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For some, Brexit has called into question the purpose of the EU and for some white liberals it has sparked concern over the possibility that it marks the end of internationalism.

The 1993 formalizing of the EU was for Africa no different than the 1884 Berlin Conference where Europe united to regulate and cooperate in its Scramble for Africa during heightened colonial activity by European powers. This predecessor union of Europe eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance. Today in Africa the EU plays the role of enforcing neo-colonialism through its Africa Working Party (COAFR) and so-called Africa-EU Strategic Partnership that ensure neo-liberal economic policies dominate Africa. We can be sure that when the partnership claims to cooperate on issues like governance and human rights it is not talking about how European countries are governed or human rights abuses in those countries. It is based on the paternalistic premise that Africa is inherently savage and contemporarily corrupt and naturally prone to abusing human rights.

elieving Brexit could represent the beginning of the end for international cooperation, as some have put it, is to believe that the world does or should revolve around Europe. The late Pan-Africanist Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) pointed out that those whose thinking is dominated by Euro-centrism and white supremacy often mistakenly “make the particular history of Europe the general history of the world.”

There is no reason to think that they would not stay red if an election were held in the autumn. But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful ‘spatial fix’ since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised.

This cultural contradiction wasn’t sustainable and nor was the geographic one. Not only was the ‘spatial fix’ a relatively short-term one, seeing as it depended on rising tax receipts from the South East and a centre left government willing to spread money quite lavishly (albeit, discretely), it also failed to deliver what many Brexit-voters perhaps crave the most: the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense

What was so clever about the language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to this feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it. The promise had nothing to do with economics or policy, but everything to do with the psychological allure of autonomy and self-respect. Farrage’s political strategy was to take seriously communities who’d otherwise been taken for granted for much of the past 50 years.

Since the mid-1970s, once the first post-war capitalist phase ended (with the collapse of the New Deal-inspired Bretton Woods system), those relying on wage income to live have fallen off the escalator. Most of the gains from technology, productivity, globalisation, have gone to the top 1% and none to the bottom 80%. People can put up with poverty, but not with humiliation – not with having their noses rubbed in their poverty by people in yachts, golf clubs and Mercedes Benzes, telling them that their poverty is self-inflicted.

Trump is therefore less a national father figure (as Reagan was), than an uncontrollable big brother who promises to make hell for America’s new liberal parents. As a performance artist, he is a dadaist. But his charismatic authority also suggests something about the perillous state of ‘the political’ today, and, I would suggest, the way it’s been crowded out by economics.