It Could Be Said #14 Just Say No To A French British Legion
A look at why a deeper military alliance with the French is not only a bad idea, but reveals the sloppy thinking that risks dooming Brexit
On Sunday I was reading a Stephen Bush article with the same type of growing dread that he normally elicits in more thorough going Labour partisans. He was returning to his recurring analysis of the strange endurance of Anglo-French military cooperation after Brexit, cooperation that he expects to intensify as the two major Eastern Atlantic military powers grapple with what they perceive as growing American isolationism.
And clearly all what Bush said is correct. But my god, I really wish it wasn’t.
An Idea Whose Time May Finally Be Here
I’ve recently started playing a lot of Risk Online, and one of the things you learn quickly is that trying defend Europe sucks. You’re actutely vulnerable to invasion from North Africa, the Middle East and Siberia. It’s such a pain in the ass that despite the greater rewards on offer you’re much better building your base in literally any other continent. Alas for real life European leaders that option is not available to them, they instead have to make their awkwardly located continent defensible, even as security threats on its three external borders grow.
This poor geography is exacerbated by their dysfunctional militaries, with a level of military spending that is both too low and riddled with redundancy. The European Union isn’t just struggling to meet half of the (inadequate) NATO target of spending 2% of GDP on its armed forces, but is spending what it does in a ludicriously inefficient way by splitting the money between 27 national armies. In 2019, the EU27 collectively spent more than China did on defence, but few would say it got the same bang for its buck1.
What’s more the low spending and inefficiencies are actually two sides of the same problem; whereas you might be able to convince the average Belgian voter that Europe needs a stronger border force to stop migrants getting into the Schengen Area or deter Russian or Islamist attacks on the European Union, it’s impossible to make the case that Belgium needs a stronger national military when its bordered by peaceful and friendly states it’s in confederation with. And at an elite level there’s a beggar thy neighbour logic to keeping expenditure on defence as low as possible as the more you invest in your armed forces the less you are investing in the productive parts of your economy and society. Indeed, one of the reasons Britain’s economy fell so badly behind Western Europe’s in the 1950s and 60s was that it was spending an enormous amount on defence due to the Korean War, Blue Streak and various colonial wars2. That was money our European neighbours instead spent on revitalising and modernising key industries.
So there’s a clear logic to the European Union creating a unified army3. But the logic rests on the European Union having troublesome external borders and a reasonably unified approach to dealing with them. As Clausewitz said, “war is the continuation of politics by other means”, which means that to be successful militarily you have to have political clarity. Maybe the European Union will someday reach the necessary clearness of mind to develop a successful European Army, or maybe a thousand years of history will always vindicate Charles De Gaulle’s barbs about an army without a people or a flag to march for. Either way, that’s a question for the Europeans to determine.
Leave Means Leave
We seem to be living in the Wile E Coyote phase of British foreign policy. We’ve left the European Union but we’ve not left that European state of mind. If you listened to the hysteria from much of the political, security and media establishment over the fall of the Ghani Regime in Afghanistan you would think that our interests perfectly align with the Europeans. Because for all their words on woman’s rights and protecting local allies, both British and European leaders are clearly terrified by the prospect of a wave of refugees having the same destabilising effect that the surge of migrants from Syria and Libya had in 2014 and 2015.
But the key thing here is whilst Britain could and should help mitigate the refugee crisis, it is the Europeans who actually have an urgent problem to deal with. The journey from Afghanistan to Greece or Bulgaria is around 2,500 miles. If someone from Afghanistan could make it past the security fences that are being erected in preparation of their arrival, they gain easy access to the rest of the continental European Union. But to get to Britain they would have to cross another 1000 miles, of which at least the final fifty is the English Channel. And beyond that is a coastline that should be policed more strictly than anything they would have face since entering the Balkans. Before this year these blunt facts of geography meant nothing in the face of the remorseless logic of Freedom of Movement and the ever expanding remit of the European Court of Justice, but those days are behind us. Britain is now applying the full weight of its border security regime to those who enter from Europe, and it doesn’t have to abide by the various rules designed to maintain a delicate balance between the European Union’s border states and everyone else.
In a fortnight where the British establishment has openly had a nervous breakdown at the idea that America may retreat behind the natural defences those famed shining seas provide it, one may be forgiven for thinking they had forgotten that we are similarly separated from external problems by seawater. But of course they haven’t forgotten, they’re lying.
At The Heart of Europe
We Brexiters may be a cranky lot, and those of the tribe who are Tory are even crankier than the rest of us, but when you think about it, that’s kind of understandable.
