Negotiating for one's interests counts, but ideas and speeches also count, and those who do not recognise this cannot understand at all the new European policy in the phase of the national-populist offensive.
There are public speeches that take on a symbolic value, and the British are masters in them, as was the case with Mrs. Thatcher's famous Bruges speech of 1988, which announced that she would not stop at the "I want my money back" refrain at the 1984 Fontainebleau European Council, but that she would start her authentic ideological battle, and the ten-year guerrilla war against an "ever closer union" and for a con-federal Europe.
Invited by the Institut d'Etudes européennes of the Université libre de Bruxelles to present for the first time Boris Johnson's Britain position at the start of the major negotiations on the future relations with the EU, David Frost, adviser to the Prime Minister and Delegation Chief for the negotiations with Michel Barnier (who continues to represent the EU well), served us, literally, a punch in the eye. We were expecting a tough but pragmatic negotiator; instead, with the courtesy of a gentlemen, with Oxford culture and British humour, he wanted to surprise us with a conference that already in its title nodded its great cultural and prophetic ambitions: "Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe", a genuine Brexit ideology.
According to David Frost, not only does the Brexit mark a historical turning point, but its philosophical scope lies in the continental challenge of a sovereignist revolution against the European Union. Certainly, we can only appreciate the intention, at the time of the separation of the UK from the EU, to address the change underway in a historical perspective of longue durée, full of implications for political thought, thus raising the level of a debate that for decades the British have accustomed us to make vulgar as merely a matter of mutual utilitarian conveniences. Answering to Frost that we are not interested in books and authors of the 18th century reveals in some European leaders a worrying misery, not only cultural but political. The choice of theoretical references, of the inspiring texts and authors, is in fact extremely significant for a vision of the present and the future.
In choosing the title of his lecture, Frost explicitly evoked the famous English thinker and parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729-97), a radical critic of the French Revolution, and his best-known book, "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790). For at least two reasons, this reference to Burke must make us reflect, because it is disturbing and revealing of a sovereignist philosophy extremely aggressive towards the European Union.
First of all, Burke wasn't just an anti-Jacobin. He radically rejected the modern idea of the rule of law based on what he called "abstract principles", such as the "human rights", the "written constitution", the "democratic utopia" as the expression of a "tabula-rasa madness". He could not be anachronistically against revolutionary France in its most radical forms, but he stood against the moderate constitutional monarchy of 1790; in short, he did not reject only Rousseau, but the entire natural-law philosophy which had dominated the European thought of modernity, from Spinoza to Althusius, from Montesquieu to Sieyès, from Kant to Hegel, without forgetting the English natural-law philosophers Locke and Hobbes.
Burke's alternative is based on the need to preserve an absolute continuity with national traditions, the 1688 model understood as "restoration", rejecting the idea that a society can be re-built according to values of freedom and justice. It even goes so far as defending the founding role of "social prejudice" as the basis of society, social hierarchies against equality, an anti-Enlightenment orientation that risks bringing him closer to the most illiberal conservatism.
The second reason to be concerned about this choice of theoretical reference is more important at the political level. In fact, Frost was not only inspired by Burke's book, but also intended to slightly change its title: "Reflections on the revolutions in Europe" in the plural. Why plural? Frost has made it clear, a central passage in his prophecy, that two revolutions are facing each other in Europe: the revolution of the past century, represented by the decades of European unification characterised by the sharing and delegation of national sovereignties ("sovereignty sharing and pooling"), and, on the other hand, the new revolution that opens the 21st century, symbolised by Brexit, a revolution aimed to regain sovereign control of national borders ("catching back one's borders' control"). A speech of this kind given at the first university in Brussels not only sounds like the counter-melody to the famous speech for European integration by Schroeder's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer at Humboldt University (2000). It also takes on a provocative accent: the EU does belong to a significant past, but it is the nationalist sovereignism that represents the sun of the future. Who else, if not D. Trump, has proposed Brexit as a model to be followed by all European countries? One cannot fail to notice that Frost's "prophetic" speech goes far beyond the perspectives of the extreme right-wing sovereignists of the continent, who, from Kaczynski to Orban, from Salvini to Mme. Le Pen, from the aggressive German AfD to the Spanish Vox, have all renounced, especially after the defeat in the European elections on May 26, 2019, to propose the exit of their country from both the EU and the Eurozone, and practice a policy reminiscent of that of Mrs. Thatcher: changing the EU from within, towards a weaker and more confederal model.
