The end of the beginning of Brexit, Europe's year zero?

It would be naive to frame the UK's definitive exit from the European Union as being wrong to assume that the British will cease to thrive in continental affairs. A quick diagonal reading of any contemporary history treaty shows clearly that since the beginning of the Modern Age, the strategy on the other side of the Channel has always been based on the delineation of spheres of power on the European continent. In the case of Spain, these efforts at influence are easily traceable to milestones such as the wars of Flanders, of Succession and of Independence, and, more recently, to British policy towards the Spanish civil war. 

Therefore, it is hoped that the United Kingdom's future relationship with the European Union can be reduced to a set of regulatory and trade arrangements, which appears more like an exercise in economic voluntarism than political realism.  If anything can be inferred from the last-minute manoeuvres at Westminster, designed to get rid of what was signed in the EU exit treaty, it is that Britain's determination not to have its strategic room for manoeuvre restricted by European legal structures, is important enough to continue to walk on the razor's edge of unconstitutionality, and flirt with the withdrawal from the peace agreements in Northern Ireland, the consummation of which requires a breach of international law, transfiguring the principle of 'Pacta Sunt Servanda' into a cynical 'Pacta Sunt Delenda'. 

In the cost-benefit calculation of the hard core promoter of British isolation, both risks appear to be bearable, no doubt because they are based on the conviction that the value of the prize they hope to obtain will more than compensate for the losses in terms of reputation: in the mentality of the British elite, dictating to others the rules of the game prevails, rather than abiding by them, like everyone else.

 

From this point of view, it was only a matter of time before the Good Friday Agreements were reneged on, given that, once the 'backstop' of Theresa May (the de facto permanence of the United Kingdom in the Customs Union) was ruled out, the only options available to protect the integrity of the European single market were the implementation of a trade customs office between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, or the establishment of trade customs offices between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The signing and ratification of the current exit agreement (which establishes the aforementioned customs control in the Irish Sea) can only be understood as an instrumental stratagem, which Johnson was never really willing to comply with, because it puts a straitjacket on his model of economic and fiscal policy, the real workhorse that drives the Brexit. 

By way of example, Article 10 of the protocol for Northern Ireland states that European state aid rules shall apply to the United Kingdom in respect of all trade in goods between Northern Ireland and the European Union. In practice, this means that any tax incentives granted within the territory of the United Kingdom and affecting companies in Northern Ireland would be monitored by the European Commission, which means that the European Union's competition laws remain in force throughout the United Kingdom. The same situation would remain for the regulations on plant protection and agri-food products, or rules of origin. 

To continental eyes, the fluidity and sway of British policy on matters of state is sometimes incomprehensible, when viewed through the lenses of the codified constitutional systems that are normal in Europe. The key is that in the British system, the parliament has absolute sovereignty, which in practice means that the parliamentary group with a sufficient majority has an almost unlimited capacity to make legislative changes: the UK constitution is not codified, and depends for practical purposes on checks and balances that have little more force than tacit respect for conventions: the resolution of constitutional disputes through litigation is an exception to the rule.

 

However, it would be wrong to conceive of the House of Commons as the playing field for the major parties. In fact, because of the single-member constituency system, the British Parliament has 650 parties, which not infrequently act on Edmund Burke's celebrated judgment, and vote on the basis of their conscience; as trustees of their voters, not simply as delegates of the voters. 

Therefore, over and above the pressure that the Irish diaspora lobby can exert on the US Congress to ensure compliance with the Good Friday Agreements, for example by vetoing a free trade agreement between the two countries, the real Achilles' heel for the Internal Market Bill of the British premier and his followers is not really in Brussels but in London and, to make matters worse, among their own ranks.

On the one hand, the sovereignty of Parliament is regulated by a series of stipulations for which the 'Speaker' of the House - the equivalent of the President of the Spanish Congress of Deputies - is responsible. One of the articles of this regulation, III.5, subjects the members of parliament to a code of conduct that requires them to respect the law. It is conceivable that voting for the violation of an International Treaty approved by them constitutes a manifest infringement, which may hypothetically lead the 'Speaker' to disqualify the MPs who voted in favour of the Internal Market Act.  

At the same time, a significant number of Lords in the Upper House have announced their intention to block the processing of the law in question, because it diverges from the manifesto of the ruling party, with the moral support of the five predecessors of Boris Johnson in Downing Street, and large conservatives of the caliber of Michael Howard, Geoffrey Cox, all influenced by the resignations of senior legal officials of the government. 

 

These reactions show that the accumulation of nonsense that has led to the current situation, far from being the result of a sudden and improvised mistake, is the result of a government trick, to whose opportunity cost a great deal of time, effort and resources have been devoted by the administration. In other words, the announcement by a Secretary of State, in a parliamentary series, that his government was preparing to "infringe international law in a very specific and limited way" would not have been possible without the active or passive complicity of those responsible for the application of the Ministerial Codes and the Civil Service Corps and the Attorney General, who holds the position of State Attorney. 

All of which leads us to infer that Boris Johnson's government is convinced that it will be able to overcome the remaining internal obstacles and that it can ignore both the fines that would foreseeably be imposed by the European Court of Justice at the request of the European Commission pursuant to article 178 of the still valid exit agreement and the subsequent sanctions in the form of trade barriers, which would lead, after a long and winding process, to a political and diplomatic crisis between the two international players. 

But by then, according to these political calculations, the United Kingdom would have broken the deadlock and cast off, moving towards a non-Eurocentric defence policy that was even more similar to America's and focused on shifting Britain's influence towards Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. The United Kingdom's obvious global ambitions, developed in a context of acrimony between both sides, would probably result in it becoming increasingly inescapable for the continent's countries to assume much greater responsibility for European security, with all its consequences, and in the knowledge that London will not cease in its efforts to break up the European Union and condition its foreign policy by means of the maniacal but effective formula of divide and rule.