While the global establishment through almost all of its major representatives incessantly urges Britons to remain in the EU, following the example of notables such as US president Obama and IMF chief Lagarde, even the governor of the Bank of Japan, Haruhiko Kuroda, gave an interview speaking out for the pro-EU side and ‘good heartedly’ warned British citizens of dire consequences arguing that the possibility of the UK voting to leave is, literally, “the most serious risk facing the global economy”[1], thereby raising the bar compared to Mark Carney’s (a former Goldman Sachs employee) or George Osborne’s (a former Bilderberg attendee) relatively mild, periodic risk alerts, which makes one wonder by whom Mr.Kuroda has been nudged to take part in this charade of statements given by politicians, officials, experts and academics performing their ‘compulsory figures’ and uttering one or two arguments against Brexit fairly or remotely relevant to their respective positions.
Also Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, indeed took it ‘up to eleven’ when he prophesised the end of the “Western political civilisation in its entirety”[2]. Nevertheless, championing in inconsistency is probably the one by Osborne where he claims that property prices could fall by up to 18% (which is, of course, good news to so many Britons keen to purchase their own homes) while at the same time alleging that “first-time buyers would be hit because mortgage rates go up and mortgages become more difficult to get”[3], thereby scaremongering a strange audience consisting of both current and prospective property owners. Given the almost sacred perception of private property in the UK this is most likely the sorest spot to touch and the most penetrating marketing message of the remain-campaign.
On top of this, the liberal left, usually naive and well-meant frontrunners of ‘Project Fear’, do not even abstain from exploiting tragic events like the murder of Jo Cox by a disturbed bloke to associate the leave-campaign with Nazism while elevating remain advocates to sainthood and martyrdom[4].
Last but not least, as a demographer and a practitioner of the discipline of statistics I have to note that the odds of a right-wing ‘lone wolf’ without any prior conviction and history of violence (let alone gun use) to kill an admired mother-of-two and an aspiring left-wing politician strongly on the remain-side by both shooting AND stabbing her before hailing “Britain first”, and all that exactly one week to go to the polls (sufficient time to digest but not to forget!), is less than one in a trillion. That poor chap must have been ‘persuaded’ by an ‘online friend’, probably the same ‘overseas friend’ who, punctually on the day of the murder, revealed a paper receipt from 1999 (ancient times for the digital age) showing a purchase of some manuals regarding munitions and Nazi literature[5]. Anyone who has ever tried to retrieve a copy of a receipt from pre-digital times gone lost through customer services knows that this will take days sometimes weeks, and in this case we talk about an allegedly Neo-Nazi organisation that was shut down in 2013.
Apparently we shall believe that this troubled guy read the manual and lay dormant for 17 years only to strike just days before the referendum. At least the SPLC published a full picture of him taken while doing some voluntary work in a park equipped with work gloves whereas ‘The Guardian’ cropped that picture in such a way that he appears as a militiaman and the handrails behind him resemble a rifle[6].
Yet, the intensity of this –now bloody– propaganda bombardment is hardly proportionate to the commitment of the country in question to core European institutions. One has to note that the UK to the EU is at most what a visiting academic on sabbatical leave is to his or her host university like the author of this article. The United Kingdom is not part of the European travel area (AKA Schengen) nor does it intent to participate. She is not a constituent of the common currency (AKA Euro), and again, she does not want to become a member of the Euro-club. As a consequence of both abstinences she is also not part of the European Stability Mechanism nor is she drowned into the ‘refugee mess’ Germany and environs have let themselves plunge into. Neither does the UK even think of sharing its nuclear weapons with European ‘allies’ nor does it plan to put its armed forces under joint European command apart from a few UK-led initiatives or bilateral arrangements such as the CJEF with France or the UK Joint Expeditionary Force with several Nordic and Baltic countries. The free movement of goods and the customs union is the one-and-only major bond though as of 2016 that criterion alone would qualify to connect Britain with many other countries across the globe.
