The Observer view on Britain’s lack of voice in Europe
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Version 0 of 1. European leaders will meet in Bratislava next Friday at an informal summit intended to map a new path for the EU in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave. Yet while the unwelcome outcome of June’s referendum was a trigger for the talks, this review, or re-evaluation, of the European project is long overdue. Modern-day Europe faces enormous challenges not remotely envisaged by the EU’s founding fathers when they signed the Treaty of Rome 60 years ago next year. A new consensus on how to address these shared problems, in principle and in practice, is urgently needed as the treaty anniversary approaches. Britain, unfortunately, will have little or no say over what happens next. Theresa May is not invited to Bratislava. The summit will take place without her. The government is not being asked for it views on the crucial issues confronting Europe and, if it chooses to air them, it is increasingly likely, as time goes by, that it will be ignored. The EU wants only one thing from Britain right now, as Donald Tusk, the European council president, reminded May last week: a firm date for starting exit negotiations. And this, unfortunately again, May is unwilling or unable to give them. To pretend the outcome of Bratislava and ensuing discussions will not have a big impact on British interests is to perpetuate the wilful blindness that led to the calamitous Brexit vote. A major struggle, years in the making, is coming to a head. It pits the “old” liberal, open-markets, open-borders EU, led by Germany, France and Italy, against the “new”, conservative, nationalist EU, states such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia that are more recent entrants. At issue is the future of the EU’s so-called four freedoms – the free movement of labour, goods, services and capital. Claiming to be responding to public concerns about immigration, Islamist terrorism, economic security and the erosion of cultural traditions, the Poles and their allies in the Visegrád group are resisting the migrant quota system championed by Germany’s Angela Merkel. They want greater autonomy for national parliaments, more oversight of transnational corporations and investment, the scrapping of plans for visa-free EU travel for Turks, and greater recognition of what Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, calls “historic, religious and national identity”. These objectives are shared by advancing, populist and nationalist movements across western Europe, too, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which humiliated Merkel in elections in her home state last week. And if this agenda sounds familiar, it is. It echoes many of the positions adopted by Leave campaigners and their Ukip allies. How all these issues are tackled really matters for Britain. The irony is, if they had not cut and run, the views espoused by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson would have had much more influence in reshaping Europe’s aims and priorities at this moment. As it is, they, and Britain, have no say. The Bratislava 27 face other tests. One is what to do about the eurozone’s problems, mushrooming national deficits and the widening gap between the wealthier north and poorer south. Yet it is foolish to separate broader, pan-European post-crash worries, such as high youth unemployment and reduced foreign investment, from problems in the global economy, such as lower demand in China. Britain shares these problems. And it continues to have a strong interest in a prosperous, thriving European trading bloc of 500 million consumers, purchasers of 44% of UK exports in 2014. But in this area, too, Britain will have no voice and no say. Agreeing on the need to reform and revive the EU, Bratislava will consider a range of other proposals, including more rather than less integration and, for example, strengthening EU defence and security policy. “It’s time to move forward to a European defence union, which is basically a ‘Schengen of defence’,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the German defence minister, while visiting Lithuania last week. Such statements of intent must ring alarm bells in Whitehall. As the EU’s heaviest hitter on defence, Britain habitually took the lead, prioritising Nato and pouring cold water on previous, often French-inspired EU co-operation initiatives. But soon, London will have no say at all. What price now the Brexiters’ repeated assurances that breaking with the EU would not undermine Nato and Britain’s defences? How will this dismaying abdication of responsibility play with Washington? And how Vladimir Putin must be laughing, as he continues Russia’s military build-up along Europe’s Baltic frontier. May and her ministers have no answers. No summit, no comment. |