Hans Kundnani
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Chatham House. It’s wonderful to see such a full house for this Leonard Schapiro Lecture. This lecture is going to be on the record and you can tweet, so you don’t need to turn your phones off. In fact, we encourage you to keep them on, so you can tweet, but do put them on silent mode, And this lecture will also be livestreamed and available as a video afterwards.
We are absolutely delighted to be hosting this Leonard Schapiro Lecture with Government and Opposition. In the Europe Programme at Chatham House, we’re big fans of Government and Opposition. I was just reading an article from an issue from 1968 the other day on populism, which still seems very relevant or perhaps has become relevant again. But we’re also particularly delighted ‘cause we are big fans of Helen Thompson as well. We listen avidly to the Talking Politics podcast, as I’m sure a lot of you do. So we were really delighted when Erik Jones, the Co-Editor of Government and Opposition approached us to host this lecture.
The way we’re going to do this is that I’m going to invite, shortly, Laura Cram, the other Co-Editor of Government and Opposition, to come up onstage and introduce the lecture and also, properly introduce Helen. Helen is then going to deliver her lecture. We’ll then have a discussion on stage, which I’ll moderate. We’ll go up until around about 7:15, after which you’re all invited to come up and join us upstairs for a reception. So, Laura, over to you.
Professor Laura Cram
Yeah, thank you, Hans, and thank you to Chatham House and to their team here, to Ludivine, to Hans, to Stuart and the Audio Visual Team who are coming into play. And of course, to my Co-Editor, Erik Jones, for bringing together these two venerable institutions: Government and Opposition, and Chatham House together to celebrate today, their 2020 Government and Opposition, Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture by Professor Helen Thompson.
Now, that said, and I’m really delighted we’re in Chatham House and all the fabulous organisation and all the fabulous audience that we have tonight. But I’m not sure that Chatham House would in fact have been Schapiro’s first choice of venue. In my research, for the introduction, for this introduction, I discovered that his very famous book, The Origin of Communist Autocracy, Political Opposition in the Soviet State, which was published first in 1955, might have been published in 1951, except that it was delayed in publication for four years, because of political opposition to its findings, from the Chatham House Commission that had actually commissioned the initial report. It was eventually published by LSA, encouraged by Karl Popper, and that’s when he then took up an academic post. My understanding though, is that he was a very forgiving man and time is a great healer, so here we are tonight.
So, as always, with any of these events, it takes a village, or as they say in Government and Opposition, a family to create these kind of events, so again, thank you to our Editorial and Advisory Board members who are here tonight, and to Rosalind, Jessica, Adrian and Veronica and Filippo, who all keep us in order and on track. Thanks also to our Publishers, Cambridge University Press, I know that David and Patrick are here tonight, and also to Jim, who are kindly sponsoring our wine reception tonight, as a thank you to all of you for coming and to which you’re all invited after tonight’s talk.
I have the great privilege of sharing the current custodianship, and I think of it as a bit like that, of Government and Opposition with my Co-Editor, Erik Jones. And it’s deeply humbling to take on that role as one of the Editors of Government and Opposition, you are always conscious of the giants who nurtured the growth of the journal over the years, and Professor Helen Thompson, who’ll speak to us tonight, is one of those giants. But as with Leonard Schapiro, whose razor sharp intellect was, by all accounts, matched only by his kindness and his supportive collegiality, I was very glad to find that she was a gentle giant and equally thoughtful and welcoming as brilliant.
Leonard Schapiro was a renowned academic and profoundly influential scholar, who really shaped our thinking about comparative politics and about how the Soviet politics might best be understood and conceptualised. Few students of politics or international relations will not have one of his tomes on our bookshelves from our undergraduate days. Schapiro was also a founding member of Government and Opposition in 1965 as a journal. It was a journal that aimed to use insights from the study of comparative politics to help those that were making decisions, to tease out the complex issues that underlie – underlay them and the consequences emerging from their actions. And to breach the divide between academia and the world of policymaking and public discourse.
In his honour every year, Government and Opposition hosts the Schapiro Memorial Lecture by distinguished scholars, and you can see there’s a link somewhere, to the Schapiro Lectures, you’ll find on the Government and Opposition page, a list of lectures and links to those by Cas Mudde, Carrie Wickham, Mark Blyth, Simona Piattoni and many, many others. But this year, and again today’s lecture is being livestreamed and it’ll also be published in the journal, so you can follow it up there.
This year’s a really special pleasure and because Professor Helen Thompson is not only a brilliant Political Economist and one of our very finest contemporary thinkers on current political conundrums and their roots. But she’s also one of Government and Opposition’s own. Our forward looking founding Editor, Ghiţă Ionescu, took an earlier interest in international political economy, but was not spotted by many other journals. And from her very early success in winning the Student Essay Prize, Helen’s never been allowed to get away. She’s served as Editor, Chaired at the Advisory and Editorial Boards and has said that though she wouldn’t want normally to edit a journal, she knows different, because of the people, I second that.
In 1994, Helen moved to Cambridge University, where she’s Professor of Political Economy. Her prizewinning contribution to the Academy continues unabated. She won Best Article Prize, Crick Best Article Prize for Parliamentary Quarterly in 2017 and British Journal of Politics and International Relations Article of the Year in 2018, no pressure for the 2019 round at all, Helen. Helen Thompson’s an exceptionally worthy bearer of this honour, first and foremost, for her unquestionable academic standing, but also for her public outreach work, and finally, because she enjoys a special place in the heart of her students, colleagues and the Government and Opposition family.
Leonard Schapiro was renowned for his controversial intellectual contribution and recognising the importance of the historic roots initiated under Leninism, but produced continuities and conditions that allowed, in part, for Stalinism to emerge. Helen Thompson also tackles controversial, and often, uncomfortable terrain, forcing us to consider the historic political and economic roots and existing faultlines that often underpin current crises, and for example, the highly politicised developments post-2008. Her work places contemporary political economy and geopolitics in historic and comparative context, providing exceptional insights, as I know we will hear today.
Schapiro was also known for traversing the boundaries between academia and the real world, also serving at the Bar and for working for the Intelligence Services, he spoke multiple languages and communication was his strong suit. Helen Thompson’s contributes – contribution to the public communication of complex political thought is exemplary. Her own willingness to accept the privileged position of academic knowledge has her leading the way in how to engage in political discourse as an academic. Her role, along with her colleague, David Runciman and Producer, Catherine Carr, in the Talking Politics podcast, which will be producing an issue on today’s lecture, has 120,000 average downloads per week, is reaching audiences that just might never have been able to access such discussions. Schapiro was also renowned for his dedication to teaching, and even when retired, returned to give weekly lectures to his students at LSA. Helen’s been Director of Studies at Clare College since 1995, has won University Prize for Teaching and has helped shape the lives and careers of many grateful young, and now, not so young scholars.
