Cambridge: The Geopolitics of Brexit

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