Hence, one may suspect that the stance against a Brexit vote is not due to any adverse effect it may or may not have on the UK or on the EU as a whole but rather that it may set precedence for other countries to leave the Union, but frankly that is not what this paper wants to scrutinize.
Just to wrap up the argument though, one should mention that the European Union was, and is, a construct to tame and control Germany, and to extract tribute from its productive workforce both in the form of cash payments as well as commodity exports the price of which is almost never paid out but rather credited via the TARGET system or converted to gold assets ‘generously’ stored by the US and the UK. Nowadays, it seems that the century-long ‘problem’ of high German productivity is about to be ‘handled’ once and for all by moving largely unemployable hordes of Moslem men from endogamous societies and marketing them as ‘skilled-workers-to-be’ though the workforce of most of the origin countries of this modern-age Migration Period (disguised under the heartbreaking ‘Refugees Welcome’ rhetoric) hardly contains highly qualified and skilled workers[7].
The obviously aimed long-term destruction of Germany, my birth country, is probably not for the sake of racism or some sort of late revenge of WWII, but rather because that nation constitutes the number one example of successful social capitalism. The collapse of Germany’s coherence and solidarity would certainly benefit international capital in further promoting unchecked deregulation and wild capitalism à la US style. Nevertheless, as said above, this is another story.
As a visitor in the UK, Brexit or not to Brexit is not a vital issue for me, though the debate about it both amuses and saddens one as it is based on ideological propositions and not on analysis of problems and opportunities. For the record, I suppose that sooner or later the UK will leave the EU, not to isolate itself but to form a union with countries which are culturally more similar to her, the details and reasons of which outlined below –though the current referendum may well result in a ‘remain’ vote due to the many warnings which constantly flood every possible media outlet urging the people of the UK to remain in the EU for fear of a recession even if their hearts tell them otherwise. This could be a pragmatic decision as Britain is already sheltered from the worst effects of the EU due to her absence in the common currency as well as the Schengen area.
The main inquiry of this article is not an estimation of the outcome, but why such a referendum to leave the EU was organised first in Britain and not somewhere else. The so-called ‘isolationist past’ of this country is not a sufficient explanation, rather, it seems, that the historical stance to prevent any continental union with or without the UK is a consequence and not the initiator of fundamental anthropological differences that exist between Britain and most of continental Europe.
The arguments outlined below will be difficult for a British (or American) audience to follow, let alone to accept (the reasons of which lying at their prevalent family system and the resulting cultural fabric), but are necessary to explain the peculiar position of Britain as well as several other countries, such as Norway, within Europe.
The first work to mention in this context is Alan MacFarlane’s groundbreaking study on the origins of English individualism in which he illustrates that since at least the 13th century (if not before) –in other words well before enlightenment and the industrial revolution– there was no ‘peasant’ society on what is now called Great Britain[8]. His findings indicate that land was always a commodity to be bought and sold, that no individual was tied to the soil, that parents had the right to divide their property among their children or to exclude some or all of them as they wished, that it was common for children to leave the parental home, moreover, that women had the right to hold property, and that all of this was there since the last 800 years if not longer.
These findings are hardly surprising given the resilience of family types as elaborated by Emmanuel Todd, the famous French demographer who –in collaboration with Peter Laslett and David Garrioch while at Cambridge– established a bijective link between family types prevalent in the post-1500-period and 20th century political systems[9]. Todd, in his seminal study, demonstrated that each family type across the globe corresponds to a certain form of governance (for instance, durable communist revolutions in the 20th century almost exclusively occurred in societies where the exogamous community family was prevalent in the 19th) and that liberal democracy characterised by a frequent change of government (in contrast to, for example, Japan or Sweden, where the ruling party almost never changes) was a product of the ‘absolute nuclear family’ which is, and was, prevalent in most of England, major parts of the rest of Britain (but not in Ireland!) as well in all other English-speaking countries that originated from it (the remaining ‘5-Eyes’), in addition to urban and southern parts of Norway, a large chunk of Denmark, the coastal areas of the Netherlands, and parts of Normandy and Brittany in France. These are the most liberal and individualistic geographies on the globe more or less in contrast to other areas of Europe and the rest of the world.
