(An article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard read on 25th September, 2016 on Daily Telegraph page)
Nomura
has a sober warning for Brexiteers. The last time England defied the
European order in such a drastic fashion, the schism was followed by a
century of economic stagnation and simmering conflicts that culminated
in the Civil War.
The
Japanese bank says the "obvious precedent" for Brexit is the English
Reformation of 1534. "King Henry VIII passed the Acts of Supremacy
making him 'supreme head in earth of the Church of England' and
repealing any 'usage, custom, foreign laws, foreign authority'."
This
act of petulance or patriotism - depending on your point of view -
failed to usher in the golden age of Elizabethan prosperity that we have
mostly come to believe. Or at least, that is Nomura's reading of the
reconstructed data on the real GDP per capita. There was no rise in
living standards for the next hundred years. It was a depression.
The
parallels with the Reformation are certainly striking. Church law was
under the foreign jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church, enforced by
a clerical apparatus that asserted supremacy and was widely resented.
Church taxes were paid directly to Rome.
The
fact that Henry was acting impetuously - in pursuit of Anne Boleyn - is
irrelevant. Such a break with Rome was possible only because the
authority of the papacy was already draining away across Northern
Europe, eroded by rationalism, and morally discredited by its sale of
indulgences and the tourist trade of relics.
Martin
Luther had already nailed his 95 theses to the chapel door of
Wittenberg Castle in Germany. The Catholic Church had become
unreformable, just as today's EU is trapped by its post-War ideology, by
bureaucratic vested interests, by the rigidities of the Acquis
Communautaire, and by constitutional inability to make monetary union
work. Though in fairness to the EU, there is no parallel in today's
Brussels to the court of the Borgias.
Printing
had taken off. The Pelagian humanist Erasmus had wickedly mocked the
papacy's mechanical christianity in his best-seller, In Praise of Folly.
He sold over a million copies of his works by 1530, translated and made
available to an urban intelligentsia by presses in from Venice, to
Geneva, and Utrecht.
The
censors lost their monopoly over manuscripts. They struggled to control
opinion, just as the European elites today struggle to counter
eurosceptic revolts, even in countries where the media (often
subisidized quietly by the state) cleaves to the pro-EU line.
Whether
Nomura is right about the grim economic fall-out from Henry VIII is an
open question. You could equally make the opposite case. The dissolution
of the monasteries and the dispersal of Church lands - a quarter of the
total - freed up resources, just as emancipation from Rome freed
England from the reactionary suffocation of Habsburg absolutism.
The
Reformation specifically freed the English from papal bulls allocating
the North Atlantic as a 'mare clausum' to the Spanish empire in
perpetuity, along with the Caribbean and swathes of the new world, until
that point closed entirely to English traders. This was to have seismic
consequences. Habsburg determination to crush the protestant revolt and
restore papal hegemony forced a war on England and Holland that was the
making of our mercantile ascendancies.
In
other words, the flowering of British trade with the Americas - and the
strategic lockholds that came with it - could never have occurred
without the traumatic break from Rome. The coastal cities of Northwest
Europe would not have become the richest hubs on earth.
Whatever
the GDP data purport to show - and we cannot even measure GDP
accurately today - it was already clear by the mid-Elizabethan age that
England was undergoing an economic and psychological revolution.
The
fifteen years or so from the early 1570s to the Armada in 1588 was a
time of astonishing vitality and can-do confidence, the moment when a
backward, sleepy nation broke onto the world scene with ventures and
exploration in all directions. The courage of these men is described
vividly by A. L. Rowse in his 'Expansion of Elizabethan England'.
"Nothing
is more untrue than the Victorian saying that empire came into being in
a fit of absence of mind: nothing much is apt to come into being that
way. It was the result rather of a conscious, deliberate and tenacious
campaign, in the face on constant disappointments, on the part of the
elect spirits of the nation," he wrote.
The
oceanic voyages of Drake, Raleigh, Frobisher, and Hawkings were backed
by fraternity of geographers, mathematicians, navigators, - and guided
by the strategic minds of the Hakluyts, father and son. Missions were
sent to Muscovy, Persia, and the Moghuls. English ships appeared in Istanbul, Basra, the Moluccas, and the River Plate.
"The
truth is that it gradually became a national venture. Public interest
was aroused, as never before, by the Virginia enterprise: people felt,
not obscurely, that the future of the nation was involved, as it was,"
he said.
By the
end of the century, England and Holland had fought the imperial armies
of the Counter-Reformation to a to a standstill, bankrupted Spain, and
broken Habsburg power. They had won the seas.
The
lesson is that it may take a very long time to assess Brexit.
Historians pay little attention to the ephemeral details of who lied
about what in the referendum campaign, and will probably conclude that
if it had not happened on June 23 2016, it would have happened sooner or
later anyway.
They
will give more heed to the deeper forces at work, an whether Europe's
fateful decision to launch the euro at Maastricht implied British
withdrawal. Monetary union changed the character of the EU profoundly.
It leaves the non-euro 'outers' in an untenable position, and its
centralizing logic cannot be reconciled with the self-governing nation
state. The fact that the euro has gone horribly wrong - as admitted this
month by founding father Jacques Delors - may have sealed the matter.
Much
the same is true for the Lisbon Treaty, which turned the European Court
of Justice intosupreme court with greatly enlarged jurisdiction. Claims
to legal supremacy are even less compatible with the nation state, and
the ECJ's forays into foreign policy, intelligence, and domestic tax law
through the Charter are a particular provocation.
It
is impossible to judge how much well-informed opinion crossed into the
Brexit camp as result of this legal clash, but if the rupture had not
happened this year, historians are likely to judge that it could hardly
be avoided at some point. It all comes down to who calls the shots, and
where authority ultimately lies.
Whether
Brexit is a success or failure will not be clear for decades, and
perhaps centuries. When Chinese premier Zhou En-Lai was asked about the
impact of the French Revolution on western civilisation he famously said it was "too early to tell".
We have since learned that he misunderstood the question. The point still holds.
