The end of a doomed relationship

Marriages with egoists are doomed. The relationship the Brits sought in 1973 with what was then called “the Common Market” was driven by a combination of despair and cold economic calculation. The 1960s had seen a profound critique of the state of Britain and of british industry and a feeling that joining Europe was the only option. 
But enthusiasm for that cause was muted and limited indeed to a few individuals such as Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins.

Margaret Thatcher may have had an initial enthusiasm but was ultimately horrified by what the Single Market (which she had allowed Lord Cockfield to negotiate) produced – and turned strongly against the European project in the late 80s.

Blair may have danced more to the European music but was never an  enthusiast and Brown, of course, was so embarrassed by the Lisbon Treaty that he refused to join the final signing ceremony. This history is nicely captured in this podcast

The poor Brits could never make sense of the talk of “ever-closer union” - let alone of federalism – which they tended to write off as excitable rhetoric.  

My posts last year tried to explore what it was about the Brits that made them such difficult partners….….(see pages 133-196 of To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts) I tended to blame the English - who have always played the “balance of power” card in their relationships with Europe but have to admit that we Scots, with our looser but nonetheless fervent sense of nationhood, did play a rather promiscuous role – not least with our French friends and our more nomadic role as mercenaries. 
I happen to have strong Germanophile feelings – but am highly critical of the current English political class for its total loss of geopolitical sense of the future risks from a German-dominated Europe – let alone one with Russian links….

With departure from the European Union being only 30 or so hours away (although things will remain broadly the same until the end of December), now seems a good time for a more measured statement of what has been at stake…And this, I am amazed to confess, I find in an article in the outpost of high Conservatism – the Daily Telegraph newspaper which I have only lightly edited -

Sadness, foreboding, and dismay that it ever came to such a point: these are the emotions that this reluctant Brexiteer feels as we finally leave the European Union on Friday.  

I feel no satisfaction in the traumatic moment. Yet I stick to my view that this dysfunctional marriage had to end. Such is the Brexit paradox.

There has been much commentary over recent days dividing us (again) into opposed camps: Remainers still angry or in mourning, set against triumphant foes of Brussels. But what about the rest of us with more subtle feelings and in many cases a deep affection for l’Europe des patries? 

Of course we recognise the advantages (for some) of being able to live and work anywhere in the EU. We know Brussels did a good job breaking down the cartels, opening up cheap air travel and (belatedly) ending the racket of roaming fees. 

We can see that if you are dealing with a Chinese Communist Party that sees itself in “existential struggle” with the West, or with a pathological predator like Vladimir Putin, it is better to club together in self-protection. Mark these down on the good side of the ledger. But they are not the heart of the matter.

It has been a particularly irritating habit of the British establishment, aligned with a nexus of vested interests, and their army of academic and media auxiliaries, to reduce Brexit to a matter of trade above all else. If that were the case, then one would wish to stay in the EU.  

Brexit is political – not economic

But Brexit is not about trade, and nor are the details of customs clearance or rules of origin as important as we keep being told. They are not trivial but they are second order issues.

The elemental question is who runs this country. Do we wish to be a self-governing democracy under our own courts, or a canton of a higher supra-national regime that keeps acquiring more powers – beyond its ability to exercise them competently – through the Monnet Method of treaty creep? 

There is no mechanism for removing this overweening hybrid executive in Brussels, even when it persists in error as did in nearly accomplishing the extinction of North Sea cod by sheer ecological vandalism, or when it forced half of Europe into a debt-deflation spiral from 2010 to 2015 based on economic doctrines discredited a century ago. 

How do you dislodge the European Council from the Justus Lipsius when it behaves outrageously? Can you impeach it? No, you can’t. 

Why the Brits object to the very essence of the EU

Commission fonctionnaires may be urbane, talented, and hard-working, but they are not a civil service. They can launch dawn police raids. They can impose vast fines on their own authority. They have quasi-judicial powers and the prerogative of legislative initiative. 

They are more like the Roman Curia. Nothing like this has existed in British political life since the Reformation. How do voters hold this Caesaropapist structure to account? They cannot do so. That is what Brexit is about.  

There are great numbers of us in Britain, France, Holland, the Nordics, or the Czech Republic, who think the precious liberal nation state – inspired by the redemptive values of the English Bill of Rights and the Déclaration des droits de l'homme – has been a resounding success.

We think it is the only forum of authentic democracy, the agent of the greatest moral progress the world has ever seen. We think the systematic attempt to discredit the nation state by blaming it for two world wars is an historical sleight of hand, a lie fed to two generations of European school children though the co-ordinated Franco-German curriculum in a systematic brain-washing exercise.

