The incoherence—or absence—of Theresa May’s plan for leaving the European Union is becoming starker. At the start of December, the phrase “have cake and eat it” was snapped on a note in Downing Street. Meanwhile Brexit Secretary David Davis conceded that the UK may end up stumping up membership subs to a club it has quit, which is paying without eating in cake terms. Days before, May had welcomed the prime minister of Poland, Beata Szydo, to No 10 and announced that 150 British troops would reinforce its defences. That sounded like a recipe for more engagement in Europe, not less. A week earlier, her chancellor had set out grim spending plans, based on a premise that he could no longer duck—the reality that leaving Europe will retard the economy’s growth.
At the same time, a paralysing mix of nationalist forces in the broader EU are coming into sharper relief. Chris Bickerton offers a comprehensive survey in Prospect's January 2017 issue, but December saw a pro-European centre-left premier in Rome being crushed by populists in a referendum, and a party founded by Nazis come within an ace of the Austrian presidency. All this was after a November in which the world learnt that the most likely final-round opponent to the Europhobic chauvinist Marine Le Pen in next year’s race for the Élysée is François Fillon, a trenchant right-winger with a soft spot for Vladimir Putin, who may very well struggle to rally the disgruntled working-class vote to the Republican cause. And don’t forget the ongoing weakness of the eurozone, the nasty new nationalism engulfing Eastern European states such as Hungary and Poland, or the fact that—for the first time in its history—the EU is about to face a US president who wills its disintegration.
Prospect teamed up with the European Council on Foreign Relations to facilitate a discussion, on Chatham House terms, between—on the one hand—British analysts, commentators and politicians, and—on the other—experts, statesmen and stateswomen hailing from the continent.
The European participants—who included former Swedish PM Carl Bildt, one-time Polish finance minister Andrzej Olechowski, former EU Commissioner and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Emma Bonino, and Teresa Gouveia who used to do the latter job in Portugal—were pressed on how realistic it is to hope that Europe could reform. Might its institutions, its economic arrangements and most particularly its free movement principle be adapted sufficiently to persuade Britain to re-engage, or reconsider some form of membership of an overhauled Europe?
The auguries here were not encouraging, but not hopeless. On the EU’s morass of institutions—the parliament, councils and groups seen as baffling and alien by many British voters—there was agreement that decision-making can be complicated, slow and on occasion impossible. But there was, the Europeans warned, no easy way to streamline it. The need to balance the competing interests of large and small countries—one-person-one-vote vs one-country-one-vote—was inescapable, and so states will have to continue brokering deals using some form of qualified majority vote.
The unloved European Parliament does less that you’d hope to connect with the continent’s citizenry, but as the one directly elected element in the EU architecture, its basic role is not up for negotiation. Nor was it felt there was any practical way to remove the prerogative of the unelected Commission to initiate legislation, something that critics suggest turns people off Brussels. Participants from the UK and the continent agreed, there will not soon be—and may never be—another EU treaty in which to pursue such changes. The gauntlet of parliamentary votes and especially the referendums required nowadays has simply got too difficult.
Europe’s critics are justified in charging it with sclerosis. It is no longer capable of reforming its own ground rules. But the same could be said of the United States, where no constitutional amendment has been passed since 1992, and where indeed, for a generation now, the functional writing of ordinary laws has been the exception and not the rule. Nobody, however, proposes disbanding that Union. And Washington has continued to get some things done—as the strides that Barack Obama’s administration made on the environment and workplace standards for federal contractors demonstrate. Europe could likewise govern more effectively within the existing rules, not least by making a few smart appointments to top jobs. The steps taken towards a banking union, which pool sovereignty in ways not envisaged in any full EU treaty, illustrates how chances can open up.
As indeed do the strides that the European Central Bank’s energetic Italian President, Mario Draghi, has made in pulling the single currency back from the deflationary brink—he has not rewritten a poorly designed mandate, but has rather interpreted it more creatively. For as long as the great gulf of living standards between eurozone members continues to widen, however, and while appalling unemployment dogs Europe’s south, doubts about Europe’s ability to get back to sustained growth will linger.
