Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe
This is my speech, delivered in Brussels on 17 February 2020, as we began negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement with the EU. It sets out the philosophy behind our approach.
The text at the link above is the published gov.uk version.
The fuller text below is the version as prepared for delivery. Some text was removed for time reasons and some text was considered to be party political and not published on the government website.
________________________________________________
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE
Introduction
Thank you much everyone for that very kind introduction. It is a really huge pleasure to be here at your university. I would like to say thank you also to the Institute for hosting me, and your distinguished President, Ramona Coman, for being kind enough to host me here tonight. Your institute here has really made a huge contribution to the study of European politics and European integration – and long may that continue.
Academic lectures on Britain’s EU Exit process are very much in fashion.
The Commission President spoke to students at the LSE last month. Michel Barnier did the same in Belfast. And our mutual friend Ivan Rogers has even managed to get a whole book out of his lecture series.
I don’t aspire to that – at least not till I have left government.
I am very happy to be speaking in Brussels and in Belgium tonight. Both Brussels and Belgium are places I have spent quite a lot of time in over the years. I’ll say more about my time in Brussels shortly, but on Belgium, I first came here aged 18, in the early 1980s, on my first overseas trip on my own. And I know that doesn’t sound particularly adventurous nowadays for people like you, but for a boy from provincial England in the 1980s it actually seemed like quite an exciting thing to be doing. Like most people in Britain at the time I knew rather little about Belgium, so I was literally overwhelmed when walking into Bruges from the station early on a Sunday morning, as it turned out on some kind of festival day, seeing the banners of the guilds and the parishes hanging from the buildings, and hearing the church bells ringing. It was one of the experiences that really gave me a life long love of the history and art of this part of the world, and indeed I have been indulging it this weekend at the great van Eyck exhibition in Ghent, which is amazing if you have the chance to go and see that. It took me to study it at university, and even to begin, though sadly never finish, a doctorate study of Charles the Bold, Charles le Temeraire, or the Rash as he is known here in Europe, one of the great Dukes of Burgundy who was himself a unifier of fragmented European territories, who pushed his luck a bit too far and saw his domains disintegrate at the hands of the Swiss. I will let you judge whether there are any parallels in this to what I say later on!
But I do want tonight to try to give you two things:
First, a considered view of how those of us who think Britain is better off out of the European Union actually see the world,
and then a bit of gentle guidance about how that might influence our position in the negotiation to come.
I should be clear for the record you are getting a personal view of these matters, except where I say otherwise.
The two revolutions in Europe
Before that though I want to look at the wider picture.
In 1790 Edmund Burke, one of my country’s great political philosophers, wrote a pamphlet that is famous in the UK anyway – Reflections on the Revolution in France. Hence my title tonight. [slide] That work is highly relevant today and indeed many modern British Conservatives would consider themselves to be intellectual heirs of Burke.
I actually think today we are looking at not one but two revolutions in Europe.
The first is the creation of the European Union itself – the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648. A new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.
The second revolution is of course the reaction to the first – the reappearance on the political scene not just of national feeling but of the wish for national decision-making and the revival of the nation state. Brexit is the most obvious example, but who can deny we see it across the Continent. I don’t find it surprising - if you can’t change policies by voting, as you increasingly can’t in this system, then opposition becomes expressed as opposition to the system itself.
Brexit was surely above all a revolt against a system – against an “authorised version” of European politics, against a system in which there was only one way to do politics and one policy choice to be made, against a politics in which the key texts are as hard to read for the average citizen as the Latin Bible was in the Middle Ages.
I want to explain why I moved from supporting the first revolution to supporting the second.
Burke’s view of the state
But first let me return to Burke. He had a very particular attitude to government. In Reflections he wrote:
“The state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest. …. It is to be looked on with reverence … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. …It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.”
This is how the EU began – “a partnership agreement in a trade … or some other such low concern”, not of pepper and coffee, but coal and steel, and then much more.
The question is – did it make the shift to being “looked on with reverence … a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection?”