The absolute nuclear family type, as it was coined by Todd, is characterised by a lack of pre-determined equality and assumed collaboration between brothers as well as the usual absence of more than one married generation within a household, hence, a limited authority of parents over children. The strongest bond is neither the parent-child relation (traditionally prevalent in Germany) nor the fraternity of siblings (traditionally prevalent in central France), it is the partnership of man and woman, rendering the ‘couple’ as the basic and the only relevant unit of the social fabric.
No other than Margaret Thatcher had instinctively grasped the family model of her nation when she stated that “…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”[10]. In any other European country she would have had to resign on that statement but in Britain as well as in other English-speaking countries across the planet a vast majority of people indeed blame themselves in case of failure, hence, implicitly share Thatcher’s thoughts. The idea of solidarity confined to the couple within the household as well as partly extended onto the immediate community though clubs and associations endow Anglo-Saxon nations their characteristic flexibility and openness-to-change which are the strengths of this particular family type.
What Todd asserts, and what the present author assents to, is that –in the long run– the familial and social substructure prevalent in a ‘society’ will dominate the style of the political and economic superstructure, not the other way round as imagined by both the Neo-Classical as well as the Marxist schools of thought unfortunately engraved into modern mainstream reasoning.
A more recent study by Canadian economist Gilles Duranton and his colleagues using regional level EU data from the first decade of this century revealed that most economic indicators differentiate at the borders separating family types from each other[11]. Their results point out that medieval family structures influence current European regional disparities in almost every indicator analysed, suggesting that those family structures are either extremely resistant; or, more probably, that they were internalized within other social, economic and political institutions as those developed in the past and are hard to erase as they are implicitly reproduced by each new generation.
Not only economic productivity but also political and social affinity between human groups is largely determined by family types. It is no coincidence that even after the fall of communism countries like Russia, Kazakhstan and China went into political alliance (e.g. the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation). While Huntington&Co superficially allocate these three countries into separate realms based on religion, in the Toddian universe they share one thing in common, their ancient family type, which ensures that racial, ethnic and religious differences to be set aside, even though their particular family model, the exogamous community family, has largely vanished during the second half of the 20th century but apparently lingers on in the perceptions of its progeny.
Another example is formed by the ‘5-Eyes’, the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who were brothers-in-arms in both world wars and are still aligned in security and intelligence matters (e.g. the Echolon system) and further intertwined in a series of economic, cultural and mobility relationships though there is not a single official military alliance or economic union that all five are part of nor is there a formal common travel area connecting all of them. Still, despite the vast distances between those countries, exchanges of goods, capital, people and ideas among the 5-Eyes amount to an unprecedented level of connectedness that even linguistically and religiously similar countries which form adjacent geographies (e.g. the Arab League or Spanish-speaking Latin America) can only dream of.
Again Margaret Thatcher reflected the natural affinity of the 5-Eyes to each other remarking that in her lifetime “all the problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world”[12], though her use of language as a criterion is misleading. Nigeria or India, both English-speaking, are hardly natural allies to Britain, neither is Ireland despite geographic and linguistic proximity. What determines the affinity among the 5-Eyes is their family model, more so than language, religion, race or ethnicity. It is the upbringing of children in the family, and the formation and recreation of relationships between individuals within and across households, not as a discourse but as actually experienced by children and adults alike, that form the basis of how government bodies and economic enterprises are run as well as all other social organisations are administered.
