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Charles de Gaulle was right: Britain should never have joined the EU. Thanks to his turbulent years at Four Carlton Gardens, he understood us better than our own establishment.
We distinguish ourselves, a global, Atlantic and free trade island with a very different conception of the future of Europe. We were never going to fit Jean Monnet’s model of EU state-building or even his own more nation-focused version, argued de Gaulle when he gloriously vetoed our request twice during the 1960s. And so it turned out. Our approach was exactly what Brussels was seeking to eradicate.
Why don’t we listen? Why do we waste 47 frustrating years as ambivalent members? For future generations, the opportunity cost will be staggering. If anything, Le Général underestimated how difficult it would be for the UK to become European: he thought we would have to undergo a fundamental transformation of our economy and politics. He supposed we would never try; but, in fact, our political classes, declinists desperate for a post-imperial solution, did the best they could, destroying our political system and the democratic pact between the people and the government. In the end, even that wasn’t enough.
The reality is that the EU has never been about genuinely free trade: it has always been about building a new state, supposedly to avoid war. That meant tearing down internal borders and harmonizing, while erecting a Zollverein. The British could not understand this: while we saw a liberalizing and pro-competition program, it was actually an attempt to use internal trade as a vehicle for a political project.
To use Hayek’s terminology, the view was constructivist. One of the assumptions was that trade was a top-down exercise, allowed and promoted by bureaucrats, rather than a spontaneous and truly international process. Another was that whoever controlled the money was the true sovereign and therefore the EU should have its own currency.
We will never fully recover from our long and debilitating membership in the EU. Historians have a term for this: it is called “path dependence” or “branching stories.” The past matters and irrevocably changes us.
It’s not just that our fate would have been radically different if we had never joined or left in the 1980s: every important period in our history leaves an indelible mark. We continue to circulate on the Roman roads and Londinium continues to be our capital; post-Brexit, we will continue to use kg and cm. Equally critically, every important period in history has only ended at great cost. Did Eurosceptics fully understand the costs of disengaging from the EU? No. Do we still believe that Brexit is the way forward regardless? Absolutely.
In economics, Neil Kinnock was the last to laugh. We have absorbed swathes of the European social democratic model, including high minimum wages: the voting license agenda was very different from the Bruges agenda outlined by Margaret Thatcher in 1988.
In one of the most powerful speeches of the 20th century, he argued that “we have not successfully pushed back state borders in Britain, only to see them reimposed at the European level, with a European superstate exercising new dominance from Brussels.” We’re leaving now, though, and the size of the state is unlikely to shrink, even if competitive pressures will, over time, spur a pro-growth supply-side agenda. EU protectionism towards any economy it does not control – rationalized as “defending the integrity of the single market” by stupid “trade experts” – forces us to hire customs brokers.
The valuable common law heritage that helped ensure the rise of freedom and the flourishing of the Industrial Revolution has been permanently affected. Yes, the government will roll back the European Court of Human Rights (a non-EU institution) and other excesses, but decades of membership in the EU legal system have changed the legal profession. Britain as a whole has become softer, less unique and less eccentric, our most Cartesian and rationalistic approach.
EU membership has also accelerated the decline of Scottish and Northern Irish trade unionism. However, while the end of the UK would be a high price to pay to regain our self-government, Brexit would actually be just a casus belli, rather than the main driver of any breakdown.
Some of the permanent changes of our time in the EU were hugely positive, of course: we will benefit greatly from the millions of hardworking Europeans who have made Britain their home. City were turbocharged after the launch of the euro in 1999, and it will now be very difficult to undermine their dominance.
But it’s not just that we should never have united: the EU should have left us out for its own good. Yes, in the short term he benefited from having us. We deliver billions in transfers. Its mercantilists saw us as a captive market. Its ideologues believed that our membership proved that Europe was the EU, the legitimate hegemon on the entire continent, the successor to a great civilization. This misled them into thinking that they could expand without dilution, absorbing Eastern Europe.
That fatal presumption means that the EU project is now in crisis. The acquis is no longer guaranteed, at least as regards the territory. More countries would have to leave before full centralization (a way to make the euro viable) is possible, but that is anathema to Brussels.
The UK membership also served as a crutch for the EU. We were a bridge to the United States, a decentralizing influence, a reformist force, especially in trade in services and agriculture. Some countries used to hide behind us, knowing that we would defend markets and national interests. All that is gone and yet the EU has refused to adapt. It will become more socialist and anti-innovation, accelerating its decline. There will no longer be any counterweight to the Franco-German axis. Brussels remains infantilized geopolitically, dependent on US subsidies to NATO, absorbing Russia, China and Iran.
Brexit will be a positive shock for Britain, lifting the country out of its stupor; but it has left the EU reeling in disbelief, its core convictions overturned, its certainties blown to pieces. Like all bureaucratic dinosaurs, it cannot adapt, not even to an extinction-level event. Why didn’t you listen to de Gaulle?
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