Brexit is Britain's chance to show what Europe is really about: liberty, democracy, and true national diversity
Allister Heath 29 MARCH 2017 • 6:39PM
It ought to come as no surprise that one of the great Brexiteer heroes is actually French. I’m referring, of course, to Charles de Gaulle, who as France’s president twice vetoed the UK’s bid to join what was then the European Economic Community. When de Gaulle said “Non” in 1963 and again in 1967, the British were outraged: given that the UK did so much to make Le Général who he was, harbouring Free French troops and tolerating his many conceits, how could he possibly repay us in this way?
Yet he was doing Britain a favour: we were the wrong country seeking to join the wrong club. Signing up to the project would eventually require the UK to accept a vision that was incompatible with Britain’s internationalist island mindset, its own successful, evolved institutions and its view, not disproved by the horrors of self-imposed fascism or Nazi or Soviet occupation, that democratic people power wasn’t to be feared.
A proud man, de Gaulle remained bitter about his wartime experience. But his sojourn in this country allowed him to understand the British better even than they understood themselves. It’s a French knack: Napoleon Bonaparte was right that we are a nation of shopkeepers, or at least of mobile, aspirational business-minded individualists, and Voltaire, during his London stay in the 1720s, grasped our constitutional monarchy far more profoundly than many domestic observers.
The UK today is a modern, multicultural society but its philosophical essence has barely changed. It isn’t a 52-48 nation – it’s a deeply Eurosceptic country where around 65 per cent want no or less EU, and 35 per cent want the same or more.
The 13-point difference between the two Eurosceptic numbers can be accounted for by risk-aversion, tribalism, an issue about timing (it’s too soon), a hope that the EU may still improve or a genuine belief that the economic integration part of EU membership cancels out the high cost of the rest. Very few people buy into the full dream, with just 11 per cent of UK voters saying they want more Europe, including a trivial 3 per cent who want a full EU government. Yet that, by definition, is what believing in ever-closer union entails.
Euroscepticism also began in France, where I grew up, even though I was a real liberal and never a Gaullist. In 1992, ahead of the Maastricht referendum, the French government printed tens of millions of copies of the treaty and delivered one to every home; some of us actually read ours, or tried to (the paper was horribly cheap and the font extraordinarily small). In my case, it was hate at first sight: it was a blatant power grab.
Before then, being European made loose sense, as a secondary or tertiary overarching identity similar to “Western-ness”: I spoke English and French at home, and lived in Alsace, a few miles away from Germany and Switzerland, where we frequently went shopping and where many of our neighbours worked every day, even before free movement.
But Maastricht formalised a different interpretation of Europeaness, one promulgated by Jacques Delors, François Mitterrand, Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Kohl: the idea of a new citizenship, of a new government, currency and even in time an army and foreign policy.
It was anti-American and intended to divide the “West”; it was anti-capitalist, with the internal market seen as a shield against globalisation. There would be free-ish trade between member states, but only because goods always move about freely within a single country. The plan was to leverage economics to construct a new empire, run by enlightened bureaucrats.
The Eurocrats had misread history: they saw harmonisation, centralisation and the eradication of any distinctiveness as the answer to every question
I despaired at the fact that this model didn’t respect or treasure Europe’s strengths: its beautiful differences, its genuine multiculturalism, it’s extraordinary diversity, the fact that it pioneered political competition. Europe wasn’t great because it built monolithic empires: it thrived when the Greeks and the Italians became city-traders, and when people were allowed to think, pray, invent and work freely. Libertarian fragmentation is conducive to economic, social, scientific and artistic progress; collectivist conformity breeds stagnation and decline.
Yet the Eurocrats had misread history: they saw harmonisation, centralisation and the eradication of any distinctiveness as the answer to every question. Everything had to be exactly the same, from your tiniest French village to your Polish city; an ahistorical, made-up political culture was to be created to pretend that there was a country called Europe.
The positive rationale was to avoid another war, but I feared that it wasn’t the right answer. My part of France had been, in quick succession, Swiss, French, Prussian, French, German and then French again. There were horrific shrapnel holes in the trees in the garden – many of them still containing the original pieces of jagged metal. One would discover empty bullet cartridges when gardening. I didn’t know anybody who ever wanted any of this again, young or old. But I feared that by trying to force countries together and by abolishing the only kind of democracy that could possible work – one based on a real demos and real, shared group identity – fresh tensions would be stoked again. The launch of the euro made this worse, and the proposed move to full fiscal union will lead to the ultimate destruction of the project, regardless of our own departure. The EU is a classic case of what FA Hayek called a “constructivistic” folly, a “fatal conceit”.
Brexit’s mission must be to fight back for the true European – and now universal – enlightenment values
Year after year, treaty after treaty, directive after directive, the EU gained ground and my side was annihilated. Yet what cannot work won’t. Suddenly, we have won, and the Brexiteers must rise to the occasion. Now is no time for silly celebrations, for the task ahead is awe-inspiring.
Brexit’s mission must be to fight back for the true European – and now universal – enlightenment values of democracy, equality in front of the law, tolerance, classical liberalism, individual liberty, competition, responsibility and openness. We need to remind the world that the West isn’t a top-down construct dreamt up by elitist bureaucrats: it was a bottom up, spontaneous order.
Theresa May’s task is therefore to show the rest of Europe that there is a different way forward, one that is rooted in national democracies and the continents’ diversity, yet which achieves the peace and prosperity that all of us so dearly want. It’s a monumental task, but one for which she is clearly ideally suited.
