Global News: September 2019 Archives
Why Hasn't Brexit Happened? - Christopher Caldwell, Claremont Institute
This is an excellent "explainer" -- not only in answer to the title question, but also about the constitutional impact of EU membership on the UK's constitutional arrangements, which included both subjection to foreign courts and creation of a judiciary independent of Parliament. This observation has transatlantic applicability:
"The transfer of competences from legislatures to courts is a superb thing for the rich, because of the way the constitution interacts with occupational sociology. Where the judiciary is drawn from the legal profession, and where the legal profession is credentialed by expensive and elite professional schools, judicialization always means a transfer of power from the country at large to the richest sliver of it. This is true no matter what glorious-sounding pretext is found to justify the shift--racial harmony, European peace, a fair shake for women. In a global age, judicial review is a tool that powerful people expect to find in a constitution, in the same way one might expect to find a hair dryer in a hotel room."
Because Britain's elites opposed Brexit, they didn't make use of the UK's significant leverage:
"Rogers and other British experts were strangely unimpressed by the powerful practical levers their own side disposed of. Britain was the largest importer of cars from Germany. It had a trade deficit with most countries on the continent, which meant that any breakdown in talks would idle more European factories than British ones. It was, with France, one of only two serious military powers in Western Europe. It had an intelligence-gathering relationship with the United States that continental Europe was desperate to preserve the benefits of. It contained 40% of Europe's data servers. It was due to recover its own rich fishing banks--schools of mackerel north of Scotland, beds of prawns southwest of Cornwall--where E.U. vessels took 59% of the haul. And it was the financial capital of the world. The E.U. would have no choice but to do business with an independent Britain."
About the Irish backstop, the guarantee of no "hard border" between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic:
"It was an unusual demand for a number of reasons. There had never been a hard border between the two countries, outside of military emergencies. Nor was there a need for one now. Britain and Ireland were part of the same island region, cut off by ocean and law from the E.U.'s 'Schengen' area of free movement. Britain had as much reason to demand border guarantees from the E.U. as the E.U. did from Britain. And while such borders might present new challenges after Brexit, there were proven solutions: non-E.U. Switzerland, for example, keeps its borders, travel, and trade open with four major E.U. countries. These problems only became 'insoluble' when E.U. diplomats discovered they might be used to tangle up the Brexit negotiations."
In conclusion:
"Brexit was not an "outburst" or a cry of despair or a message to the European Commission. It was an eviction notice. It was an explicit withdrawal of the legal sanction under which Brussels had governed Europe's most important country. If it is really Britain's wish to see its old constitutional arrangements restored, then this notice is open to emendation and reconsideration. But as things stand now, the Leave vote made E.U. rule over the U.K. illegitimate. Not illegitimate only when Brussels has been given one last chance to talk Britain out of it, but illegitimate now. What Britons voted for in 2016 was to leave the European Union--not to ask permission to leave the European Union. It is hard to see how Britain's remaining in the E.U. would benefit either side.
"And yet, given that Britain is the first country to issue such an ultimatum, given that pro-E.U. elites in other European countries have reason to fear its replication, given the moral ambitions of the E.U. project, given that the British who support Remain have transferred their sentiments and their allegiances across the channel, given the social disparity between those who rule the E.U. and most of those who want to leave it, how could the reaction of Britain's establishment be anything but all-out administrative, judicial, economic, media, political, and parliamentary war? The battle against Brexit is being fought, Europe-wide, with all the weaponry a cornered elite has at its disposal.
"It has proved sufficient so far."