Finally though, I’ll leave you with a special place that both Leonard Schapiro and Helen Thompson have at the heart of G&O. Sam Finer’s beautiful obituary in G&O describes not only the immense scholarly contribution of Leonard Schapiro, but his place in minds and hearts as a great and dear man and as a great Teacher. Peter Reddaway talks of Schapiro’s integrity, his wholeness as a person, a citizen and a scholar. Julia [Inaudible – 09:41] says, “There’s no-one to whom I could more readily turn in time of difficulty and secure wise counsel, encouragement and moral support.” From Michael [inaudible – 09:50], “One’s approach to him was never a mixture, but one of indistinguishable admiration and affection.” It won’t surprise you to hear that when I approach colleagues for their thoughts on Helen’s contributions to the academy and to the journal, they came back to me echoing almost exactly those words.
Without further ado, I give you Professor Helen Thompson with the 2020 Government and Opposition, Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture on the Would-Be Federation Next Door: What Next for Britain [applause]?
Professor Helen Thompson
Well, thanks very much, Laura, for those extremely kind words. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here this evening, to give this year’s Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture, and my thanks to Laura and Erik for inviting me to Chatham House and to Hans, for hosting the lecture. I’m reasonably confident that I’ve heard more Schapiro lectures than anyone else, who’s ever given the – had the honour before, so I’m well aware of the standards that have been set before. Before I start, I would like to say a few words about two people, the first obviously being Leonard Schapiro.
Leonard Schapiro belonged to an academic world, where those who make a living from studying politics, were well down the road to taking refuge in narrow professional niches, but he did not. As a British born Jew, he spent part of his childhood in Latvia, perhaps he could not. He made his intellectual reputation, as Laura has said, because he refused to indulge a historiography that denied the origins of Bolshevism – sorry, denied the origins in Bolshevism of Stalin’s murderous tyranny. The academic world he did not live to see, became ever more detached from the actual political world. In my judgement, he became complacent about the political world. In this sense, the last half decade has been a wake-up call, a reminder that to study politics is to engage with matters of profound consequences. This is the world that could take Leonard Schapiro’s family from one side of Europe to the other and back again, and lead him to spend an intellectual lifetime, endeavouring to reconcile the competing ideals of cosmopolitanism in English common law.
My second tribute is to the late Mick Moran. It was Mick, when he was Editor of Government and Opposition, who invited me to my first Schapiro Lecture and I think, 20 years ago. Mick’s last book was The End of British Politics? It was an intelligent, passionate and a distinctly Celt perspective on where Brexit might leave British politics. I was flattered he asked me to comment on a draft. I sent him back what I’m pretty sure he received as a set of peculiarly English reflections. But his ability to see British politics, from a vantage point far from London, has remained a stimulation through my own attempts, over the past three and a half years, to try to understand what Brexit means.
I want tonight to reflect on Brexit as a long-term geopolitical phenomenon. My aim is to try to explain the geopolitical faultlines around Britain’s difficulties in being inside – oh, sorry, first being outside and then inside and now out again of the European Union. My purpose causes some immediate analytical difficulties. The first is how to situate geopolitical factors in relation to other factors. Given that Brexit is simultaneously a constitutional, economic and geopolitical issue, and given that there are faultlines around each in Britain’s EU membership, how can we analytically separate geopolitics from the rest? If we look at the build up to the referendum, then the constitutional and economic dynamics seem to matter much more than geopolitics. We don’t, it would seem, need geopolitics to explain how Britain’s EU membership, in its latter stages, came apart. But I would suggest that what could not be made to matter in 2016 was geopolitical, and that its absence is part of the explanation for Britain’s exit from the European Union.
The second analytical issue is the respective weight to give to structural explanations over contingency. I’m going to privilege long-term structural faultlines tonight, but I do recognise this approach is far from sufficient. On the contingency side, there are what might be called the three Cs: Cameron, Corbyn and Cummings. Replace Cameron with George Osborne, Corbyn with Yvette Cooper and posit a successful Vote Leave – sorry, a successful coup at Vote Leave to remove Cummings and Britain might still be inside the European Union. These counterfactuals are pertinent and deeply interesting, but I’m not going to address them tonight. I also think though, that these contingencies can be overdone. Too much Brexit analysis starts from the assumption that contesting Britain’s EU membership was a Conservative Party problem, then inflicted on the rest of the country. But the Conservative Party did not creative the EU problem in British politics, rather, from the 1990s, it became more sensitive to the EU faultlines and Labour because it was in power when the most acute predicament of Britain’s membership prior to 2016 occurred, namely what to do about monetary union, and when Black Wednesday provided the inadvertent answer to that question. So, in some sense, if structural problems of EU membership were coming to the fore, we would expect the Conservatives to have been in Office.
The third set of analytical issues to consider centre around the European Union itself, what kind of political entity is it? Well, obviously that could be a lecture in itself. I’m going to start from the premise that the EU can be analysed in conventional political categories. I take it as having features that are confederal, and features that are federal. In applying this terminology, I will distinguish between the economic and security spheres. The EU is now a confederation in security terms, although the EU is far from being a complete economic federation, its federal features are concentrated in the economic sphere, primarily the eurozone, constituted by a subset of EU members, and the single market, where there is much more enforceable authority than any other federal state with a single market.
The final analytical issue is when dealing with geopolitics in Britain’s relationship to continental Europe, when do we start? In principle, we could go back a very, very long way, because there are repeated patterns. But for all the persistence of old patterns, we should recognise that the EU and its predecessors have existed in specific geopolitical environments, all dominated by the United States, and that the relationship between the EU and NATO is of huge significance to the EU’s existence.
I’m going to lay out five successive predicaments British governments have faced about a confederal or federal European entity, proposed or actual, and explain how geopolitics stood in relation to each. I’m then going to present the future as a sixth predicament, in much the same terms. So let’s start at the very beginning, in the late 1940s, when the American President, and many in the US Congress, wanted the British Government to establish a customs union with other West European states. For Washington, a West European Economic Federation was a necessary condition of West European security, a problem, President Truman did not want to deal with via a military alliance. For the Attlee Government in Britain, this American expectation was problematic, both economically and geopolitically. Britain did twice as much trade with the Empire and the Commonwealth, as with continental Europe. And the Attlee Government wanted an American security guarantee, as did the French and the Benelux Governments, they wanted that guarantee, not simply to deal with the Soviet security threat the Americans identified, but what they saw as the German one.
