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How the EU bungled Brexit Just like David Cameron, Europe's leaders were woefully unprepared

Macron and Merkel were too busy looking the other way (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images)

Macron and Merkel were too busy looking the other way (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images)


June 25, 2021   7 mins

In the last days of David Cameron’s attempts to renegotiate the UK’s opt-out-laden membership of the European Union, the British representatives in Brussels expended an enormous effort in one area: it was to persuade their counterparts that the UK could formally disavow the commitment written into EU treaties that the Union exists to realise “ever closer Union among the peoples of Europe”.

For Cameron, it was an important symbolic victory, showing that Britain had a “special status inside the EU”. For his fellow EU premiers, it was a bewildering demand, especially when the man making it had assured them that he was desperate for the UK to remain inside the EU. It proved to be more revealing than either side realised, for its logic pointed to Brexit. Yet five months later, when the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exit the EU, the idea that the UK could do such thing was treated as an outcome that those involved in the negotiations could scarcely have envisaged.

When Cameron began his round of travels to European capitals in the middle of 2015 to try to win friends prior to the renegotiations, he wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Perhaps, paying too much attention to British political punditry, his fellow EU leaders had not expected the Conservatives to win a parliamentary majority at the general election that May. Perhaps they had not noticed that Cameron had included in the Conservative manifesto an assurance that any government he headed would not enter another coalition without first securing a commitment to a referendum on EU membership. Or perhaps, since they wouldn’t have contemplated doing such a thing themselves, they did not take Cameron to mean what he said — that if the British people voted for Brexit, Brexit is what would then happen.

Most EU governments, not least the German one, were also preoccupied with other matters and would remain so throughout Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiations. By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. Only weeks after it failed — in part because Merkel made some small concessions to the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras — the German Chancellor threw Europe into tumult by upending the EU’s common asylum rules to cope with the numbers of refugees and migrants travelling from Turkey into southern Europe. By the time, in February 2016, Cameron sought to finalise his agreement, Merkel’s focus had shifted to procuring a definitive agreement with Recep Tayyip Erdogan to return migrants without strong asylum claims back to Turkey in exchange for reactivating accession talks for Ankara.

The fallout of these events seems to have blindsided Cameron. There could have scarcely been a less propitious time for any British government to have been demanding concessions from other EU states than a moment when opt-outs from the Euro, the EU’s asylum policy and Schengen – the borderless travel area that covers most of the EU – protected the UK from the crises with which most other member states were grappling.

But Cameron did not help himself. If he had acted like someone who really believed that the Eurozone crisis had so destabilised the UK’s membership of the EU that exit had to be a serious option, he might have secured his fellow leaders’ attention. Instead, he plunged into negotiations in Brussels according to a timetable in part constructed to help George Osborne become the next Conservative leader with a Remain campaign organisation already assembled and ready to go in London.

With no currency in the EU’s present-tense difficulties with which to bargain and unable to instil fear about the future, he all too predictably ended up with very little beyond the promise that the UK did not have to pretend it believed in the EU’s stated purpose. When he returned home, he had to ask British voters to Remain, having just put on an overt demonstration of how little influence the UK could exercise in a Union whose founding text he had disowned.

But the possibility that Cameron’s lack of guile and their inattention to British problems would lead to the UK leaving the EU eluded many in the EU too. (Whether it did Merkel must remain an open question.) In part, this complacency rendered the referendum result a psychic blow. If some teleological historical force is supposed to be the ultimate agent of ever-closer Union in Europe, then, the EU is not supposed to shrink, however “cold” — a word Merkel once used to describe Cameron’s view of the Union ­— the vision of passing leaders of individual member states.

Brexit would also prove a colossal practical distraction: as Emmanuel Macron later complained, it created “thousands of hours of work for European leaders”. Believing that there was a reasonable likelihood that those Remainers at Westminster who wanted to prevent Brexit would eventually prevail was easier than working out how the EU could reconstruct a different kind of relationship with the UK as a simultaneous competitor and partner.

That Brexit would bequeath Ireland a serious problem, allied to the obvious difficulties Northern Ireland would pose to any government actually procuring parliamentary assent for a withdrawal treaty, only reinforced this impulse. Now that Brexit has occurred, Northern Ireland has become instead the most fraught component of the EU’s relations with the UK. This is in part because Northern Ireland remains the UK’s primary Brexit weakness. As a matter of legal principle, the Northern Ireland Protocol weakens the UK Union, and its practical operation destabilises Northern Irish politics. So long as Joe Biden is President, it is a serious complication to the UK’s Atlantic relations, too.

