As the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union gathers steam, Remain supporters, along with an expanding congress of the global commentariat have voiced increasingly alarmist claims about the economic and political consequences of Brexit both for Europe and the UK.
Security is arguably one of the swing subjects of the EU debate and will be key for ballot boxes across the country next week. The Prime Minister states bluntly that Brexit threatens national security. Indeed, Downing Street co-operated in the writing of a public letter, authored by former defense officials, which outlined that membership of the European union was vital in deterring the Russians, containing the North Koreans and combating Islamic State. Transnational terrorism has been rampant (one could say) in Europe’s security anxieties since the first Paris attack in 2015.
Brexit is unlikely to have a major impact on Europe’s exposure to transnational terrorism. The main catalysts of terrorism in the UK are intent and capability. In regards to Islamic State, it is not unfair to argue that this will persist should there be a Brexit.
The UK has been a top target for Islamist extremists groups. Our extensive ties in the middle east, big-dick militarist deployments alongside NATO and the US since 2011 along with our close relations with Israel confirm us to be a long time participant in this top tier of targeting.
Nevertheless it is not only politics that Islamic extremists find troubling or, perhaps, insulting. There is also opposition to our Liberal cultural precepts. It is ironic to include that, before the events of 7/7, these precepts were more prominent- demonstrable by acts of tolerance towards the likes of Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza.
Nevertheless, it can adequately argued that these precepts are unlikely to change substantially upon Brexit. The UK has close military co-operation with the US and NATO and this is likely to persist as a matter of national strategy and, ultimately, security. This is aided by the planned steady increase in defense spending over the next five years.
This being said, one of the main security anxieties surrounding Brexit is that it would disrupt vital intelligence co-operation with Europe with an example of this being the fusion centre that has been recently established by Europol. This seems unlikely considering the essential part we play in the distribution of intelligence to Europe. Furthermore, the UK engages in a strong bilateral security and intelligence co-operation with key European allies, such as France and Germany, and will contain to enjoy a privileged relationship with the US as part of the Five Eyes security network.
Upon Brexit, NATO will not suddenly extinguish.. Russia will not suddenly experience a steroid gain in strength and neither would IS, al-Qaeda or the myriad of other terrorist organisations that hold us as an upper tier target. However, there would be a noticeable impact in the security community, one the is more nuanced than has been previous predicted.
Nations would continue to priorities co-operation in security. Realpolitik, rather than showmanship stage managed statement politics would lead due to its necessity.
Furthermore, Britain is a key nation that provides information to Europol, due to the fact that Europol tends to work predominantly with National Police groups rather than intelligence organisations and the Metropolitan Police, along with the serious organised crime agency, are well regarded as the best in Europe at fulfilling their duties. Continually Europol already has a successful framework for setting up operational level agreements with non-EU nations and there are already 14 agreements in place- ranging from the USA to Columbia. Considering Britain’s policing organisations utility to Europol, it would seem unlikely that, should there be a Brexit, a bridging agreement could not quickly be implemented and a more permanent agreement would be worked out considerable quickly hereafter.
On the matter of procurement, it has historically been managed unilaterally, bilaterally or multi-laterally relative to the level of co-operation by individual nations. European procurement projects have not, historically, gone well. The Horizon Frigate project broke apart because, despite all the nations needing an air defense escort, they had different of those escorts. These requirements tended to reflect the relative national interests. In theory, joint projects offer financial savings through the thinning of research investments across national budgets and bulk buying. In practice, however, the project attempts to satisfy the interests of every nation involved with specialisation and contradiction being irrelevant.
Brexit could improve the scenario for EU procurement integration, because Britain, due its global interests and active tendencies, has strong equipment requirements- making in difficult to accommodate. For Britain it is often a case of juggling multiple streams instead of procuring one system.
Then we come to the prospect of joint operations. The likes of Obama and other international figures prefer our integration within Europe because this reduces the number of organisations and people of whom they need to communicate with. The biggest problem for EU security will be that after the U.S, the second biggest military, in terms of the ability to perform global operations, is Britain. This will become even more so when the Queen Elizabeth class carriers with their F35 strike aircraft enters service. This will require severe improvement from other countries or the EU will be limited to regional security efforts. Britain will remain in NATO so there would no greater risk of an attack on Britain or its fellow European nations. There may even be less duplication of effort, and possibly even some streamlining within the two organisations, allowing them to focus on what they were meant to do, rather than trying to do everything.
