Europe’s blind spot

In Paris in December, I sat with a journalist friend in a café on the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui and listened to him explain to me why a no-deal Brexit would be a catastrophe for Britain. It had to do with an article his newspaper had published about the Mini. You might think they were typically British cars, he said, but the plant where they were made in Cowley belonged to BMW! The steering wheels were assembled in Romania! The tail lights came from Poland!

So? I asked. Brexit was about leaving the EU, not making globalisation un-happen. Who do you think wants to close the Mini plant? Britain does not want to damage its export sector any more than Romania or Poland wants to shut down a factory that provides the livelihoods of thousands.

But this explanation, so reasonable sounding to me, made no impression on my friend. Almost all elite Brexit opinion, in Europe as in Britain, is built on the premise that somebody on the other side of the Channel is going to do something profoundly against his own self-interest. These kilometres-long traffic jams at Dover that are supposed to strike fear into us. Should they happen, won’t someone do something about them? How long would they last? An afternoon? Three days?

Last weekend, before votes on the amendments were due, France’s newspaper of record Le Monde tried to rise to the occasion. It opened its editorial pages to distinguished French historians who advanced two seemingly contradictory opinions about Britain: a) it is an absolutely horrible country, and b) it is essential that France, through the European Union, continues to bind this awful nation’s fate forever to its own.

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Britain — ‘the leading slave-power of the 18th century’,  according to one of these historians — ‘would have had to stop fighting [the Nazis] in 1943 if not for American aid,’  according to another, and now merely aspires to be like Singapore, ‘the “nation of shopkeepers” of the 21st century.’