David Hannay is a member of the House of Lords and former UK ambassador to the EU and UN.
All across Europe this week commemorative events are taking place to mark the centenary of the guns falling silent on the Western Front in November 1918, after a disastrously destructive and catastrophic war between Europe’s leading nation states.
It was called a “world war”, but its origins and causes lay in Europe. What happened outside Europe consisted largely of a series of colonial wars between parts of European powers’ empires. Twenty one years later, another even more terrible global war broke out and, although it was more truly a world war, its roots also lay in Europe – as did much of the death and destruction which flowed from it.
In those two wars Britain played a crucial and, for the most part, an honourable role. But we did not emerge unscathed any more than any of the other main participants. Unlike them, however, we were slow to draw the conclusion that, as a key part of ensuring that such disasters never happened again and as a way of binding up the wounds from those conflicts, a new structure for economic and political cooperation between Europe’s different states was needed. So we helped to found NATO, but we stood aside from the European Communities.
Now, seventy years later, we are preparing to leave the European Union.
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Does that decision make any sort of sense, either in geopolitical or economic terms? It’s not easy to find any. And our timing could hardly be worse, as the rules based international order, which we and our European allies have done so much to build, is under greater threat than at any point in recent history. Shifting power relationships and Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy are shaking the foundations on which our future prosperity and security depend. And the European states, of whom we are one, will either hang together or we will hang separately.
That, of course, is the logic on which Theresa May has based her proposal for a new security treaty with the other 27 EU countries after we have left. But that proposal is very much a second-best option. It will leave us with our ear pressed to the keyhole of the meeting room, in which the EU 27 will work out their policy responses to international events. This will not just weaken our influence in Brussels, but in Washington too.
Why should we settle for second best? We do not have to, after all. The choice is ours, and it should be made by the electorate. The question that we will need to answer is whether it is in the UK’s national interest to distance ourselves from European policy making in which we have played such a vital role in the past centuries, and from the consequences of which we have not the slightest chance of escaping.