A West European Customs Union that include Germany could not be the foundations for a federation to realise security, when in their minds, Germany was a security threat. In this respect, the fact that the customs union came to nothing, between 1947 and 1950, and the Truman Administration did agree, in 1949 to form NATO, with a direct American military guarantee, was a major British triumph. But NATO left two unresolved problems: namely French security, if and when the coal rich Tsar was returned to West Germany and West Germany’s security, in regard to the Soviet Union. The European Coal and Steel Community was the French response to the first problem. The same year it was agreed the Americans quickly brought the second issue to a head, by suggesting West Germany join NATO. Since this opposition was unacceptable to the French, a path now opened to a West European Security Federation via the European Defence Community, the treaty for which we signed in 1952.
For Britain, the European Defence Community was initially much more difficult to deal with than a customs union proposal had been. This time there was sufficient American pressure and financial inducement for France to move. If the European Defence Community had been ratified, Britain would have had to accept a Security Federation as a neighbour and might have been under persistent American pressure to end its defence sovereignty and join. Britain was saved this time by the French National Assembly’s unwillingness to ratify the treaty, but this was not simply a matter of good fortune, as might be said about the French electorate’s unwillingness to ratify the Constitutional Treaty 61 years later. The British Government had leverage over the European Defence Community’s fate because it could offer a long-term security guarantee to France to maintain British Forces on the continent. Indeed, it was French insistence, upon a long-term British troop commitment, that effectively derailed the European Defence Community. The British Government also had some security leverage over what happened next.
Anthony Eden’s Government was able to persuade the Americans to retain the troop guarantee they had given to the French before the Defence – European Defence Community fell, as well as add its own. This offer made it possible to persuade the French to accept a re-armed Germany inside NATO, an outcome which the British Government had largely wished for all along. British security leverage at this point was critical. Confronted with a choice between a European Security Federation and strong British participation in the European security structure, the French, in the final instance, chose British security participation. If though, Britain survived its first post-war European trials, there were already by 1955, indications of some of the deeper trouble to come.
The relative success of the European Coal and Steel Community and the failure of the European Defence Community led to new talks among the six, as they were sometimes known, for a customs union. These were senior talks and the subsequent Intergovernmental Conference setup Britain’s second European predicament, which ran from 1956 to 1973, the year of accession. This year – this proved much more difficult to resolve, although eventually, at some cost, it was.
The NATO settlement over West Germany made it possible for the six to return to economic matters. Although the Intergovernmental Conference began in the summer of 1956, it was the Suez Crisis in October, November that year that created the decisive political conditions for the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community.
The Suez Crisis graphically demonstrated that while NATO, with West Germany inside, might have provided an answer to the Soviet threat problem, it offered no answer at all to West European energy security problems in the Middle East. 70% of oil to Western Europe in 1956, came through the Suez Canal. West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, described the British French military intervention against Egypt as an act of European raison d’état and was appalled that the American President prevented the West European states acting to prevent their interests.
Suez saw several partings of the way on energy security. Some West European states led by Italy, began to cultivate an energy relationship with the Soviet Union. The French wanted energy independence and hoped that an EEC Customs Union that included oil rich and French ruled Algeria, would help secure it. By contrast, the British Government thought that it could still rely on supply from Iran and Iraq and wished to restore the US relationship, and despite Suez, the US still needed Britain to act as a security guarantor for oil, via the Persian Gulf. The European Economic Community’s emergence in 1957, as part of the six’s response to Suez, posed acute problems for Britain because the customs union ensured discrimination against British exports.
The Macmillan Government tried to use the security issue to procure a free trade agreement between the British led European free trade area and the European Economic Community, since EEC membership would have involved subordinating constitutional issues to trade and having to discriminate against Commonwealth goods. But Macmillan’s rather darkly worded threats were useless. Quite simply, once Britain had made the commitment to maintain troops in West Germany, not least to Washington, withdrawing them was, to all intents and purposes, impossible. The different British and French responses to the Suez Crisis also meant the beginning of a long-term conflict between Britain and France about West European military security, especially after Charles de Gaulle came to power. This divergence too, added a sharper geopolitical dimension to the now already vexed trade-offs for Britain between economic and constitutional ends. To make the predicament worse, de Gaulle’s security purposes created a new pressure for British EEC membership from the United States. Once de Gaulle effectively pushed for a West European Security Confederation, in some sense, it must be said to replace the EEC, President Kennedy wanted Britain inside the community, to keep the community allied to NATO.
Macmillan was willing to trade a membership application for obtaining Polaris missiles from Kennedy, but doing Washington’s bidding to protect NATO, could only invite a French veto, and made joining the EEC, to deal with the trade problem, even more difficult and in the end, impossible, so long as de Gaulle remained in power. Membership, for economic reasons, did become viable, once de Gaulle left Office, albeit the constitutional problems raised by the primacy of EU law had, in part, to be fudged and part kicked into touch.
Entry to the European Community in 1973 also represented a geopolitical reorientation from the United States that, in principle, could have lessened the geopolitical tensions between Britain and other EEC members, especially France. The end of the French veto coincided with a crisis of Britain’s Washington relationship over Britain’s military withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. During the Yom Kippur War and the oil price shock, Heath moved British policy to the French side, over Middle Eastern matters, prompting a furious reaction from Henry Kissinger, who promptly suspended American intelligence sharing with London. Nonetheless, even at the point of accession to the European Community, there were clear limits to any alignment of British and French geopolitical perspectives.
During the 1973 to 74 energy crisis, the French insisted on independent action, ensuring no collective European Community policy emerged. Without one, Heath sided with the Americans and not the French, over the 1974 Washington Energy Conference.
Meanwhile, de Gaulle’s successors remained unwilling to take France back into NATO’s joint military command, from which de Gaulle had removed the country in 1966. Without common security ground between France and Britain, the European Community would still be dominated by its capacity for economic federation. This would come to include the very awkward military issue, where the Heath Government abandoned Britain’s first commitment to a European policy framework in the snake in the tunnel, before accession even took place. This would have lasting consequences for Britain’s approach to European monetary matters.
