Thread by @Usherwood

Feeling ambitious this morning (maybe it's the sun), so let's have a bash at "Brexit and the tide of political history":

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Partly this comes off the back of where we are in Art.50, with the dawning realisation that the WA/PD bit of it is only one part of a much bigger thing

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Partly, it's from just finishing "The Fear and The Freedom" by @KeithLoweAuthor, which talks about how WWII has had lasting and global impacts

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Any way, while this is all going on, it occurs that we're seeing the clash of two basic models of political organisation

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The first says that states are natural units of political organisation.

Their marriage of territory and community is mutually-reinforcing and beneficial, which is why they predominate

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Essentially, they're much better purposed to provide effective and enduring governance, so they out-performed their competitors in the early modern period and they look set to continue as such into the future

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The second model sees things as a long-term progression, from small to bigger political units.

We go from tribes, to cities, to states, and then to international and global governance

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This is made possible and desirable by developments in technology and civilisation, which also generate problems that require increasing levels of coordination: villages don't destroy the ozone layer, if you like

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You can see how both models work, not least because both are in operation right now: we have more international/global governance than even before, but we also see nation-states very prominent in the mix

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Brexit looks like a natural experiment in this.

Is it about exposing the limits to supranational governance, or exposing the limits of what states can do outside that movement?

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Excitingly (for this thread), we won't know the answer for many years yet

But we can make a couple of comments right now

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Firstly, even if one of these models is 'right', then that doesn't mean we'll have a clear-cut outcome. Indeed, if either were clear-cut then this situation would never have occurred in the first place.

Instead, they are macro trends, with lots of scope for variation

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Nation-states have never been the sole model of political organisation, and supranational moves have been highly uneven in both scope and depth

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So the second key point is that we retain agency: we're not simply to be swept along by that tide, to be deposited wherever it decides.

Instead, we have the power to make choices, to guide where we want to go

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Of course, that'll require us to have those kinds of discussions and to take the necessary actions to try and achieve our objectives

And that's down to all of us to do

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A big part of that is going to be about working out what works for us, rather than what fits the bigger patterns of history

/end