religious freedom an objective of US foreign policy and, entre autres, obligated the State Department to submit an annual report to Congress on the state of religious freedom in every country in the world. So in conformity with the law, the US embassy in Paris has reported annually to its hierarchical superiors in Washington on the state of religious freedom in France—and noting the status in France of the Church of Scientology, recognized as a religion in the US—which the State Department has dutifully noted in turn in its obligatory report, and with the US government—conforming to the law—expressing its pro forma concerns on the matter to the French government. And with the French government taking the American letter of concern and throwing it in the poubelle—and with no one saying anything more about it.

I guarantee you, M. Quatremer, that no one in Washington or at the embassy in Paris could have cared less about the anti-Scientology lawsuits in France or the French state considering the Scientologists to be a profit-making enterprise and not a religion.

As for “virulent” critiques of France’s policy toward sectes (i.e. cults), from whom? Who has been “virulent” about this? Do you have any examples?

Again, M. Quatremer, I guarantee you that no one in Washington, London, or anywhere else in the “Anglo-Saxon” world, who is not him or herself a member of a secte, cares what happens in France on this score.

En France, les défenseurs du droit des femmes musulmanes intégristes à couvrir leur corps à la plage ou ailleurs

M. Quatremer, serait-il possible d’éviter le mot “intégriste” quand vous parlez de l’islam? Ce terme est polémique et péjoratif, et qui ne veut rien dire en ce qui concerne l’islam. Aucun spécialiste—universitaire ou journalistique—de l’islam ou des musulmans ne le utilise. Et il ne se traduit même pas en anglais (par ex., “intégrisme catholique”—which is the only legitimate use of the term—is called “Catholic traditionalism” in English).

As for Muslim (and other) women having the right to cover their bodies on the beach and elsewhere, well, that is their right, is it not? I mean, France is not only a free country but also a civilized one, which is not going to tell women what clothes they may or may or not wear when they venture out of their homes. Et on ne va certainement pas les obliger à exposer des parties de leur corps sur la plage qu’elles n’ont pas envie d’exposer. N’est-ce pas? One certainly hopes not.

Seriously, this burkini hysteria in France is completely ridiculous. It is an only-in-France affair.

C’est moins le débat sur le burkini ou le voile qui m’intéresse ici que les raisons sous-jacentes aux critiques de la presse anglo-américaine… elle a manifesté là une gigantesque incompréhension de ce qu’est le modèle français

Question: what precisely is this famous “modèle français”? The law of 1905? If this is the model you have in mind, there no “incompréhension” whatever. The 1905 has its specificities but is entirely comprehensible to any “Anglo-Saxon.”

Let us continue:

et les Français qui se sont réjouis de ces critiques n’ont pas mesuré à quel point le modèle britannique et américain est différent du nôtre, un système dont ils ne voudraient par ailleurs à aucun prix : place de la religion, liberté d’expression, relativisme culturel, autant d’éléments qu’il faut prendre en compte si l’on veut comprendre la nature profondément différente du débat en France, en Grande-Bretagne ou aux Etats-Unis.

In point of fact, the American and British “models” of church-state relations differ more from one another than the American does from the French. The United Kingdom has an official church—the Church of England—whereas in the United States of America church and state are separated. As France also separates church and state, the USA and France are on the same side and against the Brits. Les Amérloques sont plus proches aux Frenchies qu’ils ne sont aux Rosbifs… Sérieux!

D’abord, la place qu’occupe la religion dans le monde anglo-saxon est particulière : la laïcité à la française n’y existe tout simplement pas.

Ça c’est vrai. La laïcité à la française ne peut pas exister aux USA ou ailleurs, pour la simple raison qu’elle est française. La laïcité à la française ne peut exister qu’en France, de même que, par ex., la laïcité à la turque (laiklik) ne peut exister qu’en Turquie, et la laïcité à l’américaine (secularism) ne peut exister qu’aux États Unis d’Amérique. Et ainsi de suite. Les relations entre l’État et les cultes sont spécifiques à chaque pays. They are a product of each country’s history and culture.

Certes, l’État est séparé de l’Église, mais en ce sens qu’il est neutre à l’égard des religions, qu’il n’en favorise aucune en particulier. Mais, la religion est partout. Toutes les religions sont autorisées en vertu du premier amendement de 1791 : «le Congrès ne fera aucune loi qui touche l’établissement ou interdise le libre exercice d’une religion».

Religion is indeed more present in the USA, as is the overall level of religiosity in American society. But this is cultural. It has nothing to do with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution—which you cite—which defines the relationship between religion and the state. Just as Article 1 of the 1905 law—”La République assure la liberté de conscience. Elle garantit le libre exercice des cultes sous les seules restrictions édictées ci-après dans l’intérêt de l’ordre public.”—defines the relationship between the French state and religion, though does not speak to society. That French society may be non-practicing or atheist in its majority or, rather, deeply religious—as was the case for a sizable portion of Frenchmen in 1905—is immaterial in regard to the 1905 law. The 1905 law, as with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US constitution, speaks to law, not to culture. And the Establishment Clause and Article 1 of the 1905 law—the bit about “ordre public” aside—are really very similar.

Depuis 1956, la devise officielle est «in god we trust» et elle figure même sur la monnaie américaine.

This has been deemed constitutional, as it refers to god, who is common to all and not to a specific religion. Those who don’t believe in god may, for good reason, object to this. Quant à moi, en tant qu’athée—et depuis ma petite enfance, n’ayant eu aucune instruction religieuse de mes parents (athée et agnostique)—je m’en fous. La devise “In God we trust” est purement symbolique, sans conséquence aucune. Son inscription sur la monnaie me laisse totalement indifférent, comme pour le plus grand nombre d’athées outre-Atlantique. C’est du folklore américain.

Mieux, le président américain prête dans la quasi-totalité des cas serment sur la Bible (mais c’est une pratique non obligatoire).

This is a French classic, à soulever le fait que les présidents américains prêtent serment sur le Bible (quoique cette pratique, comme vous dites, n’est pas obligatoire). À propos, in 2005 I attended a colloquium in Paris, at the Palais de la Justice, on French and American conceptions of laïcité/secularism, with prominent specialists of church-state relations in the USA present, among them the well-known constitutional law professors Sanford Levinson and Marci Hamilton. During the intermission I had the opportunity to ask these two august scholars about the constitutionality of the president swearing the oath of office on the Bible. They both told me that, in their well-considered view, this did indeed violate the letter of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and certainly did its spirit. Voilà. But so long as a citizen did not file a formal lawsuit against a newly elected president doing this, there would be no jurisprudence on the question.

Résultat, même les sectes les plus extrémistes y ont droit de cité (des Mormons de l’Utah aux Amishs, en passant par les Témoins de Jéhovah, les Scientologues, etc).

What precisely is a “secte” (in English, a cult)? Juridically speaking, the term is not defined, either in France or the US. But whatever the definition of a cult—here’s one: a group calling itself a religion (a) that is small in number, (b) that is led by a guru figure with an all-powerful hold over his faithful, (c) that espouses beliefs that are far removed from the mainstream and are considered bizarre or weird by just about everyone outside the group, (d) in which members disconnect from, or outright sever relations with, persons outside the group, including their families, and (e) where there are severe costs, including threats, against members who wish to leave the group—the Mormon church—a religion with some 15 million mostly prosperous adherents worldwide—is not this (as for the Amish, this is an Anabaptist community dating from the 16th century, so please don’t call it a secte; and likewise for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who’ve been around since the 19th century). And none of these three can be qualified as “extremist,” whatever one means by this.

Vous avez certainement entendu la vieille boutade, qu’une religion est une secte qui a réussi…

On compte aux États-Unis plus de 450.000 églises et ce n’est pas demain la veille qu’un président officiellement athée pourra se faire élire.

450,000 churches in the US, a country of 320 million inhabitants? Is that a lot? In France—whose population is one-fifth of the US’s—the number of religious edifices is around 100,000. On an atheist being elected president of the United States, who knows? Ten years ago who could have imagined that a métis—seen in the USA as black—and with a middle name of Hussein could have possibly been elected president? Pas moi. Things don’t happen until they happen.

De toute façon, je parierai qu’il y aura un président athée ou areligieux aux USA avant que la France laïque n’élise un président de la République d’identité musulmane…

À cela s’ajoute le respect absolu de la liberté d’expression, pendant de la liberté religieuse totale : on peut proférer toutes les opinions même les plus extrémistes, qu’elles soient racistes, antisémites, négationnistes, etc. L’existence officielle du KKK et d’autres groupes suprématistes blancs sont là pour le montrer.

On frise la basse polémique ici. Je ne vois pas le rapport entre le KKK, groupes antisémites etc, et la question de la laïcité. M. Quatremer, vous savez pertinemment que la liberté d’expression aux USA est dans le premier amendment de la constitution et que ses paramètres sont définis par les arrêts de la Cour suprême, pas par le législateur. C’est une particularité du système américain. Ça on le sait.

En outre, la société britannique reste une société de classe strictement hiérarchisée où chacun fait ce qui lui plait dans sa classe sociale tant que l’ordre social n’est pas perturbé.

Voilà une caricature d’une autre époque de la société britannique. Ce cliché était exagéré même il y a deux générations—en fait, il a toujours été exagéré—mais en 2016?… Allons.

By the way, do you believe that class consciousness has been less important in France than in Great Britain? Or that the hierarchies in British society are steeper? Academic studies of the question (e.g. this) have, in fact, shown the opposite, that France is a more hierarchically ordered society than Great Britain. Just saying.

Enfin, outre-Manche, tout comme outre-Atlantique, la liberté d’expression y est quasi absolue, héritage de la rupture avec Rome et ses dogmes. Cette liberté a néanmoins ses limites, des limites marquées au coin de la religion : pendant longtemps, l’homosexualité a été durement réprimée (alors que la polygamie des sectes était admise)

Until very recently homosexuality was repressed everywhere, not just outre-Manche et Atlantique. As for polygamy, this has always been illegal in the United States. In this respect, the state of Utah, which was founded by the Mormons, could not be admitted into the union (which it was in 1896) until the Mormon church formally abolished polygamy.

et, comme dans une banale théocratie, les États américains n’hésitent pas à s’inviter dans le lit de leurs citoyens. Ainsi l’Alabama a interdit, jusqu’en 2014, la fellation et la sodomie, même au sein des couples hétérosexuels, la Virginie interdit de faire l’amour en pleine lumière ou encore le Dakota du Sud impose que les hôtels aient des chambres à lits jumeaux séparés de 60 centimètres si le couple réserve pour une seule nuit. Il est même précisé qu’il est formellement interdit de faire l’amour au sol, entre les deux lits… Les lois et pratiques de la plupart des États américains sur les atteintes à la pudeur n’ont rien à envier aux pays musulmans.