Instead of proposing a search for an idea of Europe that unites us beyond Brexit, and seeking a convergence at a high level, Frost has chosen to divide and put in contrast in the most radical way the integration of the 27 and sovereignism, seeing them as alternative philosophies, opposite world-views. The illiberal conservative Burke becomes an instrument for a philosophy of confrontation. But in this way Frost not only makes negotiations more difficult but, with the sole exception of British courtesy, he ended up aggravating all our doubts about future mutual relations, especially around three big questions:
a) Frost did not let anybody be in a position to answer the question that is to be posed necessarily after the exit on 31 January 2020: what model of economic and social development will the British Conservatives choose? Andrew Gamble, professor at Cambridge, rightly argued that the "left-wing Brexit", sold in vain by the Eurosceptic Labourite Corbyn to his disoriented voters, is impossible (apparently, "socialism in one country" appears attractive only on the condition of not living in that country). But it is not clear whether the British (or rather English) conservative model of the 21st century will resemble May's ambitious Victorian dream of a "Global Britain", or rather the one that the then Prime Minister Cameron had contemptuously rebuked in 2016 to Farage: a little introverted and modest idea, a "Little England". The only positive sign: Frost promises that the British do not want to lower their standards, but paradoxically they reject the EU social and environmental standards. Other "Brexiteers" have babbled confused summaries of their ambitions: the myth of a "Singapore on the Thames", a fiscal paradise (forgetting that Singapore is working well thanks to the fact that 30% of the population is composed of immigrants, which does not seem to be the ideal of the Brexiteers); it would be, said Merkel, an unfair competitor at the borders of the EU, incompatible with the proposal for a second-generation, highly regulatory, CETA-type trade agreement. It is therefore not clear even to the British what the Johnson government will do with the political and economic independence claimed and flaunted in the negotiating mandate given to Frost and published on February 27, 2020. The confusion that reigns in the palaces in London will condition the quality of the compromises which the excellent negotiator that M. Barnier turned out to be will work on without concessions.
b) Linked to the model of society is the great theme of the fight against climate change. It could provide a ground for convergence between the EU and the UK, as the very important COP 26 conference at the end of 2020 is announced as a co-presidency between the UK and Italy. But neither Frost nor Johnson seem to highlight this potential for a high-level agreement. If the conservative government's distance from Donald Trump's climate scepticism could bring us closer, we can only see that the EU's decision to make the "Green Deal" the priority of priorities runs counter to the UK's choice of a competitive race-to-the-bottom model, a tax haven, based on social and environmental dumping.
c) Finally, the issue of security is not being taken seriously by the United Kingdom, which looms like an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It is clear that Britain, even leaving the EU, is not leaving Europe: it continues to have security interests on the European continent which it will have to manage in cooperation with us, with the EU, the first power. So did everybody, not only W. Churchill but all the British governments since Napoleon and the subsequent Concert of Europe.
Europe is more committed than before to its Defence Union. In this sense, as not only Macron but also Mogherini said, although Brexit is certainly sad news, it is also an opportunity for the 27: nobody can deny that the European Union has made more progress towards the Defence and Security Union in the three years after the Brexit referendum than in the 40 years with the United Kingdom: PESCO, Defence Unit at the Commission, Armaments Agency, etc. It is paradoxical that, while our common threats are getting worse, from Russia to the Middle East, to Libya, at the risk that all of us, the British included, will become the sacrificial victims of the bipolar battle between the US and China, the United Kingdom is not only leaving the EU, but is not proposing to rapidly consolidate some forms of cooperation.
In conclusion, what does the Johnson government want? Competition or cooperation? On 26/2, M. Barnier expressed concerns convergent with ours: not only the UK's internal rhetoric focuses on emphasizing independence and sovereignty, but even in Brussels leading British ministers present themselves with an aggressive rhetoric that interprets Brexit as the first stage of a "European revolution of sovereignty" and sees the current turning point and even the negotiations as a kind of gradual euthanasia of the EU.
But to come back to Frost's comparison, citing Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution in the name of British conservatism, it must be remembered that while the Déclaration des droits de l'homme and the values of the French Revolution continue to exert a European-wide and world-wide influence after 230 years, it is the counter-revolutionary regimes that have been condemned by history, with the exception of the nostalgics of De Maistre, Burke or, later, Mussolini and the various national fascisms, and forgotten. Of course, if the British Conservatives raise the level of the challenge, and propose themselves as the leaders of a continental nationalist and sovereignist revolution, the EU states cannot respond by making business as usual and arguing over the budget. As the continent's first power, it is an urgent responsibility of the EU to, first, consolidate its internal unity, and, second, offer a perspective to the whole of Europe, an innovative perspective, that is already maturing in practice through the setting up of concentric circles around a centre, i.e. a more integrated core functioning as the political leader, and concentric circles which will include in distinct roles, on the one hand, the countries aspiring to join the centre and, on the other, the recalcitrant ones, i.e. the countries whose governments have their heads turned back towards dangerous nationalist myths of the 19th century, and tinker with what has clearly become the hypocrisy of a national sovereignty to be regained.
Translated by Vittorio Quartetti