The Observer
Comment & Analysis 25.08.19 45On an unfavourable day,
viewing Brexit-era Britain from the outside is like
watching a goldfi sh circling the castle ornament in its
bowl. The country seems short of memory, hazy of sight
and prone to fl uttering around kitsch visions of the past.
The reporting of Boris Johnson’s tour of Europe
was a case in point. Eurosceptic tabloids celebrated
the supposed infectiousness of the prime minister’s
optimism: “Ja, we can,” ventriloquised the Daily Mail
over a photo of Angela Merkel sharing a drink with
him. On Friday, the newspaper covered his return from
a meeting with Emmanuel Macron with a shot of him
raising his hands over his head in victory. By contrast,
some Remainers saw in Merkel’s comment – “we could
also fi nd [a solution] in the next 30 days, why not?” – an
attempt to mock or troll the prime minister. They rolled
their eyes at fi lm footage seemingly showing Macron
urging Johnson to get his feet off a table during their
meeting in the Élysée Palace.
The Brexit ers were farthest from the mark. It was
simply not true, as even the BBC implied, that Merkel
suggested that the Northern Irish backstop has a decent
chance of being replaced within a month. And Peter
Oborne’s claim in the Mail that “Johnson triumphed
in Berlin” was utter nonsense. The German chancellor
had not remotely wavered from her red lines. Like
other EU leaders, she remains committed to avoiding a
hard border on the island of Ireland and will only resile
from the backstop if Britain comes up with a viable
alternative. Macron went even further, stressing that the
mechanism is “indispensable”.
Yet neither did the prime minister experience the
slap-downs that some on the other end of the spectrum
detected. Merkel’s comments were no mockery; not
for the fi rst time, British commentators of various
stripes were reading too much into her words. And full
footage of the Paris incident showed Macron joking
that Johnson could put his feet on the table. The prime
minister obliged only for fractions of a second, cameras
fl ashing, before continuing their conversation in a more
respectful pose.
While EU leaders have not changed their conditions,
the looming deadline of 31 October is prompting
them to re-engage with the question of how to make
those conditions sellable in Britain. Their exasperation
mingles with regret and a serious desire to minimise the
losses from Brexit. Not for them the childish diversion of
trolling a major head of government for likes.
The facts, the raw realpolitik, of the matter are quite
simple. EU leaders want to protect Ireland and believe
that they have already gone far enough in Britain’s
direction by proposing a backstop allowing some of the
benefi ts of full membership without the costs. Brexit ers
want to leave the club on unrealistically favourable
terms and under their current leadership tend to
impatience. Remainers want to stop the process, but are
divided and do not have an easy path to power. Any deal
will require compromise. In the absence of a mutually
acceptable deal, the EU is, of the two parties, the much
larger and better prepared to walk. The brutal logic of
1:9, the ratio of British to remaining EU GDP, cannot
be gainsaid. Seen from some corners of Brussels, such
calculations are the only ones that matter.
This bare reading of the facts is misleading, however,
as it does not take into account what one might call the
history factor. Perceptions of history are emotional. They
get in the way of bald calculations of power and narrow
advantage. That makes the developments of the next
weeks much harder to game out than the realpolitik
alone might suggest.
The subject is the interest linking all of the major
players in the Brexit drama. Macron and Merkel are both
history nerds and devour books on it. The chancellor
celebrated her 60th birthday fi ve years ago by inviting
the historian Jürgen Osterhammel to lecture her guests
on “the horizon of history”. She later gave members
of her cabinet copies of The Sleepwalkers, Christopher
Clark’s account of the prelude to the F irst W orld W ar.
Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have both written their
own, albeit poorly reviewed, history books, while
Dominic Cummings writes about alternative outcomes
of recent political events as “branching histories”. For
their part, Remainers often turn to Britain’s intensively
European past for proof
of the country’s essential
link to the continent. And
all sides, implicitly, have
a historian’s nagging
interest in the future; in
what the past says about
what is to come.
This Historikerstreit
may make a no-deal Brexit
more likely. Remainers see
their struggle as a battle
for the country’s open,
European soul. Brexiters
are often fond of Britain’s
supposedly buccaneering (the term seems almost
obligatory) past and want a similarly free-roaming
future. All of that makes the two sides within Britain
fi endishly hard to reconcile.
Meanwhile, Merkel considers it her historical role to
keep Europe together in turbulent times, which means
ensuring that Brexit does not entail the sort of benefi ts
without costs that would make leaving the club, or
threatening to do so, a tempting option for others. And
Macron wants his presidency to be remembered as
the time when not just France but Europe fought back
against decline and defended its common sovereignty
in a world increasingly defi ned by rival power blocs.
His long-termist ambitions leave scant room to coddle
Britain. With the prospect of parliament agreeing to a
compromise deal low, he is more inclined than Merkel to
cut Britain loose.
A clear sense of history can, however, also strengthenthe case for compromise. Spoiled by their island history,
Britons are relatively blithe about chaos and rupture,
but even this has its limits. Remainers and most
Brexiters fear a no deal and neither side wants to be
held responsible for the disruption it would probably
unleash, for the national change of course it could cause.
Nor does any continental European leader want to go
down as being responsible for that chaos. The EU is
more concerned than Westminster realises about the
geopolitics of a hard or no-deal Brexit. Its leaders are
kept awake not by the prospect of reduced BMW sales
but of Britain falling prey to a tug-of-war between big
external powers such as the US and China. The meetings
in Berlin and Paris were thus more nuanced than either
sides of Britain’s polarised politics acknowledged.
Technocratic debates will seem to dominate the next
few weeks. But they will be but a battleground on which
rival historical visions, theories about the past and hopes
for the future, will clash. Where facts are contested or
still to be made, emotions reign. And so it is in the Brexit
saga. The entities of “Germany” and “France”, “Brexiters”
and “Remainers”, not to mention various other EU
countries and intermediate and sub-camps in the British
political ring, all contain contradictory impulses.How, given these realities,
might a no deal still be avoided? The coming struggle
pits history or, more precisely, the perception of it
as a motor for a no-deal Brexit against history as a
motor for compromise and de-escalation. The risk of
fragmentation from a no deal must appear greater to
continental Europeans than that of fragmentation under
a compromise deal. Compromise must somehow be
made to seem to the Brexiters currently running the
show in Britain a better path to national redemption
and self-realisation than a no deal. Remainers must be
persuaded that history will look more kindly on them
for stopping a no deal than for cleaving unbendingly to
the immediate goal of stopping Brexit. And then? Who
knows. New British elections and new leadership in
Brussels both beckon. Change, in some form, can come.
Brexit-era Britain is, in fact, the very opposite
of a goldfi sh in its bowl. It is at once crippled and
empowered by long memories. History is a force in
itself, pushing mere mortals around. It can engender
fatalism. But it is also an emotional, human creation.
And like all human creations, ultimately, it is capable of
being mastered.Jeremy Cliffe is Brussels bureau chief and Charlemagne
columnist at the EconomistJeremy
Cliffe
Exasperation mingles with regret
as Europe tries to deal with Brexit
Angela Merkel
is less inclined
than Emmanuel
Macron to cut
Britain loose.Andrew Rawnsley is away