In much of Europe it arguably did, in a way. Coal and steel were the engines of war; and the sources of power and resource. Managing them collectively meant that, on the European continent, this immediately had more profound political implications. It was a noble project. Post-war British leaders such as Attlee and Churchill understood this but didn’t feel the same moral force.
But in Britain we know the answer – it didn’t. I think Burke understood why. Burke’s argument was essentially that the abstract foundations of the Revolution ignored the complexities of human nature and of human society. The state, to Burke, was more of an organic creation, entwined with custom, tradition and spirit.
And indeed in Britain, to many, the institutions of the European Union always felt abstract, technocratic, disconnected from or actively hostile to national feeling. (It is somehow symbolic that the last act of many of our MEPs was to be banned for displaying their own national flag.) In a country where institutions just evolved and governance is pretty deep rooted in historical precedent, an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design rather than by evolution, and which vested authority elsewhere, was always going to feel like an unnatural addition. That is why Take back Control became such a powerful slogan.
The second revolution
Much of this still does not seem to me to be understood here. One of the reasons why people here failed to see Brexit coming and often still see it as some kind of horrific unforeseeable natural disaster is that, at root, they were unable to take British Euroscepticism seriously, but saw it as some kind of irrational false consciousness.
That is also why so many commentators seem to find it odd for someone of my background to support Brexit. I recognise I am unusual in doing so. Media profiles regularly say I am “one of the few Brexit-voting diplomats”. (Actually there are a few more of us, but they won’t thank me for identifying them, even now.)
Even last month, Lord Kerr, whom I worked for many years and for whom I have huge respect while profoundly disagreeing with him, said in the FT of me “that he’ll be extremely diligent in doing what he is told”, as if no member of the UK foreign service could possibly have the same view of the European Union as our current Prime Minister without being instructed to do so.
In real life my story is completely different. I began my time in Brussels in 1993, as a typical pro-European. That was rapidly washed away. My exposure to the Brussels institutions rapidly turned me into a persistent private critic of them. Yet in public I had to spend most of my life in the Justus Lipsius building, and if not there in the FCO’s Europe Directorate. I wasn’t the only one – I recall a secret drink in 2005 with a couple of colleagues in a back room of the then Foreign Secretary’s office when the Dutch voted against the European Constitution – but it was definitely a minority taste. So I was experiencing in daily life a form of cognitive dissonance about the value of my work that eventually drove me out in 2013 – and then back as an adviser to the now Prime Minister in 2016. Returning to lead the negotiations in 2019, it was a relief to be able to finally come out and express my true nature – and help finally take the UK out too.
Part of the reason for my doubt was the one I began this lecture with – that the EU’s institutions may have been fit for pepper and calico but were not going to be able to govern this diverse continent without huge turbulence unless a lot more flexibility was built into the system. So far, as we discovered in the 2016 renegotiation, it hasn’t been, and seemingly won’t be.
But I also came to be very sceptical about the idea it was ever going to work well for the UK, because our political tradition was unsuited to abstract and distant institutions, and because we weren’t ever going to be committed to the goal.
Many people argue that Britain had found the sweet spot in the Union – the ideal mix between economic integration and political absenteeism – only to then carelessly cast it aside. I don’t think this is entirely realistic. Instead, like a guest who has had enough of a party and wants to find a way of slipping out, Britain had by 2016 already found its way to the hallway without the party goers noticing. It was only when we picked up our coat and waved goodbye that people said “oh, are you going?”
The rejection of the single currency; the refusal to join Schengen; the Justice and Home Affairs opt out; the ambivalent attitude to the Treaty of Lisbon (and still more so to the European Constitution – who can doubt that the planned referendum on that would have produced a no vote?); the Cameron so called veto on closer Eurozone collaboration; the unambitious and botched renegotiation; and finally the 2016 referendum look more like inevitable staging posts on the way out than a random series of unfortunate events.
