So I know you have adoption outcomes of all of these is, of course, a safe as you know,
she was one of the community of surprise and the sleeping outside professional group.
English is definitely a success. Nanny has wise men,
very wise woman of Europe and being actually to revisit that report on European patterns
that she was very much involved in advising the Convention on the Future of Europe.
She also advised the presidency of the I did I got your a beautiful idea which these days you had a little artistic pass.
But anyway, she had a course who managed to distinguish to academic record vehicle.
No, not at all. For college, though, of course, NYU, not to mention of the many, many articles created in volumes.
She is, of course, the the mother of the idea of democracy, love denied in Europe of democracy,
although we had the oil in that rather lovely island and she is also dedicated.
Really sorry Keesha.
I didn't I can't tell you the number of conferences, workshops, seminars,
which is not only organised but mostly animated in a wonderful, wonderful way.
Those of you who at the conference saw earlier today and also the number of students all over the world,
former students of that, at least in the most unlikely places, and who always teaching incredibly warm.
And so we're very, very lucky to have this person who came to us for granted to give the keynote today, but was a very lucky to have an event.
And we they do not for granted both have a very distinguished academic career embraces many of the same places Oxford also Columbia
College London many occasions so he actually from city security policy and then going wider and wider and about particularly in Europe.
In the overview article published in May 2016 under the title Britain's Influence in the EU.
You might have an interesting perspective in these days about these purposes.
He also does absolutely, extraordinarily, it's great project for the UK in a changing Europe,
which claims and aspires to be absolutely impartial in the British debate about Europe.
And I think absolutely and people in the institute of this of the Brexit that you are pretty
close and I think strong achievement and I think you try and not think that across that time.
But I think that and it is also incredibly active on Twitter.
I thought in from the time we got involved entirely and he did a wonderfully in his shop via Twitter bio as a better trustee of
politics throughout Europe and interested in response to this lecture letter is going to give you a rather unusual perhaps.
I kind of agree it is, I thought, a reduced Shakespeare version of a much longer text that she is in the process of
writing on this subject to access directly to sacrifice the three meanings of Brexit.
Then I will respond and then we have time for discussion.
So he's got the introductory press and he was going to give the keynote originally, but I must say it's worth doing it,
if only for such gracious introduction and having and then indulging my musings as well as having all of you here today.
Thank you. As many of us have had already a long day saying it, thinking it in the beginning was the word,
and the word was Brexit, but nobody quite knew what that word meant.
And then the Oracle speaks of Brexit means Brexit.
Since the June referendum, we each have our own way of dealing with the ubiquitous tautology.
What does it say about the prospect of Britain's exit from the EU that the word itself,
the most Googled in 2016, was the main contender for its elucidation?
That's Britain. Mean Brexit mean I will not backtrack or we're ready to pay the price or ask you or on the other side, good riddance.
What does that mean? As scholars, we are so involved in witnessing the day to day political saga which tries to rationalise it all.
We turn to the past trying to explain why this happened.
And earlier on today, Sara and Katherine give us wonderful analysis of that.
We turn to the future, trying to predict what will happen or prescribe what should happen.
We heard a lot about this earlier on. So explanation and implications, political sociology and policy.
But what about the in-between? What does MI mean in Brexit?
Mean Brexit. So indulge me.
Meaning matters. Well, we have entered a battle of narratives whose protagonists will spare no future shortcuts.
Which one dominated the next two years will help determine the nature of the Brexit deal and maybe of the EU itself.
But they also meticulous instrumental reasons, meetings, process feelings, but do not transcend them.
And as all of that famously argued, when the hidden narratives which sustain our society rise to the surface,
they borrow from the qualities of past fantastic tales which help determine what we see together.
They become mythology. So I couldn't help my friends then to explore the meaning of Brexit as mythology,
to juxtapose parallel and incomparable meanings under the shadow of great archetypes,
and treat Brexit like all such archetypes, as a dramatic pivot around a moment with a before and an after.
Somehow connecting a feature of being. To be or not to be European and a feature of do it to stay or not to stay in the EU.
For as with all such archetypal myth, it is in the making disconnection visible that the moment acquires meaning,
allowing for an infinite retelling, and yet serving as a stable beacon for our collective imaginations.
So in this period, I suggest that the meaning of this work can be told through the prism of three archetypes,
each connecting, being and doing in a different way. Stories of exodus, stories of reckoning, and stories of sacrifice.
Now, whether these stories echo most faithfully the voice of the world itself,
as bacon would have had it, or whether they simply constitute common reference.
We feel we know what they each mean,
and yet yet they they do not emerge from the collective soul of humankind to provide easy answer to our predicament.
