Britain’s future is as a nation state – not in the EU empire
The world is changing and countries are now increasingly independent. We have to be prepared to go it alone
At the London School of Economics on Thursday, Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator, unwittingly reminded us why we had voted Leave. “The world of tomorrow is a world of empires,” he told his audience, “and only a united Europe will play a role of significance.”
The idea that the world is coalescing into empires sits oddly with recent history. Since the Second World War, countries have tended to become more numerous, smaller and more democratic. When the EEC was formed in the 1950s, there were 80 states in the world. Today there are 200, the last 30 having come into existence since 1990, like Montenegro and South Sudan. There is no sign that the trend is slowing. Kurds have just voted for independence, and Catalans seem set to follow.
The EU, alas, is a child of its time. The top-down, corporatist and grandiose assumptions of the 1950s were shovelled into its foundations. Back then, clever men generally agreed that the future belonged to conglomerates. Whether in business or in geopolitics, the giants would trample the midgets.
That, though, is not how things worked out. To general astonishment, Hong Kong went on to outperform China, Singapore to outperform Malaysia – and Switzerland, come to that, to outperform the EU. The states with the highest GDP per head today are Liechtenstein, Qatar and Monaco. Yet palaeo-federalists in Brussels continue to trot out hackneyed phrases about being too small to count in the world.
Such talk was always irrelevant to Britain – the fifth largest economy on Earth, the fourth military power and one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Indeed, I wonder whether, on some level, it isn’t precisely Britain’s size that bothers Eurocrats. I’ve noticed that people who are relaxed about Kurdish or Catalan independence often get hot under the collar at British independence. The trouble is that we are not easily pitied or patronised. Because we developed a capitalist economy before anyone else, and became commensurately wealthy, we tended to have the upper hand in our dealings with foreign countries. We don’t fit the role of underdogs.
When Norway and Switzerland voted against the EU, their decision was seen for what it was: a preference for democratic self-government. But when the UK voted the same way, a hundred columnists reached for clichés about the British Empire.
It is this lingering resentment, this sense that we need to be cut down to size, that is the main bar to a swift resolution of the talks in Brussels. On paper, agreement should be straightforward. Both sides want to trade with each other. Both want to guarantee the rights of people from one jurisdiction who have settled in the other. Both want a close relationship on intelligence, security and police cooperation. Neither wants border infrastructure in Ireland.
Sure, there are bound to be arguments about the money, as well as about issues like fisheries. But the broad outlines of a deal – leave the common political institutions but staying in the free trade area, paying for a share of any continuing programmes – should be clear enough. Many Euro-federalists were calling for precisely such an arrangement long before our referendum – including Mr Verhofstadt.
Now, though, they find themselves conflicted. Intellectually, they accept the case for an accord that benefits both sides, but emotionally they feel jilted. Even those formally involved in the talks can’t help tweeting passiveaggressively. Some openly aim to drag out the process in the hope that Britain might change its mind. Others accept that we’re leaving, but want to delay things for so long that we are prepared, in desperation, to sign whatever terms are put in front of us. Hence the spectacle of Michel Barnier insisting that the clock is ticking while refusing to speed up the talks.
It’s true, as everyone keeps saying, that a deal is far preferable to a collapse of the talks. Failure to reach agreement would be a headache for both sides. Flights would be disrupted, trade slowed, and Ireland would face the sort of hard border that divides, say, Poland from Belarus. No one in Britain should want this outcome. But the worst possible thing would be to face it unprepared.
Britain has to get ready for a no-deal scenario now. By “get ready”, I don’t mean circulate contingency plans among civil servants. I mean make the actual preparations. We need to train new immigration and customs officers; to produce international driver licences; to make our patenting regime independent under international rules; to put lorry parks along the M20 in case there are go-slows at Calais (though, come to think of it, this is a common enough experience even while we are EU members). We need to negotiate air slots with individual EU states, which have as much to lose from a failure to reach agreement on aviation as we have.
We can’t do these things as an elaborate bluff. With 18 months to go, we must put them in place now so as to be able to meet any outcome confidently. Talks break down when one side misreads the other or overplays its hand. The biggest threat to the current negotiations is the lingering belief in Brussels that, if Britain is offered punitive terms, it will either accept them out of desperation or change its mind about leaving – a belief deliberately encouraged by Tony Blair and Vince Cable.
The best way to avoid a breakdown is to be ready for one. Prepared for the worst, we can confidently expect a mutually advantageous outcome.