The continental imperative

BREXITEERS rarely hesitate to profess their love of Europe. Daniel Hannan, a campaigning MEP, stresses that he speaks Spanish and French. Sarah Vine, a journalist married to Michael Gove, the anti-EU justice secretary, points to her husband’s penchant for a glass of Bordeaux. “I love Europe!” Boris Johnson protested, unbidden, in a recent conversation with Bagehot. To prove his point, the former mayor of London inflicted a rendition of “Ode to Joy”, in the original German, on a startled crowd of supporters. Such declarations are often accompanied by what might be called the pro-European case for Brexit. Britain voting to leave the EU on June 23rd would produce a “domino effect” and “the democratic liberation of a whole continent”, gushed Mr Gove in a speech in April. It would be a helpful “wake-up call” concurs Liam Fox, a former defence secretary.

Such overtures have a semi-official slogan: “Love Europe, Hate the EU”. It is even available on sweatshirts. Which is all very jolly. It also bears no relation to the reality of Brexit and the campaign being fought in its pursuit. Take Mr Gove’s dream of a sunny European spring. This rests on the Utopian premise that the dark forces of European history—nationalism, fragmentation, demagoguery—would simply dissipate in the pandemonium of the EU’s sudden collapse. Hardly any mainstream figure on mainland Europe agrees that Brexit, let alone the EU’s dissolution, would lead to more democracy and dynamism (it would do the opposite, argues Radek Sikorski, the Anglophile former foreign minister of Poland). It is also why hard-right populists like Marine Le Pen in France and Lutz Bachmann, the founder of Germany’s anti-Islam Pegida movement, have both endorsed a Leave vote.

Moreover, for people who claim to love Europe, Brexiteers seem rather energised by its woes. The continent’s economic decline, relative to the likes of China, is frequently and gleefully invoked (Britain is “shackled to a corpse” runs the over-used metaphor); in an article for the Daily Mail on May 22nd Steve Hilton, a former adviser to David Cameron, described the union’s member states as “ungovernable”. Meanwhile Vote Leave, the official Out campaign, warns of “terrorists and gangsters” roaming the continent. Leave.eu, another Out campaign group, has shared a video purporting to show migrant youths in Greece, France and Hungary attacking police cars, scrambling over fences and fighting over food. “ANOTHER far-right party emerges in Europe” bellowed the Daily Express, one of the Leave camp’s favourite media outlets, on May 25th above an article on Denmark’s ultra-conservative New Civil Party.

A simple message runs through all this: Europe is sliding into stagnation, turmoil and extremism. Britain must inoculate itself by getting out of the EU (or as Mr Hannan calls it: “the elderly, creaking, sclerotic economies on the western tip of the Eurasian landmass”) while it can. Europe has plenty of problems but such exaggerations will become yet more lurid as the campaign enters its final weeks; expect more blood-curdling warnings of the chaos should Turkey join the EU.

The insinuation that Britain should abandon its neighbours in their hour of need—anti-democratic forces on the march, decline and disintegration threatening—is a betrayal of the blood, sweat and treasure that the country has dedicated to the pursuit of peace and prosperity on the continent. Europe today has been shaped much more by its island neighbour than it might admit; by Britons who sheltered from bombs rather than suing for peace, who landed on the beaches of Normandy, prosecuted Nazi war criminals, built new states from the rubble (the architecture of modern Germany was designed by British civil servants), helped defeat communism and—though not involved from the start—helped to shape the institutions and scope of today’s EU.

Europe bears the stamp of British endeavour and influence, and is all the better for it. That is not a case for glorious, self-satisfied isolation, but for Britain staying in and rolling up its sleeves. Such was the argument of a letter to the Guardian on May 25th in which over 300 academic historians pointed to Britain’s past and future “irreplaceable role” in Europe. “The lesson of history is that British isolationism has often been associated with continental disintegration,” observed one of them, Niall Ferguson, at a speech in Downing Street ahead of its publication.

Fog in the channel

Britain’s past achievements were more than philanthropic; they were also self-interested. For just as plant seeds and spores blow across the English Channel (the same varieties of flowers and fungi bloom in Kent as do in Flanders), so, too, do the continent’s triumphs and traumas. Europe’s economic sluggishness is Britain’s problem, too: it still sells more services to Luxembourg than to India, for example. No country can truly insulate itself from pollution, criminal networks or mass migrations. And in any case, some 2.2m Britons live in the same European countries wracked by the apocalyptic crises so prominent in the pro-Brexit campaign’s arguments. Citing unemployment, terrorism or instability on the continent as a reason for Britain to withdraw from the EU is like spotting your neighbour’s house on fire and resolving to put a better lock on your door.

Which is a round-about way of saying that Britain, though an island with an island’s outlook, is also a European country. Its connections with the continent grew up over millennia of shared history; of the ebb and flow of people, ideas and goods. The result in 2016 is a large moral, economic and political stake in the success of the mainland, the dominant institution of whose common civic life is currently—like it or not—the EU. To be “pro-European”, really, is not to have a passion for Beethoven, or to be able to conjugate a passé simple. It is to possess a concern, both selfish and munificent, for an old continent that encompasses Britain now as in the past. “Love Europe? Make the EU better.”

^{Economist.com/blogs/bagehot}