Strategies have consequences

The United Kingdom, it is frequently alleged, has traditionally favoured enlargement of the European Union in the expectation that it would dilute the European integration process. There is little, if any, documented justification for such claims. But it is absolutely true that the UK has always – with one faltering exception – energetically championed enlargement. It has done this both for noble matters of principle (as a staunch supporter of democratization), for pragmatic mercantilist reasons (a greater market for exports), and also for geopolitical strategic considerations. It is a consistent and, most would acknowledge, commendable stance that runs through the premierships of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron (and also the 2010–15 deputy premiership of Nick Clegg). But, despite this consistent strategic stance, British politicians and civil servants never devised a consistent strategy to deal with the consequences of the successive enlargements they championed.

This chapter will consider the UK’s attitude towards enlargement over time. It will then consider what enlargements (“widening”) – and their opposite – do in terms of consolidating the European integration process (“deepening”) and then examine the consequences of enlargement for individual member states’ power in the traditional decision-making body of the European Union – the Council (the European Parliament will be considered in Chapter 4). The chapter will look at the increasing imperative for all member states to build alliances and conclude by examining briefly the draft Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by the Theresa May government and show how the UK will have gone from a gradual decline in its individual power to “(in?)glorious isolation” to the reductio ad absurdum position of no power in the institutions at all.

This chapter does not argue that UK support for enlargement was somehow “wrong”; on the contrary, most commentators would argue that it has been one of the UK’s outstanding successes as a leading EU member state (HM Government 2014). But such a position has had consequences. As a function of the UK’s strategy, the environment within which it was obliged to operate as a member state changed with each enlargement process. Such a changing environment required not just adaptation, but a strategic understanding of how the UK could best behave within it and what new constraints it would face.