Hegel and the political philosophy of Brexit.

• Author: Copilac, Emanuel

Introduction: Hegel, the European Union and the struggle for recognition

Although it was one of the most surprising and influential political events of 2016, Brexit is only now starting to be understood at its true scale (Webster 2016, 14-30). I intend to assess Brexit through a Hegelian lens, which will prove to be an interesting approach in grasping the underlying causes and possible consequences entailed by Great Britain's exit from the European Union (EU).

The article starts with an introduction to the Hegelian concept of the struggle for recognition. By this logic, Brexit emerges as a consequence of the way in which British society perceives itselfs as being insufficiently recognized (valued) by the EU, and by the desire to obtain new concessions regarding the acquis communautaire. After a short methodological discussion and a brief literature review, the next section discusses the process of Brexit, along with a possible Hegelian interpretation of it on different levels (political, economic and philosophical). Finally, the conclusion synthesizes the whole philosophical endeavour, offers several modest predictions of the impact of Brexit, and outlines some potentially useful avenues for further inquiry.

Let us start with Hegel's opinion regarding European nations, as presented in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right: "European nations constitute, according to the general principle of their legislation, morality, culture, a family, and therefore the international juridical behavior is modified in this sense, even in a situation where reciprocal damage is the rule. The states relation to one another remains uncertain: there is no praetor to settle the disputes; the higher praetor is the universal spirit existing in and for itself, the world spirit" (Hegel 1996a, 325) (2). Today, after two centuries of warfare, disputes and compromises of all sorts between European nations, the institution of the EU may be considered such a praetor. Thus, "reciprocal damage" is no longer a constant of European history, at least not in the unconcealed form of war, as was the case at the beginning of the 19th century, when Hegel was at the height of his intellectual powers.

With reference to Hegel's position regarding European nations, the EU could be considered, to a certain extent, an intermediary spirit between the distinctive spirits of its constituent peoples (Hegel uses the term 'nation' rarely, and not in the sense we are falimiarized with) expressed through states, and the world spirit. That these spirits of peoples wold eventually give birth to a global state, the sole political form in which inter-national and inter-individual recognition to be juridically confined and functional, like Alexandre Kojeve considers, is another discussion, very interesting and fertile, but without a stake for the present paper, although Hegel specifically rejected the idea (Kojeve 2012; Hegel 1967, 290). According to Hegel, the "principles of the spirits of peoples, in a necessary progression of stages, are themselves only moments of a universal spirit which, through them, rises and fulfills itself in history, as totality comprising itself" (Hegel 1997, 77; original emphasis). Hegel would have very likely appreciated the merits of the European construction as a whole, its innovative rationality, at least in the first decades after it was created. Today, I am almost sure he woud criticize the EU, but in an immanent, constructive, not in an exterior-negative way, implying the need to change it through itself, not against and from outside itself, and thus not opting for a radical political alterity. And I am also aware my argument can be contested. One could argue that Hegel was a fierce advocate of war as a mean of moral and political rejuvenation of states.

Indeed, if one take into account some of the Hegelian ideas regarding war one could be, at least initially, horrified:

'sometimes, happy wars have prevented internal disturbances and have consolidated the state's internal power'; 'During peaceful times civil life expands, all spheres find their rightful place and people end up being comfortable, they mire themselves; their particularities grow more and more rigid, until they ossify. But health requires the unity of the body, and when its parts became so rigid in themselves, than death has arrived. (...) the state is the individual, and in individuality negation is essentially contained. Although a number of states constitute themselves in a family, nevertheless this union, as individuality, must create an opposition and give birth to an enemy. From wars, peoples emerge not only strengthened, but also nations irreconcilable in themselves win, due to wars pointing outside, internal quiescence' (Hegel 1996a, 316-317).

