The Prime Minister has had a turbulent week, but that is nothing compared to what 2019 has in store
The prospect of a no-deal Brexit, combined with deteriorating Anglo-Irish relations, could mean no one has a happy new year, writes Ulster University academic
When Harold Wilson coined the phrase “a week is a long time in politics” he could not have envisaged the week the Prime Minister has just had. Last month she referred to her cricketing favourite Geoffrey Boycott with the words: “He stuck to it and got the runs in the end.”
Well, if Mrs May had been batting in a Test match she would have found herself on a sticky wicket, facing hostile fast bowling and fierce spin, knowing that some on her own side were trying to run her out, hearing commentators damning her technique and finally discovering that the umpires rejected all appeals against bad conditions.
Somehow, she survived. Yet criticism of her politics, like criticism of Boycott’s cricket, remains. Spending time in negotiation, like spending time on the pitch, is not the same thing as winning the game.
As Conservative backbench MP Lee Rowley put it: “Stamina is not a strategy.”
It is difficult to separate the personal from the political in the present withdrawal agreement. Trust in the Prime Minister and belief in the agreement are inextricably linked.
It is hard to have confidence in the future of either. A few days ago the influential Tory house journal Conservative Home editorialised that Mrs May’s deal was just about sellable if some concession could be got on the Irish backstop.
The European summit in Brussels, like the one in Salzburg earlier this year, demonstrated
❝ After 40 years of membership of European institutions, the players know each other too well
❝ Unlike the UK, the Irish had done preparation properly and spoken of EU principle cleverly
how false that hope was. Yet the gulf in understanding between the UK and the EU 27 is hard to explain.
It is tempting to cite the Prime Minister’s own failings — a tin ear for political mood, poor negotiating skills — which make these tragic encounters a diplomatic farce, a negotiating disaster and a personal humiliation.
But one suspects there’s something more than her personality. Other Prime Ministers have had the same experience, her predecessor David Cameron for one. One long-standing explanation is that the British and continental Europeans (especially the French) approach political problems with very different mindsets. When the UK joined the European Community in 1973, Edward Heath’s Government assured voters not to be misled by the continental habit of grand declarations and statements of principle.
Since it was the British habit to avoid both, voters were warned not to misjudge the country’s new partners.
In the real business of politics and diplomacy, so the argument went, everyone understood each other perfectly and the UK had nothing to fear.
In a recent essay the distinwas guished Cambridge historian and convinced Brexiteer Robert Tombs returned to this explanation but came to the opposite conclusion. Addressing the question: why is it so difficult to agree a satisfactory withdrawal agreement? He drew on intellectual history as well as personal knowledge.
In 2006 he and his historian wife Isabelle (who is French) had written a study of the subject, That Sweet Enemy.
Tombs thought that a conceptual gulf described much of the present crisis. On the one hand, Michel Barnier’s style — and the European Council’s — considers British reluctance to define principles as either proof of poor preparation or as inability to clarify its objectives. That, more or less, was Jean-Claude Juncker’s rebuke of Mrs May in Brussels.
On the other hand, the British find this approach inflexible, if not deliberately obstructive. That more or less sums up the reaction of the Brexit-supporting UK media to the Brussels summit. If both sides seem in different mental universes, Tombs concluded “that is because they are”.
This is plausible up to a point. However, one could persuasively argue the opposite case — that after 40 years of membership of European institutions the players know each other all too well. The EU knows British “flexibility” can translate into opt-outs. The UK knows EU principles can be modified when necessary.
Does that knowledge not suggest a satisfactory meeting point? Unfortunately not for what is possible for states within the EU is in principle different for that (one) state wanting to leave. Mrs May’s deal is actually a recognition of that difference in principle. Whether all provisions of its backstop consequence are wise is a different matter.
When it comes to mutual understanding, surely the Irish and the British should be at one? Matthew Arnold’s 19th century distinction — the romantic Celt and the business-like Anglo-Saxon — no longer fits reality. The engagement of Dublin and London to settle the Troubles, their transformation from antagonism to co-operation, has been read by scholars as a model of positive inter-state relations.
What would both sides not know about the other? And yet there was another major British miscalculation about the Irish position on Brexit.
The experience of the Brexit negotiations appears to invert Arnold’s distinction.
We now have romantic, nostalgic Anglo-Saxons up against efficient, competent Celts, certainly a commonly held view among Irish intellectuals.
The first badly misjudges the UK’s position. The second, though, has undoubted merit. Ireland’s EU diplomacy (to use cricketing terminology) has knocked the British around the park.
There are a number of reasons, founded mainly on the collective interests of the 27 EU states and the strategy of the commission. Another important reason is contrasting purpose. For the UK, the patriotic interest after the EU referendum is unclear. There is no consensus (hence the Parliamentary stalemate).
In Ireland there is almost universal acceptance that Brexit represents a threat to the national interest. The patriotic objective is to do whatever possible to mitigate its impact on Irish society. That means government doing its utmost to keep the UK’s relationship with Europe as close as possible.
For example, former Taoiseach John Bruton argued that Brexit was widely regarded by Irish people as “a profoundly unfriendly act”. And unfriendly act is diplomatic speak for: if you mean to do us serious harm, don’t be surprised if our response is also painful. Ultimately, the Irish response disordered the UK’s expectations of co-operative pragmatism between London and Dublin.
The cross-bench peer and Irish historian Lord Bew spoke of that disordering in House of Lords debates. Shortly after the referendum he acknowledged the Irish Government’s resentment at being placed between “a rock and a hard place”. But the sensible option, he argued, for the British and Irish Governments together to “work out an appropriate solution with the European Union”.
Why was this not happening? He thought that such co-operation did “not fit with the framework of European law”, that very inflexible approach Tombs had written about. For a year after June 2016 Bew was still confident that good relations between Irish and UK officials would deliver.
He was not alone in thinking that. Bertie Ahern said as much. So too self-designated fervent European John (Lord) Alderdice. In his 2018 Dr Garret Fitzgerald lecture, Alderdice argued that flexible solutions on the border are in everyone’s interest. The ‘Well, take it or leave it. If you want to do Brexit, here are the consequences’ Brussels agenda would be bad for everyone.
Later Bew admitted that things had changed, but of one thing he was sure. The model built up by negotiating the Belfast Agreement, ending ‘the cold war between the north and the south’, is definitely not the model in the backstop. What had changed in Dublin’s response?
It was the new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar who announced that the Irish state is “not going to design a border for the Brexiteers”. Why should it indeed? In their biography, Leo Varadkar: A Very Modern Taoiseach, Philip Ryan and Niall O’Connor identify the change happening in July 2017 when Varadkar and Foreign Minister Simon Coveney agreed to “adopt the most hardline stance possible in relation to the border”. Why shouldn’t they? Tony Connelly’s important book Brexit And Ireland puts the change a little earlier, but he acknowledges the same logical question: why should the Irish assist in the UK’s unfriendly act? He details the skill of Dublin’s diplomacy to make this new hardline Irish position “into the European position”. Unlike the UK, the Irish had done their preparation properly and spoken of EU principle cleverly. That goes a long way to explain why the backstop stays as it is and Mrs May continues to score a duck at European Councils. Now what?
The Prime Minister has had a turbulent week, yes. But this may be as nothing if in 2019 we face a no-deal Brexit, deterioration in Anglo-Irish relations, a populist surge in the European Parliament elections, the possibility of another Eurozone banking crisis, all in a global order lacking its customary stabilising mechanisms (one of which is a trustworthy US President). It may not be a happy new year for anyone. Arthur Aughey is emeritus professor of politics at Ulster University. His publications include The Politics Of Northern Ireland: Beyond The Belfast Agreement (2007) and Nationalism, Devolution And The Challenge To The UK State (2001)