London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 14, July 14, 2016. Contribution to a collection of responses to the referendum, pp. 8-15. Spanish translation here.

The decomposition of the modern state has reached a new stage, in the very country where the modern state was invented. It was the UK under Thatcher that blocked the development of the EU into a supranational welfare state on the postwar British model associated with Keynes, Beveridge and T.H. Marshall. Since then the neoliberal revolution, led by the US and the UK, has for ever closed this window. Instead of protecting Europeans from the maelstrom of the world market, the EU has turned into a powerful engine of liberalisation in the service of a deep economistic restructuring of social life. Under the aegis of the EU, the UK has reverted to being two nations, a nation of winners using the globalised world as their extended playing field, and a nation of losers driven from their commons by another firestorm of primitive accumulation. Seeking refuge in democratic protection, popular rule, local autonomy, collective goods and egalitarian traditions, the losers under neoliberal internationalism, unexpectedly returning to political participation, place their hopes on their nation-state. But the existing architecture of statehood is no longer designed to accommodate them, certainly not in the land of Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. Here, those lucky enough to command subnational political and institutional resources, in Scotland in particular, hope to use the EU’s supranational state regime to break up the national state regime of the UK, nota bene to regain and extend local control, and clearly not to cede it to an authority even more remote than London. Weiterlesen →