Where merkel is pragmatic on brexit, macron is just chippy | thearticle

Readers of TheArticle will not have been surprised by Chancellor Merkel’s flexibility in response to the Prime Minister’s proposal to renegotiate the Irish backstop. “It was said that we

will probably find a solution in two years,” she said at their joint press conference in Berlin. “But we could also find one in the next 30 days. Why not?” Why not, indeed? For years the EU

position on the backstop has become ever more entrenched, driven mainly by Irish nationalism and French revanchism. Now a more pragmatic German voice has been raised — and about time too. A

report from the University of Louvain has concluded that a no-deal Brexit could destroy 1.6 million jobs across the rest of the EU, including 300,000 in Germany alone. Angela Merkel cannot

afford to leave any stone unturned in the attempt to find a compromise. As suggested here yesterday, there is common ground between Boris Johnson and Mrs Merkel on preserving as much freedom

of movement as possible between Britain and the Continent after Brexit. Now that the British feel they are finally about to “take back control”, they are more relaxed about migration,

particularly that of skilled workers. Likewise, the Germans — like virtually all Europeans — are keen to keep access to the UK’s dynamic labour market. Boris Johnson was by far the most

liberal, free-market Mayor of London and presided over the city’s most prosperous period in its 2,000-year history. He is eager to extend the benefits of the capital’s cosmopolitan,

freewheeling culture to the Leave-voting regions of Britain, some of which are among the most depressed in Europe and poorer than the poorest states in the US. Germany has similar problems,

especially in the former Communist eastern provinces, but Berlin is still a drain on the taxpayer rather than a huge generator of wealth, like London. Cutting the umbilical cord between

London and Berlin would endanger the latter’s nascent tech and service sectors. There was, therefore, a certain irony in Boris’s allusion to Mrs Merkel’s controversial slogan during the

migration crisis: “Wir schaffen das.” (We can do it.) She has given Germany the task of integrating more than a million Muslim migrants — a task that is already well under way, with a third

of them now in jobs and paying taxes. If the other two thirds are to find work, the impact of Brexit must be managed to minimise disruption to trade, technology and tourism on both sides of

the Channel. No wonder Angela and Boris got on so well. Her legacy is in his hands. That is not how Emmanuel Macron sees things, however. He seems to have a chip on his shoulder the size of

the Eiffel Tower. Before the British Prime Minister had even arrived in Paris, the French President had lectured him on the British national interest. In his opinion, the danger to the UK

comes not from the EU, despite its threat to impose a virtual blockade in the event of a no-deal Brexit, but from across the Atlantic. “Can the cost for Britain of a hard Brexit — because

Britain will be the main victim — be offset by the United States of America?” Macron answered his own question: “No.” He went on to warn the British that they would suffer “historic

vassalisation” at American hands, being reduced from a “great power” to a “junior partner” of the US. “I don’t think this is what Boris Johnson wants. I don’t think it is what the British

people want.” It won’t have escaped the French President’s notice that three years ago the British people voted to leave the EU. So what is he talking about? Macron is talking, not about

Britain, but about France. It is France, not Britain, that fears becoming the economic and cultural “vassal” of “the Anglo-Saxons”. It is France, not Britain, that worries about being a

“great power”. And it is France, not Britain, that insists on a “strategic choice” between the EU and the US. It all goes back to 1940: the fall of France, Vichy and the Occupation, De

Gaulle and the Resistance. Macron was born four decades later, but he still sees the world through the prism of what the French call “the dark years”. After the Liberation, De Gaulle

declared that Vichy was “null and void”, but he could not erase the national humiliation from French memory. For most of the war, he insisted, he represented the French state — but he was in

London. And though the Resistance played a key role, the Liberation could not have happened without D-Day and the Anglo-American forces. Ever since the war, France has sought to reshape

Europe as a rival superpower to America. It was futile during the Cold War, when the threat came from Soviet Union. It is still futile today, when the threat comes from a predatory China and

a resurgent Russia. There was never a chance that Macron could turn Britain against its Atlantic alliance, whatever Jeremy Corbyn and his friends on the far-Left might like to think. As for

being a “junior partner” of the Americans: Britain has been one since 1941, when the US entered the war — for which Europe has reason to be grateful. Margaret Thatcher was Ronald Reagan’s

junior partner in the 1980s — again, for the benefit of Europe. What matters is not the seniority, but the partnership.