M. Quatremer, the United States of America is a big country—the size of a continent—with a large population and a federal system of government. And there are countless jurisdictions, each of which enacts local ordinances (arrêtés municipaux) on all sorts of things. America is a country and society where one finds everything and its opposite. Aux USA, on a tout et son contraire. In America, if you look for it, you will find it. The laws and ordinances you mention were enacted a long time ago—many in the 19th century—and most have been long forgotten. In any case, none of these silly laws in any way affects the lives of the near totality of the American population.

rappelons le scandale du Nipplegate

Ouf. I’d forgotten about that one. So what’s the point?

Allons un peu plus loin et rappelons à nos amis américains que la ségrégation à l’égard des Noirs, peuple fondateur des États-Unis d’Amérique, n’est pas si lointaine – en considérant même qu’elle ait vraiment cessé — et que les États-Unis n’ont pas hésité, il y a 70 ans à enfermer dans des camps tous les Américano-japonais parce que soupçonnés d’être génétiquement des ennemis…

Vous frisez encore la basse polémique. Je ne vois absolument pas le rapport entre la ségrégation raciale du passé, ou le traitement des Japonais-américains pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, et le sujet de départ de votre article. Où voulez-vous en venir?

Par ailleurs, si on veut parler des méfaits des USA du passé, parlons de ceux de la France aussi, par ex., de son histoire coloniale et les massacres qu’elle a commises—particulièrement en Algérie, le pays d’origine de la majorité des musulmans en France—et, tant qu’on y est, l’implication de l’État français dans la déportation des juifs pendant la guerre… Si on veut parler de l’Histoire, parlons de l’Histoire.

Better yet, let’s just stick to the subject at hand.

Si une femme musulmane française voilée affirme sans rire qu’elle est moins bien traitée qu’un chien alors qu’une autre se demande si on ne va l’obliger à «porter une lune pour être reconnue» (heu, ça n’est justement pas le but du voile ?), que pourraient dire les Afro-américains, eux, qui peuplent les geôles américaines et qui n’ont pas intérêt à avoir affaire à la police blanche s’ils ne veulent pas être abattus…

Encore la basse polémique. What do imprisoned Afro-Americans have to do with the personal opinion of one Muslim woman on the way she feels treated in France? Personally speaking, I do not see the connection.

Enfin, rappelons que ce sont les Anglo-américains qui se sont jetés à corps perdu dans des guerres contre des pays musulmans avec les résultats que l’on voit, ce qui accroît le sentiment d’une guerre entre le monde occidental et le monde musulman. Les leçons de tolérance des Américains sont assez étonnantes à l’heure où le candidat républicain, Donald Trump, veut interdire l’accès du territoire aux Musulmans, ce qui est autrement plus grave que quelques interdictions municipales du burkini. Faut-il aussi rappeler que la ville de New York s’est opposée à la construction d’une mosquée à proximité du mémorial du 11 septembre ? Et on n’a guère entendu les Anglo-saxons lorsque tous les pays d’Europe de l’Est ont refusé d’accueillir des réfugiés parce que musulmans. Mais le burkini, voilà une atteinte intolérable aux droits des femmes musulmanes…

M. Quatremer, l’article du New York Times vous a manifestement mis de mauvaise humeur, as you’re throwing everything at it but the kitchen sink (expression américaine): the Iraq war, the Ground Zero mosque, Donald Trump… Ouf!

Allez, none of these have anything to do with the subject of the NYT article.

And by the way, you are mistaken that the ville de New York opposed the Ground Zero mosque. The mayor of the time, Michael Bloomberg, strongly supported the project, as did the Manhattan borough president and many other local elected officials, plus the current mayor, Bill de Blasio.

Il ne s’agit pas de dire que le modèle français est parfait, ce qui n’est manifestement pas le cas, mais qu’il est différent : la liberté d’expression n’est pas totale (diffamation, lois mémorielles, répression du racisme et de l’antisémitisme)

Freedom of expression—a value that I think we are all deeply attached to—is not total anywhere. E.g. the Official Secrets Act in the United Kingdom is far more severe than its equivalent in the US, as are British libel laws. And commercial speech in the US is not protected by the First Amendment. As for lois mémorielles in France, I think these are terrible, as I have written on more than one occasion (if one is interested, see here, here, here, and here).

l’espace public est étroitement réglementé

Qu’est-ce que vous voulez dire par “l’espace public”? La rue? Si oui, vous avez tort, car celle-ci n’est pas étroitement réglementé en France. La France est un pays libre—et heureusement—où les gens peuvent s’habiller en public comme bon leur semble (pourvu qu’ils ne dissimulent pas le visage, bien entendu).

la séparation de l’Église et de l’État est absolue (sauf en Alsace-Moselle)

The Alsace-Moselle exception. Guyane aussi. Ce n’est pas rien. In America, there are no exceptions to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. And in France, there are several domains where the church-state separation is not total, e.g. the state subsidizing confessional schools (Loi Debré)—which is impossible in the United States—and paying for the upkeep of places of worship built before 1905 (provided for in the 1905 law). Some ten years ago, when my daughter was in collège (public) we received a letter informing us of the school’s service d’aumônerie (chaplain services). I was astonished to learn this existed in public schools in laïque France, as such is impossible in public schools in the US, laïcité à l’américaine oblige (and with, par ailleurs, public schools in the US educating a higher percentage of school children [90%] than the public system in France).

And then there’s the Bureau Central des Cultes in the Ministry of Interior. There is no such official interlocutor with organized religion at any level of the American state.

Conclusion: les États-Unis d’Amérique sont, à maints égards, plus laïque que la France. Je ne rigole pas.

l’Église catholique ayant été renvoyée dans ses églises avec une violence dont on n’a pas idée aujourd’hui

Vous exagérez. Le conflit entre les deux France autour de la loi de 1905 était âpre mais le sang n’a pas coulé dans les rues. Je ne crois pas qu’il y ait eu mort d’homme.

Même la langue française a un statut incompréhensible pour le reste du monde (c’est la seule langue admise par la Constitution et une Académie veille à sa pureté)

Many countries in the world have an official language and which is inscribed in its constitution. This is incomprehensible to no one.

Bref, invoquer l’exemple de «tolérance» anglo-américain est donc un non-sens puisqu’il ne se découpe pas en tranche et qu’elle est religieuse. Est-ce de ce modèle dont nous voulons ?

I have no idea what you’re talking about here. And believe me, no one is proposing that France exchange its precious “model” for another.

N.B.: Il y a 7,5 % de musulmans en France, le pays occidental qui en compte le plus, 4,6 % en Grande-Bretagne et 0,8 % aux Etats-Unis. Même s’ils sont à prendre avec d’infinies précautions, ces chiffres de 2011 restent intéressants, car ils montrent aussi la spécificité de la France qui accueille forte communauté non chrétienne.

France has the largest Muslim population in the Western world—in both percentage and absolute number—on account of its colonial past. Some 85-90% of Muslims in France have roots in former French colonies. And France’s complex history with its largest Muslim colony—Algeria—explains at least in part its neurotic relationship with Islam and its present Muslim population. But that’s for another discussion.

Moving on to Thomas Legrand’s editorial (if one is still with me…). It begins with a question by Patrick Cohen, followed by M. Legrand’s response:

Vous revenez sur la polémique entre le New York Times et Manuel Valls à propos de la condition réservée en France aux femmes voilées..

Oui, le quotidien new yorkais a donné la parole à des musulmanes, françaises ou vivant en France. Précisons que ce n’est pas une enquête journalistique mais un appel à témoignage. Ces femmes ont des mots très durs, parlent de ségrégation et dépeignent une société française largement hostile. Manuel Valls a réagi à cet énième portrait d’une France raciste. Il estime que ne pas avoir donné la parole à des Françaises musulmanes qui ne portent pas le voile (l’immense majorité) produit une image déformée de notre pays. Il l’a écrit au journal, qui lui a d’ailleurs répondu. Cet échange entre le 1er Ministre et le NYT montre, encore une fois, le mal que nous avons à faire comprendre à l’étranger notre rapport collectif à la religion. L’idée que l’Etat, ou même la société politique, puisse contester à la religion le droit de vouloir édicter des règles de vie sociale est une idée totalement incomprise, singulièrement dans le monde anglo-saxon.

A couple of remarks. First, if Manuel Valls and other Frenchmen who adhere to his conception of laïcité have a hard time being understood by non-French people, maybe it’s because their arguments are not good. Maybe Valls & Co are trying to defend something—the right of the state to interfere in the decisions of women as to what clothes they may or may not wear—that is, in fact, almost impossible to defend before non-Frenchmen.

What M. Legrand says here reminds me of something I read two or three years ago by the conservative American intellectual Walter Russell Mead, who, writing on his visit to Europe (including France), sighed about the difficulty he had in trying to explain to uncomprehending Europeans the attachment of Americans to the Second Amendment of the US constitution (sur les armes à feu) and, as he put it, the preference of the American people for “small government.” My reaction in reading Mead on this was that if his European interlocutors couldn’t comprehend him, maybe it was because what he was arguing was, objectively speaking, incomprehensible to European sensibilities—and, one may add, to those of a very large number of Americans too. No European who is not slightly batty can comprend the unrestricted, over-the-counter sale of semi-automatic rifles and other weapons of war such as exists in large parts of the United States, and of the legal right of people to parade around in public with these, including in schools and stores. Yes, the world-view of the National Rifle Association is indeed a difficult one to explain in Europe (and including in Anglo-Saxon Great Britain, where the consensus view is that Americans are crazy when it comes to firearms).

As for “small government,” if Mead means by this that Americans prefer that the government not organize social insurance schemes such as health insurance and old-age pensions—that this be left up to the private sector and not be obligatory—then, yes, Europeans will not understand this, and rightly so (what Mead suggested about the preferences of Americans also happens not to be true, but that’s another matter).

So back to Manuel Valls and those who support his laïcité de combat, yes, they will indeed have a difficult time explaining to non-Frenchmen that the state should have the right to tell women what clothes they may or may not wear. If you’re trying to sell an objectively shitty product—here, a conception of laïcité that is liberticide and that, in effect, discriminates against believers of one religion in particular—people are not going to buy it.

Second remark. No religion in France is “dictating the rules of social life” to anyone. M. Legrand implicitly essentializes Islam and then implies that it is telling women what to do and wear. But no one has any evidence that Muslim women in France who wear a headscarf or burkini are being ordered to do this, that anyone is telling them to do anything.

The editorial continues:

Manuel Valls est-il le mieux placé pour mener ce débat ?

