Britain’s neighbours fret that it could drift away

IMAGINE BRITAIN in a few months’ time, having left the EU without a deal. Markets and sterling are plummeting. The country has left the EU’s foreign-policy structures without any framework for future relations. Its government falls. A new prime minister scans the world for friends and picks up the phone to the White House, Zhongnanhai in Beijing or even Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

Such an outcome is very unlikely: for a start, Theresa May could even now just squeeze her deal through. Yet European leaders and officials are spooked as they contemplate a no-deal Brexit, or even a hard one as Mrs May intends. This shapes their posture and reveals something of their wider state of mind. They reckon that an acrimonious divorce could make Britain desperate for trade deals with giant partners like America, China and others. And they fear, says Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations, that over time those actors could exploit its weaknesses, imposing conditions that peel Britain away from Europe’s foreign-policy caravanserai and leave it in a position similar to that of Turkey: a semi-European player with unpredictable foreign entanglements.

Donald Trump’s White House may want revisions to Britain’s policies on the Middle East, suggests one EU official; perhaps its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Rem Korteweg of the Clingendael Institute reports Dutch worries that American pressure in trade talks could also split Britain away from European sanctions and weapons-export policies. China’s designs on Britain cause even more apprehension. China has a record of using its weight in bilateral talks with European countries (particularly those in economic or diplomatic strife, like Italy and Hungary) for foreign-policy ends. “The Chinese will be ready. They have a clear feeling of the power ratio,” notes a senior EU diplomat. He suggests that the price of a trade deal could be British acquiescence to Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea. Others speculate that London could sign up to the “belt and road” infrastructure programme or further open its critical infrastructure to Chinese money.

No-one expects an overnight transformation. The concern is more that Britain’s need for new trading partners and inward investment, and its absence from common EU forums, will over time pull it away from the European fold. Among the more lurid predictions are those by Marc Roche, Le Monde’s correspondent in London, who imagines Britain ending up as a “tax haven at Europe’s gates” and “China’s Trojan horse in Europe”.

Britain has done little to dispel such anxieties. Its shambolic Brexit negotiations give EU panjandrums nightmares about British ministers with no experience but abundant neo-imperial fantasies parading into negotiating rooms with the Chinese and losing their shirts. Guff about “global Britain” and Theresa May’s earlier hints that she might use the country’s European defence commitments as bargaining chips, though long since abandoned, have heightened doubts. Some observers spy signs that London is softening certain foreign-policy positions ahead of post-Brexit talks: for instance by supporting Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.

The continentals should not worry so much. Britain has always been a mercantile, semi-detached sort of European foreign-policy power. Brexit could accentuate the country’s relative openness to foreign cash but is not its cause. Beijing first declared a new Anglo-Chinese “golden age” in 2015 and seems to have since lost interest in the country as a backdoor to Europe. And even if a charlatan like Boris Johnson or an anti-Western leftist like Jeremy Corbyn ends up in Downing Street, Britain’s prime minister is constrained by Parliament, public opinion and the wider institutional establishment. All of these remain committed to the pre-Trump transatlantic order and close foreign-policy co-operation with continental Europe, as recent debates in the House of Commons on softening Brexit, or curbing its deleterious effects, have illustrated. The strength of Britain’s institutions, the size of its economy and its crucial role in NATO all make comparisons with Italy and Hungary unhelpful. Britain may be opportunistic, even cynical, in the aftermath of a rough Brexit. But it will remain an integral part of the Western alliance. And it is a bit rich to worry about the British when Germany remains in hock to Russian energy interests and Italy, not Britain, has just signed up to China’s belt and road plan.

Something to worry about

Still, European concerns to the contrary, no matter how overdone, are significant on two levels. First, they help shape the attitudes of the remaining 27 members of the EU to a no-deal Brexit. All are fed up with the talks. None is convinced that maintaining good commercial relations with Britain is worth pursuing talks indefinitely, or allowing it to cherry-pick the benefits of membership. But more than is realised in London, angst about a no-deal or otherwise fraught Brexit splitting the West and isolating Britain continues to stay the hand of even the most negotiation-weary European leaders. It motivated Angela Merkel’s successful insistence at the EU summit on March 21st that Britain be granted more time to pass its negotiated Brexit deal or to request an extension. It is a weak Britain’s strongest card.

Second, Europe’s anxieties are symptomatic of the times. After years of complacency, it is slowly taking its own geopolitical situation more seriously. There is talk, though little action, about seeking “strategic autonomy” from America. The EU is increasing efforts to curb Russian-backed political interference and has introduced a screening mechanism for Chinese investments. At their summit on March 26th Mr Macron and Mrs Merkel chided Xi Jinping for trying to exploit Europe’s divisions. “They perceive a ring of countries on the EU’s fringes that are vulnerable to outside powers,” explains Jan Weidenfeld of MERICS, a think-tank in Berlin. The fear that Britain could join this ring says at least as much about the EU as it does about Britain itself.