Nine months ago, the British voted to leave the European Union. Despite the current rejection of the British by most of the other Europeans, it may be precisely in multicultural United Kingdom where the identity of the future Europe is being forged.
I have been living between Madrid and London for three years, and since Brexit, it is especially in my English environment that I observe how initiatives are emerging to rethink the idea of Europe from social democracy and not from populism.
The first of these initiatives in which I was involved began the day after the referendum vote, when I received a request to join a Facebook group from an old friend. The group was called Europeans in the UK, in English Europeans in the UK.
Only a couple of days later, on June 28, this group and others organized a large demonstration attended by thousands of people according to the local press. At the demonstration there were Italians, Spaniards, Poles, but, above all, many British.
During the demonstration, there were not many shouts of rage, nor slogans with economic threats like those that had populated the political campaigns in favor of remain (staying in Europe). In the demonstration, dozens of hearts and posters were mainly seen that said: Europe, we love you. The debate about Europe had ceased to be rationalist and had become a matter of feelings and identity, also for the supporters of remain.
At first, I thought that the Facebook group and the demonstrations were a kind of passing tantrum of the people who had lost the referendum. But nine months later the demonstrations are repeated with more and more people, the group of friends on Facebook Europeans in the UK continues to grow and, above all, the British members grow. They talk about practical things, for example, how to get visas, they share press articles about the consequences of Brexit, but they also talk about the idea of Europe and its relationship with racism, emigration or the freedom of movement of people.
These last nine months, dozens of other Facebook groups similar to the one I am in have been created. In addition, many other different initiatives are emerging that promote the debate on Europe: the pro-European liberal democratic group, MoreUnited.uk, which aims to reform politics and already has more than 25,000 registered followers on the internet; the newspaper The New European which defines itself as the pro-remain newspaper and which, in its first print run, sold more than 40,000 copies; the documentary Divided Kingdom, in English Divided Kingdom.
The demonstrations, the new Facebook pages, the magazines, the films that are emerging in the United Kingdom, are a reflection that perhaps a new grassroots Europeanist social movement is developing. This movement is organized spontaneously and disassociated from political parties or traditional European elites. Also disassociated from the new populisms. The activities of the different groups of this social movement recreate in their conversations the discourse on Europe, and with it, its values, its objectives, its needs and, therefore, the structure of its identity.
Pro-European politicians have been aware of the need to create a European identity since the foundation of the European Union. However, the construction of this identity has been politically directed by and for the elites.
The Europeanism resulting from this social movement will surely be very different from the Europeanism politically constructed from Brussels in the last 70 years. But if it gets big enough, it has a good chance of forming an alternative to conservative populisms and a new Europe, perhaps more united than the current one, but different.
Brexit is a reflection that efforts to create a European identity in the United Kingdom have failed. British insularity may have played an important role, but Europe’s failure is undoubtedly linked to its lack of connection with people’s identity.
Pro-European politicians have been aware of the need to create a European identity since the foundation of the European Union. However, the construction of this identity has been politically directed by and for the elites. Elites who had eleven founding fathers as an intellectual reference. A network of universities such as the European University Institute of Florence and the College of Europe designed to promote the theory of European integration and also facilitate the sentimental pairing of young people from different countries who would later form families of convinced Europeans. European Documentation Centers strategically located in Chambers of Commerce and other national institutions that provided the data that fed the studies supporting European integration and its main thesis, which was federalism. Perhaps only school and university exchange programs, such as the Erasmus program that annually moves more than 650,000 students according to data from the European Commission, have been able to contribute to the European identity in a somewhat more massive and depoliticized way.
But Brexit has shown that it is a mistake to continue building Europe thinking exclusively about institutions. For Europe to stop being an institution of distant bureaucrats and become a collective identity, people need to take ownership of the idea of Europe.
The emergence of a Europeanist social movement in the United Kingdom may be a way for that appropriation and for the creation of the new collective identity. Scholars of social movements have shown that collective identity is created through constant interactions between members of a community. People have to participate in activities that allow them to talk about the Europe where they want to live.
Thus, in order to create a socially and economically strong Europe, we may need more political integration in Europe, as social democratic politicians say. But social movements are also necessary to build and disseminate a European collective identity. The Europe we want to be has to be able to be thought and discussed by people through activities that form communicative (such as Facebook) and cultural spaces of their own (such as new newspapers, films and other artistic and citizen activities). Far from the imposition of a single institutionalist solution, the role of politicians has to be to create links between the activities of social movements and European institutions. Paradoxically, it may be this time that the British, or, rather, the “Europeans in the United Kingdom” (as my Facebook friends call themselves) will help to re-establish the idea of Europe.
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NOTE: The following article has been published in the Huffington Post newspaper with the following link:
We publish it here with the author’s permission.