En France, pourquoi pas, même si l’on peut considérer qu’il est parfois un peu raide sur le sujet, le 1er Ministre, chef de la majorité, est tout indiqué es-qualité pour donner sa définition de la laïcité, en débattre et, le cas échéant, proposer au parlement de préciser, adapter la loi dans l’esprit, du moins, du consensus patiemment établi depuis 1905. Mais ça, les Américains ne le comprennent pas. Ils sont organisés en communautés agrégées (ont la même prétention universaliste que nous) et n’admettent pas que l’Etat se mêle des préceptes d’une religion. Et pour eux, quand le chef du gouvernement se préoccupe des droits (et devoirs) des femmes musulmanes, il empiète forcément sur les libertés d’une communauté et donc sur les droits de l’Homme.

Americans organized in “communautés agrégées”… Voilà, le fameux communautarisme anglo-saxon… This is one of the most hackneyed clichés (clichés éculés) in the French ideological repertoire. It is a French fantasy. A figment of the French imagination. And a tremendous French conceit, as Frenchmen who speak about “communautarisme anglo-saxon”—which is never defined or explained—are implicitly asserting the superiority of the supposedly universal French model over that of the imagined “Anglo-Saxon.”

In fairness to the French, it should be pointed out that French academic specialists of the United States never employ the term “communautarisme”—a neologism devoid of social scientific value—in their work on the US.

Non, M. Legrand, les Américains ne sont pas organisés en “communautés agrégées.” Ils sont tous des citoyens avec les mêmes droits et devoirs. Comme en France.

Continuing

Il est très difficile d’expliquer aux Américains l’individualisme positif des Lumières, le fait que la République française ne reconnaisse qu’une seule communauté, la communauté nationale composée d’individus émancipés. C’est d’autant plus difficile qu’objectivement, tous les Français ne sont pas égaux et que la consonance des noms des citoyens discriminés n’y est pas pour rien. Qu’une religion impose, par une forme d’aliénation qui écrase le libre arbitre, un accoutrement qui cache et soumette la femme, nous choque autant que les Américains sont choqués de voir un 1er Ministre s’occuper de ces questions. Vu d’une grande partie du reste du monde, Manuel Valls est un blanc, chrétien qui veut soumettre des minorités. Je me souviens d’une discussion avec des confrères américains quand Lionel Jospin était 1er ministre. Aucun de mes interlocuteurs ne me croyait quand je leur disais que personne en France n’accordait aucune importance au fait que Lionel Jospin soit protestant et que d’ailleurs quasiment personne ne le savait. En réalité, nous n’en avons pas conscience, mais notre modèle laïc, auquel nous tenons, est une spécificité dans le monde. Il faudra trouver les moyens de le préserver, sans qu’il puisse être perçu, à l’étranger, pour ce qu’il n’est pas : un repli identitaire…

I have much to say about this passage, which has a number of problems, but will limit myself to two comments: First, if, as suggested above, a Frenchman is having difficulty in making an argument about France to educated foreigners—and particularly to those from the Western world—then maybe his argument is flawed. Maybe he needs to rethink his argument. Second, Americans are as open-minded as anyone else, and certainly as much so as Frenchmen. And intellectually speaking, they are also products of l’Âge des Lumières. Educated Americans are not so different from educated Frenchmen or other Europeans. If you explain something to them and do it well—including the story about Lionel Jospin (which I have also done many times to Americans)—they will understand you. Believe me.

C’est tout ce que j’ai à dire (pour le moment au moins).

UPDATE: In case one missed it, the best analysis that has appeared on the bigger picture of what the burkini hysteria is all about is the tribune by Farhad Khosrokhavar in Le Monde, dated September 9th, “‘Le fondamentalisme laïc fragilise la France des droits de l’homme et de la femme’.”

2nd UPDATE: Financial Times Paris bureau chief Anne-Sylvaine Chassany has a good article, dated September 15th, “France: Islam and the secular state.” The lede: “The burkini bans have exposed historic tensions that are dividing Muslims and threatening French unity.”

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Elie Wiesel, R.I.P.

Elie Wiesel at Yad Vashem, 18 December 1986 (photo: AFP/Archives/Sven Nackstrand)

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I have nothing in particular to say about him that isn’t being said by everyone else. One salutes him as a witness to the Holocaust and for the role he played in instilling the memory of this—of the greatest crime in the history of the modern world—in the collective consciousness (in Europe and North America at least). As it happens, I am presently teaching a section on the Second World War in France—in which I naturally cover the Holocaust and history of antisemitism—in a course for American undergraduates on a summer program in Paris. The day before yesterday we went to the Père Lachaise cemetery, mainly to see the steles and memorials to the wartime deportees and other victims of Nazi barbarism. We lingered for a minute at the stele to the memory of those who perished at the Auschwitz III-Monowitz Buna slave labor camp, where Elie Wiesel was deported to at age 15, before the transfer to Buchenwald in the final months of the war.

Wiesel was not without blemishes, taking regrettable positions on a number of issues, e.g. supporting the Iraq war, uncritically apologizing for Israel. As Peter Beinart, entre autres, has covered that well, I won’t. The obituary in The Forward by Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, “Elie Wiesel, the moral force who made sure we will never forget evil of Holocaust,” is worth reading. Note, in particular, Berenbaum’s discussion of Wiesel’s Francophilia

Offered French citizenship upon his arrival [in France in 1945], Wiesel did not understand the question and consequently refused the invitation. His statelessness and the intricacies of traveling without a passport was the reason he stated for becoming an American citizen a decade later. Thus, unlike many survivors who immigrated to the United States, Wiesel regarded France – and not America – as the land in which he rebuilt his life in freedom.

Those who worked with him in France remembered his intense desire to learn French and to absorb French literature and the thrills of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the purveyors of French existentialism. He had a passion for music, and earned his meager living by leading a choir and to his final days he loved to sing. He was determined to master the language. Jack Kolbert wrote that “Wiesel chose to write in French just as a convert chooses a new religion.”

Wiesel wrote: “I owe France my secular education, my language and my career as a writer… It was in France that I found compassion and humanity. It was in France that I found generosity and friendship. It was in France that I discovered the other side, the brighter side of mankind.”

Wiesel was kinder than many French Jews – and even many contemporary Frenchmen and women – who recoil at the French cooperation with the Germans in the deportation of Jewish children and the betrayal of non-citizens and even French Jews.

Like Samuel Beckett, Wiesel chose to write in his adopted language French – neither Yiddish even though Yiddish was his native tongue, nor Hebrew, the sacred tongue in which he pursued his journalistic career. And not even English, the language of the land in which he lived for more the last three score years of his life.

Also see the obituary in The New York Times by Joseph Berger.

UPDATE: I asked Holocaust scholar and friend Marc Masurovsky for his thoughts on Elie Wiesel. His response:

Elie Wiesel? He created a persona and fell into the trap of that persona. I give him tremendous credit for having put into accessible words the trauma that he survived. But I fault him for not having done enough for the cause of restitution. In fact, he never spoke out on behalf of those who sought looted art. If he had, I believe that Holocaust educational institutions would have been placed in an uncomfortable position and would have had to choose whether or not to heed his message. That’s how influential he has been and will continue to be. I do credit him for having dissented with the pre-Holocaust museum board for having presented a more spiritual vision of what a Museum should look like. But then, that’s why we don’t put poets in charge of policy and politics.

Following up

One more point. The US Holocaust Memorial Council almost threw Elie out because he threw his support behind the first iteration of the New York-based Museum for Jewish Heritage, at a time when the USHMM was not even built. Also, he supported a competing design for the museum, proposed by Israeli architects which would have been a superb memorial, devoid of content.

2nd UPDATE: The well-known gauchiste political scientist Corey Robin, playing the empêcheur de tourner en rond, has fired off a dissenting view on Elie Wiesel on his blog.

3rd UPDATE: Another Holocaust scholar friend of mine, who asked not to be named here—as he doesn’t wish to publicly debate the issue—wrote this to me about Elie Wiesel:

I deliberately didn’t post anything on Wiesel, besides the Beinart piece from Haaretz. Weisel was blind to the nature and extent of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians, and what made this so lamentable was the fact that he was the public face of defending human rights and “never again.” The letters to Weisel by Arthur Hertzburg reveal the hypocrisy or lack of moral clarity on Weisel’s part. Regarding Holocaust Studies, among specialists Weisel was regarded as a pop culture bullshit artist, claiming he had read everything there is on the subject, while remaining pretty shallow when he appeared in academic forums. Of course, there was his personal experience on which to draw, but not much more than that (despite a huge expanse of scholarly analysis). On television, he was always predictable with that studied sad, perplexed expression. One of my close friends was on the original Holocaust Museum committee, and almost quit over how much campaigning there had been to get Weisel a Nobel prize, sometimes side tracking the work at hand. During the last Gaza war, I tried to get a few of the younger Holocaust scholars to join me in addressing an open letter to Weisel, very much along the lines that Hertzberg already had laid out. No one dared to do so, though they were embarrassed by Weisel’s silence and deflecting the crucial moral issues regarding how a Jewish state, born of the Holocaust, could act with such indifference to the taking of innocent lives. That said, before the Holocaust had become a major issue and a field of study, Weisel stood almost alone in keeping the subject from passing into oblivion like so much of what had happened to civilians during World War Two. Weisel personified and embodied Jewish suffering in Europe; he was an important symbol. Eventually, in my view, his moment had passed, but he could not accommodate himself to a place outside the limelight. I tended to switch the channel whenever he was on television, rather than endure his repetitions and posturing.

4th UPDATE: Writer, business consultant, and liberal Zionist Bernard Avishai has a remembrance of Elie Wiesel in The New Yorker. Money quote

Remarkably, however, there is not a word in the Times obituary about the occupation of the Palestinian territories. That is not an oversight. To the dismay of Israeli peace activists, and their supporters abroad, who’ve seen Wiesel’s unique international stature grow over two generations—and sought his support—he rarely if ever publicly raised his voice against any Israeli actions: not the bombings of Beirut in 1982; not the subsequent massacre, by Lebanese Phalangists, at Sabra and Shatila, within the perimeter held by the Israeli Army; not the disgraceful behavior of settlers in Hebron; not the encirclement by Israeli ministries of Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood; not the obstacles placed before international efforts to restore potable water and electricity to the residents of Gaza. Many of us who admired him in our youth became increasingly impatient with his inability to see the occupation for what it was. Primo Levi, also a survivor of Auschwitz, condemned Menachem Begin’s war in Lebanon as “success achieved with an unprincipled use of arms.” For Levi, evil was too explicably human to be absolute: “I feel indignant toward those who hastily compare the Israeli generals to Nazi generals, and yet I have to admit that Begin draws such judgments on himself . . . I fear that this undertaking [in Lebanon], with its frightening cost in lives, will inflict on Judaism a degradation difficult to cure . . . I sense in myself, not without surprise, a profound emotional bond to Israel, but not to this Israel.”

