These Islands and Europe

By Professor Dame Helen Wallace DBE CMG FBA, Europe Liaison Chair and a former Foreign Secretary & Vice-President of the British Academy

Since over the years I have written quite a few pieces on the entanglement of the UK with the European Union, I thought I should check myself for consistency. So I went back 20 years to my professorial lecture at the University of Sussex: it was entitled ‘From an Island off the North West Coast of Europe’ and it was delivered in 1996. The abstract reads as follows:

British history cannot be understood except as part of the European history. However much the physical separation from ‘the Continent’ offers by way of comfort, the Channel is too narrow to permit real isolation. Yet British politics in recent decades has been marked, even scarred, by controversy over how close an engagement to accept with the ‘European project’. The politics of Europe refuse to go away or to settle down. Fluid definitions of what ‘Europe’ means seem only to make it harder for us as islanders to come to terms with the ‘mainland’.

So it seems not so much has changed. But of course, the context has changed in the light of Brexit, both for the EU as a whole and for the UK. So let me make a few remarks about the context before turning to these islands. Three big things have I suppose changed since 1996. First, the process of globalisation has developed apace with numerous consequences including the declining weight of Europe in the international economy and the migration surges of recent years, as well as the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown. Second, the world has become more dangerous, with Russia as a maverick power and the terrible travails in the EU’s Middle Eastern backyard, with the consequential refugee surge. Third, domestic politics have been disrupted by the rise of populist parties, many of them Eurosceptical, and in many European countries. These factors mean that we now have quite some range of potential scenarios that might develop in Europe.

Traditionally, one recurrent scenario has been a big leap towards a political union in the EU, though maybe not carrying with it all of the current membership. This scenario looks to me somewhat improbable. At the other end of the spectrum we now have to consider a disintegration scenario, for which there are some troublesome indicators — personally I hope that this is not a likely scenario! Perhaps more plausible is that we could see the continuing development of persistently varied degrees of integration across the continent with a leading — mainly eurozone — group flanked by other European countries linked to the core but more followers than leaders. My preference was always for a different version of this — namely a EU with less promiscuous ambitions and a tighter focus on the key issues for transnational collaboration, more flexible, more pragmatic and leaving more space for a country such as the UK to play an influential role in some key policy areas. Alas Brexit rather knocks this scenario on the head. And we should note that the role of Germany in influencing what happens has become even more critical than before.

So I come to where these islands fit into the picture, for which I need to do some reprise of the past before commenting on the current situation. Several themes have repeatedly underpinned the UK’s place in the European family. For the founder members of the EU — and for many (maybe most) subsequent joiners — membership was the best option. For the UK it was always at most a second best option (except for the few British pro-Europeans who were clear enthusiasts). The language of UK membership has across the years been the language of ‘on the one hand’, but ‘on the other hand’. For most member states membership has been tied to a kind of national project: for the founders both a security anchor and a way to economic regeneration; for the Southern and Eastern Europeans a democratisation anchor and a way to economic transformation; for the many of the former members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) a route to being embedded in the wider European family. In contrast for the UK membership has been essentially transactional and satisficing.

To put this another way — for most EU member states membership of the EU and its core aims provided a means to escape from the shadows of the past and to invest in strong aspirations for a better future. Hence the gradual extension of EU policies and commitments has been viewed through a lens of making the future more predictable and less uncertain. The building of reciprocity underpinned by the shared jurisdiction of European law was largely seen as an essential factor to provide guarantees of mutual engagement. In contrast the UK debates about the EU have been permeated by nostalgia for a period when the UK walked taller and was more proudly independent and self-reliant. In this context, the reach of European law into what one Foreign Secretary (Douglas Hurd) called the ‘nooks and crannies’ of daily life became widely viewed as irritating and intrusive.

To put this yet another way — the evolution of the EU has been marked by a debate between deep integration and shallow integration, with periods of negotiation around treaty changes where choices were made as to whether, where and how to deepen integration. Typically, the UK has found itself arguing the minimalist rather than the maximalist case; with the one striking exception of the Single European Act in 1986 when the then UK government pressed so hard — and so successfully — for tighter rules to achieve a single European market. The frequency of treaty reform initiatives over subsequent years served to reinforce UK resistance to deeper integration.

The disinclination of the UK — under both Conservative and Labour governments — to embrace some of these central policy initiatives and reforms took the UK on a path of exceptionalism, seeking opt-outs from new commitments. Thus the UK chose not to adopt the euro, and the UK vigorously resisted joining the Schengen area. The intensity of British reluctance to both of these commitments grew with the problems of the eurozone from 2008 onwards and then again with the surges of migrants and refugees of recent years. Increasingly the UK seemed to be outside the mainstream; what might have been profiled as a couple of exceptions (however important) turned into a recurrent inclination to look for the exception — or even better the opportunity to issue a veto. This was illustrated vividly at the European Council of December 2011 when the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, blocked an agreement to develop plans to stabilise the eurozone under the normal treaties and through the regular EU institutions.