It is also not surprising that apart from the ‘original’ 5-Eyes, which are almost exclusively dominated by the absolute nuclear family, the next tier of affinity extents to countries and nations that exhibit the absolute nuclear family at the regional level. Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden who leaked a vast pile of NSA documents we were informed that Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands are part of the so-called ‘9-Eyes’ which are bestowed with the ‘honour’ to be in the second-highest level of intelligence-sharing by American authorities, while Germany, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, and Italy have been sadly left out only to constitute the less-intimate third tier, named as the aloofly-sounding ‘14-Eyes’[13]. The German public was angered upon the revelation that Denmark’s relationship with the NSA is closer compared to their own country, though had the public been informed on family systems and its effect on political affinity they could have spared the agony (No offence Günter, you’re a good person, but Tommy likes Knud more than you!).
It is neither coincidence nor deliberate policy, but rather subconscious affinity that must have led US administrators to include only, and exactly, those four countries in the entire world which have the absolute nuclear family prevalent in at least some of their territory, namely Denmark, Norway, France, and the Netherlands, as partners at the second closest level. Further, it is no coincidence that other European nations where different family types are prevalent were only invited to be part of the outer ring. Intelligence sharing among countries is what gossip talk is to individuals: it is done among close friends while colleagues and acquaintances are generally left out.
Similarly, the current alliance between Russia, China and Kazakhstan can hardly be attributed to deliberate policy or geopolitical necessity as imagined by old-schools like Brzezinski or Huntington. Rather it is the common family model which was prevalent in the former century that still ties these nations together enabling their citizens as well as their leaders to share a fairly similar outlook and worldview, hence, an intuitive affinity to each other.
The observation that subconscious choices have profound effects on alliances and groupings is hard to believe for Britons, academics and laymen alike, since their prevalent family model, the absolute nuclear family, emphasises on individuality and freedom of choice more so than any other family type in the world. Family models certainly shape preferences, and thus, affect the outcomes of the decisions we take but not the actual process of it. More often than not, our subconsciousness selects one of the known and available alternatives for us, ranging from daily activities like picking a product to shop or choosing a movie to watch to more serious ones like mating a partner or voting for a party at the general election, prioritising to minimise the potential pain in addition to maximise the prospective gain based on previous negative and positive experiences imprinted to our memory[14]. These memories are certainly shaped by our upbringing during which some types of behaviour have led to success and others to failure, and some relationships were deemed more important than others.
While in the absolute nuclear family the partnership of man and woman is held above everything else (so that even the gay movement longs to imitate this bilateral bond, hence the fuzz about same-sex marriage rights), in the ‘endogamous community family’ prevalent in the Arab world, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia, among Sunni Kurds, to a lesser extent in Iran and regionally in Turkey as well, the strongest bond is that between brothers and male cousins further extendable to farther kin and even friends, undermining parental authority (thus inhibiting impersonal bureaucracies to form) and severely curtailing the freedom of women (thus restraining the educational potential of the offspring) who are preferably married to their cousins anyway. This is the breeding ground for ‘Cihadis’, young males who hate independent women, despise arts and creativity, and disdain everything which beautifies our daily lives apart from electronic gadgets and appliances which are enthusiastically embraced and admired.
The ‘politically correct’ narrative of the liberal left babbles that ‘true Islam’ has nothing to do with Cihadis and their terror, which is exceptionally correct in this case: the simultaneous envy and hatred towards the independent female on which the current modern Western lifestyle is centred on more than anything else, only emerges in endogamous societies when confronted to modernity, especially in the parallel structures throughout the corresponding migrant enclaves in Western Europe in addition to their –also modernising– home countries.
On the other hand, Malaysia, a predominantly Moslem nation which is not endogamous and where women have a heightened social status, does not produce Cihadis, neither does Kazakhstan which is exogamous to the bone. Similarly, Moslem Bosnia to the west of the Islamic world or the Comoros to the south[15] are not fertile grounds for scorned and disillusioned young men looking forward to blow themselves up to hopefully meet the 72 virgins promised in the afterlife. Only the endogamous community family is in ‘war’ with the West, not Islam per se, a war that it cannot win due to its structural and organisational weakness, which is a direct consequence of the low status of females within and beyond the endogamous family[16].