Always ambiguous, they serve as ever retreating truth mirages to tingle our mind and entrench mystery.
Humans are always, always turned on by a meaning that's hard to get.
So stories may help us see from an innocent and large question viewpoint,
or they may help us confront meanings dominant among various categories of people as they clash, overlap or cross in the dark.
Say categories like British nationals, EU citizens, Brussels bubble, EU neighbours rest of the world.
So we can use them to confront this meaning and we can use them like a kaleidoscope to shed light on each other.
And it is this possibility for recognition that I'd like to open up here in our conversation.
So let us begin Brexit.
As is the most straightforward and perhaps widely shared meaning of the Brexit, both in the UK and on the European continent,
is simply that it should be about Britain red, white and blue, Britain's prerogative and thus Britain's problem.
Brexit simply means that the UK will leave.
So progressive ideas are unmistakeably leading a people enslaved by the shackles of Brussels on an escape journey.
They are hearing the harrowing tale of another people escaping slavery in Egypt,
served by the strong headedness of prophets bargaining with the pharaoh over terms of departure and complete with the parting of the seas.
Egyptians, Europeans let the people go.
And so the story goes. Brexit is a very British thing and British exceptionalism is overdetermined.
We talked about this earlier by geography, the island, nation by history, the en invaded nation by politics, the parliamentary nation, etc.
So in this story, the tabloids did not cook the British Eurosceptic brew, but they simply served it.
So say the UK you profess to dispel British sovereignty against you.
Encroachment is to depart for the promised land of no,
the eight that milk and honey where we are not governed by others, but do the governing ourselves.
The old Anglosphere will be our new Jerusalem, which connects Great Britain's future with a glorious space in the English heartland,
with the British past the impossible note a kind of politically correct Englishman Anthony Barnett in the room speaks brilliantly about this,
which loves our parties and EU friendliness as parochial and so very pleased that the
Exodus story of an exceptional people is not only a harrowing tale said by Brexiteers,
your credulous admit that letting these people go is quite a route and people cut off from the continent by
any bit of tongue in the channel whose aspiration to harmony they never really understood the good was right,
even if for the wrong reason. The Brits are simply not European enough to remain part of this EU.
Let the EU themselves and their fantasy fantasyland tired of the fog.
Try the brass cheese French recruiters with glee.
But our myth, of course, never quite meeting what they really see.
The exodus of the Old Testament has inspired, of course, an infinite retelling.
Can we not imagine a modern kind of exodus, Exodus Lite,
where the European are spared the ten plagues and the Brits of 40 years of wondering in the wilderness?
After all, many don't want to leave it all. Why has it done this to us and claimed the Israelites to Moses?
That. Our has led us out of Egypt. That was Moses.
The Lord himself will fight for you. Just say to keep calm and carry on.
We know the verse. But what if we do not believe in your version of milk and honey?
Explain the Scots, Scottish, the Northern Irish and the London Trials.
How do you expect us to really get lost in the legal and political no man's land?
Ask the reluctant differences when your land is governed in our language, literally,
as well as the ideologically whose achievements of the last two decades stand as markers of our influence, as I have argued brilliantly.
So these guys who they elect to exist as Brexit and embark on their own Brexit is for better for Brexiteers.
How do you see the light? Understand that Exodus is an exercise in delayed gratification.
Now political sociologists and we've heard, have explained the vote as a tale of two Britains a cultural war between cities and countries,
young and poor, educated and non, and between sides who differ in everything from the death penalty to gay rights.
We're even told that the two sides have different sexual fantasies,
or perhaps it boils down to the different connotation of one word bond and not James Bond.
For one side, it evoked evokes bondage, and for another, it evokes the ties that bind.
So see from the continent, we try to draw our gaze to see better to not the hyperbolic expressions of nativist sentiment on Lennon's Island.
How British Tim they have become. I think the decision to go mad letting yourselves go.
Very frustrating tremendously. And most frustrating still.
The leaders themselves seem to have radically different ways of not being Europeans and not allowed to go.
Some want to leave because they found Europe in big, others because they find it too small for a promised land.
The parochial dream of the shires, the globalists of the antipodes, the former want more protection and to pull the drawbridge.
The later wants less protectionism and to build bridges.
So you know what? It's not clear what version other Europeans dislike more.
It's slightly alienating in different ways. If the Brits have less us because they find Europe too big,
we can confine Brexit to all that is compelling about Brexit, exceptionalism and Little Britain.
But if they have left because they find Europe too small, they may be delusional.
But this panache in the story of Cool Boat Britannia goes global.
As you said earlier, you wasn't saying it was going to happen.
You know, I have grudging admiration for these bloody minded Brits in some European circles.
