Brexit Briefing: My Favourite Post This Week . The Times. Wednesday 27th September 2017.

Sometimes I come across such a brilliant post in The Times that I really wish I had written it myself. This post is in reply to an article by David Aaronovitch : 'Macron offers us a way out of Brexit mess.' Published online: 27/9/2017. Paper version 28/9/2017

John T 1 day ago

The fact that Brits (particularly Brexiters) thought Brexit would break the EU apart shows how out of tune we are with continental Europeans. It's no surprise we can't negotiate with them. We simply don't understand them.

The 2 Global wars in which Continental Europe's 2 biggest powers, France and Germany, were the crucible prompted some introspection among them both, and one of the results of that was the EU.

The EU was envisaged as their way of preventing any more Verduns or Holocausts. To achieve this, national interests which could easily become nationalist fervour were supplicated to ideals of pan European cooperation. Henceforth France & Germany would cooperate and create institutions which would adjudicate conflicting national interests impartially and by which both would abide.

Of course, Britain has had its own Verduns and we are in the midst of the centenary commemorations of one of them (Passchendaele) right now, however.. the way we view them is fundamentally different from the way that the French and Germans view them.

You can get a flavour for this by comparing the way Verdun and Passchendaele are memorialised. 

At Ieper, the dead of Passchendaele are glorified in Lutyens stone. This contrasts with  Verdun, where 100s of thousands of unidentified dead from both sides are heaped in the drab, concrete Douaumont ossuary, their unceremoniously deposited remains visible to visitors through windows. The battlefield around the Ossuary has been left untouched and reclaimed by nature.

Our story is that we saved Europe by making enormous sacrifices that we didn't have to. We could have left them to fight, and consequently we glorify our heroism. 

Their story is that competing, conflicting nation states inevitably result in the inglorious, visceral reality of the Douaumont ossuary.

It is notable that polls consistently show little sympathy for the British among EU peoples. No EU country has a majority of its electorate who wish to give us a good deal.

It is a product of our isolationist view that we imagine they did not hear us demonising them, belittling the project which has brought decades of peaceful cooperation to Europe and willing its destruction instead of  trying to make it better.

They view the sentiment behind Brexit as the essence of disasters such as Verdun.

It is for this reason that we are unlikely to get a good deal from the EU unless we change. Brexit is perceived to  be an example of the nationalism the EU was created to quell. To Europeans the EU is worth something more than its imperfections.

They will not give up on it. Even in Greece, which endured the worst of the post financial crisis austerity and is still governed at the behest of the Troika, those who wish to leave the EU are a minority... indeed, those who wish to leave the Euro are a minority........

At this moment in time, I suspect the ,mindset of the EU is exactly as this article describes. Brexit will hurt us much more than them.

They don't want to hurt us, what they actually want is for us to understand what the EU is really about and what it really means to our continental neighbours. It isn't about German hegemony, Brussels dominion,  jobs for the boys or dictatorship, it is about the opposite of those things. 

It isn't about a purely transactional form of relationship either, as we seem to insist it should be.

If it is flawed, then the solution is to fix it, not to break it apart.

So while they don't want to hurt us, they are prepared to if they have to.

We need to understand how much our cynicism and jingoism has angered them, and why. They are not going to give us a good Brexit deal. I think they will simply let negotiations expire and then speak to us when we are ready to have a sensible conversation.

The best thing we could do right now is try to understand that, and why.

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