In favour of "Remain"

As always, Bond answers the higher calling

To all my British friends;

I know that today you will be casting a vote in order to decide whetever to remain or leave the European Union, in what is probably one of the biggest decisions that your venerable country will be taking in this young century.

The arguments in favour of remainning either follow a catastrophic narrative about the consequences of leaving, or wax poetically about these decades of peace and the dream of a unified, ever loving Europe.Real talk: The European Union is a bloody mess.

It is, seriously. There's no "ifs" nor "but" about it. It has become too much overregulated, too little representative, too opaque, too coercitive, too unwieldy for its own good.

And yes, I understand: You don't like overregulation, you don't like the loss of national sovereignity (look at what happened with Greece!), you don't like us Southern European wasting the hard earned money of the Northern European taxpayer in vanity projects, and you don't like the French either, for good measure. Guess what? I don't, either. Many of us Europeans, don't. Yes, even your much despised and maligned Southern Europeans, are not content with this state of affairs. I recieve your structural funds, yet I don't like what our politicians do with them. It is a sham.

All these problems were generated around the wishful thinking that if we become an economic cum bureaucratic union, someday, somehow, all these problems will be "eventually" shorted out, so that we will be able to face the ever growing, wider, challenging world that lies outside the frontiers of our small continent. You and I both know how that worked out.

But the thing about Brexit supporters is that they do believe that if you just leave the EU, all these problems will somehow vanish if you just isolate strongly enough and wish for it strong enough.

That is patently false. Worse: that is self-deception. Even worse: that is the very kind of childish magical thinking that brought us into this condruum in the first place. The world will still be a cold and scary place, far too big for a single isolated country to face its challenges of mass migration, climate change, terrorism and economic competition from superstates such as China or the US.

So what is the solution then? The solution is, as always, the hardest path yet to be taken. It is not merely a question of leaving or staying, even if our politicians would like to paint it in these simple terms.

No, your problems (and ours) need something else.

We do not merely need Britain to remain. We need her to LEAD. We need her to attain her manifest destiny, as the main economy of the EU and the main actor at shaping our western European civilization. We need a country that defends liberalism in a continent full of staunch statalists. We need a country that demands accountability from the European institutions. We need a country that demands governability and concrete solutions over pompous proclaimed ideals. We need a strict, rigorous country that demands checks & balances as to how our despicable southern european politicians (and not so southern) use your taxpayer money. We need a country with the weight, the guts and the will to balance Germany. We need a country with cunning statesmen in a continent devoid as such. We need a country with a strong tradition of liberalism that will reshape the European Union into its more participative, more open, more democratic image.

In short, we need Great Britain. Because we are indeed living in times of great ghallenges, great difficulties, great changes, on an ever greater wide world that lies ahead of us.

Remain, not out of fear, but rather because the bravery to put yourself in the frontlines rather than retreat into your own backyard, is what begets greatness.