At the heart of the UK “Leave” campaign there was, as Philip Collins writes in this issue, a single claim: that Europe had facilitated historically high rates of immigration, with which many Britons were uncomfortable. There was a marked divergence of British and continental voices about how to respond. British parliamentarians, even those who represent seats untouched by immigration, report that their constituents are alarmed by a perceived loss of control at the border. Arguments about the advantages of migration will get no traction, the MPs said, until national governments are empowered to manage, at least, the pace of the change.
But several European voices warned that the British debate here was solipsistic. Whereas “immigration” is a concern in many states, the question elsewhere is really about newcomers from beyond European shores. Intra-European free movement is a familiar reality, and in Western Europe’s more cosmopolitan borderlands, workers from the other side of national boundaries are not regarded as foreign at all. The basic principle of free movement was supported in enough national capitals that it was hard to envisage it ever being negotiated away.
There was, however, acknowledgement that the backlash against the results of this principle was not unique to Britain. An anti-emigration party—concerned about depopulation—is achieving success in Lithuania, and Angela Merkel is considering plans for restrictions on welfare payments for European newcomers to Germany, the sort of thing David Cameron had once hoped to achieve. (His idea for an “emergency brake” on overall numbers might also return.)
Proposals emanating from Switzerland were also held up as worthy of British study. It has never been in the EU, but used to accept many of the rules—including free movement—in return for single market access. But it is now brokering a new relationship, after a 2014 referendum mandated new restrictions on immigration. Bern is pushing for the right to say that all vacancies must be offered to local residents of five years’ standing before recruitment from abroad is allowed. If granted, this could set a useful precedent for London, as it charts a course between the economic rock of severance from the single market, and the political hard place of failing to change anything on immigration.
But the chances of such a compromise—several participants stressed—will not be helped by the use of EU nationals already resident in Britain as a bargaining chip. With the settled lives of their citizens at stake, responsible governments are bound to take a harsh line against the UK. More generally, it was said, the best way of transcending the hard logic inclining Europe towards a hard Brexit will be for the UK to adopt a less transactional, and more co-operative tone.
Boris Johnson can josh all he likes about Europe’s need to peddle Prosecco, but he won’t change the brutal economic reality. Namely, that only a small sliver proportion of European exports go to Britain, whereas nearly half of those from the UK head into what will remain the world’s biggest single market—the EU.
If a measure of humility is in order for the negotiations, there are still several procedural pressure points that could snap the May government out of its cavalier stance. Most immediately, there is a legal challenge that is now in front of the Supreme Court, after the Court of Appeal ruled that it was unlawful for the government effectively to unmake by decree the 1972 Act of Parliament which enabled Britain’s entry into the European Community. An explosive referral to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg remains possible, to establish whether or not the invocation of the famous Article 50, the exit clause that May has now got MPs to agree she can trigger by March, is revocable as most lawyers believe, or irreversible as the PM has maintained.
She has made that claim to try and give substance to her circular “Brexit means Brexit” slogan. But as the months pass, and the consequences for trade and jobs of departure from the single market and the customs union sink in, it is dawning on Parliamentarians that Brexit could mean very different things. For the moment, MPs feel constrained: public opinion appears firm, with even many remainers agreeing that Brexit is settled, and may as well begin. But the anxieties which are now starting to surface on the green benches of the Commons could soon be felt in the country too. That is, perhaps, why determined Brexiteers are so desperate to start a two-year Article 50 process, even though that time limit can only set the clock ticking against Britain.
The EU is imperilled by populism, but it has endured dog days before. It has often survived on a diet of fudge, and there is a chance it can do so again, until more tranquil times return. Under May, Britain risks blundering into something less familiar, a sharp departure from the bloc which is—by dint of geography—destined to remain its principal trading partner. There was no referendum on leaving the single market, and there may be no majority in Parliament for doing so. All we can say with confidence for now, is that Brexit means uncertainty.
