BRITAIN’S POST-BREXIT IDENTITY CRISIS
JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER THE UNITED KINGDOM LEFT the European Union on Jan. 31, Boris Johnson traveled across the Thames to the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich to give a speech outlining the kind of country he as prime minister now hoped to build.
Hair typically tousled, Johnson began by pointing up at James Thornhill’s vast ceiling painting titled “The Triumph of Peace and Liberty Over Tyranny.” Britain’s departure, he suggested, could be a moment of liberation and transformation. An island long shackled by continental constraints would fly like Superman, Johnson opined, “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion” for the benefits of free trade and charting your own national path.
Brexit backers hope to take back control of a country whose 2016 referendum realized a vote to reject not just the European Union but also a model of globalization favoring prosperous urbanites over poorer, rural communities. Even before the new divisions and shutdowns brought about by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Johnson was leading the world’s most radical experiment in deglobalization: a bloody-minded push to overturn decades of conventional wisdom that midsize nations must band together, both to reap the rewards of trade and solve problems that each would find too large to fix on its own.
If it works, Brexit will act as a rebuke to those globalists who argue that economic prosperity and democratic sovereignty are hard to reconcile. Other nations may follow suit, rejecting the strictures of multilateralism for bold new eras of national autonomy. But that is a big if, given Brexit also leaves Britain facing awkward questions not just about the kind of trade deal Johnson may strike with the EU but also about the kind of country Britain aspires to become.
Many arguments for Brexit were based on misunderstandings—perhaps willful, perhaps not—of globalization itself and thus the way Britain’s ties with Europe are now likely to be recast. Johnson wants to believe that Britain’s future can be simultaneously more open to the world and more in control of
