24 March 2016

The EU; An Awkward Fit for the UK

Why Britain is facing a different choice to the rest of Europe.

by Neil Tidmarsh

The political unit in Europe is currently the nation state. The EU is a system which is intended to enable the nation states to cooperate with each other; but the price of cooperation is a level of political authority above that of the nation state.  So it is not really possible to exist as an independent nation state within the EU, and the end result of an ever closer union is potentially the withering away of the nation state altogether.

For the majority of member states this is not a problem.  For some it is even a definite advantage – and so they are very enthusiastic about the project.  For a minority, however, it is a problem, a definite disadvantage, and there is considerably less enthusiasm.  Why the difference?  Why is a country like the United Kingdom such an awkward member of the EU?  Why is it clearly so much less suited to membership of the EU than is any other member state?  The answer can be found in the ways that the British nation state differs from all the other European nation states.

The English nation state has existed for over a thousand years.  The first king of all England was Athelstan in the tenth century, but the foundation of the state really goes back to Alfred the Great in the ninth century.  The British royal family can trace its descent all the way from Alfred in a direct and unbroken line.  Although the nation state of the United Kingdom – of which England is the core – is not so old (400 years effectively since James I and VI, or 300 years officially since the Act of Union), there were kings of Britain – not just England – as far back as the sixth and seventh centuries.

So England has been an uninterrupted and continuous political entity for 12 centuries.  In all that time it has been a work-in-progress, an ongoing project in constant evolution along pragmatic and organic lines, adapting to empirically meet the immediate real-world needs of its people, not engineered by abstract theories.  And that evolution has largely been driven from the bottom up; much has been made of Magna Carta, but in fact that was not an isolated or unique deal; King Ethelred in the ninth century and King Edward in the tenth century also had similar limits to their powers defined and imposed on them by their subjects.  Later kings found to their cost that such limits were not to be exceeded: King Edward II and King Richard II were both deposed; King Charles I was defeated, deposed, tried and executed after rebelling against the sovereignty of the people by raising his banner in Nottingham.  Kings subsequent to Charles I found it hard to appreciate that Britain had in effect turned itself into a republic, with a hereditary head of state who was relatively powerless against the sovereignty of parliament, directly representing the will of the people.  James II never accepted this, and was turned out of the kingdom in the rebellion of 1688 as a result.  George I had it spelled out to him and was so disgusted by it that he spent as little time in this country as possible.

This flexible but enduring system has worked well.  It has provided its citizens with political stability, material prosperity, justice and the rule of law, individual freedoms and defence from foreign aggression.  What more could one ask of a political system?  In particular, its ability to provide both a secure, stable state and individual liberties has been the wonder of the world for centuries, a balancing act which puzzled and amazed commentators and visitors from Voltaire onwards.

And yet the people of Britain are now being asked to move away from this ancient and well-tried system – a system they have spent over a thousand years building carefully and laboriously to suit their needs pragmatically and empirically, a system which has proved itself time and time again over the centuries, and which still works for them better than ever – and instead to embrace an uncertain system which is only a few decades old, engineered on the Continent from the top down by a political elite pursuing theoretical and ideological abstractions rather than responding pragmatically and organically to real and immediate needs; a system which remains untested, has shown itself to be rigid and inflexible, which has struggled to cope with all the challenges it has so far encountered, and promises to take them in a direction over which they will have little say.  Why on earth would anyone say ‘yes’ to such a choice?

We could ask why the other nations of Europe are apparently saying ‘yes’, and here the differences between them and Britain become apparent. Their choice is rather different.

First, the other modern nation states are not so old: Germany as a single political entity is less than 150 years old; Italy just over 150 years old; Greece less than 200 hundred years old; Spain just over 400 years old.

Second, they have been built top-down as much as bottom-up, so they are more used to top-down systems.  Germany is a good example of this.  In the first half of the 19th century, the Frankfurt Assembly attempted to unite the German states from the bottom-up via political and economic co-operation.  In the second half of the 19th century, however, this attempt was brutally blown apart by Bismark and Prussia uniting Germany top-down by force.  Prussia brought the other German states under its sway through coercion and invasion, then, to consolidate its grip over them, led them into war against their neighbours – Austria-Hungary, Denmark, France – until, standing on the ruins of France in 1870,  Bismark was confident enough to get the King of Prussia crowned as the Emperor of Germany.

Third, the nation state on the Continent has not successfully delivered the full package of political stability, individual liberty, justice and the rule of law, material prosperity and defence from foreign aggression as it has in Britain.  Looking back over the last century and its two world wars, at the nineteenth century and its endemic revolutions (seven in France alone, including counter-revolutions and coups d’etat), one could say that the nation state has in fact failed as a political system on the Continent; so of course the nations of continental Europe are looking for an alternative, a supra-national alternative built along lines of co-operation and non-aggression.  They are right and sensible to do so.

But it has not failed in Britain.  That is partly a matter of the luck of geography (Britain happens to be an island, and so has been hard to invade) but also a matter of method (bottom-up development being more effective and durable than top-down development).

It is no wonder that the people of Britain are hesitating as they are being asked to abandon the vehicle which they made themselves, and which for centuries has safely and successfully taken them to wherever they wanted to go, and instead climb aboard a brand-new and relatively untested vehicle built by their neighbours’ political masters, which so far has provided only a very bumpy ride for its passengers, and which will take them on a journey (unless it breaks down completely, which at the moment looks like a distinct possibility) over which they will have little control, to a destination which they don’t particularly want to visit.

This is nothing to do with the arrogance or pride of a once imperial nation.   It is nothing to do with the superiority complex of a nation which won a great empire, or the inferiority complex of a nation which lost a great empire.  Britain has had no empire for over two generations now; ‘empire’ impinges hardly at all on the consciousness of the modern Briton.  In retrospect the empire can be seen as a very brief and almost accidental episode in the history of this country (Victoria was crowned Empress in 1877, and less than a century later the empire no longer existed).

On the other hand, most Britons are aware of the many centuries in which their current political system has served them, and served them well, and are naturally and understandably worried about swapping such a well-tried, long-standing and above all successful system for a blind leap into a new system which offers them less control of their own destiny and does not guarantee the benefits of the old one.

Next week, Shaw Sheet will continue its EU referendum run-up by putting forwards an opposing point of view and arguing in favour of EU membership.

 

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