Predicament number three for Britain, I would suggest, ran from 1988 to 2003. Again, it involved the relationship between the EU, as an economic federation, and a possible security confederation, and again, it eventually involved the Middle East. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the European Community gear up to become a monetary union. It also experienced the geopolitical shock in the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. The first of these developments created a problem for Britain and the second, and potential, albeit complex opportunity. Monetary union proved a large scale problem. Britain was outside the exchange rate mechanism, when the discussions began, and there was little prospect that participating in a single currency, could readily be domestically legitimated. Nonetheless, staying out appeared to come at a high price. Enough members of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet thought that since monetary union was likely to happen, keeping options open, was the price that had to be paid for retaining British political influence within the community. Mrs Thatcher of course disagreed, and her Cabinet colleagues accordingly removed her.
But John Major’s ‘keep options open’ approach was soon wrecked by Black Wednesday. What had been a de facto opt in to monetary union in the Maastricht Treaty became after September 1992, a clear opt out position. Indeed, this opt out strategy became the template for all awkward treaty changes, thereafter. Meanwhile, the geopolitical shock of the Cold War’s end opened up a possible path again to the EU becoming a security confederation. The Major Government wanted to make the security confederation provisions in the Maastricht Treaty in practice, absolutely NATO dependent. It was helped in this by the fact that the EU supposed foreign policy hour of Europe in the Balkans, turned into a disaster requiring NATO intervention.
Tony Blair, by contrast, attempted a radical shift in strategy. For Blair, making the EU an actual security federation was the means to ground politically, Britain’s EU membership and increased British influence. An EU that was a deeper security confederation could, he thought, shift the EU’s centre of gravity to an area where Britain could exercise leadership. This strategy entailed moving closer to France and accepting the EU should have at least some military independence from NATO. The bilateral Franco British Saint-Malo declaration in 1998, provided the basis for the EU to acquire some military capability for peacekeeping purposes, but Blair’s strategy came apart over events in the Middle East.
Barrick bankrupted Blair’s ambitions, when he could not persuade the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder and the French President, Jacques Chirac, to support the war. Blair wanted a common EU position on a Middle East issue, when one was simply not available. Moreover, the Iraq War now illustrated how Middle Eastern discord could spread to divisions within the European Union about Russia. Jacques Chirac could not contain his fury that those East European states that were about to join the EU sided with Washington over Paris, putting NATO and their Russian fears first. Without any realistic prospect that the EU could develop as a security confederation, Blair was back to the problem he inherited. If the EU were a partial economic federation and Britain could not join monetary union in the absence of democratic support, there were limits to British political influence inside the EU.
Predicament four, I would suggest ran from 2009 to the referendum in 2016, and it’s centred on the hitherto suppressed constitutional legitimation problem, the eurozone crisis and their lethal interaction. By 2005, all three then principal British Political Parties had reached a consensus that there had to be a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. This could have produced a crisis for British membership, if the Labour Government had had to go ahead with the referendum, but this was avoided by the French and Dutch no’s to the treaty. The repackaging of the Constitutional Treaty as the Lisbon Treaty, restored the problem. Gordon Brown responded by ignoring it, in good part, because any attempt to re-legitimate membership via any referendum was, as Cameron was to discover, very risky. But the Conservatives could not as readily ignore the constitution legitimation problem. The Coalition Government passed the 2011 European Act, which promised a referendum on any new treaty that removed powers from Westminster and it also made a commitment to try to renegotiate some Lisbon powers back from the EU.
The eurozone crisis pushed Cameron’s attempts to claim powers back in the direction of protecting financial services for new single market regulations. But even in principle, this could only have worked with a confederal opt out tactic on a new treaty, and the 2011 European Union Act added to the unlikelihood of there being one. Moreover, financial services in the City were never viable issues for constitutional re-legitimation. Fraught as it already was, the claim powers back strategy was then derailed by the politics of freedom of movement, under conditions of the eurozone crisis. Confronted with the rise in UKIP, Cameron switched from an initial promise in his Bloomberg speech to concentre renegotiations around the relationship between the single market and monetary union, and switched to the issue of freedom of movement.
This move was more domestically coherent in – this move was more domestically coherent in motivation, but even more impossible to realise inside the EU. And wanting an emergency break, Cameron took on the single market’s extremely strong unitary authority. Cameron was now endeavouring to have voters re-legitimate the status quo of Britain’s EU membership, but the status quo, after they had witnessed a demonstration that Britain was part of an economic federation, where sovereignty belonged to the EU and not the British Parliament. These developments appear free from geopolitics and security, but I would suggest they were not.
Cameron, after all, wanted to solve the problem of constitutional legitimation. The question is, why he politically failed. This can be seen as a matter of the referendum itself, but I would suggest that it was more a matter of the renegotiation. After all, Cameron conceived a two-step sequential move, and the first part conspicuously failed. Procedurally, Cameron conceived of the renegotiations as dealing first and foremost with Germany, effectively appealing to the undoubted display of emergency decision-making exhibited by Merkel, during the eurozone and refugee and migrant crises. But Merkel had no incentive at all to move on a single market for its own sake, and so to compromise, would have to have been convinced there was a serious risk of Britain leaving, and to fear that this outcome would have deleterious geopolitical and security consequences for the EU. Yet, German politics is the crucial reason the EU struggles to engage at all with geopolitical questions and is a weak security confederation. As recent German pronouncements on NATO have shown, German Politicians, including Merkel, tend to assume that because Germany needs NATO to provide security, the EU-NATO relationship in its existing form must endure.
Even now Brexit is happening, the German Government still seems to assume that Britain must commit to European security, regardless of what economic relationship is negotiated. The other week, AKK, Merkel’s supposed successor, said that on defence and foreign policy, “The UK has to be a privileged third party in our German and EU co-operation,” while simultaneously warning that “A trade agreement will be harder to negotiate because there could be no question of British cherry picking.” On the French side, where geopolitics and security very much do matter, the Cameron Government was in no position to incite fear either. Since 2010, Britain and France have been bound by bilateral security framework, the Lancaster House Treaties. These gave France an institutional architecture for the institutional relationship with Britain, whether Britain stayed or left the European Union.
Within the EU security federation, Britain was also still an unreliable ally for France. Although France fully returned to NATO in 2009, the [inaudible – 35:39] Government saw the EU security confederation in essentially Gaullist terms, as an entity that needed more autonomy from NATO. This was not Cameron’s view at all, ensuring his government blocked proposals, among other things, for an EU military Headquarters. Seen this way, the German Government was not movable on the single market for Cameron because it does not expect to have to make any concessions, in other spheres, for geopolitical reasons.
For the French, meanwhile, Brexit offered the potential opportunity to make the EU security confederation more substantial, without any real risk of France losing a privileged security relationship with Britain. In sum, the EU’s weaknesses, as a security confederation on geopolitical matters, ensured there was little incentive for the French Government to make concessions on a single market, and little likelihood of the German Government doing so.