5th UPDATE: Riki Lippitz, cantor of the Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange NJ—with whom I was acquainted in high school (I was, and remain, friends with her sister, Lori)—shared her personal memories of Elie Wiesel on WNYC News.

6th UPDATE: Lebanese-American writer and pundit Hussein Ibish—who is presently Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington—writes in Foreign Policy that “Elie Wiesel’s moral imagination never reached Palestine: The great writer’s humanitarianism knew no bounds — except where it met his nationalism.”

See also the op-ed in Haaretz by Simone Zimmerman and Jacob Plitman—both activists in progressive Jewish organizations—”Remembering Elie Wiesel means recognizing Palestinian suffering even if he never could.”

7th UPDATE: Two pieces on Wiesel from past years, which have been making the rounds on social media: Sara Roy, senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, “Response to Elie Wiesel [on his statement on Hamas],” in the gauchiste CounterPunch (September 9, 2014); and Arthur Hertzberg, “An open letter to Elie Wiesel [in regard to his declarations on the Intifada],” in The New York Review of Books (August 18, 1988) (h/t Eric Goldstein).

Père Lachaise cemetery , Paris

Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris

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More on the Brexit vote

London, June 24th (Photo: Mary Turner/Getty Images)

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Continuing from my previous post…

I came across just yesterday (h/t Jamie Mayerfeld) a comment by Nick Clegg—ex-Lib Dem leader and ex-Deputy PM—published in iNews on the eve of the referendum, “what you will wake up to if we vote to Leave…” This merits a copy-and-paste in its entirety

Are you still undecided? Are you someone who – pummelled by weeks of claim and counter-claim – has been left exhausted and annoyed? Have you been looking for answers, yet all you’ve encountered are insults and exaggeration?

Maybe you’re so fed up you think to hell with it, let’s throw caution to the wind and vote Brexit. Imagine, however, what happens next. Imagine how you will feel on 24 June?

Having woken on Friday to the news we’re quitting the EU, you will assume that those who persuaded you to take that leap of faith have a plan about what to do next.

So imagine how dismayed you will feel when you discover, instead, that Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson can’t agree among themselves what life outside the EU looks like? They may be united by a ferocious loathing of the EU, but they have no shared plan for the future.

So you will look towards our leaders in Westminster to sort out the mess. Instead, they argue among themselves: the Conservatives descend into a bloody leadership election; Parliament enters years of constitutional gridlock trying to extricate itself from the intricate legal stitching which binds us to the EU and gives us access to world markets.

Then you discover just how unprepared the Government is – that there simply aren’t enough trade negotiators in Whitehall, for instance, with the expertise to renegotiate 50 or so international trade accords.

As politicians bicker, you become increasingly unnerved by what’s happening in the economy, too: overseas investors take fright; money flows out of the country; our credit rating is slashed; the interest on our borrowing goes up; unemployment rises; sterling tanks; prices in the shops go up.

Nicola Sturgeon soon announces that preparations have started for a second independence referendum, claiming it is the only way to keep Scotland in the EU. And this time most commentators think that she will win.

Still, at least they will finally sort out our borders, right? After all, ending mass immigration was the Brexiteers biggest claim of all.

So imagine how you’ll feel when you discover that they don’t have a plan for that either? Some argue for a new land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to stop EU immigrants coming in through the “back door”. Others that a new border would harm the peace in Northern Ireland. The Australian points system which they advocate is no solution either – it has led to immigration levels twice as high as in the UK.

Panic starts to spread among the 1.3 million Brits who live, study and retire elsewhere in the EU. Spanish politicians start to complain about paying for public services used by British pensioners. If we start excluding Spanish doctors and nurses, why should they keep paying for our pensioners?

And then there’s that faintly queasy feeling you get when you see Donald Trump on the TV, visiting the UK on Friday, declaring his joy at the Brexit vote.

Meanwhile Angela Merkel invites President Obama to an emergency summit to discuss the fallout – the UK is, of course, excluded from what soon emerges as the new “special relationship” between the US and Germany.

The Brexiteers say you will “regain control”. But it won’t feel like that. Instead, the economy lurches to recession; there’s upheaval in Westminster; no plan to allay concerns about immigration; another referendum in Scotland; a steep slide in Britain’s standing in the world.

Our wonderful country adrift – not in control. And for what? Nigel, Michael and Boris still won’t be able to tell you why.

Talk about prescience.

On the wonderful United Kingdom adrift and no one being in control, The Economist’s Bagehot columnist posted a breathtaking commentary yesterday evening, “Britain is sailing into a storm with no one at the wheel.” No copy-and-paste here. Just click on the link and read the whole thing.

The tagline of Bagehot’s column is “Anarchy in the UK.” That this could be said about the United Kingdom is scary, indeed terrifying. If the UK—one of the most serious polities in the history of the modern world—can descend into political anarchy, then, well…

The “anarchy” in the UK is going to continue for months, no doubt about that, until David Cameron’s successor moves into 10 Downing and invokes Article 50 (thereby causing the £ to fall even further, roiling financial markets, and triggering or aggravating all sorts of other calamities). Or does not invoke it. And as I’ve been saying since last Friday, I am convinced that Article 50 will not be invoked. Brexit will finally not happen.

On the legal/constitutional side of the matter, see this nine-minute video explanation by University of Cambridge public law professor Mark Elliot, on the Public Law for Everyone website (his several posts on Brexit have been usefully collected on one page). See also the analyses by David Allen Green, who blogs on law and policy at the FT and his Jack of Kent blog: “This is what sovereignty looks like – where we are with Article 50,” and “Article 50 and the start of a political stalemate.” In the former post, he reminds us that

The referendum on EU membership was advisory not mandatory. It was deliberately drafted by Parliament not to have any legal consequences. (The last UK-wide referendum, on the AV voting system, did have such a binding provision, but this time Parliament chose not to include one).

As such, the result of the poll has no more legal standing than the result of a consultation exercise. It was a glorified opinion survey, and that is what Parliament intended it to be.

In the latter post, he says this

It would appear that no UK politician, including those who headed the Leave campaign, is in any rush to press the “red button” of the Article 50 notification. The now departing Prime Minister David Cameron says it is up to a successor. One likely successor, Boris Johnson, says there is no haste. The red button will be positioned behind a locked door in Downing Street with a protective case placed on top. It is not going to get pressed by accident, if it is ever going to get used.

And what will happen without the button being pressed may be a political phoney war. It may well be that nothing happens at all: that the referendum result just hangs there, and things carry on an institutional and supranational basis much as before.

And there are events which could make it plausible that the notification button is never pressed. (…)

One such event would be the PM deciding that Article 50 will be invoked only if approved by a vote of the House of Commons, 75% of whose current deputies are Remainers. In such a vote, MPs would necessarily be free to vote their conscience. As parliament in the UK is sovereign and reflects the will of the people—having been elected by the people—it is difficult to see how one could credibly argue that, in the event of a vote rejecting Article 50, it is countering the will of the people as expressed in an advisory referendum. And seriously, will the next PM and his/her majority in the Commons willingly provoke a crisis with Scotland and the Ulster Catholics—leading to the possible breakup of the UK—simply to respect the “will of the people” as expressed in an advisory referendum that should have never been held in the first place, and for a cause—Brexit—that the majority of MPs oppose?

On the matter of the referendum—and the institution of referenda more generally—Kenneth Rogoff had a totally excellent, must-read day after commentary in Project Syndicate, “Britain’s democratic failure.” Rogoff begins

The real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority. Given voter turnout of 70%, this meant that the leave campaign won with only 36% of eligible voters backing it.

This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence – far greater even than amending a country’s constitution (of course, the United Kingdom lacks a written one) – has been made without any appropriate checks and balances.

Does the vote have to be repeated after a year to be sure? No. Does a majority in Parliament have to support Brexit? Apparently not. Did the UK’s population really know what they were voting on? Absolutely not. Indeed, no one has any idea of the consequences, both for the UK in the global trading system, or the effect on domestic political stability. I am afraid it is not going to be a pretty picture.

Further down

Is it really enough to get 52% to vote for breakup on a rainy day?

In terms of durability and conviction of preferences, most societies place greater hurdles in the way of a couple seeking a divorce than Prime Minister David Cameron’s government did on the decision to leave the EU. Brexiteers did not invent this game; there is ample precedent, including Scotland in 2014 and Quebec in 1995. But, until now, the gun’s cylinder never stopped on the bullet. Now that it has, it is time to rethink the rules of the game.

The idea that somehow any decision reached anytime by majority rule is necessarily “democratic” is a perversion of the term. Modern democracies have evolved systems of checks and balances to protect the interests of minorities and to avoid making uninformed decisions with catastrophic consequences. The greater and more lasting the decision, the higher the hurdles.

That’s why enacting, say, a constitutional amendment generally requires clearing far higher hurdles than passing a spending bill. Yet the current international standard for breaking up a country is arguably less demanding than a vote for lowering the drinking age.

Exactly. Now one may object to Rogoff that the 50%+1 rule of the referendum was accepted by all—that this was the rule of the game—and one cannot change that rule after the fact simply because one does not like the outcome. But that still begs the question as to the legitimacy of such a plebiscite—with consequences so devastating and unanticipated by the electorate—and why it should be accorded primacy over the sovereignty of parliament and on such a critical, complex issue no less—and in a polity with no plebiscitary tradition. Even in France, where the instrument of the national referendum is in the constitution and been employed ten times over the past six decades, parliament has the final word. In France—where Bonapartist reflexes persist—an issue of constitutional import cannot be decided by referendum only; it must be approved by parliament meeting in joint session and with a three-fifths majority. In the United States, national referendums are, of course, non-existent, and with qualified majorities in effect necessary for all major pieces of legislation, not to mention obligatory for constitutional amendments and treaties. And in Germany, there is no such thing as a referendum.

The general view at the moment is that, regardless of the arguments spelled out above, it is politically inconceivable that the PM or House of Commons would go against the “will of the people” and reject Brexit, and that those who say otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking. The above-cited Michael Elliot has said so himself. But politically inconceivable is not legally inconceivable, and what appears politically inconceivable today may appear less so in four months, if/when the public mood has changed and the calamitous consequences of Brexit have become crystal clear to everyone, including UKIP voters.

On credible scenarios for Brexit not happening, there’s the one by a Guardian reader, which has been viewed by tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of readers over the past three days in social and regular media. And political scientists Richard Ned Lebow and Simon Reich—of King’s College London and Rutgers University-Newark, respectively—have a good piece in Washington Monthly on “How Britain can break from Brexit: A roadmap for how Britain can walk itself back from its disastrous referendum.”

