What does the future hold for the European Union?

Sean O'Grady considers the bloc’s reasons to be cheerful – and fearful – when Brexit is finally over

A Banksy artwork in Dover last year (Getty Images)

Well, I’ve checked again, and I’m sorry to report that the famous British newspaper headline “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off” never actually appeared. Not in The Yorkshire Post before the Great War, nor in The Times in 1957, nor anywhere else. Alas, as Boris Johnson would say, it is apocryphal.

Still, the fact that it has proved such a persistent myth reveals much about Anglocentric attitudes, right up to our times. Understandably the British have been obsessed with the consequences of Brexit for Britain (albeit with some increasing boredom setting in); they seem less bothered about what it will do to the European Union.  

As usual, too, such parochialism will prove a mistake, given that Britain can’t be just towed out into the Atlantic. We will still be trading, still share geography, and share links of culture, family, sport, security and much else. So what happens to the European Union matters too.  

What does the bloc’s future hold?  

On 31 January, so-called Brexit Day, the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, granted an interview to the BBC’s Europe Editor, Katya Adler. So far from being some kind of pet bichon frise penned up in a kennel next to the Berlaymont, as the Eurosceptics would have you believe, Adler asked a slightly biting question, about whether Brexit represented a failure on the part of the EU. After expressing thanks to the British for their contribution, Von der Leyen asserted that “something happened” over the three years that had passed since the 2016 vote. To her mind, people in Europe had come to realise that they were better together, and could face global challenges that much better as a union.  

She had a point, though a little overspun. The sheer difficulty, division and pain of Brexit, and its probably depressing economic results, have certainly given many across Europe pause for thought about any dreams of leaving the EU. Support for Europe in Europe is, according to polls, a bit higher than it was before David Cameron launched his ill-starred attempt to renegotiate British membership. Those watching to see how the British got on with Brexit have not been impressed.  

The overwhelming mood among Europeans towards their union is best described as “neutral”. The last EU-wide polling suggests that in a three-way choice, “indifference” would be the first-past-the-post winner in most places, expressed as neutral between a positive or negative image of the EU.  

Yet there are important variations, as a result of the succession of crises that have hammered the European project in the past decade or so. The global financial downturn gave rise to local banking collapses which in turn led to sovereign debt crises – in which the likes of Portugal, Italy and Greece were about to go bust. Their indebtedness and instability in turn drained confidence in the survival of the euro. After that came the migrant crisis; a wave of populist hostility directed towards the EU; Brexit; and Covid, which exposed some of the bloc’s shortcomings. However, the EU, its currency and its institutions survived, albeit with one less member state. The EU should have had PTSD, but it has at least affected an air of concerned serenity.  

As you might expect after being at the brunt of a decade of upheavals, there isn’t much affection for the EU in Italy, Greece or Cyprus, where 61 per cent, 66 per cent and 54 per cent of the population say they tend not to trust the EU.  

What must be more concerning is that that distrust is shared in unexpected places traditionally associated with integration and with enthusiastically Europhile governments, such as Belgium, Luxembourg and France, where more than half of respondents express distrust. Thus Emmanuel Macron remains at odds with many of his compatriots in his belief that “more Europe” is the answer. The gilets jaunes and other symptoms of disillusion have subsided but not disappeared, again concerningly in a nation where sovereignty is vested in the people.  

Macron’s relative unpopularity next to the extremist Marine Le Pen is no surprise in current circumstances. Le Pen no longer talks wistfully about “Frexit”, because Brexit has been no end of a lesson, but that is not where the danger now lies. There is a twist to that.  

The danger to Europe’s future lies not in Brexit-secession, but in this movement away from public sentiment, the pursuit of ever closer union at an accelerated and urgent pace. As Christine Lagarde, then chief of the International Monetary Fund and now president of the European Central Bank, put it so plainly in 2016: “The years are over when Europe cannot follow a course because the British will object. Now the British are going, Europe can find a new elan.”  

Or “goodbye and good riddance”. Except of course that it wasn’t just the British who tried to apply the brakes: in a system where the national veto had mostly disappeared, there was a bloc of northern states that tended to resist further integration, including the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, plus, where cash was at stake, Germany and Finland. That was a formidable blocking majority, but now significantly weaker with the UK absent.    

So the momentum towards ever more European unions continues – the European Health Union, the European Banking Union, the Capital Markets Union, some sort of defence union – all are in varying stages of development.  

