On June 23, the people of Britain will vote in a referendum to decide if they will stay in the European Union or step out on their own in a Brexit. For their sake and ours, I hope they choose to exit.
We should get one thing straight right away about the EU: It is not a democracy. The EU is the successor of the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951 and intended to prevent another war between France and Germany by taking away their ability to make their own policies.
The EU is an ever-deeper union that is steadily depriving its member nations of the right to govern themselves. That’s not an accident: It’s what the EU was designed to do. It’s not, as Americans are wont to think, another United States: Our very different union was founded on our claim to self-government.
The EU’s bureaucrats like to claim that the plan has worked: They have brought peace to Europe. In reality, the post-war peace was the result of NATO, and the superpower contest between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that suppressed Europe’s national rivalries. The EU was a product of that peace, not its cause.
So why did Britain join the EU? Because in the 1960s, as the Empire faded, Britain lost its national confidence. Its economy was a mess. It couldn’t see any other options, and its leading politicians persistently denied that Europe was anything more than an apolitical free trade area.
That was never true. And today, there definitely are other options. If Norway can thrive outside the EU, so can Britain, which has the fifth largest economy in the world. If the U.S. can trade with the EU, even though we’re not part of it, so can Britain.
In the bad old days when Britain joined, the risks of being outside Europe looked greater than the risks of being inside. But today, if you’re in, you have to face the fact that the EU is going to be run for the benefit of the Euro, which Britain doesn’t use. And there are other risks.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has invited one million refugees into Europe, and they are now supposed to be shared around the entire EU. And then there’s the feckless EU diplomacy that did just enough in Ukraine to annoy the Russians, without possessing the strength necessary to deter them.
The last refuge of the desperate Europhile is to claim that we need a united Europe to ward off the Russians, and their tentacles of bribery and intimidation. But America’s chosen security instrument in Europe has always been NATO, not the European Union.
Nor will the EU save Europe from Russia’s more subtle forms of manipulation, or indeed from the lure of illiberal, populist politics. The EU does not stand for liberalism: It stands for the rule of the elite. Moreover, the world has changed since the EU’s predecessors supposedly bound Germany to the West.
In its earlier days, the EU didn’t reach too deeply into nations. The trick then was to win over the elites. And the EU did that, in spades. But it’s never won the hearts of the people. There are Germans, Swedes and Italians in Europe, but few outside the elite identify first as Europeans.
So the deeper the EU has reached down into nations, the more the peoples of Europe have come to resent it. Every time anything goes wrong, be it in the Greek economy or on the bloody streets of Paris, the cry from Brussels is always the same: the EU needs more power.
But the more power the EU gets, the more it is resented, and the more openings are created for extremism on the right and the left, movements the Russians seek to exploit. The Front Nationale in France is not going to be stopped by the EU; it is driven by resentment of the EU.
Britain can’t solve these problems for us by staying in the EU. It tried to turn the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community, into an economically liberal and outward looking group in the late 1950s. But even then, Britain didn’t have the power to remake Europe in its own image.
So it’s time to break the cycle. Britain, a nation with a long history of self-government under law, a nation that was the home of genuine liberalism, can be free, prosperous, and strong outside the EU. The nations of Europe need an example of freedom, not the baby-sitter of Brussels.
And if you believe they do, you should ask yourself a question. If being governed by a remote, bureaucratic elite is good for Britain, why isn’t it just as good for us?
Ted R. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in The Heritage Foundation’s Thatcher Center for Freedom. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
