Week 12 Post: Silver Linings: McNamara, The EU, Brexit and Trump

Week 12 Post:  Silver Linings: McNamara, The EU, Brexit and Trump

This week’s class discussion related to the question of a global public sphere revolved primarily around NGOs.   But, I do want to go back to the first reading,” Constructing authority in the European Union” as the EU has been put to the test in the six years since the article was written.    I am sure I was not alone in overlaying thought akin to, “I wonder what McNamara is saying now” to every point she was making on cultural foundations and successes. The section “Abolishing borders, creating community” was especially difficult to get through without the perpetual what-ifs and if-onlys floating through my head.  It is hard to see a world that appeared to be coming together so torn.  I confess this is not the only reason I bring this reading into my Week 12 blog. As I sat a little forlorn and considering switching back to some NGO related theme, my phone flashed a headline from the Washington Post: “After Brexit and Trump’s victory, Europeans are beginning to like the E.U.again.”  It was a welcome break from the gloom. Drawing on points made in the article, I reflect here on the E.U., Brexit, and Trump in relation to an earlier shift in global dynamics that may grant us, if not reprieve in the moment, a reminder that all those ideas passing between us, all the shields we put up against the world, will not change our once unfathomable interconnectedness and the collective fortitude that comes out of it.

 Rick Noack notes in his November 23 article that both Brexit and Trump’s election launched “crisis meetings” in the EU, which coincided with approval ratings going up in five of the six most populous European countries. So, Britain is having a difficult time with that exit thing and our President-elect’s relationship with Putin is making our European friends look less critically on the union’s imperfections.  Were the vote taken today, Brexit would be a thing of the past tomorrow.  While nearly half of Denmark would have voted themselves out as well a few months ago, that number is down to ten percent.  Even Norbert Hofer, Austria’s Trump, has done an about turn on his demand for a referendum. At what seemed the eleventh hour, nations are rallying.

McNamara speaks to the subtle influences on the creation of European identity beyond economics – the construction of the European Union as a “social fact,” something taken as a given.  Passports, education, formal and informal shared resources, most obviously influence this.  But, the way people interact changes as well. While national identity remains, there ever more linking the individual states.  They are driven together by evolving intersubjective understandings. And so, for all the squabbling and turns at rejecting the whole, a realization is taking hold that they are truly, to borrow from a campaign slogan across the water, “stronger together.”

The same sentiment played out in Marrakesh this month.  There is an environmental connectedness after the Paris Accords that is strengthening in the face of threats from the incoming U.S. regime.  The world is not crumbling but rather marshaling forces in like communities that are increasingly overlapping, interweaving, and melding with others.  We can build walls and burn bridge to our leaders’ content. Thankfully, there is a shared “other,” or twenty or a hundred, out there with whom we each have connection in one way or another crafting new bridges with bricks from those very walls.   

McNamara notes, "...the postmodern cultural turn has been a critical legitimizing force enabling the EU's success at the same time as it creates unique stresses and strain's for this global governor" (173). In my mind at first reading, the stresses had tested its governor beyond capacity.  Maybe not.  

References: 

McNamara, Kathleen R. 2010. "Constructing authority in the European Union." in Who Governs the Globe:153-179   

Noack, Rick. 2016. "After Brexit and Trump's victory, Europeans are beginning to like the E.U. again." Washington Post <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/24/europeans-start-liking-the-e-u-again/#comments>  Accessed November 24, 2016