They dared. Well, so for every European applauding the departure of this four draggers, another will miss their experts.
But. For Britain has been everybody's balancer of the French.
On behalf the German of the Germans, on behalf of the French and of both.
On behalf of the periphery. It's not for nothing that you get to be the most sought after ally in the council negotiations after Germany.
Great regret has many variants on the continent.
In fact, we find even beyond Europe, this ambivalence writ large Commonwealth citizens bemoaning the closing of their link to the EU.
They're happy but can be flattered to be chosen as less problematic migrants than the close by pools.
And spoken to many of them. The prospect of an awkward rule,
Britannia does leave puzzled observers wondering why the Brits would want to abandon a land that still attracts so many from the rest of the world.
But it doesn't hurt either to serve as the new horizon for this rebellious tribe.
So the house. What happens next year when you don't see it?
That's behind the slide. We've got the biting of the apple.
So where we have such a prospect, European leaders seek to enact a more self-aggrandising version of this story where it is they who set up the gates.
This is not your eggs of this Brits, but our banishment.
You may have chosen to bite the apple and claim control over your life, but we define the terms of departure.
This story is not about freedom gain, but paradise lost.
But what does punishment say about the Badger?
It is surely for Brussels to recognise that it could give, given Cameron a better deal to sex up the Remainers.
So see what we have freedom with in Egypt.
Truly not an option. And what does banishment say about the banished?
That they deserved it. Remainers did not only care for their own bite at the EU apple.
I know many in this room. So it was banishment anyway.
Always on the knife pitch, all or nothing, but with little separation between the two.
Really, devil. A short moment of gluttony in paradise.
Who said that biting the apple was written in British jelly?
How do we make sense of the very real possibility that a decision could have gone the other way?
If only? And we've got a lot of it only counterfactuals today together.
No one would be talking about Brexit, British exceptionalism.
To be sure, there is nothing less exceptional in Europe than exceptionalism.
And the EU is the machinery designed to turn exceptions into rules and exceptional countries and to rule.
By now, Britain's exceptionalism lies both with taking the EU too literally and its rules in its rule abiding.
This and its insistence of special treatment in or out of the EU, as the French like to say in above language about any business.
But then again, which country in the EU does not have a so-called transactional view?
You were saying that or Catherine was saying that's not what's in it for me.
The British only exceptional in their belief that leaving the table altogether will strengthen their hand.
So this exodus means exodus by the guardians of the faith on the continent cannot
obscure the fundamentals that Brexit means inventing a new category of country,
namely former member, say former EU member states.
The people who painted here resided in Egypt for many centuries before they left,
which meant which really made them indispensable to the Pharaoh and the family.
Now we can treat the Brits as if they had never been part of us.
Can we never run our markets, build our cities, build our coffers?
They deserve better than those who have never been our equals around the table,
who do not know our strategies are and are a dirty little secret in the EU Council.
The the other fundamental as the Putin Trump axis laid bare, the old commonality is about the idea of old Europe,
which is not the EU and somehow, even for a harsh Brexit years, remained part of the promised land.
How do we handle this? So in the end, it could be you or you.
Any of us perhaps? Sure.
Are the Brits exceptional who feel left behind by economic growth, left out of politics and left frustrated by that societal change.
Well, this is a question. Which leads us.
To our second story. Brexit is not just about Britain, of course.
As we should start days from the little island colony retreating within its shores to the continent as a whole.
Itself, the this multiple major landmass we find land submerged by our seismic wave after another,
each coming on stronger before we've had time to absorb the aftershocks of the preceding
chaos is upon us and the shockwave threatens to engulf the very foundation of our world,
Order says. Just as meaning drifts towards stories.
A reckoning we read Brexit as a revealer of terribly uncomfortable truths.
Brings us no longer just means a fact of the matter that Britain will lead.
But an injunction Brexit means that everyone should meet.
It is about the fate that is awaiting the ever smaller union.
The Brits have only served to make it visible.
So Brexit may be a bombshell in the European landscape, but the landscape was already devastated by the policies and mindset that betrayed its people.
Did now is the only reason for European leaders to hang on to the first exception
with soaring sense of reckoning stories and important stories of reckoning.
Tell us that this is not a tsunami coming from nowhere or from Wall Street or from Palmira, but one of our own making chastisement for past deeds.
It tells us that the EU is being punished less for what it has done.
Then what it has failed to do. Deal with unfair competition, uncontrolled migration, unfettered enrichment.
So with Brexit, the spectre of European disintegration has become real and institutionalised in procedures.
Article number and summit agenda that citizens didn't used to know at all.
Euroscepticism is now not only power in some of the UK but able to command the very boundaries of Europe, a clear marker of our collective identity.
