A
Better Britain Outside the EU
Brexit—a
British exit from the European Union—would give the U.K.
self-determination and free it from the dysfunctional European
project
By TIM MONTGOMERIE
Updated Feb. 19,
2016 4:58 p.m. ET
Margaret Thatcher
predicted that it would end in tears. She described “the drive to
create a European superstate” as “perhaps the greatest folly of
the modern era.” The late British prime minister knew the lesson of
the past: When politicians try to impose grand designs on peoples of
different histories, languages and cultural allegiances, the edifice
totters and collapses.
Once devoutly
pro-European, Thatcher had come to worry by the late 1980s that grand
projects emerging from Brussels, like the effort to create a single
European currency, would centralize power and create a vast
bureaucracy. She saw that democratic accountability would be
impossible across a wildly polyglot European Union. And she feared
that the sort of cronyism and collusion among big business and
politicians that she had dismantled in the U.K. would re-emerge in
Brussels. Almost every one of her fears has been vindicated.
Britain will soon
have the opportunity to decide whether or not to remain a part of the
European project that it joined in 1973. After EU leaders agreed late
Friday to several key British demands, including a so-called
emergency brake to let the U.K. restrict welfare benefits for EU
migrants, a nationwide referendum is likely to be held in June,
fulfilling a promise made by Prime Minister David Cameron at the last
general election. Polls suggest that the outcome of the vote is too
close to call, but a British exit—or “Brexit”—is a real
possibility. It would also be a wise choice, for the U.K., for Europe
and for the U.S.
Prominent
Conservative politicians, including Iain Duncan Smith and Michael
Gove, are expected to campaign for Brexit, endangering the unity of
the government. But Mr. Cameron, most of his top ministers, the
leader of the opposition Labour Party and the country’s largest
businesses will hold firm with the EU. They will argue that Britain
should not walk away but should remain at the EU’s highest table,
helping to fix the continent’s problems. They worry that if Britain
leaves the EU, London won’t be able to influence the rules that
govern the world’s richest single market, with more than 500
million people.
In normal times,
this alliance of powerful businesses and politicians would be enough
to guarantee victory for the pro-EU cause. But as the U.S.
presidential race continues to prove, these are not normal times, and
having the establishment on your side can be more of a burden than a
blessing. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have amplified the hunger
for change of an electorate that is angry at big business, concerned
about rising immigration and anxious over economic insecurity. In
Britain, the EU gets much of the blame for such ills. It was the
anti-EU camp, not the backers of European unity, that celebrated when
Goldman Sachs recently announced its support for having the U.K. stay
put.
The problems
produced by the EU are not hard to see. The single currency helps to
explain why the European economy remains in the doldrums long after
the U.S. recovery has begun. The rise of China and emerging markets
inevitably meant that the developed world’s share of world trade
would decline, but the EU’s share is declining twice as quickly as
America’s. Youth unemployment stands at 49% in Greece, 46% in Spain
and 38% in Italy, and millions of young lives will never fully
recover from these extended rates of joblessness. This economic
weakness has brought extremist parties to the fore, whether it is
radical parties of the left like Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s
Syriza or the illiberal nationalist parties of the right in Poland
and Hungary.
The British public
remains skeptical of the EU. Mr. Cameron had hoped to steer them away
from the exit door by delivering substantial changes to the terms of
the country’s membership. He has spent much of the past year
touring European capitals to try to fulfill a reform agenda that he
first set out in a 2013 speech that called for Europe to become a
much more economically liberal continent. He has also sought—without
great success—to limit the welfare benefits that EU citizens can
claim if they come to the U.K. under the EU’s freedom-of-movement
regime.
The mixed results of
Mr. Cameron’s renegotiation reflect the mixed nature of today’s
European politics. A socialist is president of France, but he is
widely disliked. A conservative is chancellor of Germany, but the
migrant crisis has pulled down her popularity. Spain’s conservative
prime minister has lost his majority and is clinging to power. An
assertive new nationalist administration governs Poland. Italy’s
bright, young Blairite prime minister, Matteo Renzi, is full of
promise but has yet to deliver much.
Trying to unify such
a diverse group of politicians, some of whom will soon face tough
re-election battles, was always going to be a tall order. It has been
especially hard to get Europe’s leaders to focus on Britain’s
renegotiation demands amid the flood of migrants and the Greek
crisis. In his talks over the past few days in Brussels with other
European leaders, Mr. Cameron finally won support for the limited
reforms that he has proposed—reforms that, in any event, have
seemed entirely inadequate to the British public, according to all
opinion polls.
But the campaign for
keeping Britain in the EU still has some cards to play. The pro-EU
camp will seek to exploit the natural conservatism of British voters
wary of changing the status quo. We can expect the same kind of
fear-based campaign that helped to keep Scotland in the U.K. during
its 2014 referendum on independence. There will be dire warnings that
Brexit would leave Britain shut out of key European markets and
suggestions that the City of London, the business and financial
center so important to the British economy, would lose market share.
With the world economy already experiencing uncertainty, many
undecided Britons may decide that this isn’t the time to add to it.
The pro-EU camp will
also emphasize the protracted divorce negotiations that would likely
follow a vote for Brexit. For a period that could well last two
years, many global businesses may decide to suspend investment
decisions until they know what kind of access the U.K. will have to
EU markets. Britain has a substantial trade deficit with the rest of
Europe, so supporters of Brexit argue that Germany’s car
manufacturers, Spain’s hoteliers, France’s winemakers and other
industries that profit from trading with the U.K. will help ensure a
good free-trade deal if Britain chooses to go—but a period of
uncertainty is inevitable.