President Obama, in a visit that has shades of a Roman Emperor attending to a recalcitrant province, warned the UK of its irrelevance to the US vision of Western security upon Brexit. However, what has ever closer union contributed to European and global security since the end of the Cold War? The logic behind the assumption that the European initiative is a force for security, democracy and, both economic and political, stability rely on a variety of myths that bare little resonance to the political reality.
The first of such myths presumes that the EU is an effective basis for exchanging collective and progressive democratic goods along regional rather than discredited national lines. Secondly, there is a further assumption that the ever closer union and the 28 nation bloc contributes to general peace and stability- particularly when it comes to the expansionary military policy of Russia. The final myth assumes that Brexit will leave the EU intact while the UK is reduced to the margins of European as well as world politics.
When you examine the recent history, a very different picture is painted on this European canvas.
Firstly, we need to look at the ECC as a peace process. The formation of six state EEC did not bring about peace in Europe. The EEC itself was the conclusion of a peace process, not the cause of peace directly. After almost half a century of war, peace was achieved by force. For the western side of Europe this was achieved by the product of American arms, with some British help.
By the 1980s, the common market had evolved into a thirteen state membership. However, those who first conceived of a union of European states in the 1950s did not incorporate their idea of a union as a union that would exist in the “west”. Churchill, mistakenly cited by American advocates as a proponent of the current European project, wanted no such union. Churchill hoped that the American special relationship with the UK would facilitate a united states of open democracies not the incremental evolution of a European super state.
A European super state, however, was the precise idealistic vision of Liberals. They perceived a union, administered from Brussels, but running, mostly, along a Franco-German axis. This would mean that there would be a third global force in politics that is seated between the Soviet and American political blocs and, therefore, not being an American led west. Thus, the fall of the Berlin wall provided Jacques Delors and Jorge Manuel Barroso an opportunity to fulfil this vision. This required that rapid expansion of Europe into the former soviet bloc and, at the same time, deepening pro-European super state sentiments in centralised Europe.
A mixture of Supranationalism and elitism fuelled the post-Cold War dream of ever closer union and ignored the historical and constitutional differences that divided the more developed western European states. Rather than developing stability, the Schengen agreement of 1985 and the Maastricht of 1991, founded on the basis of a common foreign and defence policy (along with the disastrous currency union) ,has created a Europe sans frontiers which has lead to increased insecurity and economic instability. The EU has, as a result struggled to incorporate economically instable states of eastern Europe, who’s democratic heritage is rather questionable, into this forced accelerating bloc. This has, as a result, only contributed to further division and disagreement.
Idealism replaced prudence with predictably catastrophic consequences. We now have the paradoxical situation in which increased power in Brussels and the European commission has undermined regional stability. A Europe sans frontiers comes at a massive and unsustainable cost to security. This is due to mass exploitation by smuggling gangs and those like ISIL.
The European Union was founded in 1993, and from the Bosnia crisis at its inception, to its most recent attempts to sanction Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and address the Syrian refugee crisis, through to the buying off of Turkish autocracy, EU policy has looked a bizarre mixture of incoherence and appeasement.
The direction of EU policy inevitably follows Germany’s supervening interests. The failure to consult long standing members of the EU over the refugee crisis, or funding Turkey to contain the problem, sees smaller European countries, like Greece and Italy, looking towards Moscow rather than Berlin.
Taken together, it can come as little surprise that some states in eastern Europe like Hungary, and mainstream political voices in its western member states, are beginning to exhibit profound disillusion with the EU, while some seasoned onlookers like George Soros perceive the European project to be on the ‘verge of collapse’.
There is, to adapt Adam Smith’s phrase, much ruin in a union. Ironically, the Obama presidency and generally has bought into the idea that the European Union is a force for democratic progress rather than a bureaucracy, which as its current president recently admitted interferes “too much in the lives of its citizens”.
The problem is that regional unions, associations, currency and trading blocs come and go, not only in Europe but also in Asia and everywhere else. What remains permanent in Europe and the world are nation states that ultimately have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
In the UK, a minimal permanent interest like that of Australia or the US, and indeed as other European states are beginning to notice, requires border security and a sovereign authority vested in a national parliament not in an unelected transnational judiciary in the Hague or a commission in Brussels.
“Good fences”, as the great American poet Robert Frost observed, “make good neighbours”. In this he was echoing the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Love thy neighbour, yet don’t pull down your hedge”.
Given that this understanding is the spirit of 1776, it seems bizarre that American Democrats prefer mythology to a prudent appreciation of modern history.
beyond the Edge of reason 