If there is such a thing as collective identity and it has transformed every domestic
theatre from Marina's two years into a local battle somehow for the survival of Europe.
So in short, Brexit a strengthening represents the challenge of Eurosceptic view of the world,
which has captured the public imagination across Member States.
The boldest expression of the new politics of anger, popular insurrection, tribal eruptions.
It will not do to dismiss the prophecy as a self-fulfilling.
The euro sphere will ignore it at its peril. But of course, just like Exodus, so is a reckoning does come in different shapes and forms.
What there is, should we hear? For one, the for one, the uncomfortable truth that must be faced.
This is very intrusive affair. Who is to say Oedipus pictured here was always going to steal his dad's politics and marry his mom, Jocasta.
But for what reason? Who failed to heal the prophecy? The parents who wavered at his birth.
The shepherd waver that the river he himself to build read the signs.
So it doesn't tell at the paradigmatic seeker and avoider of truth Oedipus both very
deliberately so this things riddle and very accidentally fulfils the prophecy.
What have I don't ever begin by acknowledging that the truth is blindingly obvious.
Upon realising what he had brought about his own eyes, which could not see him, will be led by his daughter.
To second use is always the Redeemer. So we have our differences for whom the bell tolls in these stories of reckoning.
Some believe in indiscriminate judgement.
And others said it's only the sorting out the worries from the sitters as Bush painted so vividly many centuries ago.
So in this story of popular wrath, there's little doubt that elites must be punished for the double sin of gluttony and contempt as
the happiness you reveal in their favourite game of chess and capitalism playing Russian roulette.
Will the welfare and dignity of millions yet reckoning in the real world can be impervious to the impartial eye in the sky?
Perhaps. And as always, the most vulnerable will pay the poorer in the South, the east, the still left behind.
After all, who among the powerful does not believe that they are the ones who belong on Noah's Ark?
Now, depending on your art and theological bent, the story that we are taught.
The story of reckoning is about different kinds of end the end of our world,
the end of the end of history, or about an interregnum between one world and another.
And in the far reaching of the earth, one hears the echoes of post-imperial sharp shards.
Learning loud and clear in the sound of the corporation are rejected by the very nation which invented them.
What's their claim to fame anymore is ignorance.
And others believe, of course, that the last judgement will never happen.
That this means that the EU now lives in its shadow in a state of permanent ontological insecurity,
a reckoning forever postponed and or ever possible.
So where does the reduction lie then? Embrace it is not the bluntest expression of the Eurosceptic verdict.
There are, of course, many types of scepticism with different takes on what kind of chastisement we should expect as Catherine so brilliantly.
So certainly I will continue to discuss tomorrow, so to speak, and I apologise to hugely simplify.
There are those across in Britain and across Europe who vote or demonstrate against Brussels for London,
Budapest or Athens, and for whom the EU says its credo to tell nationalism through agreed constraints across Europe.
Fingers pointed at the other within rotate towards the union, bent on chipping away from the community's most fundamental collective instincts.
The capacity to include. So they are those who demonstrate against Brussels for London.
But then there's the other side.
Those who vote or demonstrate against London, Rome or Paris through their note to Brussels, for whom the true target of people,
Brexit or Brexit or present, is the service of national establishment, the system nurtured by the release.
In short, we can have national sovereignty and popular sovereignty and it would be a mistake or Europhiles.
Aren't we all, both Europhiles and Eurosceptics to dismiss the idea there is Euroscepticism.
We can try to dismiss cries of the USSR. Heard from Warsaw to Budapest as unreconstructed transitional s, sure.
But the powerful move to take back control has long been heard in the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Athens.
Through past EU referendum campaigns and the like.
So question can we learn anew to disentangle the yearning for self-determination from nationalism and xenophobia,
mindful of the mistakes of our forefathers? Now I think it's even harder to dismiss the second variant of Euroscepticism in the EU,
simply the collateral damage of the pathology of national democracy to boot.
Well, yes, when we recall that repatriating powers from Brussels may disempower people like us consumer activists or victims of corporate power.
Sure. But no. If we see the EU as an enabler of elite collusion,
allowing the political class across Europe to strike the Faustian bargain, as Chris Bickerton and others have said,
changing self-government at national level or liberal constitutionalism at EU level,
thus creating Weber's famous iron cage but more still remote opinion cage in a bubble.
So along these lines,
the elites cannot or ever drift in their lifeboat in the belief that the reckoning is simply part of the folk consciousness that has set equally.
Fail to acknowledge that we are here to deliver public goods precisely because these are public and thus cannot be left to the public wins.
But what if the people stubbornly remain a multitude?
Now. Just as in the myth of air, which concludes the republic,
Plato tells us that we might or might not learn from our past lives when choosing future ones.
