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The second article in our Brexit book festival is from international relations expert and prolific author Philip Cunliffe, the author of the recently released "The National Interest: Politics After Globalization".
Ten years after Britain voted to leave the European Union with the Brexit referendum of 24 June 2016, and pro-EU sentiment remains strong across Britain’s liberal and professional classes. This sentiment is maintained with a crude but steady ideological barrage slung out by the liberal media, their magazines constantly replenished by poorly-designed opinion polls gerrymandered to show that the majority of the population supposedly supports re-integration with Brussels. That liberal elites refuse to accept their defeat even a decade later is no surprise. Brexit was no ordinary vote in which one centrist party replaced another, but an assertion of popular sovereignty and grasp for constitutional and national renewal. It was all the more humiliating for the fact that it was inflicted by Britain’s working classes1, a snub not easily forgiven by the liberal middle classes who vest so much of their self-worth in their status and social rank.
Despite the fact that this electoral defeat still smarts so badly, the prospect of Britain formally rejoining the bloc is still unlikely – although it cannot (yet) be ruled out. This is because the liberal elites devoted to rejoining the EU would never dare expose themselves to the prospect of humiliation in another popular referendum, and rejoining would be difficult to do by parliamentary means alone, as it would seem to fall short of the kind of popular affirmation extracted by the 2016 plebiscite. In these circumstances, the real function of arguments to rejoin is less to lay the ground for a re-rerun of the referendum so much as to provide ideological cover for actually existing (re)alignment with Brussels.
This is the process by which Britain draws closer to Brussels in strategic, trade and regulatory terms, but without any overt political leap back into the club. Such measures have the benefit of appearing as pragmatic adaptations and justifiable concessions to our neighbours, in contrast to the shrill and ideologically-charged arguments for Rejoining. The aim however is that in due course, Britain becomes so tightly intertwined with Brussels once again that rejoining the union eventually becomes an after-thought, a rationalisation and tidying up of an interdependent relationship rather than an explicit political decision, with no need for wide popular support or formal democratic affirmation.
This pernicious process of alignment – or ‘soft’ rejoining – is well under way, having started before the Starmer government, with the previous Tory government of Rishi Sunak and the Windsor Framework2 of 2023, which tied Northern Ireland – and through it, the rest of the Kingdom – into European regulatory jurisdiction, limiting Britain’s capacity to pursue regulatory independence and diverge from EU standards. Arguably, re-alignment started even earlier, when Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv in June 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, abandoning a local party meeting in Doncaster (which the Tories had only just won from Labour). Boris’ trip to Kyiv offers us a stark reminder of the readiness with which British politicians are willing to substitute the glamour of miliary adventures and international partnership for the hard graft of domestic renewal.
If realigning began almost immediately after we left the EU, what is new today however, is the claim that this is all in the national interest3. Repeatedly, we are told that it is in Britain’s interest to pursue deeper integration with the EU. Even Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a man whose entire career was built around aligning Britain with transnational human rights law and embedding the country into international institutions (as opposed to pursuing British independence), now consistently intones the national interest in virtually every policy pronouncement. Some prominent Rejoiners such as Ben Judah, ex-speech writer for former foreign secretary David Lammy, even go as far as to roll up rejoining4 with the project of Anglo-Gaullism5, a political vision named for the charismatic French general and president famed for his dogged and unyielding defence of French honour and independence. The implication is that Britain can pursue its national interests as firmly as the sovereigntist French president did when he pursued European integration under French leadership in the 1960s. By claiming Rejoin for Anglo-Gaullism, Judah is clearly implying that there is no contradiction between robust self-assertion and European integration.
This is a stark difference with the rhetoric around the referendum in 2016. Back then, the arguments against implementing the vote by withdrawing from the EU were plenty – ranging from absurd constitutional contortions (that the referendum was advisory and not legally binding) to absurd invocations of existential threat (that British withdrawal would precipitate immediate economic collapse), and everything in between. Most counter-Brexit effort was expended in trying to undermine the vote itself – either directly, by crudely attacking voters as incapable of rational decision-making, or indirectly, by suggesting that the voters were unduly swayed by foreign influence. Rarely if ever was the argument for Remain made in terms of the national interest. This is unsurprising: after all, the premise of the case for Remain was that British political independence was anathema – an atavistic throwback to a world prior to globalisation, a few steps away from a revival of militaristic nationalism and autarky. To argue in terms of the British national interest was to admit that British independence existed and had to be acknowledged rather than suppressed – something that run contrary to the entire world-view espoused by Remainers at the time.
With this in mind, today we could say the fact that Rejoiners now do have to make their case in terms of the national interest – thereby conceding the value of national independence to begin with – is some measure of the homage that vice must pay to virtue. Instead of seeking to batter the voters into submission through abuse, invective and lawfare, arguments for Britain’s future framed in terms of the national interest recognise the validity and reality of the British people as a nation. The national interest concedes the fact that the British people have distinctive concerns and interests that must be addressed and propitiated rather than simply being dismissed, written off or crushed. More than this, the national interest framing also gives us further reason to be confident of the underlying weakness of arguments for Rejoin, and with them, arguments for realignment too.
This is for the simple reason that the European Union itself is predicated on gradually eliminating national interest and even national independence. This project is not just contained in efforts to harmonise institutions as a result of Ursula von der Leyen’s power-grabs, or an effect of the federalist clauses of the Treaty of Maastricht, or a function of the Eurozone. The suppression of national independence reaches much deeper in the European project, as it is legally enshrined as early as the 1957 Treaty of Rome in the phrase ‘ever closer union’. It is this phrase that makes explicit that the ultimate purpose of European integration is to bind the member-states closer together – politically, legally, economically – to the point that there is no longer any meaningful difference between them. Trying to make the case for Rejoining in terms of the national interest then is saying that ever closer union is in the national interest, or in other words, that a slow and gradual process of national dissolution and extinction is also the national interest. Making the case for Rejoin in the national interest is, in short, a self-defeating argument: it is an argument that disintegrates in the process of being articulated.
As long as arguments for Rejoining and realignment are made in the terms of the national interest then Rejoiners will remain on the back-foot. At the same time, any effort to depart from making their arguments in the national interest will seem detached and idealistic – harking back to a world before the new trade wars and geopolitical rivalries. Could any country not afford to look to its national interest in a world dominated by the likes of Trump, Xi and Putin? Rejoiners are therefore trapped in a cleft stick. For those concerned with preserving British sovereignty and liberties rather than blending them away, a relentless focus on the national interest is the means to preserve those goods – and with it, breaking open the path to reap the rewards of independence conferred by Brexit.
