than welcome it; beneath the veneer of Western solidarity there has always been a clear vein of anti-Americanism in the politics of the EU. During the Cold War this was obscured by the urgency of forming a united front against the Soviet Union, but even that requirement cut two ways: NATO and the military actions of the 1940s and 1950s such as the Berlin airlift were the most effective means of maintaining the Iron Curtain, and an independent Continental foreign policy led by France was not the most obvious pillar of Western security (and one should not forget the ever-present temptation of German unity bought by a promise of neutrality which the Soviet Union dangled in front of Germany throughout the Cold War, and which in a subtle fashion may turn out in the long run to be the bargain the Germans accepted). Nowadays, one would have thought that any objective analysis of a traditional kind would conclude that the EU was potentially more of a risk to the US than to Russia: it is the EU which is economically successful, which can interfere with American companies in one of their largest markets, and which can increasingly play an independent – and, as it turns out, often catastrophic – role in foreign affairs, as in the disastrous Libyan adventure cooked up by Britain and France, who seem to see themselves as the basis of a kind of EU military force. But America’s fears of the EU have been assuaged over the years by Britain’s presence; the extraordinary level of integration in foreign policy between the two countries has been a guarantee that the EU will not develop in an openly hostile way.
In the days before the radical extension of qualified majority voting to most important matters that come before the EU Council of Ministers, Britain’s role as a Trojan Horse was very straightforward, since it could veto measures that it – or the State Department – opposed. That is no longer the case, as the demand for Brexit within Britain testifies; the central fear of the advocates of Brexit is after all that Britain, with its special interests which are seldom shared by other countries within the EU, will be consistently outvoted – it has been in the minority more than any other state in the last decade, and that is only likely to get worse. Most opponents of the EU in Britain would be mollified by a return to the voting arrangements which were in place when Britain joined. But the State Department does not yet appear to have drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that Britain will not be an especially effective Trojan Horse in the future. Even its military role, as it has come increasingly under the spell of French military revanchism, will be far less reliable as a means of projecting American influence inside Europe. At the extreme, the Horse may be turned against the Greeks themselves, and that prospect ought to keep undersecretaries of state awake at night far more than the prospect of Brexit. The very reasons which drive the campaign for Brexit should – if the State Department were thinking clearly – make it very unconfident that the old order will be maintained even if Britain stays in the EU, and very fearful of what may happen if the existing project simply limps forward for another generation or more. One might even say that the last couple of decades have seen an historic defeat for American foreign policy; the European settlement in which Britain functioned as its arm within the EU was gradually transformed in the course of a subterranean diplomatic struggle into a new arrangement in which Britain cannot play the role assigned to it. Overconfident as ever, the British Foreign Office has clearly continued to pretend to the US that it holds the key to Europe; the snag is that one day the State Department will discover that the locks have been changed.
There are wider issues which the question of America’s attitude to Britain and the EU raises. Secrecy has always been part of the business of international affairs, with negotiations conducted entirely in private, and possibly without the agreements which are made ever becoming fully public. In the past there were secret treaties (such as Charles II’s infamous Treaty of Dover, which in retrospect bears some similarities to the EU treaties!), and though they have largely vanished, the world of diplomacy still operates with a far higher level of concealment and subterfuge than would ever be acceptable in domestic politics. Traditionally, citizens have accepted this: the ambassador, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country, did not usually threaten the internal political structures of his nation, and if he did he would be summarily dismissed or prosecuted. One of the deep problems of the modern international order, of which the EU is the most extreme example, is that this is no longer the case. International agreements bite deep into the internal organs of states, but they are arrived at by the same opaque processes by which they have always been handled. Given the traditional division between executive and legislative, moreover, and the fact that foreign affairs are usually the special province of the executive, this feature of the modern world has handed enormous new powers to governments. The American senators who blocked the US membership of the League of Nations may have known (at some subconscious level) what they were doing – just as Weber said the reactionary opponents of civil service reform in nineteenth-century America knew what they were doing when they resisted the move to a modern bureaucracy. The fact that we do not really know exactly why Britain is in the EU, and the smell of secrecy which hangs over both the history of its accession and the recent diplomacy to keep it in the EU, are among the principal reasons for wishing to get out.
Notes
1 ‘French President Charles DeGaulle’s Veto on British Membership of the EEC, 14 January 1963’, at https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125401/1168_DeGaulleVeto.pdf. 2 Quoted in Helen Parr, Britain’s Policy Towards the European Community: Harold Wilson and Britain’s World Role, 1964–1967 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 19.
16 May 2016
By mid-May it was becoming likely that Hillary Clinton would win the Democrats’ nomination for President, but Bernie Sanders’ supporters still had some reason for hope. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 53% of respondents said they would vote for Sanders if Trump were the Republican nominee, and only 39% for Trump, whereas Clinton and Trump were in a dead heat ...
One of the curious ways in which British and American politics continue to run parallel with one another – think Thatcher/Reagan and Clinton/Blair – is that in both countries at the moment class war, and class contempt, have unexpectedly reappeared. In both countries, moreover, one of the key issues has been international trade: in the US the argument is over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in the UK the argument is over Brexit. But on both sides of the Atlantic, trade has come to stand in for a much wider range of threats which the old working class faces. The difference between the two countries, however, is that in America the Left has understood this and – to a degree – has been able genuinely to speak to it, while in Britain the Left has remained imprisoned in the mindset of the Clinton/Blair years, however much it might ostensibly deny it.
The degree to which commentators in this new world feel able to express their contempt for the pathetic losers stranded by the glorious capitalism of the recent past is quite astonishing. From the United States comes the infamous article by Kevin D. Williamson from the National Review in March 2016 about Garbutt, a decaying industrial town in upstate New York:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt...3
But that can be exactly matched by a column in the London Times eighteen months earlier by the socially liberal Conservative Matthew Parris writing about a by-election in Clacton-on-Sea, a decaying seaside town in Essex. UKIP duly went on to win the seat.
[U]nderstand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.
So