The fifth British predicament runs from June 2016, the referendum to December 2019, and might be considered twofold, reflecting the obviously now bitter divisions in the British party policy, for the May, and then the Johnson Governments, was how to negotiate a withdrawal agreement that could pass the House of Commons, and for Remainers in Parliament, how, at least after the 2017 General Election, to re-contest the decision to leave. I shall concentrate entirely on the first of these, although I would suggest that a significant part of the attempt in Parliament to stop Brexit, came from a judgement that Britain’s geopolitical position in the world should not be subordinated to British democratic politics.
Let’s start with the protracted difficulties in the Article 50 negotiations with what the astute French Analyst, François Heisbourg, identifies as a paradox. In 2016, “It was reasonable,” he wrote, “to expect that governments sharing the same basic defence and security interests would behave rationally and work together to limit the negative consequences of Brexit.” I think the geopolitical explanation, and of course it’s not the only one, of why Article 50 negotiations instead became as fraught and potentially as destructive as they did, starts again with the weakness of the EU as a security federation and its reliance on NATO. This ensured Britain was still bound into ongoing security co-operation with most EU members, whatever happened.
In order to have followed through on the implicit security threat in Theresa May’s Article 50 letter in 2017, if Britain was asked for more than the government would contemplate on the economic side, there would have to have been sufficient domestic political consensus to make leaving the EU about Britain’s relationship to the EU via NATO too. This would have meant an overt alliance with Donald Trump. Yet, there was nothing remotely like the domestic political consensus to raise the stakes on NATO matters and ally with Trump.
By the Future Partnership document, published in July 2018, the Government was, to the contrary, saying that Britain was, “Unconditionally committed to maintaining European security and could continue to contribute to common defence and security policy operations.” In this respect, the incentive for the EU to prioritise long-term security co-operation over the single market’s cohesion was not there. Heisbourg’s paradox is, in part, further explained by the fact that after the referendum result, there was a shift in the EU on security policy. So there wasn’t really an established security status quo, from which the Article 50 negotiations could begin. With Britain leaving the EU, moves to which Britain had been opposed could be agreed, including an EU military headquarters and a framework for some states to integrate further in defence, under what was called Permanent Structured Co-operation.
In December 2017, the EU’s then High Representative for Foreign Security Policy said, “All the building blocks of a security and defence union are finally there.” One of those building blocks you could have added was Brexit, but of course, the EU actually becoming a load bearing security federation is an entirely other matter. The EU remains completely constrained in this area by Germany’s extremely limited monetary capability, and by profound internal disagreements about NATO.” In reality, any security ambitions the European Union have, still require a close relationship with Britain.
What in French terms was previously EU strategic autonomy, is now European strategic autonomy. Macron does want an ongoing security partnership with Britain. He’s shown no inclination to bin the Lancaster House Treaties. The European Intervention Initiative he pushed to provide a military capacity for intervention in crises around the EU’s borders, exist institutionally outside the European Union and it does so to include Britain. Indeed, Macron is clearly more interested in the European Intervention Initiative than the EU-based Permanent Structured Co-operation Framework. It was Theresa May who chose not to use this enduring common security ground with France, to try to make the withdrawal agreement more palatable to Conservative MPs. Indeed, by agreeing to participate in the European Intervention Initiative, without then having securely withdrawn agreement, she went, we might say, in the opposite direction.
However, there was a clear change of approach on security in geopolitical questions, when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Johnson sought and got changes to the political declaration on future military co-operation, with new language stating that Britain would retain sovereignty in deciding levels of co-operation. He also immediately made a change on a matter around Iran. May had stuck with France and Germany on almost all matters Iranian, after Trump ended the Iran Nuclear Deal. This included trying to put together a European naval response, when Iran seized a British flagged tanker in the Persian Gulf last summer. On day one, on becoming Prime Minister, Johnson had the Navy join the US led operation in the Gulf. So, literally, Johnson has since kept Britain allied to Germany and France, in what has proved a vain attempt to preserve the Nuclear Deal, and he issued a joint statement with Macron and Merkel, in response to General Soleimani’s assassination. But his decision over naval action in the Persian Gulf was a demonstration that Britain had on Iran, the capacity to withdraw co-operation and ally with the United States. It was also a demonstration, not for the first time, how far Britain and the EU share basic security interests in the Middle East, is very much disputable and very much politically contested.
What then about the future, that’s the sixth predicament? Now Britain has left the European Union, how can the Johnson Government simultaneously construct new economic and security relationships with the EU, whilst establishing Britain’s own territorial union, under secessionist pressure in at least Scotland? If we put this predicament into its geopolitical context, the possible contingency of the American relationship to Europe is, I would argue, now central. There is the risk that the American security guarantee to the EU via NATO is coming to an end. That would be a problem for Britain, regardless of Brexit. The British Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace recently told The Sunday Times that the prospect of the US ending the security commitment keeps him awake at night.
The case for this fear goes beyond Trump’s reported personal threats to withdrawing the US from NATO. In a world in which the United States’ geopolitical priority is containing China, NATO is a secondary consideration, but there can be no common EU or EU plus Britain response to this problem. The American international relations scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that “Since Russia does not have the capacity to dominate Europe, the United States doesn’t need a permanent military presence in Europe and can be an offshore balancer.” But, in practice, the United States has increased its military presence in Europe in recent years, primarily by deployments in Poland and the three Baltic states.
What might be on offer in any post NATO scenario would perhaps be security guarantees to individual East European states, in regard to Russia. This will be an outcome that would obviously be incredibly divisive within the EU, especially given Macron’s desire to reset Russian relations. It would raise the question of whether Britain could or would back bilateral American security guarantees, and at what political cost it could and would do so. Then there are the questions of the Persian Gulf and Iran, and how far these will continue to expose differences between Britain and France and Germany.
On the Persian Gulf, Trump has also been frustrated, claiming that the Europeans, Japan and China are all free riding on the American Navy, when he says the United States no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. But American withdrawal is unlikely, not least since the American economy would seriously suffer from a large hike in oil prices, caused by supply problems with the Strait performers, and no American President is likely to want the Chinese Navy policing the Gulf. There will, though, perhaps be more pressure on the EU about burden sharing in the Gulf, since with Britain having left, and Albania’s accession talks having been vetoed, no EU member state or prospective member state is contributing at the moment to naval protection for ships in the Strait.
