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Four and a half years have passed since June 23, 2016. This is a remarkable amount of time that Britain has spent primarily on itself and its sensibilities. It took four and a half years to turn the British referendum on leaving the European Union into law, four and a half years to exhaust three prime ministers, countless cabinets and an entire political class, four and a half years for a monothematic excess full of intrigues, traps, power games and divisive fantasies.
Britain has paid a high price for wanting to leave. The country has stood still in time, politics has been radicalized and the fantasies of secession in Scotland are growing again. The British received: a light departure. Because the trade agreement, including the symbolically significant fishing quota and the important agreements on the future of the financial sector and all other subdivisions of political and social existence (criminally except foreign and security policy) no longer lives up to the promise of freedom and sovereignty that Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage once surrendered. That is good news, for both the British and the Europeans in the EU.
Of course, neither Brexit hardliners nor parliaments will be able to grasp the subtleties of the deal, which will now have to reach a deal in an outrageously short time. This deliberately created time limitation helps Boris Johnson in particular, who is now celebrating with a triumphant gesture the great freedom that is actually not that great. The UK will always do well to anchor close to the EU trading bloc if it does not want to lose its main trading market.
The British desire to leave always reflected two things: a longing for the purity of the nation and self-determination that was deeply ingrained in the past, and thus an anachronistic understanding of the world woven into the 21st century, in which a conscience pronounced class is not enough to oppose the Silk Road. or to affirm the power of artificial intelligence.
Nostalgia is an important part of the British self-image. The Brexit movement had managed to combine nostalgia with nationalism and fear of the future. This resulted in an explosive political mix that Theresa May was unable to defuse and even Boris Johnson was no longer able to control in the end.
Johnson’s fiction of “splendid insulation” ended in front of empty supermarket shelves
That’s why Johnson now had to accept a common-sense bargain if he didn’t want to risk his country plunging into the economic abyss with a radical exit amid the turmoil of the crown. The prime minister is already acting like the emperor in the new clothes. Week after week he appeared before his people, promising heaven on earth, while the pandemic was a foretaste of life in splendid isolation delivered. In recent days, his fiction of isolation has almost ended in front of empty supermarket shelves.
In the dramaturgy of negotiations, an agreement shortly before the door closes is a proven means of keeping critics at arm’s length from all sides. It’s the same this time. But that does not mean that the UK and the EU will be happy for the rest of their days. The treaty has not resolved the contradiction in Britain’s desire for sovereignty: trade relations require common rules, and the idea of unconditional freedom is gone. See you in court at the latest to resolve a dispute.
The kingdom’s always complicated relations with its European neighbors have always centered on British identity, on the national idea. Now it seems they have found neither Johnson nor his political opponents. The furious history of couple between the island and the mainland continues, therefore.
