I had been living in London since 2010, says Lea Ypi, but in 2016 \u201cI wasn\u2019t yet a British citizen, I wasn\u2019t a European citizen, I was only an Albanian citizen, and for the first time my ambition to simply be a citizen of the world was shattered: I have to apply for citizenship here before it\u2019s too late, I told myself\u201d. Ypi teaches at the London School of Economics and writes books that blend her personal story with that of parts of Europe.<\/p>\n
A work permit, in the UK as it was before Brexit, was sufficient, but then between 2015 and 2016 the \u2018take back control\u2019 rhetoric began, the vote to leave the EU won in the referendum and foreigners no longer felt safe. \u201cIn those months, the regularisation procedures had begun and I took advantage of them,\u201d says Lea Ypi, \u201cwith that resurgence of sovereignty, all my cosmopolitanism was no longer of any use.\u201d She smiles when she says there were bizarre moments, for her, an Albanian from a country that would do anything to join the European Union (membership is no longer a distant prospect): \u201cOthers have also discovered that European citizenship can mean exclusion. The British used to say to me: now we\u2019ll have to queue outside the EU one, and I\u2019d think: Welcome to my world,\u201d she says with a twinkle that flashes across her eyes so often it seems to live there. \u201cWe\u2019ve always been in the other queue! And even the Europeans living in the UK would say to me: now we\u2019ll be excluded, and I\u2019d say again: welcome to my world. Many, like us Albanians, have experienced this exclusion for decades, and with the referendum, the British and Europeans have also entered the reality in which we have always lived.\u201d Ypi is convinced that democratic citizenship is not synonymous with inclusion; she pays more attention to those who have been overlooked, left out, or left behind than to those who wield power, because the system either works for everyone or it doesn\u2019t; the wrong queues shouldn\u2019t exist at all.<\/p>\n
It is human capital that interests me: for ten years we have been assessing the costs of Brexit for the British and for Europeans; it is always a calculation with a minus sign in front. Perhaps there has been some compensation, but this divorce has not been a good deal for anyone. But how do you measure the fact that we socialise less, work together less, exchange fewer ideas \u2013 in short, that we no longer live in the same chaotic family?\u00a0 There is no precise answer; one can gather up decades of anecdotes about the loss of familiarity \u2013 which is ultimately a lack of communication, of meetings, of chance chats \u2013 but nostalgia mingles with the ability to get used to everything, even silly separations. Lea Ypi finds a measure of it: the impoverishment of universities. \u201cNot mine,\u201d she says, \u201cwhich is well-funded, like Oxford or Cambridge; here, students arrive and we keep our jobs. But elsewhere, over the last two or three years, there have been many redundancies.\u201d I\u2019m thinking of the University of Essex, which is public and renowned, a centre of excellence: in one department, eight out of twelve lecturers were recently made redundant. This means dismantling not only the lives of individuals, but a social fabric that will be difficult to rebuild.\u201d\u00a0 So that\u2019s how it went: Brexit was meant to shake off the bureaucratic ballast typical of Brussels and ended up doing the exact opposite \u2013 all we hear about are forms to fill in at customs, requests for special treatment for certain products, and exceptions on stamped paper; it wanted to give a voice to the people against the elites, a major shake-up of the establishment, and it ends up with \u201cthe ruling class consisting mainly of the economic elite in power,\u201d says Ypi. \u201cThere is no longer the social mobility that existed before: those living in the peripheries in the broadest sense are increasingly condemned to remain in the peripheries, and those who already had means and access have even more.\u201d In short, we are importing America\u2019s flaws, and yet Trump\u2019s excesses towards foreigners, including Europeans, should have created a new space for freedom and knowledge in Europe, but the UK had started early, and sooner, with its nationalist isolationism, \u201cThere was a massive brain drain, especially of\u00a0 Europeans who went back home,\u201d says Ypi, \u201cbecause until the referendum very few Europeans had applied for British citizenship: they didn\u2019t need it, they were all European anyway. Then, however, it became necessary and many preferred to leave, to the extent that huge gaps were created in the labour market: \u2018the little things, the symbols, matter\u2019\u2014if you no longer feel welcome, you leave. Thus British society has frayed: \u2018the knowledge needed to transform a country is no longer being generated\u2019 and differences, disagreements and divisions are growing.<\/p>\n
That must be why Nigel Farage, ten years after the referendum, is even aspiring to become Prime Minister of the UK: \u201cFarage is anti-establishment,\u201d says Ypi, \u201ceven when he himself is the establishment, because his movement is based on finding someone to blame, a scapegoat. First it was Europe\u2019s fault, then nothing was resolved so it was the illegal immigrants\u2019 fault, then we built walls and detention centres and nothing new was resolved so it\u2019s the fault of those who aren\u2019t yet citizens or those who are half-English and half-foreign, and so on, from one blame to the next: we\u2019ve seen this before during the Second World War, from the Jews stealing our jobs to Auschwitz\u201d. We need to change everything, says Ypi, \u201cwe need to change our analysis of reality, offer a genuine alternative to this hegemonic discourse, not simply tweak it, adapt it, or tone it down: we need to overturn it\u201d. So what will the UK be like in five years\u2019 time, closer to or further from Europe? \u201cFor a start, I don\u2019t know if the European Union will even still exist,\u201d concludes Lea Ypi. \u201cIf anti-establishment parties keep winning across Europe, they\u2019ll end up dismantling the EU, because they want to \u2018make their countries great\u2019 and couldn\u2019t care less about the rest. Viktor Orb\u00e1n has been trying this for a long time in Hungary, but he\u2019s certainly not the only one. If all European states think only of themselves, if nationalism prevails, the European project cannot survive: to stay in this, you have to make some sacrifices.\u201d There you have it: the sacrifices, the ones the British no longer wanted to make, ending up giving up even the benefits, the trade, the ideas: alone, yes, but certainly not happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had been living in London since 2010, says Lea Ypi, but in 2016 \u201cI wasn\u2019t yet a British citizen, I wasn\u2019t a European citizen, I was only an Albanian citizen, and for the first time my ambition to simply be a citizen of the world was shattered: I have to apply for citizenship here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7404"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7523,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7404\/revisions\/7523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}