Brexit Tempting, But the U.K. Should Stay | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Andy Taylor, who is a contributor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     The voter rage propelling the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is not just an American phenomenon. Throughout Europe citizens are expressing deep discontent with self-serving political elites uninterested in addressing issues that threaten their futures, particularly uncontrolled immigration, radical Islamic terrorism, and economic insecurity.

    In the United Kingdom, this sentiment has transformed a June 23 referendum on whether the country should stay in the European Union. Prime Minister David Cameron, his top Cabinet officials, most members of the opposition Labor Party, and big business are working for what is called the "Remain" campaign.

    But with the public both angry and fearful, the coalition calling for Brexit, or British exit from the EU, expands. Comprising an eclectic band of small businesses, cultural conservatives, socialists, and an uncomfortably large number of Cameron's fellow Tories - including the always-entertaining mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who nakedly covets the premier's position - the "Leave" crowd is growing confident. It is no longer obvious that Britain will continue as a member of the organization it joined in 1973.

    Leaving now seems a distinct possibility for two reasons. First, the EU's inability to solve the problems that most vex its people patently is not an illusion. It cannot control its external borders from a flood of Middle Eastern and African migrants - more than a million came in 2015 with more than that expected this year.

    The problem is exacerbated by the Schengen Agreement that permits free travel within just about all the bloc and illuminated brightly by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. And it's not just peace the EU seems incapable of delivering. The Euro, the great symbol of European cooperation and success, continues to bind its users in a painful monetary union.

    Cameron himself is responsible for the second reason. The prime minister last year pledged he would hold the referendum and support continued membership on the condition that Britain's position in the organization was improved - for example, if it was allowed to reduce benefits to immigrants and services were placed on par with goods in the EU internal market.

    Because the agreement he ultimately reached with the 27 other leaders fell well short of this ambitious goal, Cameron appears to be championing an ineffectual organization over which he has little influence.

    The current debate about Britain's future obscures a more fundamental problem, however. When it was established in 1957 as the European Economic Community, the EU was essentially a free-trade zone intended to generate prosperity and economic cooperation on a continent that only recently had been brought to its knees by World War II. The plan worked.

    But flushed with this success, technocratic leaders like Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Valery Giscard D'Estaing pushed for political union and regulation of the European open market in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1999 they had their crowning achievement: a common currency.

    The new EU quickly ran into trouble. Tremendous across-country variation in fiscal policy meant that the kind of coherent and authoritative monetary policy required for a healthy Euro never materialized. Members fudged their budget numbers so they could use the currency.

    Southern members like Greece and Italy, with their dirigiste economies and bloated public sectors, no longer had the ability to fund deficits by devaluation. Northern colleagues like the Germans and Dutch who bailed them out began, quite understandably, to demand significant structural reforms.

    Europeans don't want economic integration if it means EU bureaucrats will be regulating commerce, orchestrating national fiscal policy, and generally limiting their freedom. They also don't want political union.

    The continent should celebrate its different inherently European cultures, treasure sovereign national parliaments, and protect the free exercise of rights such as the freedom of speech, assembly, and religion that seem to evoke the ire of Brussels.

    Europe already has a common defense within NATO and, besides, the EU apparatus seems impotent to meet threats from nongovernmental actors like ISIS.

    Just because the EU is no longer the EEC does not mean the U.K. should leave, however. Some of those who want out envision Britain becoming part of an alternative organization consisting of countries like the United States, Canada, and Japan.

    That would be great, possibly preferred, but the idea betrays a severe misreading of the interests of these countries that tend to see Britain as a fading power and of no real utility outside the EU.

    The U.K. should stay to exploit the economic advantages of an open European market and push to bring down barriers to free trade in services. It should stay to protect the capitalistic principles that would lose Europe's most effective champion upon its departure.

    And without Britain, any hope the EU could avoid the efforts of socialist technocrats to erase all memories of its great cultures and liberal past would evaporate.
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