British Prime Ministers failed to exert any kind of control over events. The Major government’s approach was to get things done by causing problems and threatening exit – not from the EU, but from particular policies. This had its successes but by 1995 and the ill-fated beef war it was clear that they would not win the forthcoming general election and the incentive for EU partners to cut deals was much reduced. The Blair approach was to use Lloyd George-esque rhetorical wizardry coupled with some carefully chosen and strictly limited policy movement to create a much more positive overall impression, while not moving much in most of the key areas (Euro, JHA, deepening integration in the Constitution). The Brown approach was essentially the same as Blair’s without the wizardry or policy movement. The Cameron Government essentially replayed Majorism with a more modern style - with the big difference that as well as wanting to exclude ourselves from certain policies, we were involuntarily excluded by others from the core.
At the same time we reached ineffectually for a pattern of alliances that might deliver. Over my time doing European work we tried Third Way-ism with Germans (1997-2000); being the special friend of C Europeans (1999-2003/4); trilateralism – working with France and Germany (2004/5); bilateralism with the French in the early Sarkozy / Brown years; working with the Nordics, Dutch, and Irish under Cameron; and finally a desperate hope that Germany would deliver what we needed to make the renegotiation viable.
The tactical problem with this approach was obviously time-inconsistency: no-one knew whether a deal with us would stick or whether we are really willing to invest in the contacts and underpinning of relationships that make them work. The strategic problem was that it made it all too clear we never knew what we wanted to achieve other than stop other countries doing things they wanted to do.
Given this background it was bizarre that so many people can have told themselves “Britain is winning the arguments” and that “the EU is in many ways a British project”. It plainly is not and it is surely a form of false consciousness to think it is. Brexit is a re-establishment of underlying reality, not some sort of freakish divergence from it. One reason why “take back control” was so powerful as a slogan was that we had clearly lost it.
The Noble Revolt
Of course, the referendum in Britain did not form the neat conclusion to this shuffle to the exit door that many of us thought.
We nearly had a third revolution, or at least counter-revolution, until the issue was finally settled in December with the election.
There were some in Britain who plainly thought the whole project was a terrible mistake which just needed to be stopped one way or another. They came very close to managing it, in a modern day “Noble Revolt” - the famous description by academic John Adamson of the run up to the English Civil War, in which he argued that a small group of ideologically motivated noblemen came to dominate the state and attempted to reduce Charles I to a puppet king.
Obviously not every opponent of Brexit took quite such an extreme view. It’s clear that many feared, and fear, the economic consequences. Indeed for many it seems to be a simple fact, rather than a prediction, that Brexit will do economic harm. They include it seems Michel Barnier, who said in Belfast that Brexit was “always a matter of damage limitation”. Indeed much of the last three years of turbulence in the UK has been driven by a fear that the country could not cope with the economic consequences of Brexit. I believe they are wrong and I will explain why.
The slaves of some defunct economist
There have been many economic studies of Brexit in the last few years, culminating perhaps in the famous 2018 studies from the Government and from the Bank of England. Indeed the iron of those studies seems to have entered the soul of Britain’s political class, in distorted form, and speculative predictions about the economy in 15 years’ time seem to have become in many minds an unarguable depiction of inevitable reality next year.
I wonder. I question some of the specifics of the 2018 study. This isn’t the moment to go into the detail, but:
No allowance appears to be made for exchange rate movements.
The size of non-tariff barriers is exaggerated – three or more times larger than seen in many independent studies.
The impact of customs costs is out by a factor of 5,10 or even 20 compared to independent estimates.
But even these effects do not product an economic impact anything like as big as the one suggested in the study. To get to those effects you have to posit (in my view) implausibly large effects on productivity from a supposed decline in trade. Yet there is at least as much evidence that the relationship is the other way around – that productivity drives trade. The claims that trade drives productivity are often in fact based on the experience of emerging countries opening up to world markets, after a period of authoritarian or communist government - transitions that involve a huge improvement in the institutional framework and which make big productivity improvements almost inevitable. The relevance of such experiences for the UK, a high-income economy which has been very open for over a century, seems limited.
