The mainstream U.S. narrative about the British decision to leave the European Union includes hand-wringing and even scorn. Yet, I see it quite differently, because I know a European country that long ago decided not to join the European Union and since then has flourished, delivering even more justice and shared prosperity for its people.
This is another moment when we can’t understand a significant issue until we check in with the outliers. Conventional wisdom is occasionally correct, but is often significantly flawed.
The stunning choice of the Norwegian people to stay out of the European Union, against the advice of their own political class, challenges three questionable assumptions made by the doomsayers: The European Union is the path to shared prosperity, European economic integration is primarily about peace and democracy, and objecting to the European Union is being a nasty nationalist.
In 1972, the Norwegian national parliament decided, by a large majority, to enter the earlier version of the European Union, which was called the European Economic Community, or EEC. However, enormous protest erupted at the grassroots level. The government was forced to agree to a referendum, and a majority of the people voted “Nei!”
The Labor Party, which had been governing Norway for decades, was shocked. Because the nature of the issue went to the heart of Norway’s future direction, the party regarded the referendum as a vote of no-confidence and resigned. That resignation, however, led to chaos because no major party could step into its place. All had supported membership in the EEC.
Finally a governing coalition was patched together and an interim agreement was signed with the EEC, in lieu of membership, that supported a trading relationship for Norway. That relationship continued when the EEC transformed into the European Union.
The Labor Party hoped that, with further education, the grassroots opposition would wither. It therefore set up another referendum for 1994, but again the proposal for membership failed. 2013 polls showed about 70 percent of Norwegians still oppose joining the European Union, and the Socialist Left Party (a junior partner that joined the Labor Party in the governing coalition in 2005) went beyond that opposition, urging departure from participation in the European Economic Agreement that interfaces with the European Union.
Denmark and Sweden have differed from Norway and Iceland when it comes to this issue: The two Nordics whose boundaries meet the rest of Europe joined the European Union. Denmark and Sweden carefully avoided joining the Eurozone, however. They retained their own currencies, giving them flexibility that other E.U. countries lacked when facing the top-down controlling austerity measures that followed 2008.
For my new book “Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right and How We Can, Too,” I interviewed Norwegians about what is now the European Union. Those who most opposed membership saw the E.U.’s member countries faltering in whatever loyalty they formerly had to social democratic ideals. In most E.U. countries the economic elite seemed to be in charge. Joining the European Union, the dissenters feared, would mean that their small country would be submerged in the domination of giant banks and corporations.
Norwegians had corrected their own errant banks in the early 1990s, but most countries did not. When the E.U. members’ financial sectors took a dive, would governments expect the resulting mess to be paid for by the workers rather than those who caused the disaster? The question was answered after 2008: Yes, make the workers pay for the elite’s irresponsibility.
Large corporations from elsewhere continue to make threats in Norway that add evidence to the case made by Norwegians concerned about being out-maneuvered. According to labor leader Asbjørn Wahl, the U.S.-based Kraft Corporation, which bought the iconic Norwegian chocolate firm Freia, pressed workers in Oslo to accept night shifts. If they refused, Kraft said, it would take the jobs to another European country.
Those suspicious of the European Union predict that high Norwegian standards would be pressed downward if it accepted membership, including worker protection and compensation, democratic participation, support for the weakest, and access to economic necessities such as public education.
E.U. opponents say Norwegian agricultural products get such high prices in other countries because they are reliably of high quality, which cannot be said any longer of most E.U. farmers’ products.
Since Denmark joined the European Union its farmers have become so specialized that the country has lost its food security. In contrast, Norway still meets its own needs for meat and dairy products despite its limited arable land base. Opponents ask: What will happen to food security, and the beauty of Norway’s landscape, if the country joins the European Union, loses its ability to subsidize its agricultural sector, and its farms are returned to logging trees?
Is the European Union the path to peace and democracy?
Labor Party consultant Dag Seierstad told me during our meeting in an office of Parliament that the growing trend toward a joint foreign policy in the European Union collides with the Norwegian vision of peace. When the people of Gaza in Palestine voted for Hamas to lead their government, the European Union reacted punitively, withholding previous financial support for the Gazan people. Norway stepped up its own aid to Palestinians in Gaza, aware of the increased suffering. “We must retain our independence,” Seierstad said, “in order to follow our own responsibilities as peacemakers.”
I know British voters who likewise want the chance for a foreign policy more peaceful than the European Union’s. When their peace campaigns bear fruit, they want Britain to be free to implement fresh policies rather than toe the line of the European Union (or, of course, the line of a militarist United States).
Just as important, Brits who have suffered from the post-2008 austerity program of massive cutbacks in health, education and other needs have an excellent reason to want freedom from the E.U.’s rule by the 1 percent. Their fight is with Britain’s own economic elite, and when they start winning again — as they did in the first half of the 20th century — they likewise want the freedom Norwegians have to implement social democracy.
