Post-Brexit,
Britain will love Europe
Without
the poison of EU membership and with Donald Trump in the White House,
Britain may feel European after all.
By TOM
MCTAGUE 12/29/16, 5:31 AM CET Updated 12/29/16, 7:19 AM CET
LONDON — Brexit
may finally have turned Britain pro-European.
Once divorce
proceedings with Brussels are out of the way, say an increasing
number of British MPs, European diplomats and foreign policy
analysts, the U.K. can rebuild ties with its European neighbors —
increasingly important political and ideological allies in the age of
Trump — from more solid foundations. Unlike before, the new
alliance will not be infected from the start.
Far from being the
cure for Britain’s Euro-hostility, membership of the continent’s
grandest project became the “poison” at the heart of the
relationship, infecting everything it touched.
“The gradual
divergence of our economic interests from the euro currency countries
would have continued to have been the poison in our relationship with
our partners in the EU,” said Crispin Blunt, the Conservative
chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee.
“Once we’re
outside the EU, this poison drains away and our relationship becomes
a positive one with shared mutual interests — the success of the 27
as a union becomes a positive interest for the United Kingdom,
alongside all our bilateral country-to-country relations.”
After 50 years of
growing Euroskepticism, June’s referendum may prove the shock
Britain needed to begin making the rational case for engaging with
Europe, according to the senior figures in U.K. and European foreign
policy circles.
The tectonic plates
of global politics are juddering with such force, few in Westminster
feel confident enough to predict where the U.K. will land after
Brexit.
In the foreign
office and across Whitehall, an uncomfortable reality is dawning —
the U.K. is leaving Europe at a time when many in Westminster have
never felt more European.
Britain’s
essential Europeanism has only been further emphasized by the
election of Donald Trump in the United States, whose emerging world
view suddenly makes America feel a very long way from Britain — and
from most European countries.
From free trade to
gay rights, nuclear proliferation, Russian expansionism and global
warming (and almost everything in between), Theresa May has more in
common with most of her European partners than she does with the
incoming U.S. president.
A new special
relationship
The tectonic plates
of global politics are juddering with such force, few in Westminster
feel confident enough to predict where the U.K. will land after
Brexit. Divorce could easily turn bitter, souring the relationship
for years to come. There is particular concern over the multi-billion
Brexit break-up bill which could be demanded from Brussels.
Yet there are
growing murmurings that a new special relationship may emerge from
the Brexit earthquake — one, counter-intuitively, between the U.K.
and Europe rather than with the States.
In telephone calls
with senior figures in Trump’s team, U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris
Johnson has pushed his department’s traditional script on the
U.K.-U.S. special relationship and underlined the threat to the West
from Moscow.
Responses from Vice
President-elect Mike Pence and Trump ally Rudy Giuliani have been
reassuring, senior government aides said, but there is a private
acknowledgement that London has been left in a holding pattern,
watching Twitter for clues as to what the most unpredictable
president in recent American history will do once in the Oval Office.
It’s not a position they have ever found themselves in with Berlin
or Paris.
Jonathan Eyal,
associate director at the respected London-based foreign affairs
think tank RUSI, said a post-Brexit special relationship between
Britain and the rest of the EU was “what a lot of the Brexiteers
have failed to envisage.”
“A lot of what
poisoned the relationship has gone,” Eyal said, pointing to rows
about European defence cooperation and wider constitutional questions
of sovereignty that have bedevilled debate about the EU in Britain.
“Leaving the European Union will allow Britain to play a more
positive and constructive role in forging European security
structures,” he said.
After all, Eyal
said, there is nothing that threatens U.K. security more than a
chaotic continent on its doorstep. Britain has skin in the game,
whether it likes it or not.
Eyal said there were
two obstacles to a new special relationship emerging — lasting
European hostility to the Brexit vote and “the temptation by some
politicians in London to play divide and rule” in Europe. However,
he added: “Once the psychological scars of 40 years of EU
membership are out of the way, the road is clear for a very
productive relationship between Britain and the European Union — as
long as both sides act on the basis of reason rather than emotions.”
Wooing Europe
Europe in return,
may look to London as a more stable and understanding military and
diplomatic partner than the erratic administration in Washington,
which shows signs of turning its back on the Continent by turning
cold on free trade, environmental agreements and defense commitments.
European diplomats
were more skeptical, insisting that diplomatic relations between the
U.K. and many EU member states may take some time to recover
following exit negotiations and even if they do, it will be hard to
manufacture the closeness that comes with membership.
“It might be a
better relationship, but it will be more distant,” one senior
diplomat for a European Union member state said. “The cooperation
within the European Union framework is very, very close.”
In private the
French remain extremely confident that nothing will change to the
military alliance struck between London and Paris.
The diplomat warned
that this was new territory for both sides. “This will be the first
time in 60 years that the British will have to think about its
relationship with Europe from outside. Equally, the EU has never had
a big European country outside and not trying to get in.”
On a bilateral
level, however, there is no sign of let up in the growing ties
between London and Paris and Berlin. Quietly but steadily the U.K.
and France are integrating militarily following the 2010 Lancaster
House Treaty, which forged closer ties on defense and nuclear issues.
While British tabloids fumed at the prospect of an EU Army, the
country’s troops were being placed, officially, under the command
of French officers.
French officials in
London and Paris privately confide that the megaphone Euroskepticism
on show during the Brexit debate went hand in hand with “incredibly
smooth” and increasingly tight bilateral relations, as if those
were two different and separate worlds. In private the French remain
extremely confident that nothing will change to the military alliance
struck between London and Paris.
Anglo-German
relations are also developing smoothly. In the U.K. government’s
2015’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, Germany was promoted
into the second tier of military and intelligence allies, alongside
France, just one tier down from the the U.S.
In the topsy-turvy
world of 21st century politics, there is an emerging body of thought
that it may have taken an historic break from the Continent for
Britain to discover its European roots.
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