As a Moslem myself, I can only confirm the destructive social climate that prevails in endogamous societies and the cultural dullness it generates, an environment that keeps the social and emotional intelligence of the average adult citizen at the level of a 14 year old teenager. Especially in Turkey, my home county, where only some regions favour endogamy, the contrast between population groups who embrace endogamy to those who categorically oppose it is striking.
Globalisation, universal literacy, and the ‘shrinking of geography’ does not diminish the importance of ancient family types, on the contrary, it only reinforces their effect: in an era where most nations imitate some form of parliamentary democracy (which ensures that in the long run the preferences of the average man on the street dominate government), and where information, goods and services as well as people and their assets and ideas can move around the globe more so than any other time in history, the only remaining difference between human groups that matters are the particular family types and the resulting organisational capabilities that were implanted onto the societies which host these families, determining how they govern themselves, with whom they ally, and how effective they produce what they produce or not to produce anything useful at all.
Some family types like the endogamous community family are incapable of maintaining territorial nation states most of which are remnants of colonial structures anyway (Libya, Iraq, etc.) while some others, notably the ‘stem family’ prevalent in Germanic and Scandinavian nations, and in Japan, Korea and Israel, in addition to regional pockets in several other European countries, gives rise to highly productive as well as solidaristic nations, whose only flaw is its isolationist tendency, which in the case of Israel reaches the extreme point where the country’s entire land borders have been fenced-off.
Many countries in the world join forces with others to form military and economic alliances, some more successful than the others. The question for Britain is not whether it should isolate itself or not, which it should not and most probably will not either, but with whom to go a union into. Whatever the outcome of the referendum on the 23rd this month, sooner or later the UK is expected to form a closer formal association with the English-speaking nations that bred out of her, and in that process to inevitably rearrange and reduce its ties with the European Union, if, of course, that amorphous construct manages to remain in its present form until that time. Roy Jenkins, probably unaware of differences in family models, intuitively grasped back in 1999 that “Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member; and that it would be better, and certainly produce less friction, to accept this, and to move towards an orderly and if possible reasonably amicable withdrawal”[17].
It is not surprising that Britain, as the only nation in Europe where the absolute nuclear family is prevalent on a countrywide scale, is the first one to ever hold a referendum on EU membership. Other countries that have a regional presence of the same family model have also voted against the EU or its provisions in some form or the other. Norway has abstained from joining the EU at all while Denmark opted to remain out of the Euro, and France and the Netherlands were the only two countries that rejected the proposed European constitution by popular vote in 2005[18].
Modern Britain is not, and probably will not be, an isolationist and/or racist nation. Not only Muslim residents of London, but also hundreds of thousands of white British citizens have voted for Sadiq Khan, and it would not be surprising if, in the foreseeable future, the British electorate sends someone like Adam Afriyie or Priti Patel to Number 10. Both figures mentioned, by the way, explicitly favour an exit of Britain from the EU. Nigel Farage, on the other hand, will probably never make it to Westminster, let alone be part of the government.
What partner choice is for an individual in terms of success and happiness is the proper selection of allies and associates for a country in terms of peace and prosperity. Most British people probably sense that continental Europe is not the right ‘partner for life’ though it could be wise not to leave for the moment and move into ‘single’ status, thereby to avoid giving an image of a ‘lonely island’ that shuts herself off. At the same time Britain can actively search and arrange her future engagements with prospective partners as momentarily she neither is dependent on her partner’s income (the Euro-zone and the ECB) nor does she live in the same room (the Schengen area) which provides her the freedom to separate the households anytime she wishes to do so. Nevertheless, even in the ‘feared’ event of a Brexit, the UK should not be worse off than any European country as both the average Briton as well as the whole nation possess the ability to cope with divorce fairly well and to stand alone for some time if that is what she wants to do –in contrast to Donald Tusk’s horror scenario.
