Vote Transfers
The EU should reform its institutional structure to make life harder for nativists
"Sign - Local Traffic Only" by Matthew Paul Argall is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Nativism - protecting the interests of native-born citizens over those of more recent arrivals - often underlies contemporary nationalism. While there is little we can do to make bigots more welcoming of migrants or immigrants, we can design our institutions in ways that make it hard for nativists to impose their will on the rest of society at key turning points.
The European Union (EU) has been designed to prevent war by mixing up the continent’s population. The free movement of workers one of its cornerstones. However, its institutional structure is still old-fashioned - the building blocks are member states, which pool their sovereignty to a certain extent. It is relatively easy for people to move from one country to another within the EU. The main hurdle to migration is the fact that 24 official languages that are spoken through the bloc, although around 44% of the continent’s population understand English.
If a European moves to another country, he or she will still have to vote in his or her country of origin, except for municipal and European elections. This week’s column will argue that the EU could align the situation on the ground with the wider goal of shared sovereignty by implementing a system of vote transfers.
Imagine that you have left one EU member state to settle in another. At the moment, the only way to gain the vote in your country of residence is to go through a slow and bureaucratic process to become a citizen, which might involve renouncing your former nationality. This seems unnecessary to many migrants.
Why not let long-time citizens of another European country renounce the right to vote in their home country in order to gain the vote in the new country? Doing so should be light on paperwork, not to mention cheap. It should also be reversible if the person’s circumstances change in the future.
We can game out what this would mean by looking at the Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016. As we all know, the campaign to Leave the EU pulled off a surprise victory with a slim margin of under 1.3m votes. There was much anti-immigration rhetoric on the anti-EU side.
The numbers are clear. There were around 3.5m European voters in the UK before the referendum, who would have swung the referendum decisively the other way if a large percentage of them had transferred their votes. This is true even if the Remain side had lost most of the roughly quarter of a million overseas votes which were cast. Another 0.7m overseas voters or so were blocked from voting in the referendum because they had been out of the country for 15 years.
There were also nearly 1.5m UK citizens aged 16 and 17 in 2016. The referendum is likely to be the most important vote of their lifetimes. Most of them were solidly pro-EU. It seems unfair for their grandparents’ generation to deprive them of the right to move to Amsterdam, Berlin or Cadiz without giving them a say in whether this was a good idea or not. A wider mandate would have yielded a different result.
There is a clear contrast with the nativist revolt in Catalonia, which was at its worst between 2012 and 2017. The Catalan nationalists’ coup d’etat failed, largely because the Spanish-speaking migrants who had come to Barcelona in huge numbers between the 1950s and 1970s were granted the vote alongside people with deep roots in the region when Spain returned to democracy in 1978. More than 60% of the population of Catalonia descended from migrants in 1999. The Spanish-speaking majority tend to vote against Catalan nativist parties, which means that the separatists have never gained a majority of the vote with a decent turnout.
Of course, in the case of Brexit, there is no use crying over spilled milk. Remain lost after a lackluster campaign that failed to engage with people’s emotions. The campaign should have sold the EU as a solution to Europe’s bloody and warlike history instead of droning on about economic data.
Following the referendum, the UK has left the EU. The damage is done. The matter seems settled for the moment. However, the EU should learn from the debacle. Vote transfers could add some friction to future nativist revolts in the countries that remain in the bloc.
Meanwhile in the UK, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, is ahead by a country mile in the polls after the Conservatives have failed to deliver the largely imaginary upside promised by the Leave campaign. He has the unenviable position of holding together a coalition of working-class voters who largely supported Leave and middle-class voters who largely supported Remain. His latest thinking is to try to deliver the fairy-tale “take back control” promises that Leave made, which is fine as far it goes, but feels a little under-whelming.
Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last year is wildly unpopular in the UK. This creates an opportunity for Starmer to shift the terms of the post-EU conversation. He should pledge a full enquiry into Russian propaganda during the referendum campaign. The findings might just give him some optionality in the future if he settles into a long stretch in government.
The English nationalists who promoted Brexit are just as annoying as nationalists from other places. The comments on this week’s column are closed. See you next week!
Further Reading
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