But that's really not an easy thing. Even the gods can be tricked by the pious men, both men of the people,
I quote departed a man who was not truly righteous, but he able to hide it and then pour it in.
The next life was destined to keep his own children.
So in this tale, the Republic, the myth of Air and the Republic of Equal Opportunity, the afterlife, only love, wisdom,
justice, courage and moderation, not the pretence of these virtues can break the cycle, reward and punishment.
So the question is, can the EU become wise and walk through the citadel of necessity pictured here?
If reckoning means really knowing, we are in a world of a second chance.
Let us not trivialise this opportunity through all these last chance summits.
That's just reform plan, on the contrary. And if this fate is meant to remind us that truth seeking comes through initiations.
So I suppose that it might help to start by distinguishing between existential and transformative scepticism.
Scepticism about the use of death and scepticism about what it does.
And I think a lot of our conversation earlier was about seeking this distinction.
And I think we do. So the EU might become slowly.
The Guardian over the long term model could be saved for future generations if it was able to do so.
But perhaps the Brexit story is more immediate, though that long term is not in the long term world said.
What if we told it not as therefore something that will or should happen tomorrow or in a decade,
but rather as an event that in itself changes the world.
A story of sacrifice on the altar of the greater good.
Britain's say Britain here takes the form. As you can see, a vacuum.
Edmund's daughter, Iduna the Stormborn, offered to the gods for the winds to rise and the Greeks to set off to conquer Troy.
Brexit means that you leave the EU in order to save it.
There is a simple, dare I say, the macho version of the story which we can call heroic sacrifice.
He implored some of the French journalists and people I talked to during the campaign leave.
Leave. So they because if you stay, you will forever bury your federalist dream.
While leaving will create a sanitary crisis of the kind that will lead our heroic leaders to act against the moral risk of crumbling into nothingness.
And I quote Some will recognise that the art of federalism, Basim, and in fact this is worse.
Brexiteers seem to agree.
Did we not often hear during the campaign Boris Johnson reassure all his continental press not to worry as Brexit will be good for you.
With us out of the way. You can at last integrate all you want.
Strangely, both sides have brought up Britain's history of truly.
Heroic sacrifice on the battlefields of Europe to herald the virtues of Brexit,
the Somme, the Battle of the Somme as the buried evidence of the virtues of absence.
Are you kidding me? Unless, of course, we understand the sacrifice narrative in a way which preserves is genuinely ambiguous nature,
a sacrifice which we can more all more easily live with, literally as an ironic sacrifice.
Always look on the bright side of life. Or, as Boris would say, we are going to make a titanic success of it.
We did. So, yes, there is a tragic irony in invoking the great sacrifices of two world wars to celebrate Britain's retreats,
to get to the cliffs of Dover as an echo of its historic landing on the shores of Normandy in Europe.
Better off when the British say in what is it that their mission never accomplished?
No theories of atonement offer us a multitude of ironic fairness.
Brexiteers know full well that the sacrifices have no way to come back and how exactly the executioners as Agamemnon impinging that content,
and then the victims of mythical sacrifice more often than not say alive and well.
Eyebrows. I like it. Jenna is replaced by a girl, literally by a listing of good friends that roam the world with her brother arrest.
Here we find we continue to come to realise that unabashedly embrace the Donald on behalf of British citizens.
Not that she is, in fact alive and well from people who have made the art of civilised skewing a national badge of honour.
It's most disconcerting to be so publicly offered to jump that trait.
Cute. Ultimately, it's sacrifice, not always in vain.
Yes, the wind did rise to carry Agamemnon to Troy after ingenious kind of sacrifice.
But there are precious few triumphs. And welcome home in the Odyssey.
Europe. What has Brexit sacrifice done for you?
There is, in fact, an ironic answer to this question, which does not require pronouncing on any resurrection.
Brexit means that you can leave the EU and therefore you should.
It's the version of the sacrifice story.
Such is the idea that the very essence of a union is defined by the way you may leave it.
And this is the intuition that I think led to the drafting of Article 15, 2002 in the European Convention, to mention that I was there.
And indeed, I remember how the Euro Federalists vehemently opposed this exit laws as a sovereign exploited for in their minds,
proper states generally do not have prenups and introducing an exit clause in Europe and the
treaties meant that the EU would not have crossed the Rubicon and become a proper state.
And as the US in 1865, when secession was redefined as civil war.
So I personally belong to another camp of Europeans who passionately defended the very idea of Brexit.
Oh, sorry, Alexis, as the key to articulating a third way for Europe.
That's not a federal state, but a federal union.
Yes, a democracy in the making and using our people to govern together, but not as one and stay together by choice.