Yet there is a paradox in the story — actually and demonstrably UK governments have left their fingerprints all over EU policies and practices. They have been in positions of crucial influence on at least three of the big achievements of the EU. As we saw above, it was the UK government (under Margaret Thatcher) which was the keenest advocate of developing the single European market, an objective that meshed well with repeated British insistence that the EU should be rather liberal than protectionist in international trade. It was UK governments that contributed so pragmatically to the development of the Union’s common foreign and security policy from idea to substance. It was the UK government of the mid-1990s that pushed vigorously for the EU to accept so many countries from Central and Eastern Europe as welcome candidates for enlargement, probably the EU’s biggest foreign policy achievement in the aftermath of the Cold War. And the paradox is this — those same UK governments never took political ownership of these important achievements in the debate at home in the UK, with the result that it is much easier to find references to what ‘they’ forced on ‘us’ than to what ‘we’ forced on ‘them’.

This brings me to nowadays in the light of the referendum and its consequences. Among the most striking features of the UK/EU referendum story is the contrasting way that the narratives in the debate have developed.

First and most obviously, the ‘leave’ campaign had an easy time developing its oppositional narrative: EU membership was presented as the worst option. The argument about ‘change’ morphed into the case for a nostalgic reversion to how things used to be for the UK as an autonomous country: free of the overbearing influence of European courts; head-on opposition to ‘deep’ integration and no truck to be had with much by way of ‘shallow’ integration; as well as the recurrent theme that the UK is ‘bullied by Brussels’ — outvoted and disadvantaged by ‘them’. This line was bolstered by the xenophobic calls to ‘take back control of our borders’ given the numbers of EU citizens in the UK, and moreover this also generated a mood of opposition to the eastern enlargement of the EU as a strategic mistake. In addition, the substance of the single European market was reduced to a litany of complaints about excessive regulation and very little mention was made of Europe’s role in the world beyond some very general remarks about the rising BRICs and the Anglosphere. All in all then, here was a narrative of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

Secondly — and perhaps less obviously — the ‘remain’ campaign had a narrative that was almost entirely transactional and anchored around what were thought to be convincing definitions of economic self-interest. The tone was that EU membership would be fine as long as the EU could be reformed. Scant mentions were made of the wider roles of the EU either at home or abroad. Little acknowledgement was given of the extent to which the UK had been influential within the EU on key issues — no sense here of shared ownership of the European process.

So here we have two quite different narratives: one about identity and the other about interests. Mostly the two narratives were on different trajectories. The identity narrative was flanked a bit by a counter-transactional set of assertions about the money that would be saved from EU budget contributions and made available for numerous worthy causes. The interest narrative made little response to the identity issues. As we know, it was the identity narrative that proved the more appealing — although not by a huge margin.

In a lecture that I gave in Berlin in September 2015 I argued that there would be a competition in the referendum campaign between an ‘open’ UK and a ‘parochial’ UK, and another between a ‘European Mainstream’ UK and an ‘exceptionalist’ UK. And so there was: parochial trumped open and exceptionalist trumped mainstream — except that of course the politics were not quite so binary and the political and economic geography of the UK also played a big part. Preferences for an open and mainstream UK predominated in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, mediated by the specifics of the Scottish and Irish situations. Preferences for a parochial and exceptionalist UK predominated in Wales and most of non-metropolitan England, mediated by socio-economic and regional factors given that voters in less affluent places were not much convinced by the economic interest and transactional arguments. So the pattern was of a dis-United Kingdom on several dimensions.

It is almost certainly a disadvantage for the UK that those other Europeans by and large have a good grasp of the English language and have been listening closely to our UK debates. It remains to be seen how they will interpret these in the light of their own images of the UK as a partner as they engage with the Brexit negotiations. And it remains to be seen how the inheritance of half a century or so of UK ambivalence about the EU will shape the UK’s stances in those negotiations.

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PROFESSOR DAME HELEN WALLACE DBE CMG FBA is Europe Liaison Chair and a former Foreign Secretary & Vice-President of the British Academy. Previously she was a Centennial Professor and then Emeritus Professor at the European Institute in the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has also held posts at the European University Institute, the University of Sussex, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Civil Service College and the University of Manchester. She is a leading expert on the politics of European integration, on which she has authored and co-authored numerous publications.