“We are not enemies, but friends. ... Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory... will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
In the shadow of civil war Abraham Lincoln in his Inaugural address was speaking of another union in another time, warning against a parting of the ways. But, as our neighbours in the UK today cast their votes on whether to secede from the EU, it is important from this side of the Irish Sea to make the same point.
Leave campaigners insist that the EU is an undemocratic, dysfunctional alliance in which the interests of one state are systematically overriden. This is not a description of this cooperative venture, where sovereignty is not lost but shared, that we recognise.
The EU has become a convenient whipping boy for all our ills, from Syrian refugees to the war in Ukraine, unemployment, hospital waiting lists and the collapse of the Greek economy. Nonsense. True, the EU has manifestly not been able to provide the answers to these crises, often because of the reluctance of member states – including the UK – to go the extra mile. But the EU is not part of the problem. It is part of the solution.
Capitalism has outgrown the nation state – the imperative to trade between nations, the multinational character of production, the challenges of pollution, crime, security, migration ... require us to co-operate, to take and implement decisions collectively.
If the Union ceased to exist we would reinvent it, as the UK will discover if it tries to disengage. The first challenge would be to renegotiate the old links, notably trade, in a form which would be barely distinguishable from today. Except, as the Norwegians point out, that the UK would not be part of the group setting the terms.
The distrust of elites driving the Brexit vote is understandable, but xenophobic populism is not the answer. The idea that problems associated with immigration can be solved by quitting is nonsense – the Leave campaign exposed its dishonesty on the issue in the Wembley debate on Tuesday by repeatedly refusing to say how much they would bring it down.
To do so would have exposed the lie that is their suggestion to Commonwealth migrants that closing the door to EU migrants would open it to their relatives back home.
The debate is as much about who the British think they are as EU policy failures. Is this a nation whose exceptionalism puts it apart from fellow Europeans, so different, so other, that it can not conceive of taking decisions with allies. Only against them. Why should the Scots not understand that otherness as an admission that they do not have a place in this English-dominated entity? Or the people of Northern Ireland?
Or is this a confident society that embraces diversity and democratic values, that vaunts its internationalism, and its leadership role in international organisations like Nato, the UN, and indeed the EU?
The fifth largest trading nation in the world, strengthened, not hobbled, by its place at the heart of Europe. Listen to your better angels. Remain, and help us together reshape the unfinished, imperfect common project that is the European Union.