So Britain has left Europe, and like millions of others in the UK, Europe and beyond, I feel an inestimable sadness. I became a UK citizen only about seven years ago, and lived in the UK only about 11 years in total, and in all this time the European Union was a shining light that made me hope for something beyond the imperial shadow of its constituents. At one time I had hoped, like a fool, that something like that could emerge even in South Asia. Though far from the reality, it is the hope of peace and equality in the world, and this country has turned its back on that hope. When the referendum vote happened I was worried that Brexit would mark the unravelling of that project. That fear is further away now, but I think it’s still there for me, at the back of my mind. In any case, I will not be a part of that project, the UK will not return in my lifetime and the EU might well change and my hopes wither.
Ian McEwan writes in the Observer:
Take a road trip from Greece to Sweden, from Portugal to Hungary. Leave your passport behind. What a rich, teeming bundle of civilisations – in food, manners, architecture, language, and each nation state profoundly and proudly different from its neighbours. No evidence of being under the boot-heel of Brussels. Nothing here of continental USA’s dreary commercial sameness. Summon everything you’ve learned of the ruinous, desperate state of Europe in 1945, then contemplate a stupendous economic, political and cultural achievement: peace, open borders, relative prosperity, and the encouragement of individual rights, tolerance and freedom of expression. Until Friday this was where our grown-up children went at will to live and work.
I feel no love for the United Kingdom, no love for Britain, and certainly none for England. But Europe was something that I thought one could love, even as a visible foreigner, as one who is not blind to history and to its problems with race and religion and inequality. I was asleep when the clock struck 11 in London last night, but in the morning I woke and remembered my mother’s account of the fall of Dhaka and the secession of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh: for all the ugly history, her elder brother wept as he watched the news. When she told me the story I sniggered and she told me I couldn’t understand what it was to watch an an ideal, even a flawed and hollow ideal, and a polity that had once chosen to come together, shatter to pieces. I feel something of it this morning.