06 November 2019

Martin Kettle: It’s not just Britain that’s breaking up, Europe is too Martin Kettle

Arguably the most surreal event during the general election campaign is scheduled for the week before polling day. On 3 December, Nato leaders, including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, will gather at a Buckingham Palace reception. The next day, the Nato chiefs will meet in a luxury – but thankfully non-Trump-owned – hotel outside Watford. It’s the event where the leaders will discuss big subjects including Syria, Afghanistan, Russia and military burden-sharing – and where none of these big subjects is likely to be solved. [...]

Yet the 2019 Nato summit is also a timely signal of something much larger in modern history. This difficult summit will be a microcosm of a wider crisis that stretches across the post-1945 international institutions. This crisis forms the material context of the 12 December election and the policy choices it poses for Britain. Indeed the election itself is also a large symptom of the crisis. [...]

The Nato summit, in other words, is not an opportunity to reassure the voters that all is well and in good hands.  [...] The rules-based order is in decline. And the continent of Europe is no longer at its centre.

It is not just Nato. The United Nations is weaker. So is the Bretton Woods financial settlement. There may never have been an internationalist golden age, but international bodies are struggling as never before in the modern era to exert power and influence in the face of the Trump administration, China and the boldness of repressive states including Russia and Turkey. [...]

Brexit, the issue at the heart of this UK election, should be seen as another symptom of this wider fragmentation rather than simply as an insular psychodrama for Britain. After all, not only would Brexit subtract significant wealth and power from the EU, it would also destabilise it. As the former MI6 chief John Sawers has argued, EU stability rested for decades on a three-legged stool provided by Germany, France and Britain. Take one leg away and the consequences are obvious.

Brexit has not toppled the EU. Indeed the EU’s response has been to pull together, rather than push further apart. [...]

Seen against this backcloth, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of the 2019 election, above all to Britain itself – but also, and to a significant degree, to the rest of Europe. The dream of 1989 may have come and gone. Brexit is one of the many things that mark the death of the more naive versions of that dream. But the fact remains. In a 21st-century world over which Europeans exercise diminishing control, countries in Europe – even peripheral ones, such as Britain – will still be disproportionately dependent on Europe’s shared peace, shared trade, shared values, shared security and a host of other practical links.

This will be a difficult century for Europe, including Britain, Brexit or not. But we will still be better off together than apart. There is no better alternative anywhere else. And the lie that there is one needs to be nailed on 12 December.

Full column on The Guardian

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