16 April 2016

       On 19 February 2016 David Cameron agreed with the other European leaders on the details of his renegotiation of the terms of membership for Britain in the European Union. The following day he announced that a referendum would be held on membership on 23 June. On 22 February the Commons debated the renegotiation deal, and the campaigning for the referendum began.

Do you remember David Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership of the EU? No, I thought not. The details of the negotiation have more or less disappeared without trace from the debate about Brexit, to be replaced by the apocalyptic scenarios of Project Fear, according to which Britain’s exit from the EU will be catastrophic not merely for the British economy but for the entire Western World. At the very least Brexit (we are told) will carve a large hole in the European economy, but – even more urgently – it will apparently disrupt the entire current security system. When American politicians or generals (insofar as the categories are distinct) lecture the British on the need to stay in the EU, they are not doing so out of benevolence for Britain, nor do they even pretend to be doing 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?