The continental imperative

BREXITEERS rarely hesitate to profess their love of Europe. Daniel Hannan, a campaigning MEP, stresses that he speaks Spanish and French. Sarah Vine, a journalist married to Michael Gove, the anti-EU justice secretary, points to her husband’s penchant for a glass of Bordeaux. “I love Europe!” Boris Johnson protested, unbidden, in a recent conversation with Bagehot. To prove his point, the former mayor of London inflicted a rendition of “Ode to Joy”, in the original German, on a startled crowd of supporters. Such declarations are often accompanied by what might be called the pro-European case for Brexit. Britain voting to leave the EU on June 23rd would produce a “domino effect” and “the democratic liberation of a whole continent”, gushed Mr Gove in a speech in April. It would be a helpful “wake-up call” concurs Liam Fox, a former defence secretary.

Such overtures have a semi-official slogan: “Love Europe, Hate the EU”. It is even available on sweatshirts. Which is all very jolly. It also bears no relation to the reality of Brexit and the campaign being fought in its pursuit. Take Mr Gove’s dream of a sunny European spring. This rests on the Utopian premise that the dark forces of European history—nationalism, fragmentation, demagoguery—would simply dissipate in the pandemonium of the EU’s sudden collapse. Hardly any mainstream figure on mainland Europe agrees that Brexit, let alone the EU’s dissolution, would lead to more democracy and dynamism (it would do the opposite, argues Radek Sikorski, the Anglophile former foreign minister of Poland). It is also why hard-right populists like Marine Le Pen in France and Lutz Bachmann, the founder of Germany’s anti-Islam Pegida movement, have both endorsed a Leave vote.