Brexit and Human Unity

THE CAUSES of the Brexit vote in the U.K. have been analysed exhaustively and exhaustingly. Most commentators agree that the immediate reasons included fear of mass immigration, loss of sovereignty, and a protest vote against a political establishment which was perceived to have abandoned the less well-off.

The leave campaign was also widely criticized for being mendacious and fear mongering, led by opportunistic politicians who did not fully believe in the arguments they were advancing. But, in truth, the Prime Minister’s decision to hold a referendum on Europe was also taken for short-term political gain and with very little consideration of the possible consequences.

Speculation about those consequences have so far tended to focus upon the possible break-up of the UK and of the EU, and of the potential impact upon global economic growth and stability. But what about the larger project of human unity that motivated the beginnings of the European Union experiment back in the 1950s? What lessons, if any, can be drawn, from the Brexit vote?

The original motivation for drawing the European countries closer together within a formal supranational structure was to prevent another catastrophic world war. In the early 1950s, Germany was developing its formidable industrial base once again and France, in particular, felt threatened by this. As Christine Devin’s excellent monograph, Uniting Men: Jean Monnet, demonstrates, Jean Monnet, the French political economist and diplomat, and a small group of fellow idealists decided that the best way of avoiding another war was to get Germany and France to unite in a commercial enterprise. The so-called Schuman Plan that they drew up proposed that the two countries pool their coal and steel resources. What made this so revolutionary was that each country needed to delegate a part of its sovereignty to an autonomous High Authority.

After enormous difficulties, the Plan was adopted and it became the seed of further integration. In October, 1955, Monnet created the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, and in 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed which instituted the Common Market. On 1 November, 1993, as a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the political realignment of former Soviet countries, the European Union was created, leading to a signficant enlargement of the member countries.

However, Monnet was clear that European union was not, for him, an end in itself. “It is a contribution to the organization of peace in the world”, and his real aim was a larger, global human unity that would guarantee this.

But how was this unity to be achieved? The approach in Europe was to begin with fostering economic integration and the free movement of peoples with the hope that this would lead, in time, to full political integration. To this end, the Single Market for member countries was created in 1993, in 1994 the Schengen Agreement was signed, and in 2002 a common currency, the Euro, was launched. The EU is now the largest trading block in the world, with 27 member states.

However, it can be argued that the European Union has made far less progress towards political union. National interest continues to be the dominant factor in deciding community policy. In fact, its failure to create a genuine political union is one reason why today it is struggling with the biggest challenges ever to its continued existence: the financial troubles of Greece, uncontrolled immigration from the countries of the Middle East and, of course, the turmoil and uncertainty generated by Brexit.

What has gone wrong? Sri Aurobindo’s writings on human unity may provide some clues. His major work on the topic, The Ideal of Human Unity, was written and published in monthly installments in the Arya between September 1915 and July 1918, and subsequently published as a book. He later made revisions, most notably in 1949 when he added a Postscript Chapter that commented on the changed international situation. He also made a brief reference to this in his Independence Message, written for All India Radio on the occasion of India’s independence.

Early in The Ideal of Human Unity he defined the core of the problem.

The problem of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties. There is the doubt whether the collective egoisms already created in the natural evolution of humanity can at this time be sufficiently modified or abolished and whether even an external unity in some effective form can be securely established. And there is the doubt whether, even if any such external unity can be established, it will not be at the price of crushing both the free life of the individual and the free play of the various collective units already created in which there is a real and active life and substituting a State organisation which will mechanise human existence.

Apart from these two uncertainties there is a third doubt whether a really living unity can be achieved by a mere economic, political and administrative unification...

This analysis seems particularly relevant to Brexit and the present situation of the EU. For example, although the issue during the UK referendum was clothed in concerns about loss of sovereignty, there is little doubt that national egoism – the belief held by some that the UK is an exceptional case, different from other countries in Europe and worthy of special treatment – played an important part in the result.

In the 1950s and 1960s this sense of exceptionalism, supported as it then was by the sense of being a major player on the world stage, may have been stronger. However, even after joining, the UK sought a special status within the European Union: it has not, for example, joined the Eurozone or signed up to the Schengen Agreement. In truth, from the beginning the UK’s motivation to join the EU was primarily economic and did not reflect any deep wish to become more ‘European’.

Monnet, like Sri Aurobindo, was very aware of the dangers of national interest, egoism, trumping the interest of the larger community, which was why he was so keen on forming supranational institutions. As early as 1943 he wrote, “There will be no peace in Europe if the States are formed again on the basis of national sovereignty with all that it entails of politics of prestige and economic protection.” And he wrote in his diary, “The focus of our efforts should be the development of man – not the affirmation of a motherland, whether big or small.”

Another of Sri Aurobindo’s great insights concerned the process by which human unity could be created and kept in being. Writing almost a century ago, he foresaw two possibilities. It could happen either through a loose federation of free peoples united by a common idea or ideal, or through the creation of an all-powerful World State that subsumed the existing nations.

Regarding the latter possibility, he noted:

At first it might confine itself to the most important questions and affairs which obviously demanded its control; but it would tend increasingly to stretch its hand to all or most matters that could be viewed as having an international effect and importance. Before long it would invade and occupy even those fields in which the nations are now jealous of their own rights and power. And eventually it would permeate the whole system of the national life and subject it to international control in the interests of the better coordination of the united life, culture, science, organisation, education, efficiency of the human race.