But Germany in particular is unlikely to move closer to the American position, especially given that it now imports relatively little oil from the Middle East. Perhaps the question is more whether Britain allying overtly with the United States militarily in the Persian Gulf last summer, is a portend of a bigger break with France and Germany on Iran. Despite the unity displayed over the Nuclear Deal there are clear faultlines between Britain and France and Germany over Iran. Britain does much less trade with Iran than the other two, it was much more enthusiastic about the new sanctions regime from 2011, that created the conditions for the Nuclear Deal. It has much closer relations with the Sunni Gulf states, including as a beneficiary of foreign direct investment.
The May Government banned all wings of Hezbollah, a position that holds in the US, but not in the EU or individual EU states, except the Netherlands. For the long-term, Britain is also much more tied to oil and gas for the Middle Eastern and France, and particularly, Germany. As North Sea production dwindles, Britain will become a large importer from outside Europe again. It does not have an energy relationship with Germany – sorry, does not have an energy relationship with Russia, as Germany, and to a lesser extent, France do, and nor could it establish one without an Atlantic crisis. These differences, in part, underpin the British naval position in the Persian Gulf. The British Navy has now maintained a continuous presence there since 1980.
In 2018, after a decision taken four years earlier, Britain opened a naval base in Bahrain, its first permanent military base East of Suez since it retreated from such commitments just before European Community accession. You see, in this way, the May’s Government’s willingness to hug the EU so close on the Nuclear Deal may have been the aberration. Johnson is not likely to escape ongoing Iran issues in working out Britain’s future and economic security relationships with the EU, any more than Macmillan and his successors could escape the legacy of Suez.
To conclude, Britain has faced ongoing difficulties around the EU and its predecessors, generated by the geopolitical environment, and questions of how to judge geopolitical considerations, in relation to economic and constitutional considerations. In part, these predicaments have arisen from Europe’s general post-war geopolitical difficulties. There are structural faultlines around military and energy for European’s military and energy security for European states that have run straight through from the late 1940s. One, existing relation to the EU’s awkward relationship to NATO as a military alliance, the second, runs between the European states themselves and between some European states and the United States over energy, and it has repeatedly involved conflicting approaches to Middle Eastern difficulties. Choices around what British governments can and cannot extract from Britain’s security relationship to the EU and its predecessors and how they can manage their differences with France and Germany over energy in the Middle East, have been impossible to avoid, and there have, thus far, not been politically sustainable answers.
Boris Johnson’s Government will now try to construct an economic relationship with an economic confederation, with very strong regulatory power and will quite probably have to try to make use of security and geopolitical issues, to get much beyond a minimalist agreement. Without success here, the economic disruption from leaving the European Union will be substantial, but to profit from broad security issues, will be to force a geopolitical reckoning for the EU of the kind it has thus far avoided. One could argue that there are a number of forces building towards that reckoning, well beyond Britain’s succession from the EU. The failure in Ukraine, Trump’s election and quite probable re-election, and Macron’s election and subsequent deep disappointment with the German Government. But the EU’s own geopolitical and NATO divisions – sorry, I’ll start again. But the EU’s own geopolitical faultlines and NATO’s divisions cannot actually be resolved, and remain easier to avoid, not least with Germany.
Macron too, for all his preoccupation with geopolitical matters and near contempt for taking the single market as the EU’s defining purpose, still has to make his own trade-offs about geopolitical objectives, in relation to French domestic economic and political constraints, including the charge issue of fishing. Franco-British rivalry is not suddenly going to disappear because both sides are exasperated with the Germans about the Sahel. In a world geopolitically dominated by the United States, whether European Union exists as a neighbour and whether European Union and NATO are divided about military and energy security, British Governments will continue to face very sharp predicaments about how Britain can have a politically sustainable relationship with the European Union and at what domestic political price [applause].
Hans Kundnani
That was brilliant, Helen, as we expected, and challenging, and I always think that listening to you talk about Brexit and reading you on Brexit makes one realise how superficial and, I think, historical, a lot of the debate we’ve been having in Britain, over the last few years has been. I – there’s a million things I’d like to ask you about. I do want to take some questions from the audience, we don’t have a huge amount of time. But maybe I can just push you a little on – to spell out a little bit more what the story you told, and particularly about the geopolitics, what it tells us about Brexit I suppose, in particular this distinction that you made between the sort of security realm and the economic realm. You know, you told this story about the EU as a partial economic federation and as a weak security confederation. What about that was the problem for Britain? I mean, let me put it this way, if the EU had gone further, for example, in economic federation or if, for example, it had been a stronger security confederation, would that have made the British – the series of dilemmas that you’ve described, would it have worsened them or made it easier for Britain to deal with Europe?
Professor Helen Thompson
That’s a good question. I do have a whole section about this that I took out. I think that early on, and perhaps even – certainly early on, a security confederation that had a clear relationship to NATO and that that was the focus of, if you like, to use the language that I was trying to avoid, of West European integration, that that would have been easier for Britain. Because you would have expected Britain to be able to exercise more influence in a security confederation than in any kind of economic relationship. The problem with the economic confederation, federation, whichever way we want to describe that, I think, changes over time. To begin with, it’s a trade question, it involves a significant trade adjustment because of Imperial and Commonwealth trade and moving away from it, and then from 19 – well, I was going to say from 1972 it becomes a monetary question. But I actually think you can see the monetary issue already at work in the 1960s, if you look at de Gaulle’s second veto. So when he vetoes the application of the Labour Government in 1967, he actually makes quite a strong point about sterling and sterling not being a currency that’s suitable to be with these other European currencies. So, the argument he makes about Trojan horse and American security interests is the first veto and then he moves onto the monetary issue, actually quite explicitly in the second veto. So I think that it’s trade, it becomes monetary issues quite quickly and then it becomes monetary issues emphatically.
But I think that the difficulty in saying that, okay, if the primary orientation of whatever the E – the security federation was going to call itself, that that was something that Britain could dominate or at least have an equal partnership with France in, would have run into the French difficulty. Because the French difficulty is that they do not want security to be so dependent on the Americans, and so you would have to have imagined a British Government that had a different attitude towards NATO, or you would have to have imagined that de Gaulle didn’t go down the path in which he did. But de Gaulle was only an extreme version, if you like, and I’m not using extreme in a derogatory way, of the French response to Suez in 1956, because they take – the lesson out of that is, you cannot be dependent on the Americans like this, ‘cause the Americans will just screw us over. And, you know, we can’t be reliant on them and unless you’re going to say…
Hans Kundnani
But Adenaeur says at that moment to the French, “Build Europe, it will be your revenge.”
Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, yeah, and Adenaeur was probably – is furious – he’s probably even more furious about it. I’ve been actually reading quite a bit about Suez, just before Christmas. Adenauer was probably even more furious about it than the French and the British are, actually.
Hans Kundnani
So – but in a sense then, there’s a kind of a zero sum gain, isn’t there?
Professor Helen Thompson
It is, but the thing is, is that you can clearly manage these problems, and that’s partly the story – you could tell the story slightly differently than what I did and suggest that that what happens is, is that you should just keep trying to manage the predicaments and you shouldn’t try to solve them. And that Cameron’s mistake was to try to solve something that was unsolvable, and that he thought that there was a, sort of, like, sticking plaster that could be put onto the constitutional legitimation question. And he didn’t realise how all the different bits fitted together and that the sticking plaster actually was going to be destructive. So, I don’t know whether it has to be zero sum in the end, but I do think that we all have to accept that it is a genuine predicament to which there isn’t actually a solution.
Hans Kundnani
Yes. Then after the referendum in 2016, both the UK and the EU decide to kind of separate the economic and security realms and there’s this kind of, as I say, agreement almost, to not allow questions of security and Britain’s commitment to European security to, in any way, influence the negotiations about the economic relationship. Do you think that was a mistake?
Professor Helen Thompson
I think that – I think it was odd, I’ll go that far, aside from anything else, because it’s not clear, as I was suggesting, it’s not clear how – well, put it differently. The only sort of two potential cards that the UK had was either the threat of no-deal or making some security threat. Now, the threat of no-deal wasn’t plausible because there was nowhere near sufficient domestic political support for Brexit, in order to think that you could sort of absorb that level of economic disruption into British politics. So what was left was the security card, and now, I don’t think that’s an easy card to play, not least because I think the Germans are just – they just don’t think like that. They just – I mean, it’s a repeated pattern, not just with the British, but with the Americans, and to some extent, the French. Is, is that they don’t do trade-offs between economic questions and security and geopolitical questions. It drives everybody else mad, but they don’t do it. They may have to in the future, but I wouldn’t even necessarily bet on that. So, I think there was a strong sense – I mean, and I say this just from things I’ve picked up, rather than having really decisive evidence about this, that the Foreign Office did not want foreign policy questions to get mixed up with trade questions, so they wanted separate spheres.
Hans Kundnani
Yes, it seemed to be sort of indecent at the time.
Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, and that Theresa May’s attempt then to tie them together in the Article 50 letter came apart as soon as the – she lost the majority in 2017, and was generally in a much weaker position. And that – clearly that approach clearly caused a great deal of consternation amongst people in the Conservative Party. And I do think there was an attempt to shift this when Johnson came into power. I’m not suggesting whether it was saying anything about whether it was successful or not, I just think you can see some change of approach.
Hans Kundnani
And do you see, going forward, given, as you say, the shift under Boris Johnson, that Britain might, in some way, play that security contribution in a different way?
Professor Helen Thompson
I think it’s the Iran question that really is the issue going forward, and I think if you look at trying to make sense of what Johnson’s done on that, he has gone both ways to say he did make this, really, I think, pretty significant decision on day one about the naval action in the Gulf. But he has still hugged Macron and Merkel close on other Iran issues thus far, but clearly, this Iran issue is going to be a really ongoing division between European states and President Trump. And it’s going to be a division between, Britain, I think, and the – and Germany and France, because of the just basic calculation of interests are not the same.
Hans Kundnani
Yeah, and it’s really interesting what you were saying about Britain’s potentially increased independence on Middle Eastern oil. Let’s take some questions and comments from the audience. The gentleman right at the back there and we’ll take maybe a group of three.
John O’Neill
And thank you for…
Hans Kundnani
And would you introduce yourself before you…
John O’Neill
Hi. My name’s John O’Neill, I’m just here in a private capacity. Thank you for a wonderful lecture. I just wanted to ask you about exactly the point you’ve just been addressing there. So, I think one of your themes was that in order to gain economic leverage the UK’s strongest card is security, and I think you’ve outlined very interestingly, the situation in the Persian Gulf. But I just wondered, do you think that’s sufficiently important to the EU to create economic leverage? And if it isn’t sufficiently important, do you think there’s any credible threats or security cards the UK can play within Europe itself?
Hans Kundnani
Okay, the gentleman in the middle.
Don Shallowsby
Don Shallowsby, Chatham House Member. I refer to your – to the title of your lecture, especially to What Next for Britain and what next for the European Union? I think we may be making a grave error, assigning the same pace of change to the future event as has been the case for the last 100 years or so. The world has started to change at almost exponential rate, in most domains, and you think about the British politics in just two years, in this six months, this just confirms what is happening. And if we take that point of view, that means that within ten years, by the end of this decade, things will evolve much, much faster, perhaps what takes one year will take one week. My point is that the European Union, when – it doesn’t have a comfort to stand still, it has to federate, and in my view, that will happen within – by the end of this decade. If it doesn’t, it would mean that something horrible happened to the whole world because we can’t be strangers on this planet. We have to be united, we have to share our sovereignty and not to grab it, that’s my first point, so I believe that the European federation will happen by the end of.
The second one is regarding Britain. I think Brexit is an enormous opportunity for us, because it is highly likely that the union will fall apart, in order to reconstitute itself, an entirely different configuration with smaller, if you like, devolved regions, including perhaps, Ireland. And that new Britain will have a much better chance and will feel much better within the new European federation, what do you think about that? Thank you.
Hans Kundnani
Thank you. And then, the lady here by the aisle, yes.
Lucia
Hello. I’m Lucia and I have a question, I guess, in the same vein of what’s next? And I’m sorry if you maybe didn’t want to talk about it. But I wondered what you think structurally, the implications of that kind of pro Europe rump in British politics, might be and kind of what the people’s vote campaign or that kind of whole structure then does and what that might mean for British politics, in the next ten/20, whatever, years?
Hans Kundnani
Great. So, is security important enough for the EU, then it gives Britain leverage, the future of the EU, I guess, will it federate or will it collapse, and what happens to the pro-European movement in Britain?
Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, I mean, I think that the – at the moment I would say that by itself, security is not enough for the EU to make significant compromises, when it comes to the economic relationship.
Hans Kundnani
Even after Trump?
