Sherelle Jacobs:

There is a chilling logic in Brussels’ self-destructive approach to the second stage of negotiations

Brussels’ babbling inertia in the Brexit trade talks has provoked delight and denial in equal measure among the British commentariat. But it is worth taking a step back from the debate over whether the EU’S negotiating position is “steely” and “eloquent” (The Economist) or “bewildering” and “intransigent” (this newspaper) to consider an even more important question: why, exactly, is Brussels behaving as if nothing has changed? The answer is both fascinating and frightening.

Even diehard Eurosceptics are a little perplexed by the deadpan idiocy of the EU’S negotiating position – as it has, in recent weeks, prattled on about the Elgin Marbles, lied compulsively about the Political Declaration and flexed its flaccid biceps as if it is still dealing with lightweight Theresa May. But far from losing its cool, Brussels is icily acting according to its own perverse, bureaucratic logic. This is driven by a compulsion for one thing only: total control. Both the individuals who make up a given bureaucracy and the entity itself will always act exclusively to shore up power through two main processes: regulating “chaos” and “solving problems”.

This is reflected in the EU’S blunt refusal to agree a trade-only deal and its ridiculous demands on everything from fishing and the European Court of Justice to defence. Trapped in the mantra that all Brexit pipe dreams lead back to the brick wall of the single market’s integrity, the CBI, Tony Blair, and those Brussels hacks who churn out barely amended EU Commission press releases have failed to grasp the single most important fact about these talks: the EU, driven primarily by the Will to Control, has limited interest in the intricacies of a future trade deal.

Yes, Michel Barnier seeks to inflict maximum damage on Britain with minimum side-effects for the EU. Yes, protecting the single market is a vital strategic goal. But the EU’S ultimate ambition goes further – it wishes to retain as much influence as possible over as many aspects of British sovereignty as possible, from our immigration policy to our laws.

For Brussels, unbounded control freakery is a sickness as much as a sentiment. Its bizarre laundry list of demands, which at various points have included the re-airing of member states’ claims to everything from the Elgin Marbles to Gibraltar, betrays the squalid reality that EU countries view Brussels as little more than a vehicle for selfishly advancing their own interests. Not to mention that the EU’S entertainment of such gripes smacks of the micro-managerialist’s fatal inability to set priorities.

Funnily enough, the latest management thinking offers a devastating insight into the severity of the EU’S troubled pathology. The Chicago-based guru, Gary Hamel, thinks that big corporations too often succumb to “controlism”, viewing “freedom” as its rival. His warning that “as long as control is exalted at the expense of freedom, organisations will remain incompetent at their core” offers plenty of food for thought in the corporate context. But this also hints at the new ideological dividing line in a world that was once split between communists and capitalists.

With the Soviet Union demolished into dust clouds of mafia-capitalism and the rubble of the Berlin Wall now a consumer item in museum shops, a new argument is slowly taking form. Perhaps the ideological schism of the 21st century will be between those, such as the EU, who believe countries can bring order to modern complexities through regulation and the gravitational pull of centralisation, and those, like Brexit Britain, who reckon that to thrive in our fasttransforming world countries must learn to embrace bottom-up disruption and dissent from orthodoxy.

It is no coincidence, by the way, that security is now as important as economic demands for the EU in its trade talks with Britain; defence is the defence mechanism of an institution that can’t quite put its finger on why it feels under siege; it is not threatened by a military enemy, but a rival idea. As Mr Hamel puts it, the future belongs to those who can “reap the blessings of bureaucracy – precision, consistency and predictability – while at the same time killing it”.

That’s if it doesn’t end up killing itself. Not least because, as the world teeters on the brink of another industrial revolution, the ruleobsessed EU is efficiently regulating itself into irrelevance across industries like genetics and AI, even though these will decide the international pecking order for the next 500 years.

Unable to compute the future, the EU clings to the past. On the desk of Jean Monnet, the French diplomat who was the brainchild of the EU project, sat a photograph of two young men who set out to cross the Pacific on a small raft, the Kon-tiki. He enjoyed wondering what they were thinking in that moment, as they looked ahead, knowing there was no going back. But lurking behind this touching fixation with rugged heroism was the moderniser’s mania for the linear. How ironic that, now, as the world changes rapidly around it, the EU, in its obsessive-compulsive quest for orderly direction, is actually standing still.