The bottom line: If the polls in October show a portion of Leavers regretting their vote and a clear majority for Remain, Brexit will not happen. The Article 50 button will not be pushed.

More to follow.

UPDATE: In case one missed it, Guardian columnist Nick Cohen had a great commentary, dated June 25th, on the leaders of the Leave campaign, “There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove: The Brexit figureheads had no plan besides exploiting populist fears and dismissing experts who rubbished their thinking.”

Also see, ICYMI, the enquête in Politico by Tom McTague, Alex Spence, and Edward-Isaac Dovere, “How David Cameron blew it: The behind-the-scenes story of a failed campaign to keep Britain in the European Union,” which is as damning in its assessment of Jeremy Corbyn as it is of the soon-to-be former PM.

2nd UPDATE: Ben Judah, who reported for Politico on the British public mood during the campaign, has offered extensive observations on his Facebook page. Having talked with hundreds of voters in Angleterre profonde, he came away convinced that immigration and identity were central in the motivations of Leave voters

Why is this anger at ethnic change flaring of such intensity?

This is the Leave campaign I saw on the ground.

I met dozens of activists and MP from both sides.

This was how Brexiteers framed the referendum.

This was a referendum on whether or not Britain remains part of a German-controlled banker-run bureaucratic pseudo-Union that will inevitably end British democracy, roll up Britain as a state and flood the country with unlimited numbers of Turkish and Eastern European migrants, ending the England we know.

These were the consequences of such rhetoric.

As a result I met simply hundreds of devastated people horrified to have learnt thanks to the messaging of the Leave campaign that Britain was really under camouflaged German diktat.

But such sentiments don’t exist in a state of nature. They have to be stoked up

The psychological mechanism at play reminded me of a conspiracy theory. It was as if something evil and secretive had been revealed.

I have come this conclusion because I was simply incessantly told by hundreds of frightened and vulnerable people that they had only just learnt on national TV and in the tabloids that the problems of their daily lives were the result of immigration.

There was desperation among many voters, as a result of this messaging, to save the England they loved and the public services they depended on. The majority of those I met had come to believe that a tidal immigration from the European Union was imminent due to what they believed was impending Turkish membership.

This process, of tele-populists frightening a vast chunk of the population reminded me of what I have seen reporting in two other countries I know well – Russia and Ukraine. Over and over, I was told my people with poor access to quality information that their way of life was facing extinction.

To a certain extent, given the historical scale of demographic changes, this did not surprise me.

What did, however surprise me, was the less dominant but nevertheless widespread belief that Britain was somehow liberating itself from Germany. Why was this so?

Politicians in this country like to speak of the “Air War” – or political messaging from above – and the “Ground War” or political campaigning from below. The Air War, through repeated comparisons of the EU to Hitler’s Germany, made by the Air War’s commanders (Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage) implanted this idea in a poorly educated population’s head. The Ground War, which I witnessed, was direct. Activists and campaigners ceaselessly repeated that – “this was not what our fathers and grandfathers fought for” – or that – “A vote to Remain is a betrayal of our forefathers.”

Again, this Ground War worked somewhat like a conspiracy theory in the heads of those convinced by it: it had been revealed to them that Britain was under Germany rule. This is was successfully rammed home by the Air War with the slogan – “This is our independence day.”

Tele-populists. Demagogues. Playing on peoples’ fears. What a travesty it would be if those who engaged in this were rewarded with victory.

All the more reason for parliament to reject Brexit.

3rd UPDATE: Sean O’Grady—the deputy managing editor of The Independent—has a rather interesting commentary—in which one finds some of the arguments spelled out above—”Even though we voted for it, a Brexit won’t happen in the end. Here’s why.” The lede: “I voted Leave – but, looking at the reasons, it’s undeniable that we’ll stay in the European Union after all.” Money quote

Before long this uncertainty will feed through even more concretely from the slightly abstract world of financial markets and exchange rates through to jobs, savings, and, above all, the value of people’s homes, which is where most people’s wealth is stored (especially some of the less well-off voters who opted for “Leave”). This is really why I suspect Brexit won’t, in the end, come to pass – because most voters can’t afford it in the short run, whatever the longer term advantages.

FT columnist Gideon Rachman also “[does] not believe that Brexit will happen.” The lede: “There will be howls of rage, but why should extremists on both sides dictate how the story ends?” Rachman and other Brexit doubters think there will be a second referendum—that this could settle the matter—but I’m doubtful. A second vote would backhandedly legitimize the first and unless it requires a qualified majority (e.g. 60%), be too risky. Better to just go with the British tradition and assert the sovereignty of parliament.

4th UPDATE: So who will succeed David Cameron at 10 Downing Street? This guide on the BBC News website is useful. Not that I know a thing about this but somehow I don’t think it will be Boris Johnson, that a majority of Tory MPs—who are Remainers—would select him as one of the two or more candidates to be submitted to a vote of party members. And can one really see BoJo pressing the Article 50 button and then going to toe-to-toe with J-C Juncker, Angela Merkel & Co? As for the other possible candidates, Stephen Crabb could be interesting.

5th UPDATE: Andrew Moravcsik had a Facebook exchange the other day with a conservative reader, who opined that “[t]he number one reason to leave the EU is valid! British citizens should wish to grab power back from bureaucrats.” Personally speaking, I am so sick and tired of the pablum about the supposed “bloated EU bureaucracy,” which comes mainly from conservative Eurosceptics who lazily, reflexively mouth this because it’s just this notion out there that they all repeat because, well, everyone repeats it. Andy’s response set the record straight

I am sorry, but this is a laughable position, factually speaking. The bureaucrats? About 25,000 people work for the EU bureaucracy, less than a medium-sized city. The EU disposes of less than 2% of European public spending, almost all of which is non-discretionary, because the (directly elected) member states specify specific purposes in advance, and most of which is just recycled back into the same country. The EU Commission, the only body not run by directly-elected officials, has been declining in power for 30 years–thanks in part to British pressure. Only in a few areas (like banning state subsidies, which Margaret Thatcher and every UK government since, has strongly supported) does it have any autonomous powers. The all-powerful organization is the Council of Ministers and European Council, comprised of (directly elected) heads of government, and ministers from the member states. A bit of power comes from the (directly elected) Parliament. All laws are implemented nationally, not by EU officials. Finally, there is a small amount of independence for the court, as in most countries, but even here everything is interpreted and implemented by national courts. And let’s not forget that all decision-making is essentially by quasi-consensus now–not really by majority, as the formal rules state–so individual countries have considerable power to block legislation–far more than minorities in the UK. The only exception to all this is the Euro, but–because the EU respects each country’s sovereign and democratic right not to participate in the Euro and to control its own borders by not being part of Schengen–that is not an issue for the UK. Hardly a bureaucratic system! But the fact you believe it to be such is good evidence of how successful Messrs. Johnson and Gove have been at convincing people to believe the big lies.

Touché! Couldn’t have said it better myself.

6th UPDATE: See the very good analysis, “Looking behind the Brexit anger,” on Flip Chart Fairy Tales, a sharp business blog of a blogger named Rick.

See as well the very good analysis by LSE director Craig Calhoun, “Brexit is a mutiny against the cosmopolitan elite,” in Huff Post’s The World Post.

7th UPDATE: Alex White, director of country analysis at the Economist Intelligence Unit, has a sobering assessment, in 24 Twitter tweets, of what Brexit will mean.

8th UPDATE: A prominent personality in the Conservative Party gave an off-the-record talk yesterday (June 29th) to the managerial personnel of a London firm for which he is a “special adviser.” He said the following, according to an interlocutor of mine who was privy to the talk:

– The new Conservative party leader will be under immense pressure to issue the article 50 notification shortly after appointment on 9 September.
– This pressure will come both from the electorate (NB leave voters here already getting very agitated) and from other EU leaders.
– His view is that the notification will be issued within a week or so of appointment.
– Parliament will be asked to approve the notification. He cannot see Parliament not doing so given the clear mandate from the people to withdraw from the EU
– No prospect of a second referendum on the same issue.
– No prospect of a general election. No one wants a general election and the Conservative party still has four years to run so no incentive to call one. Opposition party in disarray so no incentive either.

My questions to my interlocutor:

Three questions I would put to [the speaker]: 1. Will Article 50 be invoked before or after a vote of parliament? 2. What happens if public opinion polls show a clear shift toward Remain and with Leave voters expressing regret? 3. Is it conceivable that Article 50 notification will be issued without prior concertation with Scotland?

I agree that there will be no second referendum and no early election.

His response:

His view was that the new PM will get Parliament to approve the article 50 notification. His view was also that the large majority of MPs have no appetite for doing anything other than implementing the will of the people.

I don’t think they will care about what the polls say!

On the Scotland point I’m sure there will be consultation and of course MPs from Scotland will have their say in Parliament. No doubt some will also vote against article 50 notification.

I am becoming a little less confident in my categorical assertion that there will be no Brexit.

Wait and see. On verra.

9th UPDATE: A few good pieces I’ve read today (June 30th): “The EU is democratic. It just doesn’t feel that way,” By Amanda Taub, in the NYT; “Brexit, seen from the top of Europe,” by Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker; “Brexit’s false democracy: What the vote really revealed,” by Georgetown University professor Kathleen R. McNamara, in Foreign Affairs; “Post-Brexit, the U.K. is in its worst political crisis since 1940,” by Johns Hopkins-SAIS professor By Matthias Matthijs, in WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog.

10th UPDATE: Simon Tilford, deputy director of the indispensable Centre for European Reform, has one of the best commentary-reflections on the Brexit vote that I’ve seen, “Dear EU leaders, please handle Britain with care.” In hypothesizing that the UK may seek an EEA/Norway-style arrangement with the EU—and possibly asking to rejoin the EU down the road—he submits that a “chastened, more modest Britain can emerge from this debacle…” That would be salutary indeed.

If one is interested to see what an intellectually high-powered debate on a Facebook comments thread (and its sub-threads) looks like, see this one on the Brexit, initiated June 30th, on Andrew Moravcsik’s timeline, with the participation of professors of international relations and modern Europe.

11th UPDATE: Turkuler Isiksel of Columbia University’s political science department has a sharp post (July 1st) in WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog, “The British people have spoken. But what exactly did they say?,” in which she weighs in on the pitfalls of the instrument of the referendum. Money quote:

Here’s the problem: Most referendums do not allow for specifying alternatives, giving and weighing reasons, or ranking preferences. And they give no indication of what tradeoffs the electorate is willing to tolerate, or guidance on how to proceed with the vast number of decisions that must be made to implement the people’s will.

Referendums commit leaders to a mandated outcome, regardless of the costs and consequences. And this makes it tougher for democratically elected legislatures to deliberate, compromise and forge consensus.

Phillip Gordon of the Council on Foreign Relations—who served in various foreign policy posts in the Clinton and Obama administrations—makes a similar point in a piece (July 1st) in Politico.eu, “How Britain stays in the EU.”

The main problem with the June 23 referendum was not its rules, or the false promises of the Leave campaign. The problem was that it offered a choice between a clear alternative — remaining in the European Union according to existing rules and the specific deal that David Cameron negotiated in February 2016 — or leaving it in favor of some unspecified, unknowable alternative. This was not a fair fight: Political scientists have long known that in any election between a specific candidate and a generic “Mr./Mrs. X,” the latter always wins. It is only when both sides are obliged to put up an actual and specific alternative that an accurate test of public preferences can be made.

The lede of Gordon’s piece is “If the withdrawal process is long and protracted, Brexit could very well end up getting reversed.” Inshallah.

12th UPDATE: Philip Abbot, professor emeritus of international public law at Cambridge University, has a must-read opinion piece (June 30th) in The Guardian, “Forget the politics – Brexit may be unlawful.” The lede: “Panic not: there are good reasons to believe the government’s decision to withdraw from the EU would not be legal, and that the UK is not going anywhere.” Inshallah.

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The Brexit vote

Blue = Remain, Red = Leave (credit: The New York Times)

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I’m stunned. And it is likewise with just about everyone I know who’s reacted so far on social media, not to mention countless others. It’s the near unanimous reaction by everyone who supported Remain, as it was so utterly unexpected. The collective shock and dismay on my English Twitter feed—which I checked every half hour until 5am, when the outcome was clear—was total. And the final result wasn’t even close. 52-48 is not a cliffhanger. So much for the betting markets, which had reinforced my confidence on the eve of the vote that Remain would win, even handily. And then there are the polling institutes, whose credibility will take another hit. This is disquieting. Political scientist Yascha Mounk, in a commentary on social media last night, noted that the polls had significantly underestimated the anti-establishment vote, which “should give us a healthy degree of skepticism about current U.S. polls that see Trump trailing badly.” As the parallels between the Brexit and Trump phenomenons are manifest—in the composition of their electorates, populist rejection of “elites,” economic precariousness and déclassement, hostility to immigration, nationalism—the point is well-taken.

On the Brexit (and Trump) electorate, political scientist Takis Pappas recommended last night an article in The Telegraph dated June 7th—which he called the “best pre-referendum analysis”—by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “‘Irritation and anger’ may lead to Brexit, says influential psychologist,” the psychologist being Israeli-American Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. This one is worth quoting extensively:

British voters are succumbing to impulsive gut feelings and irrational reflexes in the Brexit campaign with little regard for the enormous consequences down the road, the world’s most influential psychologist has warned.

Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli Nobel laureate and father of behavioural economics, said the referendum debate is being driven by a destructive psychological process, one that could lead to a grave misjudgment and a downward spiral for British society.

“The major impression one gets observing the debate is that the reasons for exit are clearly emotional,” he said.

“The arguments look odd: they look short-term and based on irritation and anger. These seem to be powerful enough that they may lead to Brexit”…

Further down

Professor Kahneman, who survived the Nazi occupation of France as a Jewish child in the Second World War, said the risk is that the British people will be swept along by emotion and lash out later at scapegoats if EU withdrawal proves to be a disastrous strategic error.

“They won’t regret it because regret is rare. They’ll find a way to explain what happened and blame somebody. That is the general pattern when things go wrong and people are afraid,” he said.

The refusal to face up to the implications of what is really at stake in the referendum comes as no surprise to a man imbued with deep sense of anthropological pessimism.

“Confidence has very little to do with the information on which it is based…”

His life’s work is anchored in studies showing that people are irrational. They are prone to cognitive biases and “systematic errors in thinking”, made worse by  chronic over-confidence in their own judgment – and the less intelligent they are, the more militantly certain they tend to be.

On the Trump phenomenon—which is not off the topic here—Kahneman has this

“Donald Trump is psychologically fascinating. He represents a sort of ideal in that he is very rich, and people want to be rich,” he said.
“He’s a masculine fantasy: lots of money and lots of women. He is not afraid of anything. In the context of politicians who seem to be doing nothing, it feels compelling. He looks strong. He is a bully, and people like bullies,” he said.

Prof Kahneman compares the Trump syndrome to the strange response of Americans to rape cases that he studied in the 1980s. Society has a proclivity to blame the victim – in the Trump saga: Mexicans, Muslims, and others – because people subtly conform to the idea that the rapist cannot act otherwise.

“It is a very interesting phenomenon and it has reached the point where Trump can get away with almost anything. ‘The bully is immutable, it is in his nature, that is what he does’, and once you convince people that it is normal for you to do that kind of thing, you can get away with things that nobody else could get away with,” he said.

Corrosive economic stress seems to be the backdrop for why such a large slice of American society is willing to suspend its normal judgment. He says globalisation was badly managed in favour of winners, and has left a tens of millions of losers.

“It destroyed American manufacturing and the American middle class. There are places where real incomes have dropped 30pc over the last thirty years. There used to be a concept that if you do your job, and live your life properly, things will be fine. People don’t think that any more,” he said.

The piece has other gems, so read it all here.

À propos, I liked this passage by Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, in an instant commentary last night

I don’t have any personal axe to grind on Brexit. Except for one: I am sick and tired of watching folks like Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and others appeal to the worst racial instincts of our species, only to be shushed by folks telling me that it’s not really racism driving their popularity. It’s economic angst. It’s regular folks tired of being spurned by out-of-touch elites. It’s a natural anxiety over rapid cultural change.

Maybe it’s all those things. But at its core, it’s the last stand of old people who have been frightened to death by cynical right-wing media empires and the demagogues who enable them—all of whom have based their appeals on racism as overt as anything we’ve seen in decades. It’s loathsome beyond belief, and not something I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. But that’s where we are.

On right-wing media, it is clear that this has been a principal factor in the stoking of Europhobic sentiment in the UK. One of my cousins in England—who’s lived in the US—told me last year that a Fox News-type network would not fly in the UK. Well, with high-circulation rags like The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Express, who needs a Fox?…

David Cameron, the biggest idiot in the modern history of 10 Downing Street, has naturally announced his resignation, but one other person also needs to quit—or be ejected from his leadership position—and that’s Jeremy Corbyn, who bears at least some responsibility for the outcome in view of his quasi absence from the campaign, barely concealed Euroscepticism, and his passivity as a large portion of his party’s electorate defected to the sirens of UKIP. Corbyn needs to be dumped illico and replaced with Hilary Benn, with a newly pro-Europe Labour absorbing the moribund Lib Dems and perhaps attracting some moderate pro-Europe Tory voters. This will be all the more important if early elections are called, on which I have seen no speculation but seems logical in view of the Brexit victory.

The thing is, the referendum hasn’t decided anything, as it’s not binding. Only the parliament can vote to leave the EU and then ratify a new relationship with it. But what happens if the majority of deputies in the House of Commons are pro-Remain, as is the case today? And Cameron’s successor is likewise? À propos, Business Insider UK had a piece, dated June 21st, arguing “Why a Brexit is unlikely to happen even if the public votes for it.” Money quote

On Monday, Peter Catterall of the University of Westminster spoke with Business Insider to shed more light on why Brexiteers would inevitably be very disappointed by what would follow a Leave victory in the referendum.

“I think that most Leave voters expect to wake up on the 24th no longer in the EU if there is a Brexit vote,” Catterall told Business Insider. “Well, they’re going to be in for a shock.”

For Britain to begin withdrawing from the 28-nation bloc, the government would need to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The majority of Leave voters probably assume that this process would be triggered immediately, but that would probably not be the case.

(…) Pro-Brexit members of Parliament including Michael Gove have said they wouldn’t want to invoke Article 50 for at least two years because it would take that long to find out what sort of deal they could reach before they enter negotiations, Catterall said.

Catterall said: “It’s not just pro-EU Tories who have talked about delaying Article 50. People like Michael Gove have said that they wouldn’t want to implement the Article 50 procedure until at least 2018 because they think it would take a very long time to get things sorted.”

Cameron, who will leave office in October, has already said that it will be up to his successor to invoke Article 50. And unless that successor is the buffoon Boris Johnson—which I don’t see—Article 50 may end up waiting until the Greek Calends.

In this respect—and speaking of Greece—political scientist Michalis Moutselos, in some “scattered thoughts after the Brexit referendum,” made this parallel with the recent experience of his native country

If the Greek post-referendum experience shows anything, there is a way to reverse an anti-EU referendum vote and that is to give those banking on anti-EU populism “full” power to implement whatever their ideas of independence are. It is an enormously expensive crash course though and it leaves everyone poorer in the short term.

Reversing an anti-EU referendum. It’s not out of the question, via a vote in the House of Commons and/or a second referendum called after buyer’s remorse has settled in, particularly when the Scots demand another referendum of their own, plus the Ulster Catholics one to join the Irish Republic. And what if the “elites” decide that there is simply too much at stake on the EU question, that Brexit is too prejudicial to their interests, that the 48% does not want to cede to a 52% driven by fear and ignorance and whipped up by demagogic politicians and a gutter tabloid press, and all because of a merely consultative referendum that should have never been called in the first place? And what if the younger generation—which voted overwhelmingly Remain—decides that it does not want its future on the vital question of Europe decided by old farts who voted majority Leave and will be dead or in their dotage in twenty years? Legitimate questions. So Brexit is not a done deal. It ain’t over till it’s over.

For more on the international legal side of the issue, see yesterday’s post, by Harvard Law School student Zoe Bedell, on the Lawfare blog, “‘Brexit’ Hangover: The Morning After a ‘Leave’ Vote Explained.”

Historian Antony Beevor had a tribune in The Guardian, dated June 20th, “Brexit would make Britain the world’s most hated nation,” which is well worth the read (h/t Claire Berlinski).

A technical question on the referendum: Why does it take so long in the UK to count ballots? In France, where paper ballots are the rule, the count happens quickly. In a high turnout election, it takes 2 hours—and a max of 2½—to tabulate the ballots in a given polling station and certify the result. The procedures are efficient and 100% clean (having supervised some twenty vote counts here, I know of what I speak). 90% of the results are reported within three hours of the closing of the polls. Why is the UK less efficient than France on this score? Just asking.

I have not yet read any of the French reactions. Will do so and follow up.

UPDATE: Alan Renwick—the Deputy Director of The Constitution Unit, of University College London’s political science department—has a highly informative piece, dated June 20th, on the Unit’s website (h/t Jamie Mayerfeld), “The road to Brexit: 16 things you need to know about what will happen if we vote to leave the EU.” The bottom line: the Brexit, if it does come to pass, is going to be, to put it mildly, one huge casse-tête. Objectively speaking, the whole thing is just crazy.

