NEWS
ANALYSIS
Brexit’s Silver Lining for Europe
Both sides lost in Britain’s departure, but the
European Union has been galvanized. And the Biden administration will encounter
European allies bent on their own “strategic autonomy.”
By Roger
Cohen
Dec. 31,
2020
Updated
10:35 a.m. ET
PARIS — It
is done at last. On Jan. 1, with the Brexit transition period over, Britain
will no longer be part of the European Union’s single market and customs union.
The departure will be ordered, thanks to a last-minute deal running to more
than 1,200 pages, but still painful to both sides. A great loss will be
consummated.
Loss for
the European Union of one of its biggest member states, a major economy, a
robust military and the tradition, albeit faltering, of British liberalism at a
time when Hungary and Poland have veered toward nationalism.
Loss for
Britain of diplomatic heft in a world of renewed great power rivalry; of some
future economic growth; of clarity over European access for its big financial
services industry; and of countless opportunities to study, live, work and
dream across the continent.
The
national cry of “take back control” that fired the Brexit vote in an outburst
of anti-immigrant fervor and random grievances withered into four and a half
years of painful negotiation pitting a minnow against a mammoth. Posturing encountered
reality. The British economy is less than one-fifth the size of the bloc’s.
President Trump is leaving office, and with him goes any hope of a rapid
offsetting British-American trade agreement.
“Brexit is
an act of mutual weakening,” Michel Barnier, the chief European Union
negotiator, told the French daily Le Figaro.
But the
weakening is uneven. Britain is closer to fracture. The possibility has
increased that Scotland and Northern Ireland will opt to leave the United
Kingdom and, by different means, rejoin the European Union. The bloc, by
contrast, has in some ways been galvanized by the trauma of Brexit. It has
overcome longstanding obstacles, lifted its ambitions and reignited the
Franco-German motor of closer union.
“Brexit is
not good news for anyone, but it has unquestionably contributed to a
reconsolidation of Europe, which demonstrated its unity throughout the
negotiations,” François Delattre, the secretary-general of the French foreign
ministry, said.
What Is
Brexit? And What Happens Next?
The
European Union — prodded by Brexit, facing the coronavirus pandemic, and
confronting the hostility of Mr. Trump — has done things previously
unimaginable. It has taken steps in a quasi-federal direction that Britain
always opposed.
Germany
abandoned a tenacious policy of austerity. The federalization of European debt,
long taboo for the Germans, became possible. The European Union can now borrow
as a government does — a step toward sovereign stature and a means to finance
the $918 billion pandemic recovery fund that a British presence would probably
have blocked.
“Brexit
made Angela Merkel willing to abandon positions that had been sacred,” said
Karl Kaiser, a former head of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “There
has long been a debate about widening or deepening the European Union. Well, it
has deepened.”
Part of
this process has been a rethinking of Europe’s role. President Emmanuel Macron
of France now speaks often of a need for “strategic autonomy.” At the heart of
this idea lies the conviction that, confronted by Russia and China and a United
States whose unreliability has become evident, Europe must develop its military
arm to buttress independent policies. European soft power goes only so far.
“Who would
have said three years ago that Europe would adhere so quickly to a budgetary
relaunch through shared debt, and to strategic military and technological
autonomy?” Mr. Macron told the French weekly magazine L’Express in December.
“This is essential, because France’s destiny lies in a sovereign Europe.” He
alluded to an autonomous Europe operating “beside America and China,” a telling
formulation.
Military
autonomy is a long way off, probably a pipe dream. The attachment of Central
and Eastern European states to NATO, and through it to the United States as a
European power, is strong. Germany recognizes the need for an adjusted
trans-Atlantic bond but does not question the bond itself. Nor, in the end,
does France.
Still, the
European Union, through its European defense fund, agreed in 2020 to invest
more than $10 billion in jointly developed military equipment, technology and
greater mobility. Not a lot, and less than planned, but enough to indicate a
new European state of mind. When France and Germany plan a “euro-drone,”
something has shifted.
This change
will almost certainly lead to tensions between the European Union and the
incoming administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who, as one
official put it, “is part of the Euro-American décor.”
Mr. Biden,
a regular at the Munich Security Conference for decades, is by formation and
experience a man with a traditional view of the alliance: The United States
leads, allies fall into line. But the world has changed. The impact of the
Trump years, and of an America AWOL during the global crisis caused by the
pandemic, cannot be waved away.
“You can
only lose trust once,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political analyst. “When
it’s gone, it’s gone. We’ve learned that an American president can just undo
things.”
Most
European governments are delighted to see Mr. Trump go. They believe American
decency has returned in Mr. Biden. They do not, however, necessarily equate
their relief with a long honeymoon, even if the incoming president and Antony
J. Blinken, his nominee for secretary of state, are aware that times have
changed, and that solving big problems demands the give-and-take
multilateralism that Mr. Trump shunned.
On China
policy, on Iran, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on climate issues, a
Europe girded by the experience of an American president who scorned NATO and
coddled Russia will be more assertive. Already France and Germany have cooperated
on a voluminous dossier covering all major international issues and handed it
to officials in the future Biden administration.
Of course,
the ailing European Union that produced Brexit and rising nationalism has not
gone away. A union perceived as too bureaucratic and insufficiently democratic.
The divisions that plague a now 27-member entity, with 19 of those countries
sharing a currency but none of them sharing a government, will not disappear.
Still, the
European Union has been jolted into a new sense of its value. Brexit looks like
a one-off. The nations of Europe have seen up close that a divorce is always a
defeat — and a negotiation whose end point is new barriers is, too.
Britain’s
decision to leave was quintessentially of its era. An act inspired by an
imaginary past, borne aloft by an imaginary future, turbocharged by social
media and enabled by the withered hold of truth. It was a failure of the dream
of a “United States of Europe” — on the continent that British and American
troops died to liberate from the Nazis — first articulated by Winston Churchill
in 1946, when he spoke of a free Europe offering “the simple joys and hopes
that make life worth living.”
Everyone in
Europe, and Britain is, has lost something. But as Jean Monnet, one of the
founding fathers of what would become the European Union, observed: “Europe
makes itself in crises.”
Roger Cohen
is the Paris Bureau Chief of The Times. He was a columnist from 2009 to 2020.
He has worked for The Times for more than 30 years and has served as a foreign
correspondent and foreign editor. Raised in South Africa and Britain, he is a
naturalized American. @NYTimesCohen
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