For my book, I checked the international ratings that compare countries by measures of well-being like equality, poverty-prevention, health care, parental leave, elder care, individual freedom, etc. Typically, the ratings put the Nordic countries at the top. In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development list of the richest countries in the world, the United States is typically at or near the bottom of the ratings, and the United Kingdom somewhere in the middle. Within living memory of older people, the United Kingdom placed higher. Their struggles had achieved more equality and shared prosperity. But the longer they stayed in the European Union, the farther down in the ratings they went.
In the light of that track record for E.U. membership, who can say it was irrational to vote for Brexit? And who can fail to notice that so much of the working class, which has fared the worst in this downward trend, rejected the advice of its Labour Party leadership and voted to get out?
What about nasty nationalism?
Of course when the British or Norwegians vote against the European Union some of them are motivated by racism and ethnocentrism. Mixtures of motivations are standard in politics. To reduce a whole electoral demographic to a disliked part, however, is that tired stereotyping we already get enough of when people do racist rants and indulge in Islamophobia.
An equally bogus claim is that Brexit means “leaving Europe.” As an Icelandic soccer player remarked on NPR the other day, Britain remains as much a part of Europe as ever, just as Iceland is, which is another non-member of the European Union. Many Canadians wish they were not a part of NAFTA, but scrapping NAFTA (a wish that many Americans also share) does not mean “leaving North America.”
My Nordic research tells the real story about “nationalist” behavior. Norwegians typically give the highest per-capita contribution to foreign-aid efforts like the U.N. Development Program; they are proud that the first general secretary of the United Nations was a Norwegian labor leader, Trygve Lie, and they supply volunteers and support for unarmed peacekeepers like Peace Brigades International and Nonviolent Peaceforce. In Cambodia, I ran into a Norwegian military unit busily engaged in de-mining fields where mines had remained when the U.S. war on Cambodia was over.
When Norwegian journalists or travelers become aware of bad practices being done in some other country by a Norwegian company, they can go to a public agency funded by the government that forces the company to come in and account for what they are doing elsewhere that they would not be allowed to do under exacting, people- and nature-friendly Norwegian law. The agency has the power to ban that company’s behavior.
This is the other side of nationalism, a pride in the high standards they have achieved through decades of struggle and an insistent demand that those standards not be compromised outside the borders whether for exploitation or carelessness.
Contrast that collective self-respect that understands people-centered solidarity both inside and beyond national boundaries, with the elite-centered “unity” implemented by an undemocratic Brussels bureaucracy.
I’m on the side of the Brits — who, despite years of class war in which the rich have been winning — still hope to regain the offensive and put social democracy back on the agenda. Judging from the website of the Trades Union Congress, or TUC, labor leadership may have given up that hope. But that leadership is not reckoning with either the climate crisis that opens new opportunity for change – journalist Naomi Klein’s observation – or the yearning of the TUC’s own rank-and-file dramatized by the Brexit vote.
And who knows? Maybe in this next period of struggle, the Brits will go beyond implementing the social democratic model and invent a 2.0 version – a deeper step toward liberation.
vry good thanks nice
But Norway is in many respects the opposite of the UK. It’s a very equal country, where we’re one of the most unequal in Europe; it produces its own food to high standards where we import a great deal and most of our agriculture is highly mechanised mono-crop. It kept its banks sensibly in line where we not only let them rip but have done nothing to reform their destructive practices. We’ve let our industries decay and with them much of the country outside the south-east bubble and other great metropolitan centres etc. etc. So with us it’s been the EU that’s kept our deprived areas going with massive grants, given us the Human Rights Act and protection for workers, encouraged pan-European alliances over scientific projects, given us many environmental protection measures etc. etc.
Leaving the EU doesn’t mean a brave new social-democratic future. It means ever more power in the hands of the rich and decay for the abandoned communities in the old working heartlands. It means increased racism and hatred of foreigners, an inward-looking people with our backs to what Europe has to offer us.
Sure the EU needs massive reform – I was working for DiEM, the Democracy in Europe Movement, during the referendum and if we’d won with a small majority that would have given us the opportunity to link up with other social democratic movements across the EU to insist on serious change, above all openness and democratic participation.
As it is, this huge failure is tearing the Labour Party apart while the Tories triumph and prepare who knows what more savagery towards the poor. the disabled, immigrants and also the environment…
The working class are weak in the UK. The right are benefiting from Brexit at the moment.
If Cobyn wins the curfuffle in the Labour party then a social movement that empowers the working class may result. If he looses we are toast – and judging by the way the department for energy and climate change was merged with another, literally toast.
Much as I respect George Lakey, much of what he writes here is plain wrong! Norway is effectively part of the EU one step removed. In order to sell and trade their goods on the same basis as EU member states throughout the EU, they are compelled to accept all the rules etc of EU membership, including free mobility of labour, without their participating in any of the decision making that make up those rules.