Eurosceptics helped remove Ted Heath, only to see Margaret Thatcher parade her pro-EEC jumper in the referendum. When Thatcher was removed for veering dangerously close to opposing the next phase of European integration, they rallied behind her chosen protege, only to see John Major talk about placing Britain in the heart of Europe. And then when several of them, including Thatcher, flirted with a Tony Blair who “wrote” newspaper articles about how much he loved the Pound, they were rewarded with the most thoroughly pro-European British Government since Ted Heath.
But sometimes you have to stop crying betrayal and recognise that if you’re repeatedly outmanoeuvred, then it’s your own damn fault. At the most superficial level, it’s infuriating to see Remainers constantly harp on about Global Britain being betrayed in Kabul to shame Brexiters into acquiescing to greater military cooperation with the European Union, when Vote Leave deliberately refused to use that idiotic slogan because it runs counter to everything the average Leave voter believes. Likewise, you’ve had people who in a previous life repeatedly worried about an EU army undermining NATO, openly embrace the idea, because an American President dared to an end a twenty-year war that begun because America was attacked and it’s another way to keep the Brexit culture wars going.
And this is where we return to the idea of enhanced military cooperation with the French, something first put on the table with the Lancaster House Treaties in 2010. It’s easy to see how this will be spun to Brexiters; oh don’t you worry your little heads, this isn’t a supranational power grab, this is just two sovereign nations working together to maximise their military reach and capacity. Naturally even Tory Brexiters aren’t dumb enough4 not to query why if Britain has left the European Union, would it seek to integrate its military with the EU’s leading military power?
Well the answer goes back to Europe’s double-sided problem with military, except this cuts differently with Britain and France. They are committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence and their peoples enthusiastically support their militaries, but the elites would dearly like to do more with their armed forces. Rather than make the argument for more defence spending, its far easier to pool resources, so the spend goes further and allows for greater capabilities.
But in the same way William Hague once rightly called the Euro a burning building with no exits, this is a runaway train with one direction as the more you integrate the more money you save, the more money you save the more capacity you build to undertake joint missions, the more joint missions you run the more important foreign policy alignment becomes5.
This isn’t a hypothetical point. France has long been more aggressive than Britain about unilaterally intervening in its former colonies because someone, somewhere in Africa or the Caribbean looked at them funny or spilt their half-litre. Less than a year after those treaties were signed, Nicolas Sarkozy talked David Cameron into backing military action in Libya, despite the former’s previous criticism of such humanitarian interventions. The more integrated our militaries are, the more British troops and equipment are dragged into fighting wars that have nothing to do with us, because the alternative would be rupturing an alliance which underpins our ability to intervene when we want to.
We’ve been here before. Britain engaged in the same mixture of wishful thinking and penny-pinching in the Edwardian Era, trying to deepen military ties with the French navy so that it could concentrate its European fleet in the North Sea without committing to a formal alliance. What actually happened was that to secure French cooperation both military figures and diplomats promised their French counterparts that Britain would always aid it should Germany invade. These secret and anti-democratic promises that were then wielded against the anti-war majority in the cabinet to force them to intervene, whereas back in 1870 Britain was able to stand aside from the Franco-Prussian War because we didn’t rely on France for our defence.
Brexiters need to realise that supranationalism was just the best way to codify pan-Europeanism, but if integration goes deep enough then national vetos are little protection against the call for common action. If they want Britain to be truly independent of Europe then they have to demand that we invest our capacity to act independently. When it comes to defence, that means we don’t orientate our entire armed forces around a secret alliance with France. If that means we have to do less or spend more then so be it.
But more broadly that means we have to think more deeply about how we engage with Europe. If you want to reduce the impact European regulations have on Britain, then you need to trade less with European Union, as its the volume of trade that determines the extent to which their regulations set the contours for our industries. And escaping Brussels’ regulatory orbit may not come cheap, it could involve significant investment in facilitating greater trade further afield or increased domestic production.
Nietzsche once warned, “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back”. Eurosceptics have spent so long staring at the European Union they have imbibed its legalistic way of thinking. But facts on the ground mean far more than international law. If we Brexiters want the independent Britain we campaigned for, then we have to build it, no matter the costs involved.
To be fair even a well-run European Army would not achieve the same efficiencies as China due to the whole paying people a fair wage, giving them decent accomodation and setting aside money for veterans’ pensions. This is what the Chinese mean by the decadent West.
At our peak, we were spending 12% of GDP on defence! East of Suez is an unacknowledged first step on Britain’s road to economic recovery.
Indeed they tried in 1954 but the 20th Century’s greatest statesman, Charles De Gaulle, helped persuade the French Assembly to vote “non”. What a legend.
Well, not all of them
It’s worth saying that this doesn’t necessarily apply in the same way for France. The original idea for the European Defence Community would be that France would retain an “imperial” force away from the EDC, and you could easily envisage a scenario where France balances an overseas-focused Anglo-French force with an European-focused EU Army to maximise its influence and keep its options open.