Now, obviously, something that should, in theory, may have a way of doing its own thing and you may not support in practice.
So if Brexit demonstrates that this is a union that you can leave, it, is this very freedom to leave that that ought to entice you to stay?
This is the biggest contradiction in the public rhetoric.
If the EU is a terrible supranational leviathan living Britain's sovereign ways, how can it be so easy to detach ourselves from it?
Single vote. Welcome to the Brexit paradox.
So ready to sacrifice us now for the world, the Brexit paradox and the ironic terms of the current saga.
All these ironies and we could list many. Taking back control is, of course, the ultimate goal of all human sacrifices.
Taking back control of the wind, the rain and thunder.
Agamemnon shall sail. But what control is to be had when we all face tragic choices?
Isn't there some irony in a clean Brexit predicated on a Great Repeal Act which will
retain everything as it is the EU rules on the book and the EU citizens in their homes?
For everything changes, everything must remain the same.
Isn't there some irony in asking Westminster and Whitehall,
the two most pro-European bodies in this country, to sanction and conduct the deed themselves?
And we have a great representative here all along having to explain to the three Brexiteers at the top what it all entail.
Now here is the old British aristocratic oath of obedience at its best, the sacrifice of their own views to the will of the people.
It is hard for their friends on the continent not fully to admire a whole political class and civil service,
mobilising with such ingenuity to produce an outcome that deplorable.
And it's hard to deny, of course, the sense of humour of the British people who instructed Westminster and Whitehall
to restore their authority on UK matters while branding judges their enemies for.
Exactly that. And ironies abound.
We need to allow for the thought that the British prime minister,
when she warns of her readiness to put on her jogging shoes in a race to the bottom, she knows she's all taxes and standards.
She must see the irony in presenting self regulation as a threat on the part of a country
so proud to have often the highest standards of civilisation to the rest of the world.
There are many quotes here, you understand now.
On the other hand,
it would be ironic for her partners to insist on denying tourism the smoke and mirrors which will make the sacrifice bearable for all involved.
There's always smoke and mirrors in paintings of sacrifice.
So the irony of this British sacrifice, then, is that in order to sustain it needs to avail itself of all that is good about British exceptionalism,
that precisely which reminds us why should not happen in the first place.
You know, it's like the Enlightenment turned in Christian theology,
which privileged the idea of sacrifice for the sake of greater moral influence or moral government.
Grotius and say the UK could aspire to demonstrate his worthiness in the manner in which withdrawal it could.
We might expose European of those bits of British exceptionalism which make good
on such moral influence having to do with the right of the ruled to limit power,
sovereign adherence to legal commitment, the ethos of Her Majesty, the loyal opposition,
or a history of restraint from arbitrary interference with people's lives otherwise known as the rule of law.
So after four decades of co-creation of the new legal and political order that is the EU and would not have to be stopped without the UK,
this moral influence might still be a goal for the British negotiators.
All we need is for the two sides to picture themselves on the same sides of the commons.
That's very hard when you watch the wonderful debate.
I'm on the same side of the commons, facing a common problem called Brexit.
All British negotiator, all European negotiators are on the same side of the table.
Are the Brits up to this competition challenge? Are the Europeans?
So. The age old practice of doing something terrible for the sake of higher purpose is supposed to be the moral, the mark of our superior species.
But in his great wisdom reminded us, argued that God's decision to allow sacrifices was a concession to the psychological limitations of humans.
Do we need ghosts? If we believer in this brilliant demonstration that this is what Jesus revealed,
that somehow the scapegoat mechanism could be made visible and explicit the self sacrifice.
So the self reflective sacrifice serves as a sacrifice to end all sacrifices.
So can breakfast live up to the category of self-reflective sacrifice?
As we realise the future of this blame game. Perhaps European citizens as well as their leaders,
can mobilise the narrative of exodus and reckoning as primary material and a sort of sacrifice made good.
And then doing that by honing a very British fashion pluralism,
but a radical agonistic pluralism mediated by democratic contestation as much as technocratic rationality.
It really means that the freedom to me defines the very essence of the EU.
Then the irony would be to say the sacrificial victim and make it less palatable all at the same time call this interruptus.
So Athens interruptus is about redefining all of the various parts you exit that are creative, legal and political mind.
And the minds we've had this afternoon speaking in our seminar can offer and opening
spaces for pluralist of all countries to fight over what this exactly mean.
And we can come back to this in the Q&A.
For above all, we could start by celebrating the dramatic increase in political engagement that Brexit represents.
As we discuss this earlier, instead of castigating referenda.
But of course, let's create the conditions for this to work.
We may even dare to embrace for the sake of our digital native children.
