Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, greets British Prime Minister Theresa May at the Chancellery in Berlin, on Dec. 11, 2018.ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images
One of the paradoxical results of the Brexit breakdown is that continental Europeans have never followed British politics more closely. “It’s better than anything on Netflix,” former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski says. Another paradox is that Britain has never been more dependent on its European Union partners than it is now, when it proposes to abandon them. In a kind of sadomasochistic self-fulfilling prophecy, the Brexiteers have reduced Britain to the very condition of vassalage from which they claim to be freeing it. British Prime Minister Theresa May will have to take pretty much whatever medicine she is given in Brussels at Wednesday’s emergency European Council summit.
Yet, what follows ineluctably from that humiliating asymmetry of power is that continental Europe is not merely a spectator of the Brexit soap opera but also a key player in it. If Brexit is the British politics of Europe, there is also a European politics of Brexit. Just as the British politics often has little to do with the real Europe, so the European politics is not just about Britain.
If Britain does not participate in the European elections, the socialist grouping in the European Parliament will lose a large group of Labour MPs – boosting the chances of both the conservative European People’s Party, whose Spitzenkandidat Manfred Weber wants to be the next commission president, and of the liberal grouping (ALDE), whose leader, Guy Verhofstadt, happens to be the Parliament’s point man on Brexit.
Most important, French President Emmanuel Macron feels this may be his last big chance to push through the reforms needed to make a Europe fit for the 21st century. No one, and especially not les Anglais, should stand in his way.
The British and European politics of Brexit create strange bedfellows: none stranger than the English arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Belgian arch-Eurofederalist Guy Verhofstadt. Ramping up the fears of an obstructive Britain, Mr. Rees-Mogg tweeted last week: “If a long extension leaves us stuck in the EU we should be as difficult as possible. We could veto any increase in the budget, obstruct the putative EU army and block Mr. Macron’s integrationist schemes.”
His little ploy worked. The tweet was quoted at a meeting of EU 27 ambassadors in Brussels by those, led by the French, who want a hard line against Britain.
I am shocked and saddened to see how many continental Europeans, including long-term friends and admirers of Britain, have given up on us. We British Europeans should be under no illusions: The cupboard of goodwill is almost bare. Sickness metaphors abound. Brexit Britain is now seen as a poison, a gangrenous limb, a cancer to be cut out – the body of Europe healthier without it.
Fortunately these counsels seem unlikely to prevail on Wednesday. Led by European Council President Donald Tusk, Ireland and Germany’s Angela Merkel, most heads of government will probably conclude that the EU cannot take the risk of, and the blame for, obliging Mr. Rees-Mogg and his Brextremists by effectively pushing Britain out. That would poison cross-Channel relations for a generation, and put Ireland in an impossible bind.
Some are moved by the pleas of millions of British Europeans, projecting SOS in the colours of the EU on the white cliffs of Dover and saying, “Give us one last chance to turn this around.” And they can see that the British politics of Brexit are at long last beginning to move away from the hard Brexiteers.
Many well understand that having Britain out will damage the prospects of building a Europe strong enough to face an increasingly assertive China, Donald Trump’s United States and the existential challenge of climate change. Almost all would, at a minimum, go the extra kilometre to secure an orderly Brexit.
A reasonable deal this week would have at least three elements:
First, a flexible Article 50 extension of up to one year, although nine months should be sufficient.
Second, a kind of self-denying ordinance in which Britain commits, for this extension period, not to mess up the EU in the way Mr. Rees-Mogg threatens, and recuses itself from the battle over the top jobs in the EU. Ideally, this should come as a British offer, rather than a set of imposed conditions.
Third, Britain must commit to participating in the European parliamentary elections. We British Europeans should take that as our next great challenge. In a tweet, Mr. Rees-Mogg approvingly quoted a speech in the Bundestag by Alice Weidel of Germany’s far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland. And there’s the point: Our British struggle with the Rees-Moggs, Johnsons and Nigel Farages of the world is not separate from Germans’ struggle with the AfD, Italians’ with Matteo Salvini, Poles’ with their nationalist PiS party and Macron’s with Marine Le Pen.
It is one and the same struggle. It is the battle for Europe.
Of course, the Brexit soap opera must come to an end, preferably sooner rather than later. But so long as it lasts, let’s ensure that it’s Friends rather than a combination of Dad’s Army and Das Boot.