British Prime Minister Theresa May last week finally started Brexit, the two-year process of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Her ambassador delivered the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, who responded on Friday, “The EU27 does not and will not pursue a punitive approach. Brexit in itself is already punitive enough. After more than 40 years of being united, we owe it to each other to do everything we can to make this divorce as smooth as possible.”
These words are appropriate, but their tone is not always shared by some officials in Brussels who want to make a painful example of Britain, to discourage other countries from doing the same. Such sentiments cast the union as a protection racket, and underline the good, democratic sense in the June 23 vote to leave.
The two sides need to agree on a multitude of financial, trade, immigration and security questions, and one hopes that enlightened self-interest rather than resentment is the overriding motive.
The United Kingdom remains intent on playing a key role in NATO and other international institutions, which makes its departure a gentler rebuke than the EU might receive elsewhere. With a revanchist Russian President Vladimir Putin trying to drive wedges between Western allies, Eurocrats such as Tusk should embrace the opportunity to learn from the Brexit experience and reform themselves before they repel other member states, and further destabilize the continent.
So far, they’re struggling with the wake-up call. “In recent years, Europeans … have been made to believe that an integrating Europe is a threat to national and state sovereignty,” Tusk said Thursday. “This is a view which is both foolish and dangerous. Our mission should be to make Europeans realize that it’s exactly the opposite … We must challenge the populists. We must say loud and clear that nationalisms and separatisms which try to weaken the EU are the opposite of modern patriotism.”
This is a cardinal statement of the blindness that has afflicted Brussels and many other EU enthusiasts for decades. It is a central tenet of political freedom and real democracy that decisions be taken as close to the people as possible. Wherever possible, they should not devolve upward to a central authority, and certainly not to an unelected oligarchy, as is the case now in the EU. And yet that is what “ever closer union,” the EU mantra, has meant in practice — the stripping away of democracy and freedom from its constituent nations and peoples.
So Tusk’s arguments are unpersuasive to British, French, or Hungarian citizens alike. When told that their love of country falls short of “modern patriotism,” particularly when delivered by a Brussels executive, they rightly find it ridiculous.
The truth is that the EU has struggled to reconcile divergent interests of member countries. This was obvious during the Eurozone crisis following the Greek bailouts. Euro interest rates enhance the economic might of Germany at the expense of struggling economies; bailouts for debtor nations, meanwhile, aggravate the wealthier populations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel won the short-term political fight by warning of war in Europe. “We have a historical obligation: To protect by all means Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and bloodshed,” she said in 2011. Merkel’s ensuing decision to welcome almost a million Syrian asylum-seekers, with little vetting and less regard for the fears of terrorism in her own country and among her neighbors, dragged the sovereignty question out of the arid realm of monetary policy and reminded voters of a danger more imminent than World War III.
In the face of such EU defenses, “nationalist” counterarguments are almost redundant, to say nothing of effective. “Instead of the rule of law, we have the imperative of political union: When the dots and commas of the treaties stand in the way of deeper integration, they are unhesitatingly set aside,” Dan Hannan, a member of the European Parliament and a weekly Washington Examiner columnist, wrote in a book urging his fellow citizens to leave the EU. “Instead of parliamentary democracy, we’re governed in secret, often after being lobbied by vested interests. Instead of personal liberty, we have a mass of pettifogging regulation that makes us poorer as well as less free.”
His argument was peppered with anecdotes of practical self-dealing — EU officials are exempt from national taxation; they receive lavish stipends for the costs of travel and staff, as well — and examples of the EU’s regulatory overreach. “[H]ow is it that Britain, the Mother of Parliaments, cannot lift a tax on sanitary products?” he wondered.
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s latest white paper on “the future of Europe” recognized that trust in the EU has plummeted among Europeans, but he attributed that to the complexity rather than to the deeper undemocratic tendencies within the EU. “Who does what is not well explained enough and the EU’s positive role in daily life is not visible if the story is not told locally,” Juncker wrote.
Together, the Juncker-Tusk reactions are textbook for an embattled political class and vested interest: belittle your opponents as extremists and admit nothing except, perhaps, failures of communication with poor, misguided voters. Tusk’s insistence that the EU wants only to be “integrated and sovereign in relation to the external world” while retaining “the independence of our nations and countries” rings hollow when Brussels can bar Britain from lifting a tax on tampons and Merkel can set immigration policy for most of Europe.
That is not to say that the European Parliament should be shuttered. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Hannan are not the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece; neither is the EU only a fiefdom for self-parodying bureaucrats. The world is enjoying one of the longest periods without great power conflict in modern history, an achievement all the more precious in the nuclear age. The EU cannot plausibly take the lion’s share of credit for that, but neither should its contributions be taken for granted. Tusk should be looking to assuage voters’ concerns, even if he thinks they’re “foolish” or incorrect.
If they fail to respond, the Europeans could face escalating danger. Russia and China seek to upset the international order established after World War II. Marine Le Pen, backed by Putin, plans to withdraw France from the NATO command if she manages to win the presidency — a far greater disruption than any regnant UK policy. Putin is supporting similar movements throughout Europe, but he isn’t inventing the underlying frustration. By demonizing reasonable Euroskepticism, Tusk and others tacitly admit the uncomfortable fact that, given a choice between EU demagogues or nationalist demagogues, many voters will choose the latter.
Tusk, Juncker, Merkel and others should do all that they can to avoid forcing voters into that false choice. Divorced or not, Britain offers the real friendship and support of an old friend. It’s what the EU needs.
