For the past half-century and more, Britain’s Conservative party has been haunted—divided, exhausted, even confused—by the European Union. Yet unlike Labour, which has changed its mind on the subject as much as the Tories but without missing a beat, Conservatives have been a house divided since Britain’s first application for membership in 1961.
This has never been more painfully evident than in the two years-plus since British voters declared their independence from the E.U. Prime Minister David Cameron, who had won a stunning general election victory in 2015 on the promise of a referendum, was obliged to resign prematurely when the 2016 Brexit vote went against his wishes. The referendum campaign itself had divided members of Cameron’s cabinet, and Cameron’s successor Theresa May has, in turn, seen her own cabinet riven by her faltering attempts to negotiate a graceful departure.
Last week the open divisions among Tories were the main ingredient of their annual conference. May’s foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt was much criticized in Brussels for comparing the E.U. to the Soviet Union while his predecessor Boris Johnson pleased the Conservative rank and file by warning that Britain would be “humiliated” by May’s Brexit strategy—and her party pay a price at the polls.
The irony, of course, is that both Johnson and Hunt are correct. May’s halfhearted version of a British departure would leave her country “half-in and half-out,” as Johnson complained. And her appeasement of the E.U. has been met with the sort of dismissive contempt in Brussels that reminds British voters why they chose Brexit. As the deadline approaches for formal withdrawal (March 2019), it seems entirely possible that Brexit will be neither “soft” nor “hard” but chaotic.
Chaos, of course, is inimical to democracy and so critics of Brexit now repeat their insistence, with emphasis, that a second referendum be held to undo the first. But that’s unlikely to happen since there’s little evidence that reverting to the status quo ante appeals to the British electorate.
To begin with, it might reasonably be argued that within the past three years, three nationwide ballots have been held on the question, and Brexit prevailed each time. In 2015, Cameron’s successful electoral campaign benefited from his promise to hold a referendum in the following year. In 2016, the referendum vote itself went against the E.U., albeit by a relatively narrow margin (52-48). And in 2017, while Theresa May’s snap election cost the Conservatives seats in Parliament, her Labour opposition was equally committed to Brexit.
The idea that the Brexit vote was a terrible error, abetted by lies, demagoguery, and xenophobia, is comforting to what might be called elite opinion in Britain. But it is also an argument—or more accurately an irritable attitude—that resonates here. Like the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, what was unimaginable to some turned out to be appealing to many. To be sure, the winning sides are not necessarily correct, either here or there; but democracy is undermined not by voting but by failure to accept the results of free and open elections.
In that sense, while the Brexit vote and its aftermath have surely thrown British politics into turmoil—for which the Conservative party may or may not be punished in future polls—it is not at all clear what the long-term consequences of withdrawal may be.
With that in mind, it’s been instructive since the vote to observe the posture of the European Union toward Great Britain. Led by the president of the European Commission, the redoubtable Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, Brussels has been uniformly hostile: contemptuous of voters, insulting to the elected government charged with Brexit diplomacy, continually obstinate, obstructionist, even threatening. Whether consciously or not, the E.U. mandarins—unelected, unaccountable, unyielding—have affirmed why Britain’s attitude toward the European Union has evolved so dramatically since the first referendum on British membership (1975), which was broadly favorable.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that the idea of European unity, to which everyone pays lip service, has been transformed in ways no one anticipated at the dawn of the European Union. It is perfectly understandable that Western Europeans, in the late 1940s, would have surveyed the effects of two world wars in three decades, and the rise of a menacing empire on their eastern frontier, and sought to pool resources and strengthen common bonds to revive their civilization.
Yet what began as an effort to share assets and revive economies—and, not least, to reinvent and reintegrate German democracy—has pushed beyond the wide ideal of prosperity and friendly borders into the narrow realm of state power and national sovereignty. That is the second reason: A benign project to recover from malign nationalism has become a facsimile of an arbitrary nation-state, governed not by its citizens but a swollen bureaucracy.
A cynic would argue, of course, that the nature of governments, as a general principle, is to grow and control, and the gradual intrusion of the European Union across borders and into legislatures should not have been a surprise. But the facts that British voters have awakened to this and their E.U. brethren—most especially in the newly liberated states of the old Soviet Union—show signs of restlessness are perceived, and with reason, as threats in Brussels.
That would explain the rancorous arguments, among Britain’s Conservatives and on the Continent, about the nature of national sovereignty and the implications of the E.U.’s open-borders policy. It would also explain the E.U.’s petulance about Brexit. What started as a rebellion in rural England over agricultural regulations has become a European-wide quarrel about who governs whom—a debate Brussels should welcome but clearly does not.