But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market,  in a situation where over the next decade or so there could be a border poll resulting in Northern Ireland becoming an inherent part of the EU’s legal order. Whether this is a prospect that EU governments can contemplate with any sanguineness remains to be seen.

Only the French government, after Macron came to power in May 2017, consequentially dissented from the effort to keep open the possibility of the UK staying in the EU, without which a different outcome in Northern Ireland might have materialised. Twice in 2019, Macron threatened to veto the extensions to the Article 50 deadline that first Theresa May and then Boris Johnson had to request. As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power. For him, Brexit didn’t have to be stopped; rather, it had to be self-evident that it has deleterious consequences for Britain.

From the start, Macron also conceived the UK’s impending departure from the EU as an opportunity to reform the Eurozone by making it a debt-bearing Union, and delineating a more hierarchical EU with a Franco-German core and a ring of outer members retaining national monetary sovereignty. His opening bid, articulated in his big “Initiative for Europe” speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017, met much more British-style resistance than he envisaged.

His subsequent success during the first months of the pandemic in persuading Merkel to accept some shared debt may well prove only a temporary victory; since NextGenerationEU is for the EU and not just the Eurozone, it has also only deepened the tangle between the EU’s legal order and the Eurozone. But the chances that last year’s agreement to issue EU sovereign debt would have been realised had the UK still been inside the EU are slim, as indeed they would have been if the 2019 British General Election had led to a second referendum.

Macron is the heir of a long line of Pan-Europeanists who have believed, for geopolitical reasons, that the UK can have no part in a European economic and political union. But, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi who founded the Paneuropean movement in the 1920s, Macron strongly believes that the UK needs to be absorbed into a well-defined European security system. For Macron, there has never been a reason why Brexit should disrupt the bilateral Franco-British military relationship entrenched in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaties. Nor does he think that the EU’s own security architecture should constrain how the UK participates in collective European security matters, hence his push in 2018 to establish a structure for military action around the EU’s border in the European Intervention Initiative — which includes the UK.

As, in late 2019, it became clear that Johnson was likely to prevail over the parliamentary Remainers, Merkel joined Macron in calling for a post-Brexit European Security Council. But, emboldened by the Conservatives’ substantial parliamentary majority, Johnson has proved less pliable to Macron’s strategic ambitions than May. Contrary to the French President’s hopes, Johnson’s post-election government decided that foreign and security policy should not be any part of the negotiations on the future UK-EU relationship.

In the absence of any confederal European architecture to ground broad foreign policy co-ordination, there has been little to constrain the divergent paths the UK and the EU have taken towards China since the middle of last year. To some degree, the weight of the UK’s historical relationship with Hong Kong and the nature of Germany’s deep economic relationship with China has made this separation near inevitable. But the British and French governments have pretty similar objectives in the Indo-Pacific. It is the absence of something akin to a European Security Council that ensures there will be less internal European pressure on Berlin to lead an EU policy that extends beyond economic and climate matters, and begins to engage with the probable future pressure points on access in the South China Sea.

Whether it is China or Northern Ireland, Britain’s relationship with the EU is beset with uncertainty. On Northern Ireland, Macron insists that the UK must stick to what it negotiated. But the Johnson government won’t take responsibility for protecting the Single Market any more than the EU will treat the Democratic Unionists as their problem. The present impasse has arisen from a series of misjudgements in the UK and continental capitals about the likely outcomes arising from the political constraints at work, played out against a backdrop of a world being transformed by Sino-American strategic rivalry. This is a fracture in European geopolitics for which neither the UK government nor the EU prepared. Now it is all too evident, the question is whether there is the political space for a grand bargain to repair it.


Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and co-presenter of UnHerd’s These Times.

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Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

The article explores why the EU and European leadership did not at least give Cameron some real, tangible concessions showing they were serious about reforming the EU. Instead he was sent back empty handed, with a flea in his ear about the UK being time wasters.

