Beyond Brexit

Towards a British Constitution

Vernon Bogdanor

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788316804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Constituciones

Entry into the European Community in 1973 was a momentous event - with seismic consequences for the politics and constitution of Britain. Discussion of Brexit, equally momentous, has been confined almost wholly to looking at the economic consequences of Britain's withdrawal from Europe. But what will happen to the constitution? Beyond Brexit looks for the first time at the impact of Brexit on our constitution - on Parliament, on the courts, on individual rights and, above all, on the question of whether the United Kingdom can be held together. Vernon Bogdanor explores the ever-changing relationship between Britain and the European Union from the original concept of European unity after 1945 to 21st-century Euroscepticism and our exit from the European Union, and explains what the future holds for our system of government and our constitution.

1

Britain and Europe: The Poisoned Chalice

I

Britain’s entry into the European Community, as the European Union then was, in 1973, led to profound changes in the constitution and the political system. Brexit is likely to lead to equally profound changes. It will, of course, mean the unravelling of forty-five years of our membership of European institutions. But we will not be able simply to return to the status quo as it was before 1973. Indeed, in politics, it is rarely possible to put the clock back. Too much will have changed since 1973; in any case, the Britain of 2019 is a very different place from the Britain of 1973. Our ideas about politics and the constitution have altered, almost out of all recognition. The atmosphere of the times, the spirit of the age, are quite different. The past is, as L.P. Hartley famously said, a foreign country. It would seem, as we leave the European Union, that our future will now be under our control, ours to mould as we wish – ‘take back control’ was a key slogan of the Brexiteers. But perhaps that is an illusion. For some consequences of our membership of the European Union are likely to remain with us even after Brexit.

Beyond Brexit seeks to chart the effects of our short-lived European commitment upon our constitution and our political system and to analyse how they will be affected by Brexit. Beyond Brexit, therefore, is an exercise both in past history and in futurology. Historians, it has been said, imagine the past and remember the future; or perhaps rather they interpret the past in terms of what they think the future will bring. What is clear is that our future will be shaped by our past and we will find it difficult to escape the consequences of our European involvement, comparatively brief though it was.

But why was that involvement so brief and why did it prove so problematic?

There are many reasons, but perhaps the fundamental one is that Britain, for profound historical reasons, remained outside and on the whole unaffected by the movement for European unity, which in the immediate post-war years animated so many on the Continent.

During the early post-war years, the idea of European unity became, for the first time, albeit briefly, part of the popular consciousness of Europe. But it did not become part of the popular consciousness in Britain.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke had declared that no European could be a complete exile in any part of Europe. The idea of European unity was championed by philosophers such as Kant in the eighteenth century and by Saint-Simon in the nineteenth. Indeed, Saint-Simon believed that there was, in the continent, a developing patriotisme europeén. Nevertheless, until the twentieth century, European unity remained an idea for philosophers and prophets, rather than for politicians. However, in the twentieth century, by contrast, it was to move onto the political agenda and, after the Second World War, it was taken up by leading politicians on the Continent with some degree of popular support. This was, in part and paradoxically, a consequence of a sense of European weakness, a sense that the Continent was coming to be overshadowed by the growing power of the United States and Russia. European unity arose out of a perception of the decline of Europe, not of its strength. Even so, until the 1940s, the idea of Europe was promoted only by a few far-sighted political leaders – by Briand and Stresemann, foreign ministers of France and Germany during the 1920s and also by Winston Churchill, who, in The Saturday Evening Post in February 1930, wrote:

The conception of a United States of Europe is right. Every step taken to that end which appeases the obsolete hatreds and vanished oppressions, which makes easier the traffic and reciprocal services of Europe, which encourages nations to lay aside their precautionary panoply, is good in itself.

But then, in words that prefigured his post-war approach, he wrote ‘But we have our own dream and our task; we are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not compromised’.¹

It took the Second World War for the idea of the unity of Europe to become, for the first time, an element in the popular as well as the political consciousness of the Continent and it was this growth in the consciousness of being European which was to make possible the creation and development of the European Community, established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The six founding members of the European Community – France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries – Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – had all suffered from National Socialism, from enemy occupation or both. Britain alone amongst the European belligerents had suffered neither. For many on the Continent, the struggle against Hitler had taken on the aspect of a supranational struggle. Hitler, so it appeared, had exploited divisions amongst the European powers to establish Nazi domination over Europe. The war against him was not, therefore, merely a conventional war between nation-states, but seemed to take on the character of a war of faiths in which the nations themselves had been divided. The resistance to Nazism, therefore, seemed to have a supranational character. It sought not merely to defeat Hitler but to create the conditions under which any future Hitler would be impossible. It sought not merely to re-establish the nation states as they had been before the war, but to link them together permanently through the creation of some form of European government. Two of the most powerful elements in the resistance movements – socialism and Christian Democracy – were themselves supranational in nature and the wartime resistance seemed to hold open the possibility of these two political forces revivified and coming together in the common cause of European unity. The war, therefore, seemed pregnant with possibilities for a new Europe in which future national conflicts would become impossible.