Another danger:
Scotland might reconsider its membership in the U.K. after Brexit.
The restless, post-referendum Scots are much less euroskeptical than
the English and might vote to stay in the EU even if the U.K. as a
whole votes to leave. Nicola Sturgeon, the separatist first minister
of Scotland, has already suggested that she might hold a second vote
on independence under these circumstances, raising the possibility
that the U.K. might break apart if Britain decides to break away from
the EU.
All of these risks
are real. But so are the risks of remaining part of a politically
dysfunctional and economically declining EU. There is a strong
economic case for British independence and a strong pragmatic case
for believing that a Europe of such different political cultures
cannot work, but the real reason why British voters should support
Brexit is that we want our country to have what the U.S., Australia,
Switzerland, Canada, Japan and other free nations already have:
self-determination.
Britain is a
shriveled power today. It cannot stop 430 million other Europeans
from coming into its territory any time they like under the EU’s
freedom-of-movement rules. It is regularly overruled by EU courts. It
cannot form its own trade deals. Some 65% of U.K. laws since 1993
bear the direct or indirect imprint of the EU, according to research
by one pro-business group.
When President
Barack Obama called Mr. Cameron on Feb. 3 to relay “continued U.S.
support for a strong United Kingdom in a strong European Union,” he
was recommending something that Americans would not accept for
themselves. Polling by YouGov suggests that less than a third of
Americans would support open borders with Mexico, a joint
U.S.-Canadian-Mexican supreme court to decide human-rights questions
or a pan-American environmental agency to govern fishing policy. But
as an EU member, Britain has to endure the equivalent of these
policies—which is why Republican presidential candidates such as
Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have all expressed varying degrees
of sympathy for Brexit.
The greatest fear of
the pro-EU camp is that Brexit will start a chain of events that
plunges Europe back to the dark years of the past. But these fears
are overstated. NATO and the deployment of 250,000 U.S. troops in
West Germany during the Cold War were the real foundation of
stability in postwar Europe.
It wasn’t today’s
EU that helped to ensure order, peace and prosperity but the European
Coal and Steel Community that began in 1952 and the parallel,
free-trading European Economic Community that was formed in 1957.
Both of these bodies fulfilled the ambitions for free trade that the
19th-century Manchester industrialist Richard Cobden always sought
for Europe. “I would not step across the street just now to
increase our trade for the mere sake of commercial gain,” Cobden
wrote. “But to improve moral and political relations of France and
England, by bringing them into greater intercourse and greater
dependence, I would walk barefoot from Calais to Paris.”
When the countries
of Europe became integrated in trade after World War II, they
fulfilled the dictum often attributed to the French economist
Frédéric Bastiat: “If goods don’t cross borders, armies will.”
But sadly, many in Europe weren’t content with mere trade. Many of
the EU’s founders always intended to build something grander—a
United States of Europe—and tried to build it too quickly on sandy
foundations.
It should now be
clear that it’s impossible to have a successful single currency
without a genuine fiscal union—that is, unified authority and
decision making on taxing and spending. America’s single currency
works because more than 60% of all taxes are given to the federal
government, which then gives much more back to poorer states hurt by
the economic cycle.
The EU has no such
mechanism to produce equivalent social solidarity, and the Germans
are unlikely ever to agree to be taxed heavily to bail out the Greeks
or the Finns to help out the Portuguese in the same way that
Americans in wealthier states are willing to be taxed to help out
fellow citizens in poorer ones. Europe’s union simply lacks the
necessary ties of history, language and kinship.
It will be a while
before the EU decides its overall direction. Will it retreat from the
grand plans that Thatcher criticized and return to something like the
trade-focused model it had for most of the postwar years? Will it try
to build a United States of Europe that would give Brussels the same
kind of powers as Washington, D.C., to send financial aid to
distressed parts of the EU economy or order European soldiers to stop
refugees from entering the continent? Or, most likely, will it simply
muddle through—facing periodic crises and chronic dysfunction but
somehow keeping the show on the road?
Ideally, Europe
would take the first course, but it is unlikely: Scaling down the
union’s ambitions would repudiate the work of this generation of
European politicians and their predecessors too. That is why Britain
should choose independence in the coming referendum—and why, for at
least two reasons, the U.S. should welcome that choice.
Brexit might be the
shock that Europe needs to undergo serious reform. Neither today’s
immigration crisis nor the prolonged economic hardships caused by the
single currency have provoked reform, but seeing Europe lose its
fastest-growing major economy might prove to be the proverbial straw.
Once outside the EU
and disentangled from the red tape of Brussels, Britain also will be
able to form its own free-trade agreements and to implement a
points-based immigration system, choosing only the talented, skilled
immigrants that the U.K.’s economy needs. Britain after Brexit, in
other words, will be a stronger Britain—and the U.S. should want
strength for its most steadfast global ally.
Even if Brexit
doesn’t shock the EU as a whole into reform, it may encourage other
EU members to break free on their own, which is all to the good. The
U.S. needs allies that are as nimble and fast-moving as global
events. Multinational bodies like the EU and the U.N. only ever move
as quickly as the slowest country in the convoy. The U.S. needs its
allies to be strong and independent—not submerged within a clunky,
clumsy EU that idly declares its distant hope for a unified front in
matters of defense and foreign policy.
Yes, for two or
three years, a post-Brexit Europe will be bumpier and more
acrimonious. But the temporary upset will be worth it if it
transforms the continent from a collection of unhappy tenants of a
would-be superstate into vigorous, happy neighbors, cooperating where
it matters most but otherwise operating as free, self-determined
nations.
Mr. Montgomerie is a
columnist for the Times of London and a writer for CapX.co.
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