I also note that many Brexit studies seem very keen to ignore or minimise any of the possible upsides from Brexit, whether these be connected to expanded trade with the rest of the world or regulatory change – often assuming the smallest possible impacts from such changes while insisting on the largest possible effects from changes in our relationship with the EU. These studies are perhaps helped at times by the growth of a new type of commentariat, invested in a certain outcome and seeing every twist and turn through their own lens.
So I am not buying these figures or the fantastic ability to predict the micro detail of the economy which they imply. There is obviously a one-off cost from the introduction of friction at a customs and regulatory border, but I am simply not convinced it is on anything like the scale these studies suggest.
That is why we are confident in our strategy. We are clear that we want a Canada-type FTA-type relationship if it is on offer, and that we are willing to trade on Australia-style terms if it is not. We understand the trade-offs involved. We know that FTA-type arrangements will create friction at our borders. We would like to limit this if we can, through modern customs facilitation arrangements and sophisticated management of regulatory differences, but it will exist and we do not deny that. I just doubt it will have the consequences so many predict.
Indeed if we have learned anything from the last few years, and in particular from the economy’s refusal to behave as people predicted after the referendum, it is that modern advanced economies are hugely complex and adaptive systems, capable of responding in ways in which we do not foresee, and finding solutions which we did not expect. I have confidence in the ability of the economy to respond to all challenges.
The political economy of sovereignty: why we act as we do
But I do not rest my case entirely on looking at the numbers. There is a deeper point involved.
I made the point above that some of the studies of the benefits of trade were really studies of the benefits of good institutions and good politics. That in my view is where the gains are going to come.
Some people argue that sovereignty is a meaningless construct in the modern world, that what matters is sharing it to gain more influence over others.
We take the opposite view. Sovereignty is meaningful and what it enables us to do is to set our rules for our own benefit.
That is about the ability to get your own rules right in a way that suits your own conditions. Much of the debate about “divergence” misses this point. We are clear – and the PM was clear in Greenwich last week – that we will not be a low-standard economy. But it is perfectly possible to have high standards, and indeed similar or better standards to those prevailing in the EU, without our laws and regulations necessarily doing exactly the same thing. One obvious example is the ability to support our own agriculture to promote environmental goods relevant to our own countryside, and produce crops that reflect our own climate, rather than being forced to work with rules designed for growing conditions in central France.
I struggle to see why this is so controversial. The proposition that we will not wish to diverge is equivalent to the proposition that the rules governing us, on 31 December this year, are the most perfect that can be designed and need not be changed. That is self-evidently absurd and we should dismiss the “divergence” phantasm from sensible political debate.
Looking forward, we will have a huge advantage over the EU – the ability to set regulations for new sectors, new ideas, and new conditions – quicker than the EU can, and based on sound science not fear of the future. I have no doubt that we will be able to encourage new investment and new ideas in this way – particularly given the ideas we have to boost spend on scientific research and make Britain the best country in the world to do it.
There are other broader advantages to running your own affairs. One obvious one is that it is much easier to engage people in taking decisions. Another, less obvious, is the ability to change those decisions. My experience of the EU is that it has extreme difficulty in reversing its own decisions. Yet every state gets things wrong. Course correction is an important part of good government. Britain will be able to experiment and improve. The EU will find this much more difficult.
I am confident that these political economy factors matter. In an age of huge change, being able to anticipate, adapt, and encourage really counts. Brexit is about a medium term belief that this is true – that even if there is a short run cost, it will be overwhelmed rapidly by the huge gains of having your own policy regime.
It’s a personal view, but I also believe it is good for a country to have its fate in its own hands and for its own decisions to matter. When I look round Europe, by and large the smaller countries, who know they must swim in the waves that others make, seem to have higher quality decision making – because they can’t afford not to. Being responsible for our own policies is likely to produce better outcomes.
That is why we approach this next round of negotiations in a confident fashion. We can’t be frightened by suggestions there will be friction or greater barriers. We know that and have factored this in. We look further forward – to the gains of the future.
