Geopolitics is so huge, and so predictable: yet its impact can often be shocking. So it is with the decline of Europe, after centuries of economic leadership.
It was obvious, as with every swing in the pendulum of wealth and development before this one, that as Asia rose and then the BRIC nations and others too, geopolitics was moving out of Euro-happy mode.
Ageing populations, pension expectations that governments could no longer meet, GDP growth of 1.4 percent, 1.7 percent, and the like, rising unemployment, and dying industry, all of these spelled rougher times ahead for the EU nations.
It was a scenario that made me predict that we would see the rise of the right wing in Europe, institutional deterioration, rising conflict, riots.
It was all so clear: those strains plus human psychology — out pops anger, hatred, and loss of reason. It’s what gave birth to the Nazis: for there is nothing more potent than being pushed into poverty and feeling its unfair, half, or even a third of a nation at a time.
Yet, still, it is shocking that in the UK there is now a chance that a stable nation, the right side of four hundred years of democracy, could finally move into civil war.
The big fear for its current, polarised, extremist leaders, Boris and Jeremy, is apparently the 17 million rather older adults in the UK’s population of 66 million that voted to leave Europe.
Messaging is all about how they will riot, and take Britain down, if it does not leave Europe now — in a departure that will do precisely nothing to put the country’s manufacturing plants back up, but which has, demonstrably, done the opposite already, forcing accelerating job closures.
But what no one considers is what the other 36 million UK adults, who didn’t vote to leave Europe (12.5m Brits are under-18), will do if they are really forced out of Europe into food shortages, medical shortages, and economic woes in bucketfuls. Because, believe me, anger is now getting feverish in all directions.
And the UK’s new Prime Minister is setting fires everywhere.
The British had never seen an MP assassinated in anyone’s lifetime. But a pro-EU MP was murdered just before the EU referendum by a right-wing extremist. In recent days, when MPs complained of death threats, the chief political adviser to the Prime Minister told them the solution was to change which way they voted – then they wouldn’t get killed.
He said it to camera, broadcast by the BBC.
The Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said similar things. He has also called the law forbidding a no-deal exit from Europe the Surrender Act. He has called the 35 million Brits he apparently no longer represents or leads, traitors.
Which just isn’t how the UK used to be. It’s war talk.
In fact, the middle ground has gone. Dissent is a death wish. The truth doesn’t matter anymore.
Which I suppose is how things must always look before war begins, a kind of collective trance, nonsense as a daily diet, emotions enflamed everywhere, societal insanity taking hold. A time, a place, and a way in which even families forget that their unity is more important than London, or Brussels, Boris, or Jeremy, or any of them.
But when it has all been ignited to the final moment that the violence does begin, at least let Boris Johnson be held accountable then for all his calls to action.
Let the International Criminal Court show us that it doesn’t only look to Africa for crimes against humanity, but that fueling enmity and hatred in Great Britain is punishable too.
For sure, it was never likely that Europe would decline peacefully. From yellow vests in France to nationalists in Britain, trouble is afoot. But as the UK spirals downwards into a wormhole of self harm, there is one name on this latest skid into destruction. Leaders need to do better than moving the country into a war against itself.
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