‘I have known two Europes,’ declared the French writer, Maurice Druon, in 1946, ‘two Europes that existed. One, the Europe of the night, which began for us and for other peoples even earlier, was a Europe in which for a moment the same sun rising in the Caucasus set in the Atlantic – I have known another Europe, a weak Europe being born, having its seat in London, a Europe made up by a few exiles, of certain volunteers, all Europeans, because they did not merely belong to the nation of their birth, but because they truly belonged to a common struggle, and it is this Europe which, in the end, had won.’²

On the Continent, therefore, the European idea was seen by many and, in particular, by the Christian Democrat founding fathers of the European Community – the leaders of West Germany, Italy and France, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi and Robert Schuman – as a reaction against nationalism, of which Fascism and National Socialism were but perverted forms. From the shock of defeat and occupation, they and other European leaders drew the lesson that the nation-state had failed and that Europeans could avoid future wars and restore the influence of a ravaged continent only if they combined together to create new supranational institutions.

Maurice Druon had written that the seat of the new Europe had been in London. But, not having suffered the shock of occupation or defeat, Britain drew very different lessons from the Second World War. For Britain, the war seemed to have shown not the weakness of nationalism and the need for supranational organization; rather, it had shown the beneficent value of British patriotism. We would, Churchill insisted, defend our ‘island’, the fortress which kept us safe from invasion. The rhetoric of our ‘finest hour’ and victory in 1945 proved the strength and vitality of Britain and her Commonwealth – or, as Churchill always preferred to call it, her Empire. There was therefore no reason to crib or confine British patriotism nor to submerge it in European supranational institutions. While it was difficult for the Germans, the Italians or the French to feel pride in their national past – indeed many had cause for shame in what they or their parents might have done during the war – the British could rejoice in their past and, in particular, in their wartime solidarity. Protected by their geographical position, by the Channel and by their wartime experience, Britain’s political leaders did not find it easy to understand the very different psychology of the Continental nations which the war had ruined. European identity, then, had been constructed in reaction to war, British identity was reinforced by it.³ As Jean Monnet, leading architect of the Coal and Steel Community and the European Community put it, ‘Britain had not been conquered or invaded. She felt no need to exorcise history’.⁴

Britain, nevertheless, had seemed, for a short period during the early stages of the war, to share in the development of a European consciousness. Maurice Druon, after all, had spoken of the new Europe as having its ‘seat’ in London. When, in March 1940, Britain and France signed a treaty pledging not to make a separate peace with Hitler, they declared also that they would maintain, after the war:

A community of action in all spheres for so long as may be necessary to effect the reconstruction with the assistance of other nations, of an international order which will ensure the liberty of peoples, respect for law and the maintenance of peace in Europe.

This declaration led The Times to comment, on 29 March 1940, that:

Anglo-French unity has already reached a more advanced point than at any period during the last war, and what is more it is realized in both countries that this point is but the first step towards a closer and more lasting association.

In Le Figaro, on 30 March, Wladimir d’Ormesson insisted that ‘England is now in Europe’.⁵

In June 1940, Winston Churchill, seeking to forestall French surrender, offered indissoluble union between Britain and France, ‘in their common defence of justice and freedom against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves’.⁶ This proposal was to be revived by French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, in 1956, at the height of the Suez crisis. In 1940, following the French surrender, the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, had remarked that Churchill’s offer ‘might have marked the beginning of a United States of Europe’⁷ and one authority has commented that:

If it was right for Britain at the crisis of the war’s fortunes to take the tremendous risk of the unknown inherent in the merging of the two sovereignties, then it must have been the case already for a long time that Britain’s security was inextricably involved in preserving a balance on the continent and that this could only be done by a total commitment of her material and moral strength for European objectives.⁸

However, the fall of France and the further progress of the war were to sever the connection between Britain and the Continent. Instead of binding Britain closer, the war served to undermine Britain’s incipient Europeanism and to confirm the British in the view that their fate was separate from that of the Continent and that they, unlike the shattered nations of the Continent, remained a great power, with a reach far beyond Europe. The experience of the Second World War, and of the immediate post-war years therefore served to reinforce contrasts between Britain and the Continent.

These differences in psychology were reflected in differences in post-war constitutional experience. For, after 1945, known in Germany as jahr null – year zero – the countries of the Continent were forced to begin again, to reinvent constitutions and political systems. The German constitution dates from 1949, the Italian from 1947; the French enacted a new constitution in 1946 and then another in 1958. The Continental countries had, perforce, to rethink the preconditions of constitutional and political order. The contrasts between the historical experien...