Alphen,
Netherlands. 1 April. On Friday last, on what was meant to be Britain’s day of
departure from the EU, I took part on a panel at Tim Less’s excellent Europe
after Brexit (???) conference at The Forum on Geopolitics at Cambridge University. As
ever, I had prepared carefully-tailored remarks which I include below and, as
ever, I strayed from them to be part of an unfolding discussion. In considering
the geopolitics of Brexit I set myself three questions. First, would the EU and
its creed of a big, ever more centralised Europe be any good at dealing with
the dark side of globalisation and the big threats implicit therein? Second, is
contemporary Britain so Little Britain that its only option is to be part of a
big Europe run, in effect, by a few very elite people who are not British? Third, can the US continue to afford
Europeans a security and defence guarantee in the absence of a big defence
Europe?
My answers
were thus: there is no evidence that ‘more Europe’ would be a more effective at
dealing with geopolitical threat; Britain might no longer be a global power but
with the right leadership it remains a very significant regional power. It is
precisely because Britain does not have the right leadership that a very significant
country is being reduced into a small one; and, whatever Brexit outcome emerges
from Britain’s elite Establishment created political fiasco the only way the US
will be able to afford all Europeans a security and defence guarantee is if
Europeans do far more for their own defence and do it together. First and
foremost, that means Britain, France and Germany maintain a serious level of
strategic and political cohesion, the very cohesion Brexit is undermining.
Here are my
remarks.
Cambridge.
March 29, 2019. Let me put my cards on the table – I am a Euro-sceptic Remainer
with Brexiteer sympathies. I am also a democrat and on this day of profound
failure of British government and parliament I suspect I feel like many of my
fellow citizens; appalled and disgusted at how the High Establishment both political
and high bureaucratic, have systematically retreated from the June 2016
referendum that the same political class willed in large numbers. And yet, like
anyone who has considered the issue of Brexit at any length, and beyond the tired
mantras of the ‘Ultras’ on both sides, I am also deeply conflicted about it.
The Withdrawal Agreement was bad enough but what parliament seems now to be willing
as ‘Brexit’ will be so bad for Britain as both a power and a country, that it
could well mark the beginning of the end of the latter and certainly the end of
the former. With Britain broken and effectively contracting itself out of the
responsibilities imposed upon it by its still significant power the entire European
and global balance of power could well be destabilised. THIS is the geopolitics
of Brexit.
It need not
be this way. I have long believed in a ‘l’europe des nations’ but I am far less
enamoured with the EU and the globalist-centralisers in Brussels who use the fig-leaf
of globalism to focus ever more power on themselves in the name of efficiency
and effectiveness and in so doing erode any meaningful link between the people
and real power. I worked for EU. I have seen too often the anti-democratic tendencies
of the Brussels elite. The growing gap between voting, power and real accountability
in Europe should be a concern to any democrat. Nor is their much efficiency or
effectiveness on show in Brussels but rather a kind of sovereignty deficit that
gnaws away at the heart of the European project. For all the weakening of the
nation-states that ever more Europe entails, and the oft soaring rhetoric about
‘common’ this and ‘common’ that, the EU is crap at geopolitics. It talks
endlessly about geopolitics but is rotten at doing it – particularly hard
geopolitics in accelerating extremis.
However, for
all that, and after an exhaustive analysis, I decided to campaign for Remain
and it was geopolitics that was the clincher.
Why? Just
look at the already apparent strategic consequences of THIS Brexit. British
influence has tanked, the EU is weakened, whilst NATO and the US are witnessing
what could be the slow death of one of its major powers. Meanwhile, Presidents
Putin and Xi are clear beneficiaries of the West’s loss of cohesion and the
latest bout of European navel gazing. The strategic
direction of travel is such that, for all the patent weakness of the EU, I
considered it irresponsible for Britain to leave the EU and thus lose influence
over it, and any influence from it. My position has not changed.
There are a
range of specific geopolitical implications?
First, Brexit
‘Dunkirk’. Pre-Brexit Britain injected a level of strategic realism into the EU
and was seen by many as a force for, and voice of, pragmatism in Brussels. That
is over. As an Oxford historian (!!!!) I am careful about presenting Brexit as ‘war’
as I have heard too many allusions to 1940 of late. Bombs are not raining down on
our cities and our soldiers are not dying in the fields of Flanders. And yet to
all intents and purposes, Britain has been politically defeated by Brexit and
like all defeated powers its elite is turning inwards. Unless a real leader
emerges to replace the ersatz one in Downing Street the Brexit mess could well see
Britain cease to be a power and even cease in time to be a country. Certainly,
Britain has been profoundly weakened by Brexit and its political conduct.
Second, the
reinforcement of Brussels legalism. The narrow legalistic tendency in Brussels has
gained further ascendancy in the wake of their defeat of Britain. Brussels too
often sees law as power in and of itself even if that law has neither real
power of sanction nor action. This in a
world in which the really powerful see power as power and increasingly ‘law’ as
inconvenience. A world in which for the first time in perhaps four hundred
years Great Power beyond Europe set the non-rules of a power road made
elsewhere, in a world once again governed ever more by Machtpolitik. Europe’s
influence over those ‘rules’ i.e. the anarchy of hard Realism is being daily diminished
and Britain’s Brexit demise is accelerating Europe’s retreat from strategic and
political realism.
