On the night of the 20th, a special guest from the European Parliament got up on stage: Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-federalist and former Prime Minister of Belgium. Addressing the cheering throng he was full of praise: “you are defending European values and European principles.” 

Two days later, the pro-Moscow Yanukovych government was forced from office. The protesters had won — and so, it seemed, had the European Union. Who needs an army and a navy when you’ve got “values” and “principles”?

Fast forward to the present day and the Russian military is massed on Ukraine’s borders, poised to complete a conquest that began with the annexation of Crimea. I suppose Mr Verhofstadt could be deployed to stand in Moscow’s way, but on this occasion I doubt it would do much good.

However, Brussels could focus on something else he said back in 2014: “we as the European Union have one obligation… that’s to stay behind your cause.” In that regard, the EU might not have any military power of its own — but it does have diplomatic power. 

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Why Biden has sacrificed Ukraine

By David Patrikarakos

Indeed, the EU has a fully-fledged foreign policy apparatus. It has a High Representative (currently Josep Borrell) to act as the EU’s foreign minister; it has embassies and consulates around the world; and it has direct representation on powerful bodies like the G7 and G20. Its diplomacy is also backed with the clout that comes from being the world’s biggest trade block.

So given that capacity, one might expect the EU to be leading the effort to save Ukraine. But instead its diplomats are on the sidelines — much to the frustration of Emmanuel Macron, among others. Instead, the future of Ukraine — and by extension Europe — is being hammered out between Washington and Moscow. Even Britain, supposedly isolated by Brexit, has made a bigger impact than Brussels. 

The Russians, meanwhile, are laughing. Commenting on the EU’s lack of involvement, Sergei Lavrov — the country’s Foreign Minister — expressed mock sympathy: “We can see that the European Union feels somewhat disadvantaged.” As to the possibility of a separate EU-Russia dialogue Lavrov observed that “the US needs to be asked if it is willing to let [the EU] take any independent action.”

He was making mischief, of course. It’s not the US stopping the EU from taking a leading role — but the EU itself. The Ukraine crisis is the greatest test that the Common Foreign and Security Policy has ever faced, and so far the failure is comprehensive. Beyond the usual empty words and token gestures, the 27 member states of the European Union have been unable to present a united front. 

There’s no doubt as to which of the 27 is most to blame. As I have argued before, Germany was warned years ago that its collaboration with Russia on energy supplies would undermine the security of Russia’s neighbours. Now that these fears have been realised, the new German government has a chance to make amends. But far from showing leadership, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has weakened Europe’s resolve — for instance by blocking defence exports to Ukraine. 

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What the West gets wrong about Putin

By Harald Malmgren

The EU is Russia’s biggest trading partner — accounting for more than a third of its imports and exports. Comprehensive economic sanctions could therefore act as a serious deterrent to war. However, the threat has to be credible. There was fighting talk this week from the Danish foreign minister, who said the EU is ready to impose “never seen before” sanctions. However, that doesn’t match Scholz’s less-than-resolute language: “no one should harbour the illusion that there is any step that has no consequences for us.”

It also didn’t help when Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German naval chief, had to resign after some unguarded comments about the current crisis. “What [Putin] really wants is respect,” he was reported as saying, “and, my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands — and probably also deserves.” No doubt Putin was left wiping away the tears.

So is the EU’s problem actually a German problem? Up to a point, but the blame must be shared by other member states for tolerating it. If they won’t stand up to German flakiness on foreign and defence policy, then what chance do they have against Russian aggression?

Unfortunately, EU governments are under very little pressure from their voters to take the continent’s defence seriously. Consider the core principle of NATO — the Article 5 obligation that every member of the organisation should come to the military aid of any member that is attacked. In other words, one for all and all for one. According to this 2020 Pew report, there was majority support for this principle in some EU countries, but not others. Asked whether their own country should respond militarily to a Russian attack on a fellow NATO member, 64% of those asked said yes in the Netherlands, but only 41% in France and Spain, 34% in Germany and just 25% in Italy. This compares to 60% in the US and 55% in Britain. 

Somewhat hypocritically, much higher percentages expect that the United States would respond to a Russian attack: 75% of Italians thought so as did 63% of Germans. Clearly, many Europeans assume that they will be defended — even if they aren’t prepared to contribute to the defence of their neighbours. 

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The West must stay out of Ukraine

By Marshall Auerback

Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member. And perhaps that’s why the EU isn’t doing all it can to deter Russia. The assumption is that Kyiv represents an endpoint for Moscow’s ambitions — not a pit stop on the way to Vilnius or Warsaw or Berlin. Let’s hope that theory is never tested. 

What makes the EU’s irresponsibility harder to take is the very nature of the “European project”. On the 1st January, 1999 the euro came into being — and changed the character of the European Union forever. From that moment, it became a fundamentally inward-looking enterprise devoted to the survival of the single currency at any cost. The alternative path that the EU could have taken: a looser association of nations — but one that doesn’t stop halfway across the continent — was forever closed off. 

Well, so be it. Every empire has to have a frontier. But when the line is drawn, one has to be ready to guard it. One cannot exclude unless one is prepared to defend. The EU seems oblivious to this — and that is its greatest failure.

The past flashes into view. It is 1956. Britain has led an Anglo-French expedition to retake the Suez Canal which has been nationalised by the Egyptian President Abdul Nasser. America has forced Britain to abandon its expedition. The humiliation exposes our faltering role in the world. The British empire has gone and our economy is failing.

The solution of the governing class is to join the EEC. But, in 1963, Charles de Gaulle refuses Britain’s entry and warns, “the nature, the structure, the conjuncture that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals”. Once we finally join, this difference never substantially changes.

