Beyond Brexit is a Continent riven with dysfunction

Our own problems are mirrored by an EU that is struggling with a changing political landscape

You have to laugh. Germany’s Green Party is on a roll, surging into the vacuum left by the decay of the country’s mainstream parties. They have an opportunity to gain ground in regional elections tomorrow, presenting themselves as uncorrupted pragmatists rather than radicals. They can’t shed the crazy entirely, however.

This week, Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock declared that she wants to pull Germany out of Nato’s nuclear-sharing arrangements and send the US’S protective nukes packing from German soil. This, she claims, is the “right answer” to growing Russian and US militarism.

Donald Trump would be only too happy to say goodbye to the freeloading Germans. For Berlin’s more level-headed foreign policy establishment, however, this is a nightmare come true.

Few things better illustrate Europe’s unpreparedness to operate in a world of power-driven geopolitics than Germany’s deranged pacifism. The global legal order, from Nato to the World Trade Organisation, is being subverted by old-school, nation-state power struggles.

In a world dominated by American and Chinese nationalism, the EU will struggle. It is incapable of getting its own house in order and clever legal ruses can’t cover for the inability to defend yourself from invasion or uncontrolled migration. Britain, unfortunately, isn’t faring much better.

Some are still trying, valiantly, to get Europe to face up to its dysfunction. Recently, five wonks at Brussels’ arch-federalist think tank, the Bruegel Institute, published a paper breaking some of the EU’S most sacred taboos. It should jettison the goal of ever-closer union and irreversible integration, they argued. Instead, it should strip itself back to the basics – the single market and customs union – and offer voluntary, reversible participation in various “clubs”, like the euro, Schengen and foreign policy or defence co-operation.

Any member state wanting to join these clubs ought to accept obligations, like free movement, policing external borders and a quota system for sharing out refugees within Schengen. But if they don’t want to participate in all of these enormous projects, they should still be able to form part of the EU’S general economic zone. In other words, EU treaties must adapt to political reality, not the other way around.

In a parallel universe, the UK could quite happily have occupied the stripped back part of this EU, enjoying full participation in European rulemaking and trade policy without free movement and meddling in home affairs. It would never have satisfied the most ardent Brexiteers, but without the juggernaut of “ever-closer union”, Brexit might never have been spawned in the first place.

Unfortunately, Bruegel’s effort will undoubtedly be for nothing. Its first iconoclastic paper, published in 2016 and proposing a reform of EU rules to accommodate Brexit, was denounced as heretical to the single market dogma and all but burned in Brussels’ main squares. The second will surely meet the same fate.

Meanwhile, a year has passed since Emmanuel Macron’s interminable Sorbonne speech, in which he laid out a roadmap for the future of the euro. The centrepiece was a plan for a eurozone budget overseen by a eurozone finance minister who could police budgets and splurge investment in the region’s most moribund economies. Or, as one German official puts it: “It’s French interests and German money.”

What France has achieved so far is an agreement to establish a “European Monetary Fund” with very little funding, and a general promise from Germany to underwrite Europe’s banks, which it isn’t clear Berlin will keep. Meanwhile, the EU has passed laws to overhaul its refugee system, but doesn’t dare to implement them because the eastern countries that opposed the new rules would go ballistic.

Add into all of this the Italy factor. The European Central Bank has declared it will stop buying up government bonds in December, even as Rome has spooked markets by laying out plans for a fiscal bonanza of tax cuts and welfare spending. The doom-mongers are once again declaring the death of the euro, but I’ve seen that tape too many times before. Brussels and Rome will probably work something out because no one can afford to bail out Italy and, by and large, the Italians don’t want to leave the euro. The cost of not muddling through is simply gigantic.

Still, it’s when you appreciate all the many moving parts across Europe that a new Brexit plan mooted by a minority of Tories, led by Nick Boles, starts to make sense. His idea is that Britain ought to go temporarily into the European Economic Area – the “Norway option” – rather than sign up to a punitive and probably permanent Brexit transition and Irish backstop.

Mr Boles’ plan has many advantages. It immediately replaces the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice with that of the Efta court, which is a little friendlier to Anglosaxon legal norms. It retains Britain’s treaty rights, protecting our companies from discrimination, and removes us from the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies. It forms a stable basis from which to negotiate a “Canada deal”.

In reality, though, none of this is as simple as it sounds. The Norway model isn’t actually an easy-to-use, off-the-shelf option that’s readily available. Brussels would probably have to agree to the whole plan, and Norway’s arrangements are full of legal holes that the EU would seek to plug, to our disadvantage.

The problem is that we are running out of time just as we need to buy more of it. Britain needs time to sort itself out, plan for a no deal and, most of all, wait to see what happens on a Continent in flux. Instead, we have squandered months on infighting.

It should be no consolation that the EU itself is doing exactly the same on a larger scale. Around us, tariffs are rising, militarised islands are emerging out of the sea, the World Trade Organisation is foundering, nuclear weapons are proliferating and we are all squabbling over legal structures. The technocrats are at war with the politicians and the politicians can’t agree on anything long enough to win.

In slow motion, Europe is giving up the chance to shape its future. It’s all very well being good at global rulemaking. But without hard power and political stability, it’s going to get increasingly difficult to impose your precious rules.

Few things better illustrate Europe’s unpreparedness for the new geopolitics than Germany’s deranged pacifism