The EU is a collection of sovereign states which have come together to share areas of decision making. In so far as the EU is militaristic, this is because the states which make it up are militaristic. In fact the UK has been at the fore of pushing for military responses to Syria, Libya, Ukraine etc. The UK outside the EU will continue to push these policies with equal vigour. What is needed are changes of Government in the member states, not the disbandment of the EU.
As regards employment legislation (ie the social chapter), these have provided important safeguards for workers in the face of opposition from the Government.
This is why within the UK all the progressive forces in our society, the Labour party, the Greens, Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, Sinn Féin, the SDLP etc argued strongly in support of remaining within the EU.
One aspect not touched upon by George, is the extent to which the “Leave the EU” campaign was driven and fuelled by racism and xenophobia, by hatred of migrants and refugees. Since the vote for BREXIT, the number of racist attacks on ethnic minorities has increased massively.
And I haven’t even mentioned the consequences in Ireland.
BREXIT has been a massive set back for those of us who believe in nonviolent revolution within the Uk, within Ireland, within Europe
Norway has been able to pursue an unique political course over the past 40 years because it has been floating on an ocean of oil. You mention that Norwegian agricultural products compete on quality. You don’t mention the enormous subsidies that the Norwegian state pays to every farmer and fisherman: in the early 1980s, when I was living and working in Norway, the subsidy to each farmer or fisherman wa already about 100,000 NOK annually – only possible because of the fabulous oil wealth ouring through the state economy. A better future model would, in my opinion, be a tightening of the Nordic Union into a federation that also incorporated teh Baltic states and Scotland.
A common thread in most of these comments (and it’s wonderful that they include my old comrade Robin Percival’s!) is also expressed strongly in the website of the Trades Union Congress: the little justice we have in Britain is because of the protections provided by the EU’s more enlightened framework than we can generate for ourselves.
I understand that — if one regards oneself as weak, then even a flawed protector is better than none at all.
I confess to being influenced by Gandhi, who found on his return from South Africa that among his own people in India a widespread sense of weakness and futility had taken over. He decided firmly to refuse to cooperate with this debilitating belief. He understood the reasons for it: the British Empire was, after all, the mightiest the world had ever known, and was very clever at manipulating Indians by dividing them with both carrots and sticks. After decades of that imperial cleverness Indians were deeply committed to the belief in their own supine posture and incapacity to exert power. At the time, I would probably have joined them with my own despair.
Needless to say, Gandhi set his whole body and soul against that commitment to weakness and dependency. He challenged the young especially to find within themselves the God-given wellspring of powerfulness, of capacity, of intelligence, of ability to act in solidarity, of courage.
There were others in the Indian National Congress who knew that their equivalent of “the 1 percent” — a tiny island in Europe with a big navy — could not forever rule the Indian subcontinent. But Gandhi’s colleagues weren’t willing to challenge in as full a way their people’s sad and self-despising dependency, and therefore the independence movement couldn’t attract the mass base needed to stand up with pride and confidence.
As I say, I was influenced by Gandhi when I read him as a young man, and here in the U.S. I have run into many despairing people — my gay friends back in the day, we who huddled in the closet, and black people who said to Dr. King “Are you trying to get us killed?” Most recently I work with the widely despairing bunch of white middle class people aware of the climate crisis who would rather complain about why President Obama (himself!) didn’t save the climate, instead of getting on their own hind legs and compel change. At age 78 I still go to jail to encourage the young adults who are scared of expressing their own power. The truth is, my people have ALWAYS had within them the power to create in the U.S. the degree of achievement that Sweden (without oil), Denmark (without oil), Norway and others have attained. Always!
When in 1960 I gave up a great job in Norway and a remarkably pleasant life in a (relatively) just society to return to my wreck of a country run by the 1 percent, it was fully knowing that my people have the power to turn our country around, and that’s what I wanted to be part of.
It’s still true. My people, and — those of you writing from the UK — YOUR people, have the power, should you choose to connect with it. Your 1 percent is still, well, 1 percent. You still have the majority on your side to create a society as good or better than those the Nordics created. You have a proud legacy to learn from, just as we in the U.S. have a proud legacy of the assertion of people power to learn from. It is unworthy for any of us to give up because we didn’t learn fast enough and were outwitted by the 1 percent, or because we were too driven by factional disputes on the left to unite around a program that would mobilize the majority of the people we love and who gave us our identity in the first place.
OK, OK — Gandhi was a tough old bird. That’s how he could beat the Empire. Isn’t it time for British radicals to borrow some of that toughness and the internal sense of powerfulness and compassion from where the toughness comes, and give up the dependency on somebody else (the 1 percent of Europe!!!!!) to give them a measure of protection. Isn’t it time to set about finishing the job your inspiring forbears started?
George