The EndGame approaches

It’s the endgame moment for the BREXIT farce…with the British parliament totally deadlocked on the PM’s strategy (voted down last week by 230 votes) - and the only alternatives appearing to be

-       (i) the UK’s ignominious and chaotic exit - with “no-deal” - in 2 months;

-       (ii) a second referendum (impossible to organize in time); or 

-       (iii) a postponement for up to a year of the withdrawal (difficult for EU to accept - not least for its complication of the May Euro-elections).

Started the day trying to read all four of the lectures delivered by Ivor Rogers – our Ambassador to the EU until his sacking/resignation..….His first (October 2017) lecture set out the factors which led the country to the referendum of June 2016 – reminding us of the eurozone crisis of 2011 which had led to the UK’s isolation…The second lecture (May 2018) explored the technical options then facing the country. But it was his Nine Lessons which, in December, made the real impact.

And he has now followed up with Brexit – where is it going to take the UK?

I like the idea of such a series from someone who was at the heart of European negotiations for some years – particularly when it tries to suggest lessons for our political masters. But, somehow, he loses me…

- Perhaps it’s the lecture format……not as concise as the more formal written text?

- Perhaps it’s the complexity of the mental processes involved in the endless negotiations – where nothing is real except the computing of the perceptions of those involved?

- Perhaps it’s the absence in his lectures of references to (at least the more technical of) the commentariat – which I seem to need to test if not “legitimate arguments?

Whatever it was, I soon drifted into a more gripping podcast on “the crisis of globalization” by Mark Blyth – whose analysis, in turn, led me on to Chris Bickerton (author of a recent Citizen’s Guide to the EU) who actually manages to make analysis of the architecture of EU member states clear and interesting.

Bickerfield has written more journalistically on this in the radical Brave New Europe website and indeed wrote a little book in November 2017 supporting the case for Brexit - A Brexit proposal; and has been pinpointing the structural weakness of the EU for some years eg The new intergovernmentalism – European integration in the post-Maastricht period (2014) 

as the European states have evolved from nation-states to member states, democratic representation at the national level has been squeezed out, leaving only populist protest and technocratic responses by national executives acting in concert at the European level…… Since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992,

European integration has moved forward in leaps and bounds. In addition to monetary union, the EU has also expanded into many new policyareas: foreign policy, police and border issues, justice, social policy and employment policy. However, this expansion has not come with the transfer of powers from national governments to European institutions.But, over the same period, key EU institutions, like the Commission, have seen their powers reduced.

We have therefore seen a form of integration without supranationalism, which can be explained by the fact that the EU is a union of member states rather than a supranational state of its own.
 Member state governments are the leading agents of integration, not the traditional supranational institutions like the Commission and the Court./……The internal organizational arrangements of “member states” have a number of characteristics. One is the dominance of the executive. Another is the proliferation of institutions to which powers are delegated by central government. A third is the reduction of power of the “mediating institutions” such as political parties between the state and domestic society.

The executive dominance comes from the fact that policymaking is being undertaken less by parliaments as legislators and more by executives as negotiators. International agreements tend to empower executives in so far as they conduct the negotiations, set the terms for them, and are able to select which domestic interests they want to represent and which to leave aside ( …… The result of this shift from nation-state to member state, and the effect on the way state power is constituted, is that political life at the national level is no longer based on a combination of democratic contestation and governmental effectiveness. Political parties have been, since the beginning of the 20th century at least, the main vehicles within European democracies for the reconciliation of the competing demands of representation and responsible government (see Peter Mair’s “Ruling the Void” 2009).

Member statehood, based as it is on a thinning of the state-society relationship to the point that mediating bodies, like political parties, are increasingly marginalized, generates a kind of political life that is unable to combine representation with responsibility. Instead, the two have become uncoupled and appear as opposites that challenge one another: populism, on the one hand, and technocracy, on the other. It is the people versus the elites, rather than competing representations of the popular good and its realization through concrete sets of policies.

Further Reading

Brexit and the British Growth Model – toward a new social settlement; Chris Bickerton et al (Policy Exchange 2018)

The new intergovernmentalism – European integration in the post-Maastricht period; C Bickerton, D Dodson and U Puetter (2014)

Brexit and Beyond (UCL 2018)

The European Union and the End of Politics; James Heartfield (2013)

Judicial Power and the Left – notes on a sceptical tradition (Policy Exchange 2017)