I recall a speech by Major in Germany at the time, that the risks of UK voting to leave were very significant indeed. He was not taken seriously. So instead Cameron was left thrashing around trying to save his skin by attempting to sell us a polished t**d, while Osborne turned on his Michael Corleone impersonation. Even the Remainers largely dropped the mantra, “Remain within a reformed EU” within a few weeks, because they realised it sounded so very hollow and was being laughed at.

I was (naively) actually hopeful that Cameron would come back with some sort of roadmap, however nebulous, for real reform in the EU, although I doubt anything he came back with by then would have persuaded me personally to vote Remain. But instead he failed miserably – came back with a few weasel words. I cannot speak for others, but the message that finally came through loud and clear to this Brexiteer was: you cannot reform the unreformable. Also, now looking back, another inescapable conclusion is, the point is moot if the European leaders in fact genuinely wanted the UK to Remain.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

At that time, even suggesting that the EU needed reform was an idea which – if expressed – would earn you a bit of a dressing down if you were outside the UK (I speak from experience. Extensive experience). That very same idea has now taken root right across the EU. I think perhaps it took longer for the penny to drop outside of the UK because of the higher emotional attachment to the EU on this side of the channel. People are generally less willing to admit that there’s something wrong with something they love.

Last edited 3 years ago by Katharine Eyre
Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

I don’t think he ever understood the EU, Britain’s role in it , its way of thinking. The comments in the papers for the last five years show an extraordinary lack of understanding even of its basic mechanisms. I remember one hapless Hansard clerk being given six weeks to find out how many laws Britain had derived from EU Directives. That is, excluding trade, product standards, the CAP , economic regulation. Some 250000 pages of legislaton were involved. That our MPs and media experts had no idea was sad but did not surprise me. In the 15 years I worked,for the EU, I was never asked, either by my old university or by friends and acquaintances ,anything about how it worked, what it or I did. Snarky comments about high salaries, that was about it. Good things were presented as ideas of the government. Bad things were the fault of the EU. Even the accession of ten former Soviet,Colonies in 2004 took place without a fanfare, a back story. Perhaps because Yalta and Potsdam were too embarrassing to remember. Then there was 2012 and the PIGs, and the alleged contagion. The Guardian, among others, trumpeted the forthcoming decline of the euro and the fall of capitalism. I am sure this affected the Brexit vote in 2016, but by then the FT, the Economist,etc, had long forgotten their earlier words..

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

Yes. What amazes me is that people expect the Camerons of the world to understand some of these complexities and they obviously don’t. To me this is like having Ronald Reagan as head of a government – he doesn’t actually understand anything but relies on trusted advisers. But if the advisers don’t understand either……..

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

Sure, but there was a huge debate in the run up to Referendum, and nothing stopped those with deep technical knowledge of the workings of the EU from putting their case forward – they weren’t obliged to participate in the pythonesque ” ..yes it is… no it isn’t.. ” style debate, they could have tried introducing some of the complexities they saw into the debate to make it more sophisticated.
In fact, every time they attempted to make the case that the UK was so interlocked into the legal, political and economic frameworks of the EU that it couldn’t leave without self-harm, they damaged their own case. If such an argument was ever put to me, my instant reaction would be an angry: ‘How on earth did that happen? Did you all do that behind our backs?’, because I don’t recall mainstream politicians ever explicitly stating to us the consequences of signing up to Maastricht, Lisbon etc was that we were slowly removing our ability to backout in practice, all the while maintaining the pretence that sovereignty was in fact only pooled at our behest with us in full control and that our citizenry could in fact retract that privilege at will. And my reaction to the Remain case was often: ‘so what you are in fact saying is, you have been lying to us all these years and we don’t really have the option to retract?’. Can you see why that might make some people angry and lash out in a way you don’t necessarily consider rational.
As to the Yalta/Potsdam stuff, well those Eastern European countries became victims of a stitch-up between Roosevelt and Stalin, with Churchill having a minor say. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they were courted by the EU (and by the UK more than anyone) and they started joining, but I would make the case it was somewhat of a Faustian bargain – they didn’t fully understand the value systems they were buying into, they just saw the big subsidies that would come their way and their eyes lit up – they didn’t necessarily see they were would be jockeyed out of their cultural and political comfort zones over time as part of the package.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

Interesting

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Rob Britton
Rob Britton
3 years ago

