This week in Brexitland, July 27, 2023

What can rural Slovakia tell us about Brexit?

I got a lot of weird stares from friends in London when I said that part of my itinerary for the holidays this year would take in rural Slovakia. It was as if I was going somewhere exotic, remote and possibly dangerous as opposed to somewhere only a little over a thousand miles away, still in safe old Europe. There is so much of our own continent that is off the radar for even your metropolitan liberal wokerati London elite, it seems.

I’m going to four countries in all on this road trip: Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic. All are in the EU, yet only one (Slovakia) has the Euro as its currency. So, one for the “But the EU forces everyone to take the single currency!” buffs out there.

My sense is that being from Britain is a novelty round here. I think they struggle for Hungarian and Czech tourists, never mind from anywhere more far flung. To be fair, we are in the middle of nowhere. Or rather, outside of a town called Zvolen, sort of in the dead middle of Slovakia.

At the start of the year, I set myself a project: I would ask people in all 27 EU member states how they would react if Britain wanted to rejoin the European Union. Would their government allow it or veto it? What would be the terms and conditions? After getting the same answers everywhere I went - of course, we’d love Britain to rejoin, I don’t think there would be particularly onerous conditions placed on rejoining - Slovakia was what killed the whole thing for me. I talked via Zoom to a guy in Bratislava whom I had never met before (some Czech contacts had put me in touch) and he was dismissive of what I was even doing.

“Of course Slovakia would welcome Britain back in. Why the hell would we object? Besides, even if for some reason we didn’t want that, why would we little Slovaks stand in the way? It wouldn’t be our style. If the French and the Germans want you back in, that’s it, no one else is going to veto that.”

Having got through a third of the member states, I figured the answers were not going to significantly change. It made me realise that British exceptionalism exists for both Remainers and Leavers - the pro-Brexit bunch think we can leave the biggest single market in the world, one that contains all of our neighbours, and do whatever we want out there in the wide, wonderful world, ignoring the actual realities of international trade. The Remainers on the other hand think that Britain (England, really) has sinned against the Almighty European Project and will be punished for it.

When in reality, the attitude pretty much everywhere else in Europe is: “You did something stupid. You’ll realise it someday. When you do, let’s talk about reversing that mistake.” They are patient, knowing it will take years for Britain to come to terms with the size of the error Brexit represents - and they have their own lives to be getting on with. But Brexit has already failed and everyone knows it. Mostly because of how embarrassing it all is, the country is required to talk about it as little as possible until enough time has elapsed so that the vast majority of those thinking Brexit will come good at some point drop this fantasy, and then we can then make steps to reversing the damage done as much as logistically possible. In the meantime, bits of it will be reversed anyhow, as the next government almost certainly seeks some form of dynamic alignment with the European Union, the idea that we can regulate differently outside of the single market in order to increase British GDP by a zillion simoleons finally dying its deserved death.

Here in Slovakia, one can see the benefits of being in the single market all around you. In 2004, the year it joined the EU, Slovakian GDP per capita was around $10,000. Now it’s over $20,000, doubling during a period of prolonged international economic stagnation. And it’s obvious - I’m sure if we’d visited in 2004, we’d have been surprised by the level of poverty we would have seen here and there. Now, it all feels reasonably middle-class. Food is cheaper than in the UK, but not much cheaper. Beer is inexpensive, almost certainly because it isn’t taxed heavily. And this isn’t Bratislava, mind, but in a poorer part of Slovakia.

This is the real story of Brexit for me: not the immediate impact of it, but the curse of steady decline. While countries like Slovakia continue to grow, largely via single market membership, the UK will probably stagnate, regardless of whether we have a Labour or Tory government. Ten years from now, people in the UK won’t scoff at going on holiday in Eastern Europe because it’s somehow beneath consideration, but rather because it will be too expensive for them.

Thanks for reading. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, please subscribe. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, even better. This is all the extra stuff you get with a paid subscription:

1. Semi-daily updates on the state of the country and where Brexit is going.

2. Sections from a book I partly wrote - and will complete for my paid subscribers over this year - entitled, How Brexit Gets Reversed. It is about what happened pre-referendum, during the referendum and then after it but pre-Brexit itself, with some inside stories about Farage, Vote Leave, and the Remain campaign, as well as what I think will happen in the coming decade(s) that leads to Brexit being slowly reversed - and most importantly, what pro-Europeans can do to help the process along.

3. Anything else I think might interest paid subscribers as they come up.

Thanks everyone and I’ll see you all again next week for the worst of Brexit.