Crises and metamorphosis

Banks on the point of collapse, a currency on the edge of the abyss, wars flaring on the continent’s periphery, internal borders closed, a member stuck halfway out of the door – a series of dramas has played out before us in recent years. If a crisis is indeed a moment of truth and if tribulations can bring self-knowledge, then the European Union should have learnt a great deal about itself in a short time.

The first lesson is that when the unity of the Union or peace in the region is at stake, political motives for being together prevail over purely economic interests. In abnormal situations the underlying politics, rarely visible under normal circumstances, actively comes to the fore.

This was a striking feature of the Brexit negotiations. It was brilliantly illuminated when, in late 2017, the then British Brexit secretary David Davis gave a speech in Berlin to an audience of German business leaders, as part of a London charm offensive aimed at securing favourable terms in the withdrawal agreement. Davis warned Germany and other European member states to beware of harming their own economies in the Brexit talks, advising them not to put “politics above prosperity”. His audience greeted these words with laughter and disbelief. The encounter reveals the depth of mutual misunderstanding. German business leaders see the Brexit referendum as an irresponsible political act, a case of economic hara-kiri. How could a leading Brexiteer, of all people, tell them not to put politics above prosperity? The British minister, using a pragmatic win-win argument in the best Brussels tradition, failed to grasp the extent to which his country’s exit from the European order is experienced by Germany and other EU member states as an existential political attack on the foundations of the Union, to be withstood at all costs.