The magical thinking around Brexit

The lexicon of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s buffoonishly mismanaged effort to leave the European Union, includes technical terms such as “backstop” and “customs union,” as well as a fanciful but revealing one: “unicorn.” It has come to be a scornful shorthand for all that the Brexiteers promised voters in the June, 2016, referendum and cannot, now or ever, deliver. An E.U. official, referring to what he saw as the U.K.’s irrational negotiation schemes, told the Financial Times that “the unicorn industry has been very busy.” Anti-Brexit protesters have taken to wearing unicorn costumes. “A lot of the people who advocated Brexit have been chasing unicorns now for a very long time,” Leo Varadkar, the Prime Minister of Ireland, said last week in Washington, D.C., where he attended St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. His visit coincided with a series of votes in Parliament that were meant to clarify the plans for Brexit but which did nothing of the kind.

Instead, the next two weeks will test how deeply a nation can immerse itself in self-delusion. As a matter of European and U.K. law, Brexit is set to happen on March 29th. Members of the E.U. are frustrated because, even though they have spent two years negotiating a withdrawal agreement with Prime Minister Theresa May, Parliament has rejected it twice, most recently last Tuesday, which means that there is a risk of a chaotic, off-the-cliff No Deal Brexit, without determining new rules for trade, travel, or such basic matters as drivers’ licenses. On Wednesday, Parliament passed a motion saying that it didn’t want a No Deal Brexit, but—in an absurdity within an absurdity—didn’t legally change the deadline. On Thursday, May got Parliament’s approval to ask the E.U. for an extension. (Seven of her own Cabinet members voted against her.) But all of the other twenty-seven member states must approve it, and several have said that they will not do so unless the U.K. comes up with an actual plan for what it will do with the added time. And should the extension be short, or long enough to allow a real reconsideration of whether Brexit is even worth doing? The mood of many European leaders was captured by Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who said that he didn’t see the point of just allowing the U.K. to keep “whining on for months.”

The reasons for the M.P.s’ opposition to May’s deal are myriad, but they tend to concern the Irish border, which is why Varadkar has become a central figure in Brexit. The U.K. wants a harder border with E.U. countries than the one that exists, but it also wants to maintain its current, open border between Northern Ireland (seen as an inseparable part of the U.K.) and Ireland. Otherwise, it can’t fully uphold its commitments under the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, which put an end to the violent period known as the Troubles. Until that conundrum is resolved, May’s deal would keep the U.K. tied to the E.U.; this is the “backstop,” and it enrages Brexiteers, who insist that the border can be dealt with by inventing new technology. Varadkar called this notion a faith in “magical solutions.”

There has been a failure, among Brexiteers, to see how Ireland has thrived as part of the E.U.; with the principle of free movement of people and goods fortifying the peace agreement and Dublin’s emergence as a business center, the E.U.’s ideals of shared peace and prosperity have been realized there in a distinct way. At this point, Varadkar, who is forty, gay, and the son of a doctor from Mumbai and a nurse from County Waterford, has more clout in Brussels than May does.

In Northern Ireland, Brexit has revived calls for independence. The same is true in Scotland; both voted against Brexit. There is also a sense of betrayal among many young Britons, who grew up with the expectation that they could study, work, and build families across the Continent, and now find that future being thrown away for the sake of national nostalgia.

There is a growing public campaign for a second referendum, backed by an assortment of Remain-supporting M.P.s. Brexit has fractured the two main parties: many Tories feel that they no longer have an ideological home; Labour has been further divided by charges of anti-Semitism in its ranks. Labour’s official policy is now to support Brexit, if not May’s deal, but the first priority of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, appears to be to force a general election that would make him Prime Minister. In February, he indicated that he would back a new referendum. Last week, though, when Parliament finally had a chance to vote on an amendment calling for one, he instructed his M.P.s to abstain. The amendment was defeated, but its advocates haven’t given up.

Indeed, M.P.s voted no last week on every measure that suggested a specific way forward, apart from delay. They even voted against giving themselves more power to put solutions to a vote. They’re headed for more votes, including yet another one on May’s deal. Marina Hyde, of the Guardian, wrote that the story of Brexit is one of “politicians finding out in real time what the thing they had already done actually meant, then deferring the admission or even acceptance of it.”

Those words should resonate for Americans. The Brexit debate has been marked by particular British eccentricities, but the tendencies it appeals to—xenophobia, the belief in a lost, past greatness—cross many borders. The adherents of such movements may see the floundering of Brexit as a reason to rethink their assumptions—or, more dangerously, as proof that élites are conspiring against them. The populist dream subsists in an increasingly troubled sleep.

Donald Trump has called Brexit “a great victory.” Appearing last week with Varadkar, however, he denied that he had supported it; all he had done, he said, was to predict that it would win. He recalled the moment: “I was standing out on Turnberry”—his Scottish golf resort—“and we had a press conference, and people were screaming. That was the day before.” In fact, Trump arrived the day after the referendum. He might as truthfully have said that he saw a unicorn on the Turnberry fairway. He conceded that Brexit has gone badly, but he didn’t think that there should be a second referendum: “It would be very unfair to the people that won. They’d say, ‘What do you mean, you’re going to take another vote?’ ” But, as Trump will soon be reminded, that’s how democracy works: you don’t face voters just once but again and again, as they come to see what your promises amount to. And sometimes the second answer is very different. ♦