Taking back control
That is also why we are not prepared to compromise on some fundamentals of our position.
First, that we are negotiating as one country. To return again to Burke, his conception of the state was and is one that allows for differences, habits, and customs. It is one which means that our own multi-state union has grown in different ways – each playing unique roles in its historical development. It is fashionable amongst some to run down that state. We cannot be complacent about the Union, but I nevertheless believe that all parts of the UK will survive and thrive together. And I am clear that I am negotiating on behalf of Northern Ireland as for every other part of the UK.
Second, that our position reflects the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country. It is central to our vision that we have to have the ability to set laws that suit us – to claim the right that every other non-EU country in the world has. So to think that we might accept EU supervision on so called level playing field issues simply fails to see the point of what we are doing. It isn’t a simple negotiating position which might move under pressure – it is the point of the whole project. That’s also why we don’t want to extend the transition beyond the end of this year. At that point we recover our political and economic independence in full – why would we want to postpone it?
Third, that we only want what other independent countries have. So I want to finish with a thought experiment. Boris Johnson’s speech in Greenwich last week set out a record of consistently high standards of regulation and behaviour in the UK, in many cases better than EU norms or practice. How would you feel if the UK demanded that the EU dynamically harmonise with our national laws set in Westminster and the decisions of our own regulators and courts?
Presumably, many in the EU would simply dismiss the suggestion out of hand. But the more thoughtful would say that such an approach would compromise the EU’s sovereign legal order; that there would be no democratic legitimacy in the 27 for the regulations and the regulatory decisions taken in the UK to which the EU would be bound; and that such regulations and regulatory decisions are so fundamental to the way the population of a jurisdiction feels bound into the legitimacy of its government, that this structure would be simply unsustainable: at some point democratic consent would snap – dramatically and finally.
And however amusing, even tempting it is to run these arguments, the reasons we would not do so is that these arguments of our more thoughtful interlocutors would have very significant force.
The reason we expect – for example - open and fair competition provisions based on FTA precedent is not that we want a minimalist outcome on competition laws. It is that the paradigm of an FTA and the precedents contained in actual agreed FTAs are the most appropriate ones for the relationship of sovereign entities in highly sensitive areas relating to how their jurisdictions are governed and how their populations give consent to that government. So if it is true, as we hear from our friends in the Commission and the 27, that the EU wants a durable and sustainable relationship in this highly sensitive area, the only way forward is to build on this approach of a relationship of equals.
This needs to be internalised. The EU needs to understand, I mean genuinely so, that countries geographically in Europe can, if they choose to, be independent countries. Independence does not mean a limited degree of freedom in return for accepting some of the norms of the central power, the way China historically looked at its neighbours. It means just that – independence. I recognise that some in Brussels may be uncomfortable with that – but the EU must, if it is to achieve what it wants in the world, find a way of relating to neighbours as friends and genuinely sovereign equals, not as tributaries.
Conclusion
Michel Barnier said in Belfast that “Not one single person has ever convinced me of the added value of Brexit”
Michel, I hope I will convince you to see things differently – and maybe even think that a Britain doing things differently might be good for Europe as well as Britain.
I draw inspiration from three sources in believing we will reach a good conclusion this year.
First, we can do this quickly. I am inspired by the Treaty of Rome which was negotiated and signed in just under 9 months – surely we can do as well as our great predecessors, with all the advantages we have?
Second, from President De Gaulle. I know that Michel is a great admirer of his. He probably doesn’t know that I am too. De Gaulle, the man who believed in a Europe of nations. The man who always behaved as if his country was a great country even when it seemed to have fallen very low, and thus made it become one again. That has been an inspiration to me, and those who think like me, in the low moments of the last three years.
And last, once again from Edmund Burke, in his speech to the electors of Bristol, who urged his voters to “applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, cheer us when we recover!” We ran in 2016; we fell in 2018; so cheer us as we now recover, and go on, I am sure, to great things.
Thank you very much.