Third, the
tyranny of small powers. The EU has long been a balance between bigger and
small power in Europe. Brexit has profoundly disturbed that balance and will
reinforce a political culture at the heart of the EU that enables small powers to
constrain bigger powers from doing what necessarily they must do at times. This
constraint, and the implicit alliance between small power and big EU
bureaucracy that enshrines it, comes even at the expense of the efficient
aggregation of European state power into some form of geopolitical handle
beyond Europe. Brexit is, in many ways,
a small power victory over a bigger power and thus strengthens the defining implicit
idea at the heart of the EU to turn all European powers (with the possible
exception of one) into small powers to create the political space for more Europe.
Fourth, the possible
death of Britain. The very idea of ‘Britain’ since its creation in 1707 has
always been underpinned by a strategic, competitive narrative. Britain IS or
WAS a strategic, competitive narrative. Those days are clearly over but a state
must still act to its power if the system is to function. Without a clear
vision of Britain as a power in Europe and its role beyond it is hard to see
Britain as anything other than prey for the growing band of petty nationalists
gnawing at its rotting carcass. One of the many failings of Prime Minister May
has been her complete and total lack of understanding about the importance of
Britain’s external power and influence to its internal cohesion.
Fifth, the
resumed march of euro-federalism. Brexit has delayed the march of euro-federalism
but it is not over. With Britain’s defeat the implicit war between the
Euro-federalists and Euro inter-govermentalists will intensify with the Brexit
defeat of Britain. The EU will not and cannot stop here. This means many years
of internal struggle at the expense of effective external engagement. It also
means strategic spoilers, such as Putin’s Russia, will be emboldened. Indeed,
May’s conduct of Brexit and Britain’s retreat from strategic responsibility has
already encouraged the strategic recklessness that defines Putin’s foreign and
security policy.
Brexit cannot
be blamed wholly for Britain’s strategic demise although it has certainly accelerated
it. Indeed, Britain has long been in retreat from its 1890s zenith and, as an historian
I see Brexit in the context of World War One, World War Two, Suez, treaties of Washington
and Rome et al. There are also a range
of complicating factors that have also helped turn Britain from one time strategic
predator into strategic prey. Britain’s elite no longer believe in Britain as a
power, there are too many poles of power competing with Westminster in the land,
and the very idea of Britain as a power is neither understood nor seemingly
accepted by large swathes of its people.
Brexit
represents a monumental failure of statecraft by Britain’s elite Establishment.
It has also shown itself for the Mediocracy it is, an Establishment that has
become so obsessed with values it has forgotten that a state has interests that
must also be defended. As for Britain’s political class they are a byword for
irresponsibility. The result is that Britain has become very bad at considering
the long-term with much of what passes for foreign and security policy now
reduced to a kind of short-termist virtue-signalling.
Therefore,
unless the EU really learns to play geopolitics and Britain again learns to use
its still not inconsiderable regional weight to strategic effect then I fear Europe
and the world is only going to get more dangerous in the wake of the Brexit
disaster – for that is what it is. You see, we do not live in a world community
full of world citizens. We live in a balance of power, sphere of influence
bear-pit red in tooth and claw. And, if democracies contract out of the renewed
strategic competition that is the geopolitics du jour because it is all too ghastly and retreat into either an
anachronistic nationalistic fantasy or some kind of values snowflake la la
land, then all they do is accelerate and intensify the ghastliness.
At the
beginning of my remarks I said I was a democrat. I am. Unlike many on the
Remain side of Brexit I saw 23 June 2016 as a formal and binding commitment by
the political class to the people. Unlike many Ultra Remainers I do not condemn
the ‘peasantry’ for being too stupid to understand for what they were voting.
If that is the case all elections should be cancelled. Nor, am I re-writing
history about the contract implicit in the referendum which parliament seems
determined to break now that the people have given the ‘wrong’ answer. And yet, the position Britain is in today is
so bad and the strategic consequences for Britain, Europe and the wider transatlantic
relationship potentially so dire from THIS Brexit/non-Brexit, that to my mind a
responsible leader would come clean about the defeat Britain has suffered and
stop it. Rather, once May and Juncker
have been dumped in the dustbin of history where they both belong the search for a
new and equitable place for Britain WITHIN a broader framework of European
institutions must begin. If not, then expect Brexit to poison relations with
its close European partners for years to come and for the fracturing of Britain
itself to continue apace. THAT is the sad geopolitical reality of THIS Brexit
for Britain, its allies and its partners.
Hard truth? Britain
would be better off remaining a member of the EU than anything that is likely
to emerge from next week’s round of “I’m a parliamentarian get me out of here’
indicative votes.
Brexit is a
disaster. A solution must be found. It starts here.
Thank you.
Julian Lindley-French,
Cambridge,
March 2019
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