End in markets cold or chaotic liberalism under sexy labels such as networking bags, distributed intelligence, high interconnectivity.
There is democracy there, but perhaps not love. Let's not ask too much when we are in the EU.
We can be more traditionally institutional talk about public cloud and all
the conversation we have about differentiated integration and flexible union.
As well as the idea that somehow the EU could allow more derogation from its ethics,
more move away from one size fits all in the name of the public interest,
of course, precisely to compensate for how seriously certain national traditions take the law in the first place, this country included.
So the irony then here is that the UK is leaving the EU at a time when many of its leaders
are starting to appreciate the need for a much more subtle interpretation of European law,
including on free movement. And the need for thinking about what a legitimate opposition is.
Now, as for the rest of the world, the EU is unlikely to embrace of a philosophy of more radical pluralism would be good news,
leaving it to abandon once and for all talks of Europe as a model.
The obsession with speaking with one voice and the resort to othering and euro nationalism to make up for air insecurity,
albeit we didn't hear any call you from for other in the U.S. that the US can handle it the pursuit of others in the world.
Now, if we do so, I think the rest of the world is more likely to receive the British sacrifice not as a sign of decline,
but as a sign of Europe's welcome maturity and continuous relevance as a fascinating pluralist transnational governance expert.
So. To include. I have invited you and I apologise for for a rather long journey through the Mexican ecology in the hope that
ultimately we can reinvent ways of conducting our democratic conversation by invoking our political myth.
I could easily be accused of ignoring 2000 years of political philosophy, which develop precisely as an empty myth from Plato to poker.
But it was in the currency of politics.
Men are the currency of our political imagination and resources for collecting diverse, democratic praxis by appealing to our fundamental intuitions.
They can counter or at least supplement the hyper masculine idea of democracy, of deliberative rationality.
Not because we cannot be rational, but because to be so together, we need common languages across lingua disciplines,
ideology or national cultures, languages in which we can more we can disagree more with greater civility at the same time.
And perhaps, paradoxically speaking through the prism of middle may help us recover the period of modernity by supporting a critical distance,
smiles and question marks around our collective self-righteousness, which so often pervades debates or in atomistic politics,
reminds us that conflict must be handled rather than denied that values can remain incommensurable and thus amenable to liberal compromises,
then may appear as better templates for the conversation than technocratic blueprints.
By merging with tragic choices, lip service and the desperate ironies,
entangling human beings may contain their own epistemic limits, at least in our contemporary eyes.
And they remind us that ambivalence is our birthright, not just as individual, but also as collectors.
Like like with an Escher drawing.
Because simultaneously see the meaning of Brexit through many prisms.
There are many more you can come up come up with than I have.
And yet none of the three stories I have told offers us valuable thoughts or views
that we can harm to nature in order to claim that we were betrayed or vindicated.
We must accept the incompleteness of our narratives and open them up to each other.
Now you ask me. On my part. I didn't push you on your part.
On my part. I do admit to being partial to some variants more than others.
I do dream of the adoption of a do no harm principle to the way Britain and the EU deal with each other in the coming years.
As you may have noticed,
I do have friends travelling so this light in the hope that the bright side of British exceptionalism will continue to live in our European space.
I do not believe that this moment is our last judgement,
but I believe that the EU will be saved because embracing this transformative potential offered by its detractors,
enough people on both sides of the channel possess the meanings of greatness with gracious humility and self-deprecation.
The sacrifice, perhaps, would not have been in vain, in vain, or perhaps not even for ever.
There are critical sounds in India.
Then we hear the ultimate message of our tragic stories that we must choose hope against optimism.
We may have some solace from another mythical figure, Penelope, who, as you know, ennui that night.
Her days they are to hate her suitors while awaiting Ulysses.
In our 21st century now version of the story, we can count on our heroic Brexiteers to frantically on weave the ties that bind.
In broad daylight, as we see them do this on TV and on the radio every day.
But perhaps, just perhaps, the spirit of pan-European mutual recognition will linger forcefully enough here, there and everywhere,
so that in the dark, when they're not looking, we will continue to weave and release the fabric of our shared future.
Well, thank you so much for this very remarkable lecture to be part of the kind of literary and psychological exploration embark on your.
I thought we might. We are Brexit.
We could have been worse, Leonardo. Anyway, you can take us back to the original.
Even though I must never be the same Boris Johnson as David Cameron Abrahams at the heart of and Michael Gove it at this point, not to mention.
There is a father in his record practice.
So that was fascinating for a number of reasons, partly because of its contents,
partly because I've never so appallingly followed the broader sense of things, so hopelessly inadequate as a discussants.
It's all going to be far away from getting either a serious intellectual or a philosopher to do this.