It seems one is confronted with a most dogmatic and aggressive conservatism; the manipulation and identification of external scapegoats for internal problems, are always rebarbative practices. Hegel continues: 'the necessity of war (...) which also maintains the ethical health of peoples in its indifference with relevance to their determinate-modes and against their attunement to them and their rigid becoming, just like the movement of the winds prevents the sea water from tepidity; a rottenness in which a durable silence would have transposed her (...)' (Hegel 1967, 290). Finally,

'War is the spirit and the shape in which the essential moment of the ethical substance, the absolute freedom of ethical self-existence with reference to any other existence, it is given in its reality and confirmation. Because, on one hand, war makes singular systems of property and personal independence, as the singular personality itself, to feel the power of the negative, on the other hand, precisely in itself this negative essence rises as the keeper of the whole; the young brave man in which the woman found her pleasure, the oppressed principle of ruin and destruction, comes to light and is what is valuable. Now the natural force and what appears as hazard of luck decide over the being of ethical essence and over spiritual necessity; because the ethical being grounds itself on force and luck, it is already decided it had collapsed. - As before only penates (Roman gods of houses, m.n.) disappeared into the spirit of the people, so the living spirits of peoples disappear now, through their own individuality, in a universal community, which's simple universality is without spirit and dead and which's vitality is the singular individual as singular' (Hegel 2000, 275; italics in original).

Of course, by isolating these passages from the context, as Karl Popper did (Popper 2013, 242-290), or proceeding in a more sophisticatedly manner, but essentially in the same improper way from a hermeneutical viewpoint (Russell 1972, 730-746), some commentators all to easily identified Hegel with Prussian absolutism. Later, following this train of argumentation, he was easily accused of conceptually configurating the future National-Socialist aggression against Europe (Tibebu 2010, 112) and placed on a similar ontological anti-modern position like Martin Heidegger. Moreover, authors like Martin Cohen blame Hegel for having laid the theoretical foundations of communism and fascism as well. According to Cohen, "both doctrines adopt the Hegelian notion of individual self-consciousness being embodied in the state" and both "led to the untold sufferings of millions of ordinary and extraordinary people, victims of ideologues with Hegelian notions of >, and contempt for the sufferings of individuals in the face of it" (Cohen 2001, 167; see also Brooks 2013, 1).

Hegel sees war as a kind of proto-struggle for recognition, a central concept of his philosophy. "It may indeed happen that a state against which war is actually waged is not recognised [by its adversary]; but the very fact that war is waged against it amounts to recognition, and the state in question is recognised in full when peace is concluded with it" (Hegel 2004, 61). The master-slave dialectic metaphora from The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Spirit is too well-known in order to be presented here in full extent (Hegel 2000, 116-120; Hegel 1996b, 209-2016; Hegel 1979, 125-126; Hegel 1983, 111). The point is that only through overcoming their limited and irrational condition can both master and slave become citizens of modern, bureaucratic-rational states, a space in which they can find and recognize themselves as equals. In this way, they can consolidate democracy and, implicitly, the advancement of global spirit. But Hegel does not sufficiently correlate the idea of permanent struggle between master and slave with the idea of war as a phenomenological inevitability in the process of creating a universal conscience able to carry and mold a matching spirit.

One should consider the world in which Hegel lived, thought and wrote, the European world of the first half of the 19th century. This was a world still dominated by the Napoleonic wars decades after the defeat of Napoleon himself; a world in which these very wars, stimulated by the political philosophy of Enlightenment, pushed forward the development of national consciousness and processes of state construction. This was a process that unfolded throughout the entire 19th century and that continued to evolve until the appearance of independent states in the Third World in the 20th century. By defeating Prussia, Napoleon exerted a huge influence over the configuration rather than the rebirth of German national consciousness, given that the German space had been arbitrarily divided in the last centuries by the major European powers. One should not confuse nationalism with the processes of statal construction; although they seem synonymous, they are nevertheless two distinct political-social phenomena. A great admirer of states as vehicles of rights and producers of responsible and civically fulfilled citizens, calling...