Human groups with different family models are not necessarily bound to conflict; they may engage in fruitful exchange and close cooperation as exemplified by the intensive relationship between the UK and Ireland despite a bitter independence war had separated the two sides. The UK and the EU can still be close friends after divorce –or continue their estranged marriage for a few more decades depending entirely on the choice of the British people. If the UK chooses to separate, the next logical step for her will be to re-unite with her ‘kin’ across the oceans which could result in the most productive union ever established. Whatever Britain decides for on the 23rd and in the aftermath, her flexible family model and the resulting high level of creativity will guide her through the process, though the international establishment will try hard to thwart Britain to become an example to other dissatisfied EU countries.
[1] BBC.com, 22 May 2016, Brexit poses ‘major risk’ to global growth, warns Bank of Japan chief, by Karishma Vaswani.
[2] BBC.com, 13 Jun 2016, EU Referendum, Donald Tusk: Brexit could destroy Western political civilisation.
[3] The Guardian, 21 May 2016, House prices could fall by 18% if Britain quits EU, says George Osborne, by Rowena Mason and Hilary Osborne.
[4] NewStatesmen.com, 17 Jun 2016, Britain’s Breaking Point: We owe it to Jo Cox not to write off her death as an act of affectless terrorism or meaningless madness, by Laurie Penny.
[5] Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org), 16 Jun 2016, Alleged killer of British MP was a longtime supporter of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, by Hatewatch Staff.
[6] The Guardian, 17 Jun 2016, Nazi regalia discovered at house of Jo Cox killing suspect, by staff reporters.
[7] Michele Battisti, Gabriel Felbermayr and Panu Poutvaara, 2015, Einwanderung: Welchen Nutzen hat die einheimische Bevölkerung, Ifo Schnelldienst 68(18):3-12.
[8] Alan MacFarlane, 1978, The Origins of English Individualism: Some surprises, Theory and Society 6(2):255-277.
[9] Emmanuel Todd, 1985, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (Oxford: Blackwell)
[10] Interview for Woman’s Own by Douglas Keay, 23 Sep 1987, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689
[11] Gilles Duranton, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Richard Sandall, 2009, Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe, Economic Geography 85(1):23-47.
[12] The Guardian, 6 Oct 1999, Thatcher returns to fight old battles, by Ewen MacAskill.
[13] The Copenhagen Post, 4 Nov 2013, Denmark is one of the NSA’s ‘9-Eyes’.
[14] A vast literature is centred around, but not limited to, the concepts of Neuromarketing and NLP. Among many others see: Ap Dijksterhuis, 2004, Think Different: the Merits of Unconscious Thought in Preference Development and Decision Making, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87(5):586-598; Ap Dijksterhuis et al, 2005, The Unconscious Consumer: Effects of Environment on Consumer Behavior, Journal of Consumer Psychology 15(3):193-202; Tjaco Walvis, 2010, Branding with Brains: The science of getting customers to choose your company (Prentice Hall); Gerald Zaltman, 2003, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Boston: Harvard Business School Press); Gregory Berns & Sara Moore, 2012, A neural predictor of cultural popularity, Journal of Consumer Psychology 22(1):154-160; Neale Martin & Kyle Morich, 2011, Unconscious mental processes in consumer choice: Toward a new model of consumer behavior, Journal of Brand Management 18(7):483-505.
[15] Reuters.com, 12 Nov 2013, Egypt is worst Arab state for women, Comoros best: survey, by Crina Boros.
[16] Emmanuel Todd, 1987, The Causes of Progress: Culture, Authority, and Change (Oxford: Blackwell)
[17] The Telegraph, Opinion, 18 Jun 2016, Will Vote Leave’s blunders lose us the day?, by Christopher Booker.
[18] CFR Backgrounder, 1 Jun 2005, European Union: The French & Dutch Referendums, by Lionel Beehner.
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