THE PEOPLE, THE KINGDOM...THE CROWN!

CORNEL CODIŢĂ (translated by Cosmin Ghidoveanu)
Ziarul BURSA #English Section / 28 iunie 2016

THE PEOPLE, THE KINGDOM...THE CROWN!

Gossipers are saying that in a conversation (a private one, of course) Queen Elizabeth the 2nd has asked for three reasons why Great Britain should continue to be a member of the European Union. Because she didn't get them, more than half of the people she rules over has voted in favor of the UK exiting the EU, thus putting themselves at odds, with the other half, which voted to stay!! The queen's skepticism, otherwise well tempered and apparently benign, has generated a vote that has already caused her to lose her people, is about to cause the loss of her Kingdom, and in the end, unavoidably, the Crown! Perhaps, for a sovereign that has already ruled for more than 60 years, these losses are not so great! To us, however, who have difficulty understanding how Shakespeare, Keynes and Churchill could be expelled from Europe, based on the vote of the British, even through a referendum, this loss is hard to gauge and impossible to accept. Even though it may seem tardy, here in Bucharest, we can now provide the British sovereign the reasons she is looking for. How did we come up with them? Easy!

The "BURSA" newspaper has organized the first public debate on the Brexit issue-consequences, setting the tone for what is going to be a large cacophony of comments and arguments going back and forth and setting the bar for the debate very high...at the level of the structural economic arguments, backed by facts and their dynamic, at the level of exploring some of the most creative concepts and analysis perspectives. Therefore, most of the ideas that the reader will find beloware not mine, but instead come from the participants in the debate.

Some distressing data and facts, around the causes that have caused Thursday's vote. The first is an observation concerning the generational vote. "The elderly have voted against the young" said a lot of the live reviews of the events.

The fact that is being overlooked is another: the old people who voted in favor of exiting the EU this time are the young people who voted in 1975 in favor of the UK joining the EU!!! The vote is relevant, but not for an alleged "war of generations", but for the disappointment of a generation!!!! is this disappointment valid or not? If we look at the valuations of the social polarization index in the UK, 1975 vs 2016, then YES, the disappointment is valid. And definitely, those who voted in favor of the exit, on Thursday, are not among those that monopolize the wealth in the UK. The question is whether the exacerbation of social polarization in the UK and in most of Europe is caused by the EU machine or rather by the neo-liberal and ultra-liberal policies pushed so heavily by Mrs. Thatcher and the Thatcherism that she left as her legacy not just to the Brits, but to the European Union overall.

The second unconventional interpretation of the vote in favor of the Brexit is the reaction of British citizens, as well as of many from other countries, to what is in fact the bureaucratic-decision-making machine in Brussels. The creation and the development of the institution that is called the European Union today has been made in the name of a promise: peace and equality in development and prosperity. The Brits' vote is a way of saying, very radically and accusingly, that today's Brussels and its institutions do not deliver, or even worse, have become incapable of ever delivering what they have promised through the deeds which created them. The threat of conflicts and even war in Europe has become a tangible reality in Europe; what little development has been achieved, is threatened by the destructive wave of a the biggest economic crisis in the history of the continent and of the world, and if the promise of prosperity has been carried out it has been so for a continuously shrinking number of people and for far too few of them în the first place!!! These are truths that many Europeans admit, but here we have the Brits who had the courage to say them openly, through a vote, taking on dramatic consequences for them and for their heirs. From that point of view, the vote of the "elderly" shows up in a different light! It is a vote of the courage to say about the "European Project" through political means, what the youth do not have the strength or the interest to say, or maybe they do not have the ability and the expertise to understand on a deeper level, at the level of the Great European Values!

On a different level of analysis, it is obvious that the universe of social, political and economic phenomena and developments represents a completely unknown territory opened by the pro-Brexit vote, and even more, with a complex structure for which the analytical instruments currently used in economics, to say nothing of politics, are simply inadequate. It is like trying to open the most complicated lock of a safe with a beer bottle!!! On the other hand, mathematics shows us that very complex universes of events and manifestations can be generated by surprisingly simple construction rules and algorithms. Fibonacci or Markov or the Mandelbrot equation are the most convincing examples. The hyper-complex reality of the way the economic and political consequences of the biggest social experiment that got out of control in the history of Europe, raises the question of whether a relatively simple formula exists for generating these events with extremely complex terminal ramifications and whether that formula can be found. Now, more than ever in the recent history of Europe, it can be seen how right Popper was in saying that "the future", history that comes hurtling towards us is never, can never be the result of a concept, of a theoretical construction implemented by a thorough "builder". "The end result will always be different from the rational construction. It will always be the result of the momentary constellation of forces at odds with each other. Furthermore, the result of rational planning can not become, under any circumstances, a stable structure, because the balance of forces is (constantly) changing." (K. Popper. The poverty of historicism).

For the use of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the 2nd of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and whoever else is capable of listening today in Europe, which Romania is also part of, to the surprise of many!

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