Glendinning, Simon

LSE Research Online

In the Shadow of the EU Referendum: ‘This is the Worst’Simon Glendinning on what Brexit meansIn a bizarre twist of fate I was in Brussels in the week when the referendum took place in the UK.Working with a group of academics from across the EU and beyond, I had enjoyed a few days ofhappy speculation about a very close result, all the while quietly expecting a small Remainmajority, which is what I wanted.Waking to the result in my hotel room I spent the next hour in a stunned but solitary silence. As Iwalked over to the morning meeting, I felt my speechlessness becoming public. I struggled forsomething to say, but had absolutely nothing of my own that seemed up to the task. I still feel alittle like that now. But at that moment in Brussels someone else’s words came to me, ran throughme, and gave me the terms for coming to terms with what was going on. Shakespeare, so oftenthe supplier of our English words, gave me words. I could not speak them, I was speechlessremain. So after a few moments of unaccountable coffee-talk, I took up a marker pen and simplywrote my speech on the meeting-room white board:And worse I may be yet. The worst is not, So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’. (KingLear)I was saying, I could say, ‘This is the worst’. And hence it was not the worst. Instead of a dyingKing speaking of the movement of his own life’s ending, I wanted these words also to voice thevoice of my country speaking, from its already fragile union, but able still to speak in its name—which so dramatically, if not entirely eloquently, it had just done in a narrative that seemed to me toannounce only the moment of a self-inﬂicted wound, a wound which could leave it more radicallyspeechless than I had yet become.Starting the meeting in Brussels, the EU ofﬁcial in charge found other words for us. As if simply forinformation, but putting in the air the words that would occupy me for the following days, he readout the Article of the Lisbon Treaty that related to the formalities relating to a Member State’sdecision ‘to withdraw from the Union’. I had never heard of Article 50 before, but only a few hourslater it became the centre of political attention when Prime Minister David Cameron, in announcinghis resignation, announced that he would not invoke it, leaving it to his successor instead. Havingso recently heard the words read out that everything begins with that event—‘a Member Statewhich decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention’—I knew that thisparting gift would become the beginning of everything before everything begins. Without suchnotiﬁcation we remain, and a path to the worst is not yet. My ﬁrst hope was that perhaps it maynever be invoked: that we will always be only on the verge of another Brexit. That hope is all butextinguished, but most of the life-giving words that have come to me have found their breath in thethought that even if ‘Brexit means Brexit’, the window of possibilities of what that might mean isnarrow.But on that ﬁrst day I was trying to ﬁnd words to come to terms with the event, to participate in itmentally and psychologically, words that gave it shape and direction, words which would allow meto think still, ‘This is the worst’, and hence that the worst was not. These days the relieving wordscirculate around an ‘interim’ agreement that would hold off a ‘hard Brexit’—and which, like anuninvoked Article 50, could last forever. No doubt the terms for my relief will continue to mutate, aswe begin to ﬁnd out what Brexit means.Finding words to accommodate the event also raised a wider question of what was going on—inthe UK, in Europe, and beyond—that might have precipitated the UK’s (as I saw it) wounding blowagainst itself. One friend wrote to me that she felt we were in 1847, ‘the year before revolution’.John Grey saw ‘the magnitude of the upheaval that has occurred’ in equally world-historical terms,announcing, at least, the ‘unravelling’ of the European Union.I am not comfortable with that apocalyptic tone. History, as Wittgenstein noted, rarely unfolds in thedirection of expectation, and we have no clear idea of what ‘the year before’—the time in which wecan still say, ‘This is the worst’—is like. Lear’s darkest silence may not even be preceded byanyone’s saying them.Yet the referendum result certainly announces an end—and a certain imminence of that endhaunts everything, if not its being imminent. To ﬁnd our bearings in this event, I want to recall abrilliant essay by the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’. The essaywas written in 1919, and thus at the close of the most devastating war in Europe’s bloody history,with the death of millions. It is written with the melancholy sadness, a sort of mourning-before-the-fact, of someone who though feeling ‘everything has not been lost’, felt too that ‘everything hassensed that it might perish’.The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But theintellectual crisis, being more subtle, and by its nature, assuming the most deceptiveappearances […] this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.He looks back to the Europe before the war, to Europe in 1914, and tries to say something, afterthe event, about ‘the day before’ the event. And reﬂecting on this he sees ‘the most perfect state ofdisorder’.This is not a state he entirely shies from. He calls it, precisely, ‘modern’, and speaks in the name of‘we moderns’, using that in a boldly generic sense concerning any time or place of ‘formidable’intellectual energy and ‘the free coexistence, in all […] cultivated minds, of the most dissimilarideas, the most contradictory principles of life’; a time of intense cultural vitality, and, in pre-WarEurope, he thought, of near ‘inﬁnite potential’. Nevertheless, Valéry conceives the Europe of 1914as having ‘reached the limit of modernism’; its ‘wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencieswas like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched…’.Perfect disorder (just as much as perfect order in fact) threatens the life of a culture (it has limits atboth ends). That the upshot was war, which left Europe in ruins, seems to belong seamlessly to aphase already underway. Valéry’s essay had famously begun: ‘We later civilizations […] we tooMonday, 19 September 2016Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!Related Postsnow know that we are mortal’. Have we reached such a perfect state of disorder in our time—or,more likely I think, is it just another moment in which we can say, ‘This is the worst’?Simon Glendinning is Professor of European Philosophy and Director of the Forum for EuropeanPhilosophy in the European Institute at the LSE. His forthcoming two-volume book Europe’sPromise (Oxford University Press) traces the unravelling of Enlightenment Europe’s cosmopolitanhopes. His research interests include European identity, European modernity, and Europeanpolitics.Image credit: Will, ‘King Lear‘Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

In the shadow of the EU referendum: "this is the worst"

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