Why close ties between Germany and the UK are essential, even after Brexit

Now that Britain has left the EU, the dynamic between the two nations is changing but, as Sean O’Grady explains, a friendly relationship is vital to the success of both the UK and Germany

Boris Johnson welcomes German chancellor Angela Merkel to Chequers with an elbow bump on Friday (AFP/Getty)

Obviously such things are highly confidential, but when Angela Merkel met the Queen, the two might well have given one another a meaningful glance when the words “Boris Johnson” cropped up. These two stateswomen have plenty of stamina, and lots of experience of the odd people – mostly men – who so often end up in No 10, and of course Johnson ranks as one of the more unusual. The Queen is on her 14th British prime minister, but the chancellor of Germany has been around long enough to be onto her fifth.

Great honour as meeting the Queen to take your leave may be, it is Chancellor Merkel’s encounter with Johnson that is the more politically significant. Certainly, she is now on her way out, and, by the end of the year her successor could even be the leader of the Green Party, Annalena Baerbock, such is its strength in the opinion polls. In other words, whatever Merkel’s views and policies may be now, they will certainly be less relevant in the years ahead. Brexit will also mean an evolving new relationship between these two traditional rivals powers.

German-British relations will continue to be of critical concern, regardless of who is in power. Germany will always place the integrity of the EU and its single market ahead of almost everything, but there are plenty of areas where the EU has only marginal relevance, and these are the ones where British cooperation with Germany, and France if President Macron is willing, could actually deepen and intensify, notwithstanding the continuing tensions and resentments about Brexit. Foreign and defence policy, for example, should be a shared interest. As the pre-eminent economic and/or military powers on the continent, the E3, as this embryonic troika is becoming known, already work together and agree on a range of international issues, such as the Iran nuclear deal, in the G7 and G20, on climate change, on the peace process in the Middle East, and on resisting Chinese abuse of the human rights of the Uighur people and Hong Kongers. To a degree, there is some consensus about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, though the British are much more assertive than the Germans and French and the EU as a whole.

A succession of international crises has revealed how slow and difficult it has been for the EU to quickly form a common policy on sanctions on a pariah state such as Belarus. Conversely the British no doubt realise that German economic power counts for rather more than Britain these days, and if the UK can recruit Germany, and ideally France and the EU as well, to its causes then its diplomacy will be that much more effective.

Even outside the EU, Britain might be a useful influence for Germany in its attempts to guide EU policy, and to restrain the union’s most centralising tendencies and the wayward financial habits of other nations. When the UK was a member state, it could, with the Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans, block some of the commission’s proposals and try to maintain fiscal sanity. With the UK and its voting power gone, that “veto” has now been weakened. Diplomatic pressure from London, albeit outside the EU, might be a bit of a replacement. The UK might also provide the traditional bridge between the EU and the US, which might suit Germany; it might suit Britain too not to be marginalised by a Biden administration that has its differences with London about Ireland.

After Brexit, things could never be the same, and the arguments about Ireland, about fish and financial services and about the free movement of Iron Maiden across concert venues will periodically poison relations. But there will also be vital issues where interests converge and where the UK and EU will be stronger together than apart. Brexit hasn’t changed that.