When the European Union unexpectedly won the Nobel Peace Prize this month, the leaders of Germany, France and Italy spoke of their pride. But the British prime minister, David Cameron, maintained an awkward silence.
Before that, the British government said it wanted to exercise an opt
out of an estimated 133 areas of European Union police and judicial
cooperation to which it had once agreed.
And Mr. Cameron supported a plan for a new budget for countries that use
the euro (which Britain does not), something that would place his
nation firmly in Europe’s outer tier. The prime minister has been
hinting that he could hold a referendum on Britain’s relations with the
union, and one newspaper reported recently that a senior cabinet
minister wants Britain to threaten openly to leave the 27-nation bloc.
There was no official denial of the report.
All of which has fueled concerns that Britain is laying plans for what
political and financial pundits have dubbed “Brixit,” a variant on
“Grexit” — the shorthand for Greece’s much predicted if currently forestalled departure from the euro zone.
Mr. Cameron insists that he is trying to keep Britain in the European
Union. He argues gamely that popular consent to membership can be
regained only by refocusing the relationship on Europe’s single economic
and free trade market — which accounts for half of Britain’s foreign
trade and investment, according to the government — and loosening other
ties.
Britain has always been ambivalent about the European project. Unlike
the founding six nations, all of them defeated or occupied in World War II,
Britain was a victor. In national mythology, the war was neither a
moment of disgrace nor a humiliation. On the contrary, it was widely
considered the country’s finest hour, when it stood alone against
fascism.
So the idea of reconciliation through integration never had the appeal
in Britain that it did on the Continent. Unlike many other member
countries, Britain always paid more into the union in contributions than
it received in subsidies.
Now, with the euro zone almost three years in crisis, British public
opinion has hardened. The overwhelming majority of Conservative
lawmakers are euro skeptics, and many privately favor withdrawal.
For some this is a question of conviction, while others feel a
competitive threat from the United Kingdom Independence Party, which
wants to take Britain out of the union altogether. Adept at winning over
Conservative voters, the party threatens to deprive many Tories of
their seats in Parliament in future elections.
So government strategy toward the union — always hampered by what Lord
Christopher Patten, a former Conservative minister and ex-European
commissioner, has called “the psychodrama of Britain’s relations with
Europe” — has turned on its head.
When he was prime minister, Tony Blair sought to exploit strains between France
and Germany, the twin engines of European integration. Mr. Blair, whose
Labour Party was less Europe-averse than Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives,
courted allies among smaller nations and tried to compensate for
Britain’s self-exclusion from the euro by leading in areas like defense
and police cooperation, a policy Mr. Cameron has reversed.
Previous British governments argued that if they did not like something,
they had a chance of changing or stopping it only if they sat at all
tables with their European partners.
Mr. Cameron seeks a new arrangement that abandons any pretense of being
at the heart of the European Union. He does not, for instance, want to
stop the euro zone integrating without Britain. Indeed, he recognizes
that this is necessary to save the euro.
But can a more remote relationship work?
According to a recent study for the European Council on Foreign
Relations by Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, a polling organization,
there is a parallel with 1975, when Britain held its referendum on
membership in Europe.
“Then, as now, the prime minister, then Labour’s Harold Wilson, had a
problem managing party divisions,” Mr. Kellner wrote. “Then, as now,
most voters wanted to leave the Common Market (as it then was). Then, as
now, polling (specifically, a Gallup Poll in November 1974) suggested
that if the prime minister renegotiated the terms of Britain’s
membership and recommended acceptance of the new terms, opinion would
swing in favor of British membership.”
Mr. Kellner went on to note that Mr. Wilson did talk to his European
partners, claimed victory and voters subsequently voted 2 to 1 to stay
in Europe.
In July this year, a YouGov poll suggested that, if Mr. Cameron
renegotiated the relationship to his satisfaction and recommended a
“yes,” 42 percent of voters would vote to stay in and 34 percent to
leave.
The strategy may have domestic political logic but there are
simultaneous risks: of reducing Britain’s influence on the world stage
and making a “Brixit” a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Britain carries weight with some other member states who rely on British
influence to bolster the bloc’s free-market wing and counterbalance
France’s more statist approach.
But to anchor Britain in Europe, Mr. Cameron needs to emerge from a
whole series of negotiations successfully — or at least persuade his own
skeptical party that he has done so.
Most urgently, he faces tough discussions on the European Union’s next
seven-year spending cycle. Many officials and other observers expect Mr.
Cameron to veto a budget deal at a November summit.
That will satisfy euro skeptics only if Mr. Cameron can bring home an
improved offer later. Yet, playing to his domestic gallery with an
aggressive veto may alienate the very European allies Mr. Cameron would
need in later talks in any effort to redefine ties.
Meanwhile, the emergence of an ever more clear-cut two-tier Europe, with
much greater integration among the 17 euro zone nations on issues like
banking and financial services, is putting a strain on Europe’s unified
economic space, and could ultimately threaten London’s status as
Europe’s financial capital.
“Deeper integration in the core would come with disintegration in the
E.U.’s periphery and shrink the single market,” writes Sebastian Dullien
in a separate paper, also for the European Council on Foreign
Relations. In other words, it could undermine the one part of the
European bargain that Britons actually seem to like.
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