2nd UPDATE: Charles Grant—director of the Centre for European Reform—has an analysis on “The impact of Brexit on the EU.” His conclusion

Given the political toxicity of free movement in the UK, the new prime minister will probably prefer the ‘Canada option’, meaning a free trade agreement (FTA). That would give very limited access to the single market and be particularly painful to the City of London: an FTA would not allow the ‘passporting’ system whereby a bank regulated in London is free to do business across the EU, without the need to be regulated by anyone else. Some foreign banks in the City are already planning to move significant numbers of staff to Frankfurt, Paris, Luxembourg or Dublin.

European leaders will have an interest in ensuring that the EU maintains a close economic relationship with the UK, for everyone’s benefit. But they will not compromise on fundamental principles, such as free movement of labour, as the price for single market access. And they will not want the exit talks to be pain-free, easy or pleasant for the British, since they wish to deter others from following the UK’s example.

See also the article by the CER’s John Springford and Simon Tilford in the January 2016 issue of Prospect, “Twelve things you need to know about Brexit:What would really happen if Britain left the European Union?”

3rd UPDATE: Andrew Moravcsik of Princeton University’s Politics Dept has posted an analysis of the vote on his Facebook page:

I am doubling down on my predictions a month ago about Brexit, linked [here]. Yes, referendums are uncertain, as I noted. But now we come to the interesting part of the prediction. This was, in my interpretation, all about local politics: who will govern Britain? If it is to be Boris Johnson, then he needs a united Conservative Party, with business interests behind him, and a policy that actually makes economic sense. Anyone who heard Boris Johnson’s speech this morning heard an entirely different individual than the Trumpesque populist who spoke just 24 hours ago: all about unity, pro-Europe, praising Cameron–because now it’s all about being PM. And now, despite saying yesterday that Britain would “thrive” outside the EU, he’s all for slowing it down: 6 months to a leadership change, maybe no Article 50, take it all at a leisurely pace. This is because, policy-wise, he has only two choices: negotiate something similar to current EU membership inside or outside the EU. Remember this is a guy who, just eight weeks ago, entered the referendum campaign with the public position that Britain could use a “Leave” vote to renegotiate Britain’s status within the EU and hold a second referendum. So I assume that’s his “real” preference. But even if that can’t be achieved, the stated Leave and Boris position has been to assure voters they can have all of the single market and, Johnson added today, defense, intelligence sharing, and foreign policy cooperation as well, from outside the EU as well. (Of course the notion that a British government would agree to accept the status of Switzerland or Norway–i.e. the substantive equivalent of EU membership, except perhaps free movement (of people), in exchange for surrendering democratic input into the making of those EU rules–is perverse for those who claimed Leave was not about nationalism but about democracy, but expecting consistency in ambitious politicians is unrealistic.) I stick by my argument: no matter what Britain pretends to do, there is no alternative to de facto EU membership–and Boris, a former mayor of London, is smart enough to see it and position himself appropriately.

4th UPDATE: Peter A. Hall, who teaches politics and European studies at Harvard and LSE, has a post on WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog, “The Brexit referendum: Britain between the past and the future.” This passage is noteworthy

Thus, the Leave side represents something of an unholy coalition. The referendum was sparked by demands from segments of the Conservative political elite for relief from the regulations of the E.U. in the name of national sovereignty. But focus groups organized for the vote revealed that most ordinary people had no idea what sovereignty actually means.

Instead, the issue dominating the vote was immigration, and the margin of victory for Leave came from traditional Labour voters worried that an influx of workers from Europe was depressing their wages or taking their jobs. That influx is real. While Britain had 66,000 immigrants from the E.U. in 2003, 270,000 came last year. However, it is notable that support for Brexit was strongest in areas with little immigration and weakest in London, a cosmopolitan city where nearly half the residents are foreign-born. To borrow an older terminology, this referendum pitted Britain’s most vibrant “boroughs” against its “shires.”

On the views of “ordinary people” who voted Leave, see this report on Channel 4 News. À chacun de faire sa propre appréciation.

On citizens voting en connaissance de cause—or maybe not—and some having immediate buyer’s remorse, WaPo has a report on how “The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it.” It seems that a sizable number of voters cast ballots on the EU without having a clear idea of what the EU is or how it works. Having lived through the 2005 referendum campaign on the European Constitutional Treaty, I can attest that voters in France are hardly better informed on the EU than their UK counterparts.

5th UPDATE: Libération’s Brussels correspondent Jean Quatremer has a comment on one possible implication of a Brexit, which is the status of the English language in the bodies of the European Union. English, as one knows, has become predominant in the work of the European Commission but, as Quatremer notes, if the UK leaves the EU, there will be no EU member for whom English is the declared official language (member states being allowed to declare only one language for the purposes of the EU; Ireland having thus chosen Gaelic, Cyprus Greek, and Malta Maltese). If English is the official language of no member state, then it logically follows that English can no longer be one of the three official languages for the work of the Commission, meaning that documents may no longer be written in it. The member states could, of course, vote to maintain English nonetheless but this would open a whole new can of worms, as Quatremer points out. Another sacré Brexit casse-tête.

6th UPDATE: Timothy Garton Ash has a powerful, must-read essay in The Guardian, “As an English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life.”

7th UPDATE: A British friend here, now retired, who spent most of his career working with organisms of the European Union, has written the following to me in an email:

I’m floored. It is a physical body blow… and yes, I think it is a global disaster.

In the bigger picture (beyond EU countries to Trumpistan), I see at least 4 ideas

a) Globalisation (of which EU is a part) and technological change have left large sections of society behind – they do not have the skills to compete (and if we face the politically incorrect truth, they do not have the mental capacities – skills can be learned); we have created an underclass in a 1984 world, which is now in revolt. We will need to find a new social contract.

b) Our socially driven communication and education systems have dumbed down political discourse and we have delegitimised rational thought (including science); the general level of public education is low except for elites. The media has failed to challenge the untruths and simplifications. In other words it has failed as a constitutional bulwark which puts our democratic systems in peril. “Post-truth” politics can only lead to failure of our democracies and our human rights protections.

c) Democracy has been captured by the elites, but we have not found a way to make societal decisions which reflect the legitimacy of listening to the people and the requirement that, in a complex world, we need professional technocratic decision making (i.e. elites know best but don’t have legitimacy to decide).

d) The baby boomers have despoiled the environment and the economy in their favour and have screwed the younger generation

I am so disgusted, I can’t think anymore.

Friends and relatives of mine in England – plus Facebook friends there I don’t know personally and others I see on social media – are devastated by the referendum outcome. A sample:

A cousin (retired): “I am devastated… On the streets in St Albans over the past week I’ve heard some really idiotic and intolerant views expressed. What does it say about the culture of this country?”

Another cousin (lawyer in the City), early Friday morning: “Christ, watching Nigel Farage gloating over ‘his victory’. Am so depressed there are only two places for me today – in bed or at the pub.”

A friend (academic): “I’m going to cry… Feels like the apocalypse… It feels like 9/11 to be honest. I mean no comparison of course in terms of devastation and destruction, but same Holy Shit feeling.”

8th UPDATE: An FT reader (name unknown) has this excellent, must-read comment—which has been Tweeted and shared on Facebook by tens of thousands—on the “three tragedies” of the Brexit vote. [Update: The author of the comment is a Florence-based political journalist named Nicholas Barrett].

9th UPDATE: Here’s the best data I’ve seen on “How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday… and why.” From Lord Ashcroft Polls (h/t Bob Bonwitt).

10th UPDATE: Two fine analyses by social scientists: “Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit,” by Will Davies of Goldsmiths, University of London, on the Political Economy Research Centre Blog; and “Britain riding the tectonic plates,” by David Held of Durham University, in Social Europe.

In his essay, Will Davies links to a four-minute video reflection, two days before the referendum, by Adam Ramsay and Anthony Barnett of OpenDemocracy UK, who spent a day interviewing voters in heavily pro-Leave Doncaster, in South Yorkshire. As they learned, those intending to vote Leave expected nothing to change for them in the event of a Brexit, there was practically no campaign in the city or any public debate or discussion over the issues or what was at stake, the Labour Party—the nº1 party there—was all but absent, and the pro-Leavers were devoid of any positive vision of the future. in other words, the act of voting Leave was a coup de gueule, or cri de cœur (choose your metaphor). Takeaway: People were going vote because the referendum had been organized and with the question of Brexit put to them, but they hadn’t demanded this. The referendum was, as is known to all, a base political maneuver by David Cameron to deal with an internal problem in his political party. It should have never been organized. And its outcome should be disregarded.

11th UPDATE: One consequence of Brexit: “UK scientists could lose $1.4 billion annually after leaving the EU,” in Big Think; and “Britain’s shaky status as a scientific superpower: Researchers say the country’s decision to leave the EU will reverse decades of academic gains,” in The Atlantic.

And this from The Guardian’s ‘EU Referendum Reality Check’ page: “Would Europeans be free to stay in the UK after Brexit? The leave campaign insists EU nationals already in Britain would be able to stay – but immigration lawyers say it’s not so simple.”

Seriously, who needs this?

12th UPDATE: Andrew Moravcsik has posted another thought on his Facebook page

When I predict that within 2-3 years there will either be a renegotiation with the EU (with or without the second referendum for which 1.5 million Brits have already petitioned), as Boris Johnson was advocating three months ago, or negotiation of a status equivalent to membership outside, it’s things like this statement that will push voters there. This is the type of cynical bait-and-switch of which politics is made—but now it will work for Europe.

Voter’s remorse will increase, one may be sure of that, toward which pro-Leave politicians—particularly Tories—will not be insensitive. And these politicians will, one hopes, be attentive to the expressions of despair and fear by young people—voters themselves and the children of theirs—who do not want to quit the EU.

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Jo Cox, R.I.P.

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I hadn’t heard of her before yesterday. What a terrible tragedy. And crime. She sounded like a good person, a vocal humanitarian in the British parliament and strong advocate for Syrian refugees, and particularly for Syrian children. Syrians—and particularly those in Britain—are devastated by her shocking murder. A day in infamy, as Alex Massie, Scotland editor of The Spectator, put it in a powerful commentary.

The contrast between Jo Cox and that wretched specimen of a human being, Nigel Farage, could not be greater.

The wretched Brexit referendum is just so, well, wretched that I have barely been able to read about the campaign, except to take note of the latest polls. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee penned a column after the Cox murder, “The mood is ugly, and an MP is dead,” in which she said that “It’s wrong to view the killing of Jo Cox in isolation. Hate has been whipped up against the political class.” Her conclusion

Something close to a chilling culture war is breaking out in Britain, a divide deeper than I have ever known, as I listen to the anger aroused by this referendum campaign. The air is corrosive, it has been rendered so. One can register shock at what has happened, but not complete surprise.