There are many people who don't think I'm the first, and even my mother once accused me of being the second.
So you're going to have to get used to something a bit more prosaic.
So we move on from the from the narrative of michaelides to the monosyllabic monotone of the manner that comes across to do with Daniel Hannah.
You literary, literally a knee jerk thing.
I'm going to keep this very brief and just say three things by means of by way of challenging some of the things that Calypso said.
The first is I just think we know, yes.
Enough to come out with that kind of analysis of the nature of a narrative.
It seems to me it takes a long time to crystallise and actually depends fundamentally on who gets to write that narrative.
Now, if we believe the history is written by the winners,
then it seems to me that actually the narrative of Brexit is being written by Theresa may, being written very, very quickly and very,
very softly by Theresa may and the speed with which she's using all the options in this country,
regardless of how you interpret the outcome of the referendum, has been in equal measure, frightening precedent.
So the danger is we will end up with a far more prosaic narrative written by those in
power that will actually reflect the reality of Brexit and its impacts on this country.
The second challenge, I suppose, is I wonder whether.
A philosophical approach is going to grasp the visceral nature of what is going on in this country and elsewhere.
And that's not just the usual criticism you hear of academics rationalising the irrational, which is extreme, but also slightly patronising.
But it's also, I think, the broader points of the danger of us looking across fundamentally different sorts of reality.
Dominic Cummings So another question because of course again roots,
a rather long lasting road along us on the same blog a couple of weeks ago in which you made the interesting claim that actually it's the liberal,
you know, the liberal elite moan about fake news,
but it is the liberal elites are more likely to get reality wrong than anyone else because they are more prone to intellectual abuses.
And is that intellectual criticism that puts them out of touch when they go and talk about their versions of reality?
And actually, you came across this in the aftermath of the referendum in some very, very stark ways.
You came across it with the with the result where a BBC reporter saw him recently
in Hartlepool as they went out desperately trying to discover the real Britain.
The first time we discovered it in a pub in Newcastle where we were talking about economics and what it might mean for the economy,
and this was said that that's not unless there are different realities at work in this country, and I wonder about the dangers of imposing ours.
And the third thing, and I'm only going to say three things so you won't get a chance to say what you want to say is,
I increasingly feel that this referendum and certainly what followed it has got relatively little to do about the UK and the EU,
but is mostly to do with the UK itself.
And it is certainly, as I said, partly about divisions in our societies.
What was interesting in the referendum campaign is when you went to leave rallies and they talked about they think just means Jean-Claude Juncker,
they they Jean-Claude Juncker, plus the man who sat on his yacht, plus with his bank account plus employees with their expenses.
The the other was domestic. And actually more domestic than EU.
I think by the end of the campaign and certainly in the political debates, the to succeed of the campaign.
This is a British versus Brits story now and the EU is in fact a bit part player in it.
And crucial to the dilemma is what is becoming increasingly clear to be a rather dysfunctional political system.
But the heart of it also I'm going to do calypso, the ultimate disrespect to usual reasons now,
because I think we have a tale of excellent reckoning and sacrifice here at home that has nothing to do with our relationship with the EU.
But the exodus has been happening for a long, long time.
The exodus has been the growing disenfranchisement and alienation of large chunks of the population of this country.
The people who are increasingly in the battle between Notting Hill and listening to liberal policies like represented liberal middle class values.
Both political parties have nothing to do with that.
And you see this in the decline over time of voting turnouts.
And of course, the reckoning occurs until 2013.
Well, let me take Holly Cool again and the examples I used to do.
Well, 50% turnout in 2015, 74% of a vote in the referendum.
This is the reckoning. This is the people who had been, in their view,
disenfranchised by a political system that really thought give them a lot of money for signs of were trouble and came out and said, actually get lost.
This is the sort of revolt of the people who was excluded.
That was the reckoning of this referendum.
And there was a reckoning, of course, that opened a whole raft of unpleasantness in our society and divisions in our society that to our discredit,
we probably been unaware of beforehand, but which has been there for a long time.
The referendum didn't create the Britain we live in now with millions and billions of people being aware of it beforehand.
And that, of course, brings us to the final thing, which is the battle of the sacrifice,
which is what is going on now, because ultimately that's what this referendum will be.
The same system that, it seems to me, is ultimately what is at stake.
I mean, I personally believe we end up in Britain out of the European Union with a smaller economy that is a better economy.
That would actually be a very, very good outcome. I find it very hard to believe.
I mean, so I was talking about 61 years ago to believe, Mrs. May believe,
believes or is intending to act on what she says about just about managing as a muslim in our societies.
But the battle is yet to come.
I think it is still too soon to say with any degree of certainty who will be making the sacrifice and who is looking for.