If the EU continues to act like a hostile state, the UK should treat it as one
Ihad assumed that, once EU leaders got over their pique about Brexit, things would settle down. After all, diplomacy is usually shaped by present interests rather than by past grudges. As those Eurocrats on whose watch the referendum had occurred were gradually replaced by successors coming fresh to the job, I expected the EU to concentrate on its own prosperity rather than entering into a series of needless scraps with its largest customer.
I was wrong. The EU’s rage, like Caliban’s, is elemental. It will last for years, possibly decades, and we need to adjust our foreign policy accordingly. I am not talking here of provocations, such as Charles Michel’s outrageous claim that the UK is blocking the export of vaccines. Nor am I talking about aggressive tweets or petty diplomatic micro-aggressions or foot-dragging over ratifying the trade deal.
No, I am talking about actions with real consequences, such as the bellicose overinterpretation of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the refusal to agree to equivalence in financial services and, above all, the threat to requisition vaccine supplies. In all these cases, the EU cannot hurt Britain without hurting itself; yet it feels compelled to pick fights anyway.
Some hardline positions were adopted early in the hope that, if Brexit were made unappealing enough, Britain might change its mind. Others were taken up during the trade talks, so that they might be abandoned in return for British concessions elsewhere. With Brexit now a fact and the trade deal agreed, those rationales have disappeared, but the EU’s petulance has not. We need to face the truth that, affronted by our referendum, Eurocrats see the very fact of Britain flourishing as a kind of incitement.
Perhaps we should empathise. Exactly 100 years ago, Westminster was going through a similar process of psychological adjustment, struggling to come to terms with Irish independence. It took years before Britain accepted inwardly what it had accepted outwardly in 1921, namely that it had an independent state next door rather than a semi-autonomous protectorate. Irish politicians responded to that foot-dragging by pursuing policies that were, if not always anti-British, at least predicated on a desire to be different.
The British and Irish peoples continued to intermingle and intermarry, and relations between individuals and businesses remained warm. But relations between the two states deteriorated to the point that, in the late 1960s, Dublin was seriously considering sending troops into Northern Ireland. Only in the early 2000s was full cordiality restored.
Obviously, the parallel is inexact. Britain did not fight a war to break away from the EU and its politicians were in consequence readier to be friendly. I used my final speech in the European Parliament to tell MEPs (in French) that they were losing a bad tenant and gaining a good neighbour. Boris Johnson, like Theresa May, never missed an opportunity to say that he wanted the closest possible relationship, promising that Britain would be “the best friend and ally the EU could have”.
Hoping for good relations, Britain did not respond to the EU’s temporary imposition of an Irish border by formally withdrawing from the Protocol. It continues to offer equivalence in financial services to EU firms, even though the EU denies it to British firms (while granting it, in part, to Brazilian, Mexican and Chinese firms). It has made clear that it will not retaliate against the EU’s vaccine nationalism by withholding its own supplies – the thing that Eurocrats keep falsely accusing it of doing.
None of this, though, has tempered the EU’s belligerence. There is no way to interpret the threat of a vaccine export ban other than as a hostile act aimed at Britain. When the EU declared that it would require export licences, it carefully exempted every neighbouring state except one. Its ban would not apply to Iceland or Morocco or Turkey or Belarus – only to the UK. Now, beset by continuing delays, and furious at Britain’s relative success, it has escalated further, threatening to commandeer factories, seize lawfully purchased supplies and violate intellectual property rights.
When a neighbour threatens you with wartime measures, you can hardly carry on treating it as an ally. The EU’s behaviour over the past year must prompt a reappraisal of our geopolitical goals. Such a reappraisal was, in any case, overdue. The relative narrowing of Britain’s vision, its peculiar focus on Europe, was a product of the Cold War. For most of the past four centuries, we have been a blue-water nation, chiefly interested in transcontinental commerce, open sea-lanes, and links to distant trading posts and, in time, colonies.
The period between 1945 and 1990 was, in the larger sweep of history, anomalous. We had come through the war with a significant military presence in West Germany and, for good reasons, we concluded that defending European democracy was a moral imperative and a selfish strategic goal. With our treasury empty and armies exhausted, we drew in our strength, abandoning Asian and African bases.
Now, that slow retreat has been reversed. On Wednesday, the Government published its integrated review, heralding a pivot away from Europe and towards India and the Pacific. As the PM told the House of Commons: “The truth is that even if we wished it – and of course we don’t – the UK could never turn inwards or be content with the cramped horizons of a regional foreign policy.”
Britain is prioritising its relations with India, applying to join the Pacific trade nexus, the CPTPP, becoming an associate member of ASEAN and recalibrating its military and naval deployments. All these decisions are laudable in themselves. But the truth is that the EU gives us no choice. When, for example, it denies us equivalence in financial services, it forces the City to diverge more radically in order to compete. When it throws its weight around over Ireland, it makes it hard to justify our investment in the defence of Estonia or Romania. When it threatens to blockade our vaccine supply – to repeat, a targeted act of aggression, not aimed at any other neighbour – it sets a precedent for more anti-British embargoes, whether in the field of energy or raw materials.
We are thus both pushed and pulled towards a closer relationship with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. While individual European states might still be considered allies, the EU as a whole has chosen instead to be a rival. And, with each year that passes, more foreign policy powers are transferred from friendly national capitals to an institutionally unfriendly EU bureaucracy.
Some countries – Australia, say – are so close to us in temperament and outlook that we can treat each other’s interests as semi-interchangeable, swapping the most intimate intelligence secrets and habitually combining our Armed Forces. At the other end of that spectrum are antagonistic states, such as Iran. We need to face the fact that the EU is now closer on that spectrum to, say, Russia than it is to Canada.
One day, good relations will be restored. We can’t ignore our geography or our long-standing alliances with individual European nations. But, for now, Brussels does not regard us as a neighbour whose economic success will enrich its own peoples, but as a renegade province whose wings need clipping. Our response must be to soar higher.
While individual states might still be considered allies, the EU as a whole has chosen instead to be a rival