A generation ago, President George H W Bush famously dismissed “the vision thing” when asked to consider the larger aims of his presidency. This earned him a lifetime reputation as a charmless bureaucrat – a caricature that his tin ear and personal awkwardness did little to correct. Candidate Clinton, by contrast, got the vision thing. His aides even condensed it into a slogan. (“It’s the economy, stupid.”) This year’s US presidential candidates have not – with the exception of Bernie Sanders – offered anything like a vision of how America would change under their presidencies. Instead they have distracted each other, and the media, with a series of pointless controversies: Clinton’s email servers, the size of Trump’s hands, his slighting remarks about reporters and judges, even such peripheral issues as the politics of transgender bathrooms. Sadly, one of the few instances of political theatre even more depressing than this nonsense has been the ‘Brexit’ debate in the United Kingdom.
The Cameron government’s lack of vision for Britain’s possible future in Europe has allowed the ‘Brexit’ campaign to be simplified into a vote that pits immigration against economics. This reductio ad absurdum asks British citizens to decide whether it is more important to stem immigration (500 immigrants arrive in the country every day) or protect markets (50 percent of British exports are bought by the EU). Few, if any, of the nuances of Britain’s complex relationship with its continental allies have been considered. Instead, it has fallen to people like former prime minister Gordon Brown to make the case for ‘leading’ rather than ‘leaving’ Europe – as Brown does in a recent book which sets out lengthy “patriotic” arguments for remaining within the EU.
Brown’s vision imagines a future in which Britain deepens its engagement with Europe, actively shapes a collective anti-terrorism policy, and pursues a Marshall plan that would offer a burgeoning youth demographic (200 million) in the Middle East and North Africa “a future defined not by the choice between tyranny and terrorism, but by opportunity and hope.” He also proposes leadership in reforming energy markets, reducing dependence on Russia by selling more of Britain’s wind and wave power as alternative energy sources – and stimulating its economy along the way. Addressing complaints that Brussels has become a super-state, Brown counters that “the high tide of Europe’s federalist ambitions is receding” and the future lies “not in a United States of Europe, but in a United Europe of States.” He mentions Pope Francis’s trenchant remark, in 2014, that Europe seems to have dissipated its intellectual energies and replaced them with “the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions” – an opportune moment, surely, for a determined British government to reshape Brussels’ agenda in its favour.
History offers several hints as to what may happen, on either side of the Atlantic, if the Brexit or Trump campaigns succeed in persuading their respective countries to abandon visions of a larger role in the world. Nearly a century ago, for instance, the US Republican party was headed by robust internationalists such as Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay and Theodore Roosevelt, men who believed that America should play a global role not only through trade but by fully engaging with international institutions and setting their agenda. Within a decade, however, their vision had disappeared, leaving a hesitant leadership that watched from the sidelines while millions of Europeans were slaughtered in the Great War. Given the considerable challenges that Europe faces today, the consequences of a British or American retreat from the world may prove no less disastrous.
