But it remains a possibility.Ī more seductive vision is that of a modernised medievalism. It has not been followed because, rather unattractively, it harks back, possibly unconsciously, to the old idea that Europe is inherently divided into productive and unproductive parts and races. A core group of member states headed by Germany would federalise sufficiently to make the single-currency system work, while a Mediterranean group would choose more flexible arrangements, such as adjustable exchange rates. One alternative is what former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble called a Europe of “variable geometry”. There are several possible versions of Europe. Yet, such a binary choice is surely false. So, the Leavers were right to see a federalist logic embedded in the EU’s economic structure.īut is federalism really Europe’s destiny? Many federalists argue that if the EU’s 27 members do not advance all the way to political union, Europe will retreat all the way to a congeries of nation-states. The economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an ambitious fiscal rescue plan. Since that crisis, the EU has taken tentative steps toward fiscal union, banking union, and a lender-of-last-resort function for the European Central Bank (ECB), and, though still mostly on paper, to strengthen the supervisory and surveillance powers of the European Commission, European Parliament, and ECB. And EU leaders saw the 2012-14 eurozone crisis, caused by the single currency’s lack of political counterparts, as the necessary spur, or goad, to further state-building. Looking back, the rupture began with the UK’s decision to opt out of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.ĮMU, which every EU member state was expected to join, was intended to be a stepping-stone to political union. To be fanciful, one could say that the Leavers instinctively sensed that dusk was approaching, whereas the Remainers did not.Īfter all, the UK joined the EU late and was an awkward member, and the weight of its past increasingly militated against the Union’s future. Both Leavers and Remainers believed the outcome was open, and fought hard to ensure the result they wanted.īut in retrospect, there was a whiff of inevitability about the UK’s separation, not from Europe, but from the EU as the institutional expression of it. To be sure, no one engaging in the debate at the time thought so. This argument suggests that Brexit was in some sense predetermined. The consequences of Cameron’s political maneuvers were unintended, but his political passions were doing the work of Hegel’s Weltgeist, or world spirit, the unseen force driving history. It was a colorful way of stating the law of unintended consequences.
When the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, he meant that the direction of history is evident only after the event.
But this is a superficial rendering of a complex story. He succeeded in his first aim, only to resign immediately when the “Leave” side won the UK’s 2016 referendum on its EU membership.īrexit, on this view, was simply a historical accident, the result of one politician’s tactical miscalculation. He expected to win and keep Britain in the EU. In 2015, in order to undercut the appeal of Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party movement, and secure a Conservative majority in the upcoming general election, Cameron promised a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU. LONDON - On one level, the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union was an unintended consequence of a too-clever political ploy by former prime minister David Cameron.
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