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Why Britain needs a De Gaulle

By Peter Franklin

Now we are leaving. Brexit, the controversies of immigration, and the fraying of relations between the four countries of the United Kingdom, are symptoms of the long and chronic unwinding of Britain’s imperial role and identity. Just as the Union was constructed out of the growth of empire, so its post-Brexit reconstitution will need to evolve out of the making of the UK’s post-imperial role in the world.

We are in the early stage of a new political era. Boris Johnson exploited the opportunity of Brexit to realign British politics. In doing so, he inadvertently broke with its liberal consensus and changed its primary agents. Agents are those forces, groups or classes that play an active role in producing a political settlement. Over the past 40 years, four primary agents have determined British politics and reshaped the country: globalisation, the rise of the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. 

These are now being superseded. The new agents of the coming political era are the antithesis of the liberal global settlement. They are the nation state, the working class, social conservatism, and unconstrained democracy. “What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary.”[1.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986, p. 195] They were forged in the political battle around Brexit and they belong to the winning coalition of Tory provincials and working class.

This coalition promised a profound shift in the balance of political forces, but it found no representation in Westminster’s two-party political system. In 2019, the Conservatives succeeded in winning it over and took the wind out of the sails of nationalist populism. Victory however remains tentative.

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By John Gray

The new political era begins with the estrangement of the governing class from the country. Neither a liberal progressive Labour Party, nor a Conservative Party dominated by market liberalism has the necessary politics to forge a new hegemony. Both parties are products of the liberal settlement which favoured state driven, technocratic and legalistic responses to political problems. Institution and nation building democratic politics is an alien concept. Neither has shown the capacity to think big and strategically about Britain’s future role in the world.

No 10 appears to understand the new political imperatives, the Conservative Party does not. Conservatives have put capital and the market before democracy and society. They have sold off key national strategic assets and favoured global trade over protecting the national economy.

Their treatment of the working class has been callous and destructive. George Osborne’s austerity was born of a deep class arrogance and indifference toward people in need. Their admirable conservative disposition — which valued country, the small platoons of society, and family relationships — was crushed beneath the Hayekian liberal juggernaut. The Conservatives have been a heartless party.

Corbynism, meanwhile, was supposed to be a decisive break from New Labour and the neo-liberal consensus, as embodied by those four primary agents, globalisation, the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. In fact, it only succeeded in breaking with market liberalism, while reinforcing Labour’s drift toward a globally, socially liberal, progressive party of the middle class.

Corbynism with its focus on the individual and the state is the unruly offspring of New Labour and a product of the liberal political settlement. It misunderstands social conservativism and holds it in contempt, denouncing it in a litany of Maoist vitriol as racist, misogynist, fascist, imperialist, and white nationalist. Under Corbyn, Labour has been indifferent to England, hostile toward the idea of the nation, and believes patriotism is jingoism. Its claim to democracy has been compromised by the many in its ranks who spent three years undermining the Leave vote. It has now lost the majority of the working class.

And yet, the future of our country rests upon these two parties rising to the historic challenge of re-establishing the foundations of our nationhood and Union.

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It's time for the doom-mongers to clock off

By Tom Chivers

The first task is to restore a national economy that prioritises work and wages, families, and local place, with the purpose of correcting the class and regional inequalities of productivity, wealth and income. The kind of centrally imposed, city region devolution with limited powers, exemplified by the Conservative’s Northern Powerhouse, will have only a limited impact.

It will require a national economic development strategy which focuses on improving and modernising the everyday economy of child and elder care, health and wellbeing, education, utilities, and the low wage sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and supermarkets which sustain daily life.

These are the basic building blocks that form the foundations of economy and society. The everyday economy is the key to a one nation politics that bridges the divisions between towns, cities and regions, and between different classes and ethnic groups.

The second task is to instil a social and democratic politics of belonging about how we are to live together in our multi-ethnic, multi-national Union. A shared sense of national identity is fundamental to social cohesion and upholding our democracy and the equality of citizen’s rights and obligations. It involves re-founding the United Kingdom to secure it for the long term; deepening and extending democracy, notably in England, in order to strengthen the accountability of governing elites; and reforming our structures of governance to devolve power and resources to regions and localities.

And thirdly Britain must define its role in the world.

China is becoming a major global power. Russia is asserting itself as a pivot between Europe and Asia, but leaning toward the latter. Economic and geopolitical power is shifting east of Suez. The Atlantic as the fulcrum of global influence is giving way to the Pacific. The strategic competition between the US and China will define geo-politics in the 21st Century.

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By Paul Embery

Globalisation will not be predicated on our western interests. The time when Europeans could determine the course of world affairs is passing. In this global interregnum Britain is well placed to construct a role for itself as a strategic actor. It is not the global power it once was but nor is it in decline. It is well placed to exert strategic influence if there is the political will and capability.

Our Union has been the most successful in the world, but it needs re-founding to safeguard its future. England is one of the oldest nation states, but it needs a democratic refit. The economy has suffered from the uncertainty of Brexit and its structural weaknesses create social division and high levels of class and regional inequality. It needs reform. Britain remains a world power with an economy and technology to match but we are diminished by a governing culture of decline management.

On Friday we take our first step into the world unencumbered by empire. Verhofstadt is wrong. Globalisation has slowed in response to the disruptive impact of hyper-globalisation. Western democracies are looking to restore their nation states and repair their domestic social contracts with their alienated voters. Britain is leading the way, overcoming populism to forge a democratic nationhood, open to building a strong relationship with our European neighbours and further afield. It is time to end the doom-mongering. The future is in our hands.