Britain, Don’t Leave the E.U., Only You Can Save It.

Dear Britons: I feel your pain. As a former Brussels correspondent still traumatized by the posting, I have no illusions left about the European Union’s shortcomings and overreaches. I won’t play the Good German, begging you to stay. If you feel you have to leave, of course you must. But there’s this: A Brexit isn’t in your national interest. And I believe that, in leaving, you would betray your nation’s heritage.

In fact, you Britons have backed the winning horse. Thanks to you, today’s European Union is more ready than ever to own up to its failures. That is something you have always demanded and, now, have finally secured.

That’s why I don’t get the point of a Brexit. Just as your time has come, as the Continent sits up and listens to London, you want to slink away in a sulk? Even in Germany, the homeland of starry-eyed euro-naïveté, you are no longer deemed “anti-European” for pointing out the hollowness of the union’s many promises — promises that have now become problems.

The first false promise you spotted was the European Union elites’ lazy leniency, their false friendship toward one another and to the challenges of our times. The union regularly goes small on the big issues and big on the small issues. What we needed in Brussels was sobriety and what we got was sentimentality.

The second false promise: the solemn vow of peace and prosperity underpinning the euro. But the hasty start-up of the common currency reinforced the European tendency to waste money. That, in turn, weakened Europe’s economic region. The euro has not become a tie that binds, but a bind that divides. You warned us. We didn’t listen.

Third: that Europe’s inner borders could be lifted as the outer border was closed. What happened? The largest movement of refugees since the end of the Second World War has seen the outer border drop open like a broken barn door. As a result national barriers are springing up again across the Continent. Again you were right when you suspected from the start that the European Union would not deliver a proper border regime.

A fourth promise was an area of common rule of law, that in order for states to participate, they had to agree to hard-and-fast ground rules — say, keeping below a maximum debt level in order to retain membership in the eurozone. Sounds good. But to institute and then save the euro, its member states pretty much broke every one of those rules.

All this amounts to a devastating legacy of shattered illusions, which is one reason radical right-wing parties have grown strong. And it’s the perfect opportunity — and a rare second chance — for Britain to re-form the union into the institution that Europe deserves.

As the historian Tony Judt noted, Britain could have claimed the moral leadership in Europe after 1945 — but didn’t. Britain chose to be a friendly bystander, staying out of the earliest discussions of European economic and political cooperation.

I don’t blame your limited appetite for promoting an alternative European spirit, given the regular attacks from the bullies of Brussels. These self-appointed high priests of integration have annoyed you. But they annoy many of us, too. And there is also a fresh generation of like-minded Europeans around the Continent. Abandoning the European Union means abandoning them.

The European Union has always needed multiple engines, and Germany has always worked best as part of a twin-engine structure, providing both economic and political leadership. With France in for repairs, Germany has an opening for a partner. It is Britain’s for the taking. London complements Berlin because it not only has good ideas, it also knows how to communicate them. Britain can talk the talk but has no allies in Europe. Germany can put together alliances but is no good at selling its arguments.

Consider these three bits of hyperbole. Churchill liberated Europe. Margaret Thatcher molded it into a single market. Tony Blair enlarged it. Hyperbole or not, there’s no doubt Britain played critical roles at the critical moment. Do you really want to look on now, a spectator like Switzerland, as Europe retreats into illiberalism and protectionism, and its eastern fringes drift into the orbit of a neo-imperial Russia? You can’t isolate yourself from these; you can only worsen them by refusing to do your part. Do you want to be a hostage to the bloc’s failing fortunes? Was it for this the British men and women sacrificed so much when facing down a previous, totalitarian “European union”?

If Britain exits from the union, it will damage the political idea — never more timely than now — that a nation can pursue a policy mission that benefits itself and its neighbors. A Brexit would betray a union that, for all its many faults, is still more than the sum of its parts.

Has Prime Minister David Cameron struck the best deal for Britain? Probably not. But has anyone ever come home from Brussels with everything he wanted? And there’s more: Sure, he won only a temporary reprieve from paying welfare benefits to migrants, but in doing so he opened a conversation on real reform in Brussels. Imagine what else he could get, for all of us, if he went back.

We need British voices — insistent, contrary and maddening — to disturb decades of self-satisfied dust that has settled over Brussels. We don’t just need a union that demands reform from its member states. We also need member states that demand — and secure — reform from the union. Don’t leave the job half-finished. Don’t leave us Europeans alone with this European Union.

Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.

Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *