Five years on from the Brexit referendum, the
result is clear: both unions are losing
Timothy
Garton Ash
The UK has been weakened, but so too has the EU.
Relations between them need not be this bad
‘Most continental Europeans talk very little about
Britain at the moment, and then only with bewilderment, irritation or contempt.
Wed 23 Jun
2021 10.00 BST
Five years
after the fateful referendum on 23 June 2016, what is the current balance sheet
of Brexit? Answer: two weakened unions, the British and the European, and
bad-tempered relations between them. Lose. Lose. Lose.
The
weakening of the British union is obvious. There will be another referendum on
Scottish independence within the next few years. Scottish nationalists may win
it with the argument that Scotland should leave the British union to rejoin the
European one. A vote in Northern Ireland on Irish unification seems more likely
than at any point since it was first provided for in the Belfast agreement in
1998. Boris Johnson’s government is full of rhetoric about keeping the union
together but has no strategy for doing so.
The
negative economic consequences of Brexit have been hidden by the impact of the
pandemic, but some are now emerging from the Covid fog. Official figures show
that British exports of food and drink to the EU declined by nearly 50% in the
first quarter of 2021. An academic study has estimated that UK exports of
services were cumulatively £113bn lower over the four years between 2016 and
2019 than they would have been if the country had not quit the EU.
Despite the
glorious photo opportunities offered by the recent G7 summit in Cornwall,
Britain’s international influence is clearly diminished. In Cornwall, the UK
and the US promulgated a new Atlantic charter to mark the 80th anniversary of
the original Atlantic charter, signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D
Roosevelt in 1941. An inoffensive catalogue of good intentions, it nonetheless
invites a painful comparison between the global influence of Britain then and
now. Countries such as Germany and France see their strategic future in the
“European sovereignty” of the European Union, the very organisation that
Britain has just left.
It is less
immediately obvious that the European Union has been weakened. Some in Brussels
and Paris even suggest the opposite, arguing that it is easier to agree on
further steps of European integration after getting rid of the pesky Brits.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest unity ever achieved between member states of the
EU has been in their negotiations with Brexiting Britain. But if you want a
“geopolitical” Europe, one that can hold its own against a superpower such as
China, then losing a large member state with the financial, diplomatic,
military and other assets of the UK is a big loss. Objectively, the union’s
external strength is diminished at precisely the moment it needs to be
increased.
Moreover,
levels of Euroscepticism are alarmingly high in core member states. The vote
share of Eurosceptic parties in the EU has more than doubled in the two decades
since 2000. In a recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll, more than
50% of French, Germans, Italians and Spanish said they thought the political system
of the EU was “broken” rather than “working well”. Only 46% of German
respondents and just 38% of French said it was a good thing for their country
to be a member of the EU.
These views
are not a result of Brexit. Rather, they are a product of concerns similar to
those that drove many Brits towards Brexit. But they are sharpened by the fact
that there is now a large former member state with which to compare the EU’s
performance. The figures in that ECFR poll are almost certainly so high because
it was conducted in April this year, when the contrast between the UK’s and the
EU’s vaccine rollout performance was most stark.
In polling
done by eupinions for my Oxford research group a month earlier, 45% of
Europeans said they thought the European commission had handled the procurement
and distribution of vaccines badly. According to the Dutch scholar Catherine de
Vries, Euroscepticism across the continent works by benchmarking – and Brexit
provides a big new benchmark. Even if most Europeans think that Brexit is a
mistake overall, they can still see post-Brexit Britain doing better in
individual areas. Vaccines are not the only one.
This brings
us to the problem of bad relations across the Channel. Most continental
Europeans talk very little about Britain at the moment, and then only with
bewilderment, irritation or contempt. In the most astonishing finding in the
ECFR poll, just 14% of German respondents said they saw the UK as an ally of
Europe – an ally being defined as “a country that shares our interests and
values”. A larger number (20%) preferred to describe Britain as a rival. True,
34% viewed Britain as a “necessary partner” of Europe, but then 31% said that
about Russia and 28% about China.
Here, you
have to distinguish between inevitable and avoidable cross-Channel tensions. It
is inevitable that there will be increased competition, especially as
regulatory regimes diverge in some sectors. On Northern Ireland, it is a
logical impossibility to have a closed border between Great Britain and EU but
an open border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland and
the Republic of Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland and the EU. The Northern
Ireland protocol tries to square this circle, with an awkward fudge. It was
always going to need a lot of trust and goodwill to make it work – but that is
precisely what is now lacking.
The current
level of mutual distrust and mudslinging was anything but inevitable. Ninety
per cent of the blame for this lies with the British government, especially
with Boris Johnson and Britain’s lead negotiator, David Frost. The bombast. The
point-scoring. The twisting and turning. The declared willingness to breach
international law. The refusal to have any structured relationship with the EU
as such, beyond narrow implementation of the withdrawal and free-trade
agreements.
But a small
part of the responsibility lies on the continental side, and particularly with
the European commission. I recently participated in an online meeting with a
senior commission official closely involved in relations with the UK. In tones
of constant irritation, she repeatedly stressed that Britain is simply “a third
country”. Of course that is the legal position, just as when two people divorce
they become, legally speaking, third parties. But Britain and the EU were
married for more than 45 years. Imagine someone who had been married for 45
years speaking of their former spouse as just “a third party”, a complete
stranger. A more historically aware and strategic language should be heard from
the EU’s political leaders, including the new German government after this
autumn’s election.
In the long
run, we must work towards a Britain where a clear majority sees the point of
being in the EU – and an EU that is doing so well that even the sceptical,
cussed English want to rejoin it. In the meantime, however, what we need in
cross-Channel relations is the political equivalent of the theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr’s famous prayer: the courage to change what can be changed, the
serenity to accept what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the
one from the other.
Timothy
Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
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