Professor Helen Thompson
Well, that’s – when I – what I meant by that was, without regard for the Americans. So, I think that you can’t separate out the question of like British potential security leverage in the next few years, from the question, which is what I was suggesting at the end, as to what happens to NATO. I think that these two go hand-in-hand, and then I think that what happens to NATO also matters for what goes on in the Middle East, not just actually in the Persian Gulf because, you know, if we look at Macron’s critique of NATO, it’s got various aspects to it. But one of them is his deep frustration with NATO, in relation to the Middle East. He wants a NATO that’s going to be doing more there. And I actually think that the Syrian Crisis in 2013, actually did – actually, quite badly hurt British-French relations in that build up to Cameron’s renegotiations, because as far as Macron’s concerned, and I don’t think [inaudible – 65:08] view was any different. That that was the beginning, the withdrawal from those air strikes against the Assad regime in September 2013, was the beginning of what Macron’s since described as western collapse, you know, in the Middle East. So, I think all these things are interconnected.
I think at the same time is, is that the security side of it, in relation to simply Europe itself, which means essentially like Russia and the Baltics is complicated by the fact, again, that the French and Germans are in rather different positions. You know, the Germans are obviously significantly more committed to protection of those states, much less willing to think about a general rethink with Russia, with the big caveat obviously, that Germany wants to maintain its energy relationship with Russia. So, the question of whether Britain and French are likely to agree, I think, about Baltic security matters, is – well, I think that’s open to question, and I think that there might be continual – there might be significant disagreement.
I think on the question of the EU’s future, I think that this is again, hard. On the one hand, I think you can say that if the NATO shock comes that is a fundamental huge problem for the EU, is because it takes the provision of security for granted via NATO. And you cannot be a political entity that doesn’t have security provided from – external security provided from somewhere. If NATO is the EU’s answer, and that stops, then the EU has to face that question itself, that’s a massive existential question for the EU.
The second thing is, is though, the monetary union is, regardless of how any of us might think that monetary union care about or the rights and wrongs of it or the consequences it has for Southern Europe, you can’t readily undo monetary union, without more extraordinarily disruptive consequences. And probably a great deal of suffering, because you have all this debt that’s denominated in euros in Southern Europe and in – particular, but not only in Southern Europe. So, I find it quite hard to see how the EU simply falls apart, when you have a monetary union that has as much debt as this monetary union does.
Now, I agree with you that actually, things could actually change incredibly rapidly over the next decade. I think that some of the, if you like, deep structural faultlines that are working themselves out have got the capacity to produce, you know, very rapid economic and political change. And, you know, you can see this, in some sense, with Cameron and Brexit, he embarked on what he thought was, not a minor move, but a kind of a way in which the problem’s going to be – if not exactly completely solved, at least kicked into touch for another ten or 20 years. And it all just came – it unravelled and it unravelled, I think, in ways that he didn’t understand, it had unravelled, for instance, because he didn’t think through what the consequences of the 2011 EU Act and making that commitment about holding a referendum, when he was simultaneously trying to have a treaty. Because actually, if we hold – if he said that there had to be a referendum in Britain, on any new treaty, he pretty much guaranteed that there couldn’t be a new treaty because everybody understood that a treaty – a referendum on a treaty in Britain, would lead to a no vote. So actually, you’ve got such complicated dynamics that interact with each other, that the capacity, I think, for things, not necessarily to fall apart, but to enter into considerable flux is, you know, is very considerable.
On the pro-European group, faction, whatever we want to call it in British politics, I mean, it is the paradox of Brexit that for the first time it’s created a significant pro-European political force in this country. Now, I think you can sort of – I can be sometimes somewhat sceptical about how much of it is actually to do with the European Union and how much of it is a symbol for other things. But in some sense, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s sort of deeply thought through or coherent, it’s symbolically attached to this cause now. I think that it will manifest itself in British politics, but not really necessarily in relation to Britain’s future relations with the European Union. I think you will see it, over questions about what immigration policy is going to be. We can see that, I think, already in the Labour leadership election campaign, where you have Keir Starmer suggesting that his policy, if he were Labour Leader, would be to go back to EU freedom of movement, and I think that a lot of – well, I’m going to put that differently. I think to the extent that that pro-European sentiment is driven by something very substantive, but it has been driven by the freedom of movement issue, so I would expect to see ongoing sort of political contest around that. But what I don’t think it’s going to do is going to manifest itself into a strong political movement for re-joining the European Union. I think that for all the difficulties that the next few years are going to bring, and they are going to be many, is the idea that Britain’s going to go back to the European Union and start opening up these questions that it managed to close before, not least the monetary union question, I just can’t see that happening.
Hans Kundnani
Why not?
Professor Helen Thompson
Because I think the monetary union is just such a no-go really. I mean, is that aside from anything else…
Hans Kundnani
So, almost, because if Britain were to re-join, it would have to join economic and monetary union?
Professor Helen Thompson
Yeah, and aside from anything else, is that if you look at the polling on this, there’s hardly any shift still on attitudes towards the single currency in Britain, compared to the more general expressions of pro-European sentiment or being pro freedom of movement. And that the consequences, I think, for Britain of trying to adjust its – what’s the way of putting it? At times, fraught macroeconomic policymaking into a German-based discipline, I just can’t see it.
Hans Kundnani
So could you – so, in other words, you think it’s impossible that the EU could make some offer to Britain that didn’t involve Britain joining the euro?
Professor Helen Thompson
Well, okay, I wouldn’t absolutely say that that’s out of the question. I mean, if we’re talking about, you know, the EU having completely reinvented itself in ten years’ time, possibly, except I would put in the caveat that it’s very difficult for the EU to reinvent itself where monetary union’s concerned. I mean, it’s much more likely to collapse, in that sense, than it is to be able to reinvent itself.
Hans Kundnani
But wouldn’t it be possible that, for example, some of the other EU member states that aren’t members of the euro would somehow reach some kind of, you know, more definitive arrangement that would involve them being euro outs forever and then Britain could join on that basis?
Professor Helen Thompson
I think that the thing is, is that at a certain point you have to start thinking about like what’s the interaction again between the monetary ins and outs and the security tensions? And so that clearly, you know, the main group of outs are in Eastern Europe, and if you’re entering a period of fraught difficulties around the NATO question and then you’re trying to intersect that with the monetary ins and outs, I don’t think it adds up to anything particularly coherent.
Hans Kundnani
Yeah. I wish we could keep going, I’m afraid we’re out of time. I would have loved to have a taken a question from Anand, I’m sorry, Anand, but we – do all come upstairs for – join us for a drink. Thank you very much for you all, for your questions and for coming. Thank you very much to Government and Opposition, to Erik and to Laura and above all, to Helen for coming along and giving the lecture. Thank you [applause].
