The main reason why the Brexit debate has gone round in circles for the last two years—and why the U.K.’s negotiations with the European Union have been almost completely stalled for months—is that much of the British political class have never fully understood what the EU is or how it works. The few who have evidently consider the implications so unpalatable that they dare not spell them out publicly.
How else to explain why with just eight months until exit day, the two main political parties remain officially committed to policies that the EU could never agree to.
Prime Minister Theresa May still formally espouses a deal that will allow frictionless trade between the U.K. and EU while allowing the U.K. to pursue trade deals with other countries, diverge from EU regulatory standards, end free movement of people and cease paying “vast sums” into the EU budget.
The Labour Party position isn’t much different: It wants “a customs union arrangement” that will similarly allow Britain to continue to trade frictionlessly with the EU while negotiating free-trade deals with third countries and maintaining its say over EU rules. It is also committed to a “jobs first” Brexit that would enable the U.K. to preserve the benefits of the EU’s single market while denying EU citizens any automatic right to take any jobs that are created.
What unites both parties is an insistence on reclaiming British sovereignty. What is missing for each is any recognition that the EU should care about its sovereignty too.
When Brussels points out the obvious—that the British government’s recent customs proposal would allow the U.K. to enjoy a frictionless customs border while only selectively applying EU customs-union rules and being left free to seek competitive advantage via separate deals with third countries—pro-Brexit Britons accuse it of being too “theological.”
When Brussels says frictionless access to the single market must include EU citizens’ right of free movement, or mentions how impossible it is in a modern economy to distinguish effectively between goods and services, it is accused of overplaying its hand, or of failing to think and act strategically.
Yet no one should be surprised that the EU can’t think strategically. Nation states and super-states can think and act strategically but the EU is neither of those things.
The EU is a legal order established by treaty and overseen by a common court whose judgments take precedence over national law. When the U.K. opted to leave the EU, it rejected not only that treaty but also the legal order that underpins most of the U.K.’s key commercial and security relationships—with no inkling of what to put in its place.
It makes no sense to complain now when the EU rules out allowing the U.K. to pick and choose which bits of its legal order it will retain, let alone to judge for itself whether it has applied the law correctly and punish itself if it falls short.
Applying Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the EU is a hedgehog rather than a fox. The fox knows many things but the EU knows only one: how to protect and extend this legal order. Confronted by a strategic challenge, the EU’s response is always to reach for its rulebook. Brexit is no different except perhaps in one respect: British demands to replicate all the benefits of EU membership while remaining outside the EU’s legal order and to replace a system based on the oversight of a common court to one based on mutual trust appears to have reinforced the view across the EU that to the extent it has any capacity for strategic thinking, its overriding priority lies in defending its own sovereignty.
After all, at a time when the global order is disintegrating and the EU lacks the military capability to protect its interests, why wouldn’t it protect the one strategic asset—its single market—that gives it global relevance?
The challenge for the U.K. if it wants to preserve its commercial and strategic relationships is to come up with a new legal order that respects the EU’s sovereignty. It is an open secret in London and Brussels that Mrs. May now recognizes that her original demands were nonnegotiable and is now hoping to try to convince her cabinet to back a plan that would align the U.K. with EU customs-union and single-market rules for goods in what would be a significant sacrifice of the UK’s newly-won sovereignty.
Yet her chief negotiator Olly Robbins has already been warned that even this proposal stands no chance of being accepted by the European Council, according to someone familiar with the situation. The British political system still doesn’t seem to have internalized that for the EU, protecting its legal order also means enforcing free movement of citizens, the indivisibility of goods and services and the writ of the ECJ.
Instead, the British political class increasingly resembles a British tourist asking a foreigner for directions: Unable to make itself understood, it simply shouts louder. Complaints about EU “theologians” only reveal a worrying lack of understanding of the realities of an organization of which the U.K. has been a member for 43 years. If Britain is to avoid getting hopelessly lost, it had better start learning the language.