For Europe’s sake, Britain must not be defeated — op-ed in The Sunday Times September 10, 2017.
Reading between the lines, the message to London from the EU propaganda machine is fourfold:
- The EU will not budge. Brussels’s worst nightmare is a mutually advantageous economic agreement that other Europeans may interpret as a sign that a mutiny against Europe’s establishment may be worthwhile. To ensure that there will be no such deal, Barnier and the European Commission have not been given a mandate to negotiate any concessions to Britain regarding future arrangements such as a free trade agreement.
- Angela Merkel will not step in to save the day. The only national leader who is capable of intervening therapeutically did not do this for Greece and she will not do it for Britain.
- London must not try to bypass the rule of EU law. Every time London makes a proposal, Brussels will reject it as either naive or in conflict with “the rule of EU law”; a legal framework for exiting so threadbare that it offers no guidance at all regarding the withdrawal of a member state from the union. In this light, when they speak of the “rule of law” what they really mean is the logic of brute force backed by their indifference to large costs inflicted on both sides of the English Channel.
- Prepare your people for total capitulation — that is your only option.
None of this is new. It springs out of the EU playbook that was thrown at me during our 2015 negotiations. I had bent over backwards to compromise on a deal that was viable for Greece and beneficial to the rest of the eurozone. It was rejected because being seen to work with us risked giving ideas to the Spaniards, the Italians, indeed the French, that there was utility to be had from challenging the EU establishment.
[…] One of the reasons I opposed Brexit was that the UK would expend an inordinate amount of economic and political capital in pursuing withdrawal, ending up more intertwined with Brussels after Brexit than it was before.
In my view it was better to struggle against the EU’s anti-democratic establishment from within than from without. Alas, Britons were not persuaded by such arguments and voted to leave. As a democrat I respect their verdict, but fear that May will fall into the EU trap.
Meanwhile, Brussels’s cheerleaders are advising London to learn the wrong lessons from Greece.
The right lesson is to deny the EU the opportunity to wear Britain’s negotiators down until they capitulate. A Norway-style interim agreement or the immediate cessation of negotiations are the only two options.
As an Anglophile and a radical Europeanist I strongly support the former.
Yanis Varoufakis is co-founder of DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, and the author of Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment published by Bodley Head, £20