Unfortunately the European Commission is so intransigent and ideological that there will be no “grand bargain” to heal the rift, and it will result in the EU’s demise.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Reply to  Rob Britton

Yes, but a bit of wishful thinking?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

It was clear that if the EU didn’t give a fig for the position of a British PM when Britain could still actually leave, it would care even less once we were inextricably concreted into it by euro membership and the surrender to EU control our army, deterrent, and UN Security Council seat. A defeat for Leave in the referendum would have led directly and rapidly to Kenneth Clarke’s dream.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago

Brexit is not about governments; it is about people. It is about the weakness of Cameron, followed by the weakness of May followed by the strength of Johnson. In the press and in these columns Johnson gets a huge amount of flak but his strength drove Brexit onwards.
The resulting problems with Europe did not arise because of the thousands of minor people in Strasbourg and Brussels but because of the strength of Macron and Merkel. (We would say intransigence, not strength). They stood for what they believed and they turned Britain back into an enemy of Europe. Merkel has gone. Macron will soon go and new people will come along with different things to prove. Time always heals.

Earl King
Earl King
3 years ago

I always felt the Brits were a poor fit for the EU. First they never bought in to the Euro and secondly I don’t believe they ever wanted to be subservient to Germany let alone having the size of their electric tea kettles determined by someone in Brussels who drinks coffee. Other than Germany it is hard for me to think any country in the world wants unrestricted immigration…..Especially from populations that have such a different culture and experience.

Leon Wivlow
Leon Wivlow
3 years ago
Reply to  Earl King

Paul Dacre (at that time in charge of The Daily Mail) visited Cameron at No. 10 to discuss why the Mail was supporting Brexit. In the background the BBC 6 o’clock news was playing scenes of migrants floooding across borders into the EU. Dacre turned to Cameron and said whilst that continues the UK will never vote to stay in the EU. Whatever you think of Dacre, he instinctively understands the people of the UK in a way that Cameron certainly did not. (All Out War by Tim Shipman was an excellent read.)

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

Good article. The EU’s approach to its borders and the UK may also be seen in the current context of French-German cosying up to Russia, while the UK contests Russia’s annexed Crimean waters alone (US over the horizon) and contributes trip-wire troops to the Baltic. As for divergence, hasn’t Germany long been heading down a Sino-Russian road, with France and half the EU behind?

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
3 years ago

It simply never occurred to anyone in the EU itself, or among the governments of the EU member states, that anyone would be so (as they saw it) stupid as to vote to cast themselves out of the club, or even if they did, that any government would allow such a decision to stand.
We’d always been semi-detached from the European project (Schengen, EZ) – with even remain supporters admitting they could see faults with the EU but believing that, by Remaining, the UK could help reform it. (The perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one)
David Owen, probably the most pro-EU front rank British politician of my lifetime – and a man who knew the people and systems within the senior Brussels ranks better than most, recognised the impossibility of such a dream. After a career as a committed champion to the European cause he recognised that the EU in its current incarnation was “Structurally incapable of reform” and eventually backed and campaigned for Brexit.
It never occurs to some Remainers that he might have known a little more about it than those who insist all of us Brexit supporters were simply ignorant, racist coffin-dodgers who wanted a return to the 1950s.
It is the EU leaders’ blind adherence to “the project” that means they can offer no concessions and brook no dissent. That refusal of EU leaders and supporters to accept there are perfectly well-intentioned and well-informed people who are opposed to any further integration is what will eventually lead to the collapse of the bloc.
I’m fairly sure that Brexit was merely the first of many.

Last edited 3 years ago by Paddy Taylor
Peter LR
Peter LR
3 years ago

Thank you; very comprehensive and unopinionated.
It will be very interesting to see what the EU becomes next year when both Merkel and Macron are gone.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago

“But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market…”
Haha, very subtly and diplomatically put 😉 Does anyone still really believe the EU cares a jot about the GFA?
“As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power.”
The veto was about French domestic politics more than anything. Lots of Albanians still try and claim asylum in France and it would have been hard, if not impossible to explain to the French people why EU membership talks should be started with the country. The risk of ceding power to Le Pen (who at that point looked like quite the threat) was too large.