We see it as the guarantor of social solidarity and a bulwark against religious agitation, fracture, and the unforgiving clash of communitarian identities. We think it should not be discarded lightly. 

Why no sensible person should believe that the EU technocrats have learned their lesson

……..We are told that the EU has learned its limits and has stopped accreting power. Another Conference on the Future of Europe is planned: a two-year vox pop foray to rebuild trust and show EU citizens that their voice counts.

Forgive me for wincing. I was the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent when Europe’s leaders – chastened by the torching of Gothenburg – published the Laeken Declaration in 2001. This mea culpa confessed that Europe’s peoples had come to see the EU as "a threat to their identity" and that there was no appetite for "a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life." 

It spoke of returning powers to the member states and restoring "democratic legitimacy" through a Philadelphia convention. What happened? EU insiders hijacked it. A praesidium under super-elitist Valéry Giscard d'Estaing picked Commission lawyers to draft the wording. 

The final text called for an EU president, a justice department, a supreme court with jurisdiction over all areas of EU policy for the first time, and for scrapping the national veto across further swaths of policy. 
It became the Lisbon Treaty, pushed through by executive nod without a referendum, except in Ireland where voters promptly rejected it – to no avail obviously.

Sure enough, the insiders are already subverting this new attempt. The European Parliament – a self-promoting corporation as much as a legislature – has picked the arch-integrationist Guy Verhofstadt to lead the charge and is already talking of stripping states of their tax and foreign policy vetoes.

Nor can the EU retreat as long as the euro exists. The logic of monetary union is fiscal union, and that path leads to a unitary superstate. The euro cannot be made to work successfully any other way, as the German professoriate warned a quarter century ago. 

Either the eurozone moves towards an EU treasury with shared debts, fiscal transfers, and federal tax powers, or it will stumble from crisis to crisis with each cyclical downturn until it blows apart. But to assume those powers is to strip the Bundestag and its peers of their core tax and spending prerogatives, without which democracy is a sham.

My readers know that, as a Brit in Romania, I am no friend of the Brexiteers – but, equally, I have always been critical of the ambitions of the European technocrats and opposed to their deliberate obstruction of democratic control. 
But I did find the  author's optimistic conclusion sadly typical of the English sense of superiority - which was vividly on display for me this week when I attended a (n...otherwise very impressive) briefing session in the British Embassy in Bucharest. On the back of the official visiting card I picked up on the reception desk for the event were two words – "GREAT Britain" - with the first word blazoned in capitals and a union jack at the edge of the card! 
How crass! But how typical of an egoist1

How the article concludes

My fond hope, the article concludes, is that by saving our democratic nation state from slow asphyxiation we will head off a drift into anomie and dangerous political waters. The dust will settle and the world will wake up to find the same tolerant free-thinking UK, under the rule of law, that it has mostly been for 300 years, and wonder how it misread Brexit so badly.  

It is Europe that the liberal intelligentsia should worry about. The EU has choked off the political breathing space of its members. It risks succumbing gradually to the Salvinis, the Orbans, and the neo-Falangist syndicalism of the AfD and the Rassemblement, as voters rebel against globalist cultural nihilism.

A liberal-minded Briton does not have to apologise for Brexit and the restoration of democratic self-rule, but that does not make it a pleasant exercise. The sadness is that Europe’s hard-driving ideological elites have led us to this regrettable juncture.

I will drink my toast on Friday to fellow souverainistes across the Channel. Join us soon.

Further Reading

- “The Missing Heart of Europe” is an excellent book produced by Thomas Kremer in 2005 which goes a long way to explain british exceptionalism

- Jonathan Storey is an historian and a Brexiteer - with long experience of Europe. This the most recent of a series of extensive blogposts he has produced on the constitutional aspects of the relationship

- UK Economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the challenge to learning; Oliver and Pembleton (2006) A very good extended essay on how exactly the economic issues were interpeted

- Kenneth Morgan is another historian who produced recently this very useful analysis of the UK  policy developments of the 1970s
- Chris Grey is an academic whose Brexit Blog has, each week, mercilessly dissected the arguments of the Brexiteers. On the last day before the UK left, this post summarises the 200 plus posts to help understand “how we reached this point – and where it might be taking us” 

- Collapse of a Continent – a 2014 post which contains useful excerpts from Perry Anderson’s essential but neglected The New Old Europe (the hyperlink gives the entire book) which contains a penetrating outsider’s analysis of how various types of academics have tried to make sense of the European project
- an interesting assessment of the experience of the various individuals who have since 1973 headed the British team in Brussels

- The Observer’s political correspondent gives a brief assessment of the past 47 years of UK membership