so; they are doing it, they say, out of anxiety for the future of the post-war European order. The same is true of a certain kind of European politician, for whom the threat of terrorist attacks or Russian revanchism requires ‘more Europe’, and for whom the tearing apart of the EU would be a disaster.
But if we pause for a moment, we can see that there is something odd about this. Force yourself to remember the tedium of the renegotiation, and its footling outcomes: did it have the ring of a discussion conducted under the threat of the collapse of post-war Europe? Did it look like the really vital and urgent diplomatic engagements of the 1930s, in which it was obvious to everyone that major issues hung in the balance, or the similar negotiations of the Cold War? Either the EU representatives at Brussels in 2015–16 were extraordinarily insouciant about the implications of what they were doing, or they thought that Brexit was so unlikely (something which none of the polls, then or now, have supported, even if the balance of probability is for Remain) that it was not worth guarding against by offering politically plausible concessions, or they thought that a Brexit would not in fact be a disaster, and they could afford to run the risk of Britain walking away from the EU.
If they did not think any of these things, then there are only two explanations for the trivial character of the negotiations. One was that they were playing a game of chicken, in which they fully recognised the danger, but hoped to use fear of it as the key element in the negotiations, in order to force Britain into line. The EU of course has form in this regard: precisely this approach was used against Greece, as Yanis Varoufakis has testified. Rather than being offered some reasonable compromise, the Greek people and their government were led to believe that the choice was between exit from the euro – and even from the EU – and submission to the terms offered them. This was a manufactured choice, since they could relatively easily have been offered better terms; but the Greeks’ nerve failed, very reasonably, and they chose to swerve their car away from the centre of the highway.
The Greeks (to continue the analogy) were driving the equivalent of a Reliant Robin, which would have been no match for an armoured Mercedes even in a head-on collision, so the stakes were relatively low for the EU, as the international markets were repeatedly reminded. But with Brexit, the EU and the US are themselves now assuring us that the stakes are very high – though neither did so at all minatorily during the renegotiation. Sensible politicians do not play chicken in a high-stakes situation; neither the US nor the Soviet Union did so during the Cold War, except perhaps in the Cuban Missile Crisis – but that is no model for modern politics, and was anyway solved by a back-room deal rather than the submission of one side. Do we conclude that EU and State Department politicians are not sensible? Or do we conclude that they do not really believe what they say, since if they did, they would – according to their own lights – have been behaving in the most reckless fashion?
The other explanation for the absence of any sense of urgency and importance is that the EU representatives were terrified of offering anything more than trivial concessions, as doing so would have encouraged other countries to seek similar treatment, and the EU project would have begun to unravel. This may be right, but it does not bode well for the future of the project, and confirms that Britain would be best out of it. It reveals that the leaders of the EU do not themselves believe that there is general support for integration, and that the citizens of Europe, given half a chance, would opt for the kind of deal which British Eurosceptics want. Once again, then, the EU leaders are convicted of extraordinary recklessness in seeking to force European union upon unwilling populations by – in effect – a threat of expulsion levelled at one of the major member countries. How long can such a structure last?
22 April 2016
On 22 April President Barack Obama gave a press conference at the Foreign Office alongside David Cameron, in which he produced his famous remark that Britain would be ‘at the back of the queue’ when it came to a trade deal with the US. This remark was widely believed to have been drafted by the British government, given the fact that no American says ‘queue’ rather than ‘line’! But Obama also said of the referendum that ‘the outcome of that decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States because it affects our prospects as well. The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong Europe. It leverages UK power to be part of the European Union.’
President Obama’s intervention today in the Brexit debate tells us only one thing, but that is something of great significance. It is that President de Gaulle was right when in 1963 and 1967 he vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. In his public utterances on the issue, he stressed (as he said in a famous speech in 1963) that
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.1
But the French press of the period, and private remarks by French politicians, repeatedly made explicit the specific anxiety which plainly guided de Gaulle’s veto – that Britain would be ‘America’s Trojan Horse’ in Europe. Within Britain, this has usually been seen as an example of French cultural anxiety; but with the crisis of Brexit on the horizon, the American foreign policy establishment is finally coming clean: they might talk about their general desire for a stable and united Europe, but in their eyes Britain’s membership of the EU is and plainly always has been a means of planting a reliable agent of the United States in the heart of the organisation. The French fears of the 1960s were well founded in a quite definite sense, and it is highly likely that the French intelligence services, always preternaturally well informed, were aware at the time of this aspect of American foreign policy. And de Gaulle, with his intimate knowledge of Anglo-American relations as they had been forged during the Second World War, was in an especially good position to appreciate what British membership would mean.
Leaving aside the feelings of Continental politicians, now they have been told that what they always suspected was indeed the truth, and leaving aside the humiliation of British citizens on learning that their country has been acting as a secret agent for the US within the EU for fifty years, there is a serious question about what has now been revealed. The State Department’s devotion to European union under all administrations should always have been more of a puzzle than it has normally appeared. There is much we do not know about its real motives, and about its attitude to British membership. For example, Richard Crossman, a member of Harold Wilson’s Cabinet at the time of the renewed application in 1967, recorded in his diary that the Wilson government had turned to the Common Market only after an attempt to construct a North Atlantic free trade area between the US and Britain was rebuffed by the Johnson administration. Was this payback for Wilson’s successful manoeuvrings which kept Britain out of the Vietnam War? Certainly, one would not have expected that America’s most important military campaign since at least the Korean War would be fought without any British military involvement, while Australians and New Zealanders died on the battlefields of Vietnam (this should always be remembered by people who talk about Britain simply as America’s poodle). Or was it already the policy of the State Department that Britain should be inserted into a Continental structure which was now being talked about quite openly in foreign ministries around the world as prospectively a political union? As Con O’Neill, the British representative to the EEC from 1963 to 1965 (and the man who led the successful negotiation to join), said in the characteristically flippant terms of the British diplomat:
Mao Tse Tung declared that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Professor Hallstein [the President of the Commission from 1958 to 1967] operates in a more sophisticated environment; but he has always declared he is in politics not business, and he may well believe that power grows out of the regulation price of Tilsit cheese or the price of a grain a hen needs to lay one egg. I think it does.2
There were