Last edited 3 years ago by Katharine Eyre
Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Alleged commitment. Macron would be quite happy to see renewed instability, and the loss to the UK of both NI and Scotland. And Brexit was negotiated with as many delayed policy IEDs along the road as possible. It’s a politics of spite: e.g. allies do not contest eachother’s territorial integrity or threaten to cut off energy supplies (formerly a Russian game)

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt B

France (and especially Macron and his mates) see the EU as France’s vehicle back to greatness (although, weirdly, it’s only ever Britain who is accused of trying to turn back the clock – funny that!) Britain’s decision to leave is a huge threat to that ambition. So, as the author also points out, Brexit needs to be seen to be awful to stop other countries getting ideas and throwing a spanner in the great French works. Witness the near frenzy that happened when the UK zipped ahead with vaccinations – it drove them mad.
Friendships drop by the wayside fairly quickly when one side feels like the other side is endangering their appointment with destiny.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

De Gaulle caused a lot of problems. The visciousness of French colonisation (Madagascar, Algeria, Indo-China) was all about the pig-headedness of De Gaulle and France is still trying to live in his time, still trying to prove that France is great – when it is, in fact, just ordinary.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
3 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

You mean decolonisation. Algeria was a department of France more than 100 years before Hawaii became a State in the US.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

No I don’t mean decolonisation. From memory, parts of Algeria (populace parts) were not included in 1848. The Algerian wars were not about decolonisation, they were about trying to hang on to the colonies. Also true for Madagascar. Indo-China is very complex but Dien Bien Phu was not about decolonisation but was about hanging on.
If you are an expert in the field, you will use ‘decolonisation’ as the term for hanging on to colonies but in everyday English this would be meaningless to most people.

Alan Hynes
Alan Hynes
3 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

Eh … de Gaulle made the decision to decolonize Algeria. It’s why the pied-noirs hated him and made several attempts on his life.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
Reply to  Chris Wheatley

Were you going for “viciousness” or “viscousness” there? 😉 Viscous colonisation…the mind boggles…

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
3 years ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Well, Algeria does have oil. Not sure about its viscosity.

Matt B
Matt B
3 years ago

There is an ironic side-bar to this aspect raised by Helen: “By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. ”
The very spectacle of the EU’s harrowing of Greece to save lending banks led some to question the EU for the first time – a second-order effect of failing to see Greece’s plight interacting with UK perceptions going into its ‘unlikely’ later refrendum.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt B
Charlie Dibsdale
Charlie Dibsdale
3 years ago

I think the EU could have made concessions. The free movement of people as a principle could have been kept, but a time limit on open immigration from recently joined Eastern European countries could have been temporarily limited until countries in the union levelled up economically. The EU humiliated Cameron.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
3 years ago

Cameron, as all his subsequent behaviour has shown, is a shallow, lazy amateur who mistakes ‘connections’ for relationships and words for actions. Johnson, a product of the same production line, is equally vain and indolent, but at least shows persistence under pressure coupled with childlike buffoonery which, when all around are humourless, fragile egoists, has proven to be sufficient for success…

Liam O'Mahony
Liam O'Mahony
3 years ago

I find it telling that in all the comments there is virtually no mention of Northern Ireland! I’m assuming this proves the average Britton has zero interest in NI? This is not a criticism by the way: as a citizen of the ROI I find NI politics a huge turn off.
I wonder if the UK lost NI would the vast majority of British citizens care? Would they even notice? Are BJ, the Tories and the British in general sick of NI, DUP intransigence, Sinn Féin threats (backward-looking extremists on both sides: a sizeable proportion of the 1.6m pop.)? Just as so many of us in the Republic are: we happy little Europeans!

Chris Eaton
Chris Eaton
2 years ago

The EU bungles itself on a daily basis. And by ‘bungles’ I mean…well, I think you know what I mean. If not, I’ll be happy to explain.

Douglas McCallum
Douglas McCallum
3 years ago

The article asserts that “the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exist the EU”. Wrong!! In fact, the great majority of the electorate (62.5%) either voted Remain or stayed home and didn’t vote. The pro-Brexit vote (37.5%) was very much a minority of the electorate. Now, if you wish to say that a majority of those voting in the Referendum voted for Brexit, that of course is correct. But to claim that “the British electorate” voted for Brexit is simply wrong – and seriously misleading. Not a promising way to start an article.

David Harris
David Harris
3 years ago

In fact, the great majority of the electorate (66%) either voted Leave or stayed home and didn’t vote. 🙂