In other words, such a World State would inevitably tend to some form of totalitarianism and the imposition of uniformity.

The present European Union is far from being such a body. For example, the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ is designed to ensure that many decisions can be taken by the Member States rather than the Union.

However, there are also a vast number of EU directives which have the force of law in EU countries. While many of them guarantee basic rights or aim to protect the environment and health of its people, some of them – like the one that classifies bananas on the basis of their shape – have come in for much ridicule. In fact, Sri Aurobindo’s concern that a dominant supranational body would tend to interfere more and more in the life of individual nations and of the individual appears to be proving true.

That danger is not confined to supranational bodies like the EEC. Today, the most powerful supranational bodies are Multinational Corporations (MNCs) whose conception of unity is everybody purchasing their products or services. This version of economic globalization is based upon cultural uniformity and the creation of passive consumers, not the free development of cultures and individuals championed by Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo was clear about the need for such freedom.

It is (the) energy of the individual which is the really effective agent of collective progress. The State sometimes comes in to aid it and then, if its aid does not mean undue control, it serves a positively useful end. As often it stands in the way and then serves either as a brake upon progress or supplies the necessary amount of organised opposition and friction to give greater energy and a more complete shape to the new thing which is in process of formation. But what we are now tending towards is such an increase of organised State power and such a huge, irresistible and complex State activity as will either eliminate free individual effort altogether or leave it dwarfed and cowed into helplessness.

Consequently, the perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of the individual will be incomplete if it does not help towards the perfect state of the social aggregate to which he belongs and eventually to that of the largest possible human aggregate, the whole of a united humanity.

Both Sri Aurobindo and Monnet were realists: they knew that such a society could not be achieved in a day. At the same time, both men believed that the progress towards a larger human unity was inevitable. In his Memoirs, Monnet wrote that “something has begun, something that cannot be stopped”. And in the 1949 Postscript Chapter of The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

We conclude then that in the conditions of the world at present, even taking into consideration its most disparaging features and dangerous possibilities, there is nothing that need alter the view we have taken of the necessity and inevitability of some kind of world-union; the drive of Nature, the compulsion of circumstances and the present and future need of mankind make it inevitable. A catastrophe may intervene and interrupt or destroy what is being done, but even then the final result is sure. For unification is a necessity of Nature, an inevitable movement. Its necessity for the nations is also clear, for without it the freedom of the small nations may be at any moment in peril and the life even of the large and powerful nations insecure. The unification is therefore to the interests of all, and only human imbecility and stupid selfishness can prevent it; but these cannot stand for ever against the necessity of Nature and the Divine Will.

However, both men realised that human unity could not be achieved by institutions, by external means alone. There was an even more important element. In 1956 Monnet wrote, “I worked on creating institutions, thinking that institutions brought people closer...but this is not the method because institutions for coal and steel become institutions for coal and steel and not for men. In order to go further, one must touch the life and interest of the people. One must touch the political and human motivations, not just the technical.”

More profoundly, Sri Aurobindo spoke of the need for a psychological basis to human unity.

The great necessity, then, and the great difficulty is to help this idea of humanity which is already at work upon our minds and has even begun in a very slight degree to influence from above our actions, and turn it into something more than an idea, however strong, to make it a central motive and a fixed part of our nature. Its satisfaction must become a necessity of our psychological being, just as the family idea or the national idea has become each a psychological motive with its own need of satisfaction. But how is this to be done?

Sri Aurobindo’s answer was the living idea or religion of humanity; for only so could there come the psychological modification of life and feeling and outlook which would accustom both individual and group to live in their common humanity first and most, subduing their individual and group egoism, yet losing nothing of their individual or group power to develop and express in its own way the divinity in man which, once the race was assured of its material existence, would emerge as the true object of human existence.

The EU has achieved a great deal. Wars between its constituent nations now seem unthinkable, and it has done much to promote human rights. In recognition of this, in 2012 the EU received the Nobel Peace Prize for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights in Europe”.

But now it must go further, much further, if it is not to ossify into little more than a bureaucratic institution that seeks to regulate ever more fully the life of its peoples, crushing the life force and drying up the wells of inspiration and creativity.

Could this be the deeper reason behind Brexit? Could the Time Spirit, that larger force that works behind the scene impelling global evolution, be using the Brexit imbroglio, born out of ego, ambition and ignorance, as a means of reminding the rest of the EU, and of the world, of important truths? That unity is not uniformity; that the freedom of the individual is paramount in the evolution of society; and that, ultimately, the bedrock of unity is not institutions but a lived awareness of the essential oneness of mankind?

If these lessons are learned and acted upon, then perhaps some good may, at last, come out of the UK’s recent act of political and economic hara-kiri.

References

The Ideal of Human Unity by Sri Aurobindo (Volume 25 The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1997)

Independence message (the ‘five dreams’) written by Sri Aurobindo at the request of the All India Radio, Thiruchirapalli. (Broadcast on 14th August 1947)

Uniting Men: Jean Monnet by Christine Devin: (Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2005)