Fintan O’Toole: Ireland must join the fight for decency

The one advantage a frying pan has over a fire is that there is still something between you and the flames.

In thinking about whether, as a growing body of opinion suggests, Ireland should follow the UK out of the European Union, we must start by recognising that we have no good option.

We find ourselves in a world of turmoil where there are no safe harbours in which to shelter from the storms.

The difference between the two routes we can travel is that one (staying in the European Union) is deeply troubling in its uncertainty and the other (joining the great reactionary movement that has overtaken England and the United States) is certain trouble.

There has long been a school of thought that Ireland is much more American than European.

It found its voice in 1999, when the then tánaiste Mary Harney, spoke of how "Ireland was spiritually closer to Boston than Berlin".

Brexit has revived the notion that Ireland is much more comfortable (for economic, cultural, historic and demographic reasons) as part of an Anglo-American axis than in a continental European alliance whose centre of gravity has shifted towards the east.

Beneath this argument, there has always been a political agenda.

As Harney put it in that speech: “Our economic success owes more to American liberalism than to European leftism.”

We belong, in other words, with the children of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, not with the social democratic settlement of postwar Europe.

In effect though, this choice was avoidable. Ireland could do what it always likes to do, which is to be everything to everybody.

We could be the American bridgehead in Europe, the UK’s little brother, committed Europhiles, neoliberals and social democrats, a flying island, like Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels – hovering between Boston, Berlin and Birmingham without ever having to land in any of them.

But, suddenly, our island feels fixed again, stuck between the devil of an EU in crisis and the deep blue sea of an Anglo-American world in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

Fatal contradiction

Perhaps it is too comforting to suggest that we have choices at all.

The dilemma may be solved for us by the virtual collapse of the EU, a prospect that is as real, and as fantastic, now as Brexit or President Trump were two years ago.

If Matteo Renzi loses his referendum in Italy next month, if Geert Wilders wins the Dutch elections in March, if Marine Le Pen becomes president of France next May, the EU – as we know it – will be a beaten docket.

The crisis will be much more profound than a likely implosion of the euro. The basic premise of the EU – that it is an alliance of liberal democracies – will have vanished. Hungary, Poland, and now possibly Bulgaria, are already out of that game.

There is a strong chance that the EU will have a critical mass of “managed democracies” in which authoritarian leaders are kept in power by aggressive nationalism, control of the media, hatred of expertise and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

But it is crazy to think that there is some kind of refuge to be had in redefining Ireland as a junior partner in the Anglo-American axis.

Even if we leave aside the obnoxious politics of white ethnic reaction, there is no stability on offer there.

At the heart of both Brexit and the Trump triumph there is a fatal contradiction. Both are fuelled by the rage of communities that feel left behind by growing inequality.

Guarantee of further upheaval

Yet, both bring to power parties that are hostile to the kind of big government that alone can tackle those inequalities.

There is a mismatch between the social causes and the political consequences and it is a guarantee of further upheaval.

Both the US and Britain are irreversibly entangled in internal conflicts that will be, at best, utterly draining and, at worst, deeply nasty.

And that’s the difference – irreversible is not yet a word we can apply to Europe’s disintegration. There is still, just about, time for an emergency response to an existential threat.

The EU, bad as it is, is now the only major bloc left in the world that can fight for open democracy.

If it is not to go gentle into the good night of Putinisation, it has to declare a new compact with five basic components: fierce resistance to Trump’s attack on the Paris climate change accord; a massive EU programme of public investment in infrastructure and sustainable energy, with priority for disadvantaged communities; a disavowal of the disastrous austerity mentality and removal of the excessive and ideologically-driven fiscal rules; a radical programme of democratisation; and a common goal of directing all policy towards the steady reduction of social and economic inequalities.

There is still a fight to be fought and it is one that Ireland must be part of.

We either get up and fight for dignity, equality and tolerance or we watch the great reaction run its course and see the serious fascists move in behind the reckless buffoons.

The EU deserves much of the scepticism it gets but it is what we’ve got: the only arena, for now, in which decency still has a fighting chance.