I did read one very good piece the day before yesterday, “A short handbook of Brexit fallacies,” by Albert Weale, University College London Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy.

In case one missed it, Neal Ascherson has a good op-ed in the NYT, “From Great Britain to Little England.”

And the FT’s Philip Stephens has an equally good commentary, “The dubious lure of taking on an elite,” in which he reminds the reader that “The dirty little secret of EU membership is that it has been an economic success story.” Money quote

There is nothing complicated or abstract about the case for European engagement: it rests on three pillars: national prosperity, security and attachment to values that many Brits would claim as their own — liberty, democracy and the rule of law. This in an age when the west’s interests and values are under rising challenge from autocrats across the globe.

The dirty little secret of EU membership is that it has been an economic success story. Britain joined in 1973 as the sick man of Europe. In the subsequent 43 years it has flourished. National output has risen faster than that of Germany, France and Italy. Per capita gross domestic product has increased by an average of 1.8 per cent annually, against 1.7 per cent in Germany, 1.4 per cent in France and 1.3 per cent in Italy.

One hopes that soft “Out” and undecided voters will honor Jo Cox’s memory by voting “In” next Thursday.

UPDATE: Simon Schama has a must-read column in the FT, “Let us spurn Brexit and remain a beacon of tolerance.” It concludes

If, finally, I invoke the memory of Jo Cox, it is not to exploit her death but to honour her morally magnificent and cruelly ended life. She was as homegrown Yorkshire as you could get. But she understood with instinctive decency that to be British was also to be a citizen of the wider world including Europe; that the two identities were mutually sustaining not mutually exclusive; that no man is an island.

She was the impassioned champion of the Syrian people, tormented and uprooted by their unrelenting war. Her maiden speech said it all: “Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration . . . what surprises me time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more things in common with each other than things which divides us.”

She was, she said, a celebrant of diversity. And that, too, is what makes our country a United Kingdom.

2nd UPDATE: Writer AA Gil has a terrific tribune in the June 12th Sunday Times arguing for “In” and rubbishing the Brexit arguments. The lede: “We all know what ‘getting our country back’ means. It’s snorting a line of that most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia.”

It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.

It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

In this vein, Emile Simpson—a former British Army officer and current fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs—has an excellent, must-read piece in Foreign Policy, “Welcome to the fantasy island of Little England,” that utterly demolishes the arguments for Brexit. Reduces them to smithereens.

Prediction: If the “Out” wins—which I predict it will not—the UK government’s negotiations with the EU will be so protracted and arduous—with Brussels taking an uncompromising hard line with the Brits—that there will be a second referendum down the road, in which “In” will win.

3rd UPDATE: William Inboden—Executive Director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas-Austin and who held national security and foreign policy posts in the Bush 43 administration—has a tribute in Foreign Policy to Jo Cox, who hosted him and a group of his students at a dinner in London three weeks ago. She impressed them all.

4th UPDATE: Life peer Doreen Lawrence has a fine commentary, dated June 12th, in the New Statesman, “Europe is not an elite conspiracy against the public.” Money quote:

The Leave campaign has tried to pitch this debate as being about the people against the establishment. Nothing could be further from the truth. Europe is not an elite conspiracy against the public: at its best, it is the opposite. It is about the solidarity of the peoples of Europe with each other and our determination to create a better, freer and fairer world. It establishes a framework where citizens are protected from the state by common rules and standards.

Also see New Statesman contributing editor Laurie Penny’s commentary, “Britain’s breaking point: We owe it to Jo Cox not to write off her death as an act of affectless terrorism or meaningless madness.”

5th UPDATE: Simon Tilford—deputy director of the excellent think tank Centre for European Reform—had an excellent op-ed, dated June 10th, in The Telegraph, “If we leave the EU, other countries will think we’re a bunch of spoilt children. They’ll be right.”

6th UPDATE: In case one missed it, Andrew Moravcsik of Princeton University—who is the leading specialist of the EU in American political science—had a must-read op-ed, dated April 8th, in the FT, “The great Brexit kabuki — a masterclass in political theatre” (in PDF).

7th UPDATE: NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has a nice tribute, “R.I.P., Jo Cox. May Britain remember your wisdom,” in which he discusses her activism on many fronts. In it, he links to a tribune, dated June 10th, that Cox published in The Yorkshire Post, “Brexit is no answer to real concerns on immigration.”

8th UPDATE: Glen Newey, who teaches practical philosophy at the University of Leiden, had a spot on piece, dated May 8th, in Foreign Policy on that insufferable clown Boris Johnson, “The Boaty McBoatface of British politics.” The lede: “The Brexit fight is proving too big a stage for Boris Johnson’s brand of political performance art.”

Newey also skewers the Tory ‘Remain’ camp, notably David Cameron, in an LRB blog post, dated June 22nd, “Bad Argument Olympiad.”

9th UPDATE: FWIW, my Brexit referendum prediction is here.

10th UPDATE: My cousin in London, Umesh, has a smart commentary—which is typical for him, as he’s exceptionally smart—on social media this morning (here), after casting his vote. Money quote:

Whatever the polls say, I cannot believe the British public would be so idiotic as to vote ‘leave’ and throw us into years of complete chaos: protracted negotiations, economic and political uncertainty and inevitable economic decline. Not really a decision which should have been given to the public in the first place.

He predicts the ‘In’ will win by an even greater than I did above. I hope he’s right.

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The refugee question: A moral crisis

Off the coast of Libya, May 14 2015 (photo credit: Reuters/MOAS/Jason Florio)

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French polymath social scientist and physician Didier Fassin—who is based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—has an essay in The Nation dated April 5th, in case one missed it, “From Right to Favor,” on the refugee crisis in Europe—or the “so-called refugee crisis,” as he calls it—which he asserts is “a moral issue before it is a demographic one.” This is one of the best intellectual reflections I’ve come across on the subject, so I wholeheartedly recommend it. Didier Fassin is one of those incredibly smart and talented scholars, who is worth reading on any of the wide range of subjects he writes on.

On the (so-called) refugee crisis, Think Progress has a dispatch (May 2nd) by reporter Justin Salhani, “Refugees are rejuvenating dying Italian towns.” It concludes

Economic projections aside, the affect of repopulating dying villages has also had a profound affect on the people of these villages.

“Thank God they brought us these people,” Luigi Marotti, a 68-year-old who takes care of the Roman Catholic Church in Calabria’s town of Satriano, told Bloomberg in February. “Satriano was dead. Thanks to them it’s alive again. The village can start growing. If they leave, I don’t know where we can go.”

If any of the refugees don’t want to stay in Italy, they should come to small-town France, which could also use the shot in the arm—and Béziers in particular, which really does need it. If the mayor there is uncomfortable with the idea, he’ll come around…

UPDATE: Jean-Marie Guéhenno, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, has a post (May 13th) on the Carnegie Europe web site, “Conflict is key to understanding migration.”

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The Brussels massacre

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Tenir bon. English translation: ‘hang in there’, or ‘remain steadfast’. I have nothing original to say about the Islamic State’s latest outrage except to express horror and the sentiment that people need to remain steadfast and not succumb to fear. And, obviously, hope that European states adopt effective strategies to smash the clandestine infrastructure of the Islamic State and kindred terrorist organizations. On this, I read one interesting article today, “What to do about Brussels” by freelance journalist Joshua Hersh in TNR. The lede: “Going to war won’t solve Europe’s homegrown terrorism problem.” See also the piece linked to in the article that the author published in BuzzFeed in December.

À suivre.

UPDATE: Historian and Morocco/Maghreb specialist Pierre Vermeren, who teaches at Université Paris 1, has had several illuminating op-eds and interviews of late on the Rifians—the Berbers of Morocco’s Rif region, who predominate in the North African Muslim immigrant population in Belgium (as well as the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in France and the Netherlands)—Rifians being the ethnic group of most of the terrorists implicated in the Paris and Brussels attacks: “Arrestation de Salah Abdeslam: Comment Molenbeek est devenu un État dans l’État,” in Le Figaro (March 18th, originally published in November 2015); “Pierre Vermeren: ‘La Belgique, foyer djihadiste et plaque tournante de la drogue’,” in Le Figaro (March 22nd); and “‘La Belgique est devenue un trou noir sécuritaire’,” in Le Monde (March 23rd).

2nd UPDATE: François Heisbourg, who chairs the council of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, has a typically smart commentary in Le Huffington Post (March 22nd), “Attentats de Paris-Bruxelles: Parler d’armée et de guerre concernant Daech, c’est se tromper de combat.”

3rd UPDATE: Malise Ruthven has an excellent review essay of three excellent-looking books in the April 7th issue of the NYRB, “Inside Obedient Islamic Minds.” The piece is in the comments thread below for those who can’t get behind the wall.

4th UPDATE: The Guardian’s Jason Burke says (March 23rd) that “It is no surprise siblings with past crimes carried out attacks on Brussels.” The lede: “The el-Bakraoui brothers highlight the links between terrorism and criminal records, and the strength of family in Islamic militancy.”

5th UPDATE: The Guardian’s Martin Chulov has an article (March 25th) on “How Isis laid out its plans to export chaos to Europe.” The lede: “Before the Paris attacks, leaders of the terror group gathered to hear its new strategy: spreading fear through European capitals.” And here’s a piece from the FT dated last November 19th on “Belgium’s arms bazaar.” The lede: “Black market in guns has made the country an operational centre for jihadis, but officials are cracking down.” Thankfully the NRA does not have a lobby in Brussels.

6th UPDATE: Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group has an absolutely must-read interview in the NYR Daily (March 24th) with Belgian terrorism researcher Didier Leroy, “Why Belgium?” This is one of the best analyses I’ve come across on the subject at hand.

7th UPDATE: Farhad Khosrokhavar of the EHESS in Paris, who knows the subject better than just about anyone, has a most important op-ed in Le Monde (March 25th), “Les profils pluriels du djihadisme européen.”

8th UPDATE: Washington Post foreign affairs writer Ishaan Tharoor has a piece (March 23rd) on “The Saudi origins of Belgium’s Islamist threat.”

9th UPDATE: The sharp, insightful British writer Kenan Malik has a sharp, insightful op-ed in the NYT (March 30th) on “The little we know about the jihadists in our midst.” The lede: “The more we learn about homegrown terrorism, the more our official explanations look like fiction.”

10th UPDATE: Julia Lynch, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has an informative post in WaPo’s Monkey Cage blog (April 5th) on “why so many of Europe’s terrorist attacks come through this one Brussels neighborhood,” the neighborhood, of course, being Molenbeek.

11th UPDATE: The NYT has a lengthy article (April 11th) on “A Brussels mentor who taught ‘gangster Islam’ to the young and angry,” by reporters Andrew Higgins and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura.

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