{"id":36643,"date":"2016-12-14T03:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T08:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36643"},"modified":"2016-12-13T10:18:48","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T15:18:48","slug":"niall-fergusons-bremain-recantation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/14\/niall-fergusons-bremain-recantation\/","title":{"rendered":"Niall Ferguson’s “Bremain” recantation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Niall Ferguson<\/a> regrets sacrificing his principles to help his friends stay in power:<\/p>\n

The three words you are least likely to hear from an academic are \u201cI was wrong.\u201d Well, I was wrong to argue against \u201cBrexit,\u201d as I admitted in public last week. By this I do not mean to say \u201cI wish I had backed the winning side.\u201d Rather, I mean \u201cI wish I had stuck to my principles.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years I have argued that Europe became the world\u2019s most dynamic civilization after around 1500 partly because of political fragmentation and competition between multiple independent states. I have also argued that the rule of law \u2014 and specifically the English common law \u2014 was one of the \u201ckiller applications\u201d of western civilization.<\/p>\n

I was a staunch Thatcherite. I was a proud Eurosceptic. So what on earth, many old friends wondered, prompted me to take the side of \u201cremain\u201d in the referendum on EU membership?<\/p>\n

A part of the answer is that I sincerely convinced myself that the costs of Brexit would outweigh the benefits. But I too readily trotted out the doom-laden projections of a post-Brexit recession from the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury, and others. I accused the proponents of Brexit of being \u201cAngloonies\u201d as opposed to Eurosceptics. My most desperate sally was to compare Brexit to a divorce \u2014 desperate not because the analogy is a bad one (it still fits rather well) but because I myself am divorced.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I linked to his divorce analogy<\/a> at the time:<\/p>\n

I suppose there are such things as amicable divorces. Mine wasn\u2019t. Like the First World War, it was fought for more than four years, and ended with the Treaty of Versailles (by which I mean that it imposed territorial losses and the payment of annual reparations for a very long time).<\/p>\n

Which brings me to Brexit, the ultimate divorce. Leave aside the arguments based on economics. Leave aside history, too. Instead, permit me to get personal. You want to get a divorce from Europe? Very well, let me explain what divorce is like<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Niall Ferguson regrets sacrificing his principles to help his friends stay in power: The three words you are least likely to hear from an academic are \u201cI was wrong.\u201d Well, I was wrong to argue against \u201cBrexit,\u201d as I admitted in public last week. By this I do not mean to say \u201cI wish I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,53],"tags":[389,337],"class_list":["post-36643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-politics","tag-davidcameron","tag-eu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9x1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36644,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36643\/revisions\/36644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}