European diary, 31.12.2020: So now Brexit is done. 1200 pages of “deal”, a few hundred pages of which Boris Johnson already held up to the camera at Christmas during his three-and-a-half-minute Christmas speech on Twitter, promising his countrymen that there was plenty of fish in it. His whimsical speech about hope, turkey, pudding, Brussels sprouts and brandy butter will go down in history. As what, this very history will still prove. Literarily, at any rate, as a parody.
It has spread good cheer on the island. The European friends on the continent, who declared the negotiations concluded on Christmas Eve, were somewhat less credible in their good mood. There is no triumph involved, at most the relief that a superfluous torment has finally reached its at least halfway bearable end. This morning, the British ambassador in Vienna was also allowed to make an attempt to create a good mood on the radio. This was much more difficult for him than for his prime minister.
The Erasmus program, which has brought hundreds of thousands of young people from the mainland and the islands closer together, has come to an end. Even Leigh Turner couldn’t turn that into brandy butter. But when asked whether the Brexit agreement and Britain’s exit from the EU would bring any advantages, he could only proudly emphasize that the trade agreement that has now been concluded would be better … than a no-deal Brexit. We would have thought of that, too.
What remains is fish. The fishing quotas of European fishermen in British waters are now to be reduced by 25% over the next few years. That won’t ruin the EU. Nor will it help British fishermen much. If they ever wake up from their stupor. For the money that the Brexit has cost – and will still cost, e.g. to carry out customs controls, for duties that should not be levied – the British fishermen could probably have been better helped. But the dream of restoring Britain to its former stature as a global leader was stronger. A dream that is admittedly torn between two claims, the idea of itself as the center of the Commonwealth representing a supranational empire, and the old colonial feeling of representing a superior culture.
But “the proof of the pudding comes with the eating”. Whether much will remain of these dreams, other than more fish from British fishermen, only time will tell. For it is the Europeans on the continent who are supposed to buy this fish.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
European Diary, 14.9.2020: The British House of Commons decides on the unilateral termination of the Brexit Treaty requested by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as part of the so-called “Single Market Act”. The fact that both British laws and international law are thereby broken seems to be of no concern not only to the Brexit Government but also to the majority of the House of Commons. The main argument is the indeed precarious status that Northern Ireland will receive in the new set of rules that Johnson whipped through parliament as a big deal not even a year ago. In a customs union with Ireland and the EU – and a customs border with the rest of the British Kingdom. At least when the negotiations for a comprehensive free trade agreement between the UK and the EU are in trouble. His predecessors John Major and Tony Blair are now “horrified”, but the exit-drunk majority doesn’t care anyway.
Once again, it is clear what price the Brexiteers are apparently willing to pay for their nationalist revolt against European unification. The laboriously achieved, yet precarious state of peace in Northern Ireland is now in danger of being deliberately sacrificed. The fact that Johnson likes to play with fire is well known. But most of his tories now follow him like lemmings. All it takes is a few absurd conspiracy theories that are becoming increasingly popular among right-wing populist leaders: the EU is planning a “food blockade” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the Kingdom.
The Brexiteers grotesquely overestimate Britain’s possibilities to play itself up as an international economic and trading power outside the EU under the protectorate of the USA. This will take its revenge when it is already too late. As it stands, in the next few years Britain will be less concerned with its great, in reality rather ailing economy than with the centrifugal forces that Brexit releases, from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and eventually in London. To which the answer is likely to be nothing more than nationalistic furor.
Installation Union Europe? Photo: Dietmar Walser
The European Union started out as an economic community after World War II. Its history dates back to 1952 when its predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, was founded. Today, the EU is also a political community. The only directly elected body since 1979 is the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Its first president was the French politician and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil (1927–2017). In addition, that same year, the French champion of women’s rights Louise Weiss (1893–1983) became an MEP for the Group of European Progressive Democrats. Already during World War I, she had founded the peace-oriented journal L’Europe Nouvelle and kept publishing it throughout two decades. Despite being highly vulnerable as the daughter of an Alsatian Jewish mother, she was active in the Résistance during World War II. Her efforts toward a united, democratic Europe were honored by appointing her the first Oldest Member of the European Parliament and by naming the parliamentary building after her. Indeed, Louise Weiss understood that the concept of the Union was limited in scope to economic aspects, and early on, she pointed to the lack of a European community of solidarity by stating: “The Community institutions have produced European sugar beet, butter, cheese, wines, calves, and even pigs. They have not produced Europeans.”
^ Louise Weiss, 1979, © Communauté Européenne
< European Parliament, Louise-Weiss- Building ©, Dominique Faget / AFP / picturedesk.com
> Mural by Banksy in Dover 2017; painted over in white by unknown individuals in 2019, © Bansky
Also delegated to the European Parliament in 1979 was Stanley Johnson—grandson of the last interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Kemal. As MEP for the British Tories, he belonged to the same group as Weiss. In 1992, he vehemently endorsed the Maastricht Treaty, which endowed the European Union with its current form. Now, his son Boris Johnson is leading the United Kingdom out of this Union. Do the grandchildren of the World War II generation regard Europe as nothing more than a sentimental and obsolete peace project? Hostilities against the EU are also triggered by parties on the Continent. Are the demands for more national autonomy symptoms of a growing right-wing nationalism? At the same time, exit demands are multiplying also in countries at the edge of Europe that find themselves—despite all the lip services paid to a European community of shared values—confronted with Europe‘s de-facto erosion of solidarity. Is it thus already possible to consider European integration as having failed? Is this the beginning of the end of Project Europe?
