Prime Minister Theresa May: pushing Brexit The View
Martin Mansergh
We live in a world where moral authority often seems to be scarce or diminished, and largely unheeded. One or two issues can dominate and distract attention from others. While practical considerations are always important, the ethical dimension has also to be weighed in the balance.
It is paradoxical that a prolonged era of peace in much, but not all, of the world has been underpinned by the threat of mutually assured destruction, which was only narrowly averted in 1962 and 1983.
Superpower leaderships, whose support base includes strongly organised groups strongly motivated by Christianity – in the case of Russia the Orthodox Church – do not hesitate to develop and update weapons of mass destruction regardless of past limitation agreements, that, if ever used, could extinguish millions of civilians, and jeopardise life on earth.
While the threat is diminished nowadays, despite recurring alarms, the opposition and critical comment has diminished as well. There have been small religious sects, mostly emanating from America, who almost look forward to a great cleansing and a new utopian humanity, dubiously relying on certain passages in the Prophets and Revelation.
Integration
A group of former Irish parliamentarians, of which I was part, paid a short visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg a couple of weeks ago. We stayed three nights in Karlsruhe, home of the German Constitutional Court, which acts as a powerful brake on German support for European integration, and was once housed in a city Schloss belonging to the last Imperial Chancellor Max von Baden, who procured Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication in 1918.
We also toured places on either side of the Franco-German border along the Rhine. One of them was the Maginot Line, a largely underground string of fortifications built in the 1930s and intended to hold up any renewed German invasion. The problem, when it came to the crunch in May-June 1940, was not that it could be easily overrun, but that it could be circumvented. In many ways, prohibitions in the Irish Constitution were like the Maginot line. They held up the advance of secularism, but could ultimately be circumvented.
A resident of Alsace born in the 1860s and who lived a long life would have changed state five times, in a province that shifted between France and Germany in 1871, 1919, 1940 and 1944. The father of our Maginot guide first fought the Germans in 1940, and was then conscripted to fight with them on the Russian front, being lucky enough to return to his family from Russian imprisonment in the late 1940s. Sensibly enough, the street signs in Strasbourg are bilingual, reflecting its mixed past, with the French name in larger print on the top, and the German name underneath.
The German word Schlacht is far more evocative than its English equivalent ‘battle’. Schlacht also means ‘slaughter’ or ‘butchery’. The decisive but bloody battle of Leipzig in 1813, which led to the end of the Napoleonic Empire, is known as the Völkerschlacht, which can be translated as ‘the battle of the nations’ or as ‘the slaughter of the peoples’.
If one reads graphic accounts of the wars that followed, the siege of Paris in 1871, then savage suppression by the French of the Paris Commune, the static slaughter in the trenches of the First World War, the deportations and extermination of the Second World War along with the incineration of cities, one gets a better sense of the moral and practical motivation behind the foundation in the 1950s of what today is the European Union. Several states are still applying to join, despite the UK being on the point of leaving. They see it as a way of securing their freedom, rather than as sacrificing it.
Aspects
Common membership of the EU across these islands provided a model and framework for peace arguably far more important than any grumbles that people may have with different aspects of the EU. It has also provided a framework in which independent Ireland has been able to thrive to a far greater extent than was possible in the early decades of independence, because EU membership gives us some influence over our external environment, as we have seen dramatically in the Brexit negotiations.
Crossing the border from the picturesque Alsace village of Wissembourg back into Germany at the top of the street, the tour guide pointed out a seamless and frictionless border.
There is now more reason to hope that Brexit will turn out less harmful than depicted in worst case scenarios. Behind the scenes there has been a huge amount of damage limitation work going on, with agreements made, where possible, to maintain the status quo, sometimes on a changed legal basis. The notion of March 29 as a cliff-edge is overblown. The reality is that negotiations on future trading relations between Britain and the EU will resume shortly afterwards. It is unlikely that there will be much immediate change, but over time adaptations may need to be made.
The Irish backstop is designed to guarantee the future free flow of goods and people between north and south, but a UK-wide customs union with the EU with regulatory alignment would achieve this across the Irish Sea. Apart from continuing peace, protection of the Single Market along the Irish and EU land border has to be secured, as otherwise there is a danger of barriers being created between Ireland and the EU, which would be disastrous.
Tentative parallels have been drawn with Ireland’s past. The EU has been compared to the Act of Union, but it does not involve abolishing our democratic institutions and their absorption into distant European ones. Federalist ambitions will never be achieved on a tiny EU budget.
Brexiters may be adopting the Michael Collins strategy of winning ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’, but they will lose, heavily, influence over their immediate European environment. The best analogy is external association.
As a British think-tank visitor put it recently, Britain is presently half-in and half-out of the EU. Post-Brexit, it will be the other way round.