Ian McEwan: Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country's history, is done
In a dangerous
world crowded with loud-mouthed “strongmen”, the EU was our best hope for an
open, tolerant, free and peaceful community of nations. Those hopes are already
threatened as populist movements have swept across Europe. Our withdrawal will
weaken resistance to the xenophobic tendency. The lesson of our nation’s
history these past centuries is plain: turmoil in continental Europe will draw
us into bloody conflicts.
Nationalism is rarely a project for peace. Nor does
it care to counter climate change. It prefers to let tropical forests and the
Australian bush burn.
Take a road trip from
Greece to Sweden, from Portugal to Hungary. Leave your passport behind. What a
rich, teeming bundle of civilisations – in food, manners, architecture,
language, and each nation state profoundly and proudly different from its
neighbours. No evidence of being under the boot-heel of Brussels. Nothing here
of continental USA’s dreary commercial sameness. Summon everything you’ve
learned of the ruinous, desperate state of Europe in 1945, then contemplate a
stupendous economic, political and cultural achievement: peace, open borders,
relative prosperity, and the encouragement of individual rights, tolerance and
freedom of expression. Until Friday this was where our grown-up children went
at will to live and work.
That’s over, and for
now the force is with English nationalism. Its champion is Johnson’s Vote Leave
cabinet whose monument will forever be a special kind of smirk, perfected back
in the days of the old Soviet Union. I’m lying, you know I’m lying and I know
that you know and I don’t give a damn....