The years are over when Europe cannot follow a course because the British will object. Now the British are going, Europe can find a new elan

Christine Lagarde, the then IMF chief in 2016

The point here is not that they are bad ideas. Donald Trump’s disdain for Nato should have had Europeans reaching for their pistols. The Covid pandemic revealed a woeful lack of solidarity in healthcare.  

Above all, Macron and the European Commission are right, for example, to want much more control over member states’ budgets. As we now know, a monetary union – the euro – cannot survive without a fiscal union. Yet only now are European Union bonds being issued with all member states liable to repay them – the only sustainable path for a stable currency. Notably, these coronabonds yield more than national bonds issued by Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, but less than those of Spain, Italy and Greece – reflecting the risk. All is fine provided everyone is prudent; if not, then there will be more bailouts, though less public support than in the past. The idea is still not widely accepted in Berlin. Nor is Macron’s plan for a European defence entity – the “European army”. It’s also difficult to fit neutral Ireland, Sweden, Austria and Finland into such a replacement for Nato.  

Whatever the merits of these probably necessary and inevitable steps towards an ever closer union, they divide member states, and Europe’s populations, as successive crises over money and migrants have shown. It all might still succeed, were it not for troublesome voters. So ambitious are Von der Leyen’s plans (including to be fair some attempt to strengthen democratic legitimacy) that she is prepared to contemplate treaty changes.  

To which any sane observer would have shouted “Whoa!” (she is, after all, a keen equestrian). In many EU states, treaty changes have to be ratified by referendums, and it is doubtful that in most of Europe – and especially the larger founding states of Germany, France and Italy – any referendum to do with Europe would win, no matter what question was on the ballot paper. Elsewhere such integrationist moves can also be scuppered by parliaments (including regional assemblies) and national constitutional courts.  

So even if Europe is freer to integrate without Nigel Farage shouting the odds in the European parliament, and even if moves to create a federal state actually make logical sense, and even if they’d make everyone richer, they will be almost impossible to push through, given the new politics of our age.  

Much the same, by the way, goes for the EU’s proposed expansion into the western Balkans, initially Albania and Northern Macedonia where Macron has used his veto. The EU is getting rather stuck.  

The good news for Europe is that it has demonstrated over the past decade an almost British gift for muddling through and improvisation. The worse news is that it may not be enough

It is interesting, by contrast, that in two of the countries with the most defiantly hostile governments, Poland and Hungary, the public is much more pro-European and inclined to trust Brussels. Romanians and Lithuanians also have relatively few hang-ups about Brussels. The answer to that conundrum may be that in areas where the population still appreciates the benefits of membership – not least for visible inward investment and free movement of labour to high-wage neighbours – the European project still feels very useful. Yet that is very much a transactional approach, like that of the Scandinavians (and the British in their time), and not the kind of patriotic pull that the European ideal is supposed to inspire. Former communist bloc states plus Finland also rate the EU as protection against a revanchist Russia – another big reason why they’d never leave, though it wouldn’t stop them from trying to shape Europe in their image, which they have as much right to do as anyone. The Czechs, strikingly, have a marked aversion to joining the euro, more than in any other country.  

(The Irish, no doubt wary of London after Brexit, put the most faith in the EU.)  

Somewhere in all this and the coronavirus pandemic, a scheme to find out what the European public actually wants Europe to do was lost. Contrary to Von der Leyen’s dismissal of Brexit as in any way a talisman of failure, her predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker published in 2016 a “white paper” of options for Europe’s future. The European parliament has also been trying to convene citizens’ assemblies, with a view to possible reforms. The lively Guy Verhofstadt, former Brexit coordinator of the parliament, might bring the “Conference on the Future of Europe” to life and relevance, if it ever gets going. They’ll probably get no further than Cameron did, but at least in those initiatives there is some vague recognition of a problem, and a potentially lethal one.  

The good news, then, for Europe is that it has demonstrated over the past decade an almost British gift for muddling through and improvisation. The worse news is that it may not be enough, though you’d not necessarily bet against it being around in a decade or two if Germany continues to be able and willing to pay the bills. If the logical answer to Europe’s problems is greater integration then the problem there is that that project is no longer politically realistic, and the very attempt to integrate would simply exacerbate tensions; one by one the referendums would be lost and popular mistrust stirred up.

If the answer is “less Europe” and more “variable geometry” with a central core in the euro and sharing a common budget and mutual defence obligation, but with varying opt-outs all over the place, then Europe becomes an even less cohesive entity able to act decisively or even function as a unit. On balance, Brexit was bad for Europe, but even if Remain had won in 2016, Europe’s most heroic years were behind it.