The EU empire is failing to protect its borders. We will all pay the price

The Victorian historian J.A. Froude recalled a time when “the lights were all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by but the stars”. He meant the weakening of religious faith, but we too feel the foundations of our moral and physical confidence crumbling. Since at least the 18th century, we have supposed that, however haltingly, the world was moving intellectually and morally in our direction, because the West had discovered or invented ‘universal values’. In the long run, this may still prove to be true; but in the long run, as Keynes remarked, we are all dead.

In the short run, we are faced with a new axis linking what Lenin called “great Russian chauvinism” with the religious millenarianism of Iran and its proxies, and the rapacious state capitalism combined with traditional cultural aloofness practised by China. Unaligned countries, and even long-time allies, are adapting to new centres of power. Within Anglophone democracies, cultural institutions are busily sowing dissension and demoralisation in a modish espousal of ‘decolonization’, which is a disavowal of Western culture and history. Much of our disarray is self-inflicted: a moral as much as a material failing.

We have experienced this before. After the costly victory of 1918, peoples and politicians in democracies were mostly incapable of facing the terrifying fact that new and even greater dangers were looming. Humane and progressive people clung to what they hoped was a peaceful rules-based international order. The grand old man of Labour, George Lansbury, proclaimed that Hitler, as a non-smoking vegetarian, must want peace. To the Liberal Lloyd George he was “the greatest German of the age”. The Tory Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax hoped that “one day the Führer will be seen entering Buckingham Palace at the side of the King”. Labour bitterly opposed defence spending: “Do not compete with the fascists in arms,” insisted its leader Clement Attlee, “and they will not rearm” – the classic illusion of the well meaning.

Can we wholly blame them for closing their eyes to the prospect of a second Armageddon so soon after the first? Yet eventually they did face the unpalatable. Prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – later condemned as ‘guilty men’ who had left Britain defenceless – had in truth begun major rearmament in the mid-1930s, against popular opposition, even while working for appeasement. Ordinary people also began to confront the prospect of war, volunteering for the territorial army, the naval reserve or the auxiliary fire service to prepare for bombing. But too late. Had the West been more visibly prepared and resolute, Hitler would probably have been overthrown by the German army.

Can we see much sign today that Western politicians and peoples are waking up to the dangers facing them, even to the extent that Baldwin and Chamberlain did? Ukraine is the test, like Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. We prevented the Czechs from defending themselves in 1938. At least we have helped the Ukrainians to resist, but now they are in danger of being effectively abandoned by being given too little too late. America, as in the interwar period, is tempted by its old illusion of isolationism. If it gives in, that will among other things be a huge failure of Britain’s principle global strategy for a century: to get America involved in European defence.

What of the European Union? How distant the days when British politicians and diplomats thought that ‘Europe’ was a budding superpower which we had to join to avoid being left exposed as “a minor power”, as the Foreign Office put it, “hopelessly in the middle of the two power blocs”. Though some still want to clamber back on board the Marie Celeste, the danger from the EU is just the opposite: of a weak and divided continent unwilling to defend itself.

Sometimes, danger creates political solidarity and identity. France and Britain took shape through their mutual conflicts. Prussians, Bavarians and Saxons were welded into Germans by repeated threats from France. Across the Atlantic, ‘these United States’ became ‘the United States’ in the crucible of the Civil War.

I used to think similarly that if anything could create a true ‘United States of Europe’, it would be an attack by Russia. But the opposite has happened, and far from galvanising Europe, it has exposed its divisions and irresponsibility. Guy Verhofstadt vaunted the EU as a great empire, but what sort of empire neglects to defend its borders? Germany has been grudging, and France devious. Now the EU is hesitating about giving financial aid, and dithering about Ukrainian membership, which many observers fear will cause yet another EU crisis. It has been Britain, by the speed of its response – training and arming Ukrainian troops since 2011 – and the US, by the huge volume of aid it has given, that have maintained Ukrainian independence so far. But if America steps back, it will mean not only the defeat of Ukraine but – following so many failures and retreats – the end of any pretence to global leadership. Iran and China are watching and waiting.

What can Britain do in the face of Continental weakness? Of course, continue to discourage American isolationism and support the willing in Europe, including Scandinavia and Poland. But there is little sign of a general realisation of global danger, and few if any national leaders are willing to sound the alarm and admit the costs. We are not, in the near future, facing conventional war. But we are facing hugely expensive challenges in every sphere. ‘Sub-threshold warfare’ means we must not only repair our armed forces, but also our cyber capacity, intelligence gathering, communications, strategic industries, and above all energy supplies. We need to integrate, not divide, our polyglot population, and confront those who are demoralising us from within, often on public funds. Ironically, our traditional fear of governments having too much power has allowed our largely autonomous public institutions to be taken over by illiberal minorities. These “over-mighty subjects” need to be brought to heel, and only public pressure can make politicians do it.

So far we have not been called on to make significant sacrifices. Are we still capable of them? Orwell wrote in 1940 that England was like “a family with the wrong members in control”, but still able to move together, “like a herd of cattle facing a wolf”. I hope we never have to find out the hard way if this is still true.

Robert Tombs is author of The English and Their History, of which an updated edition has just appeared

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