Like many of my generation, I have always been an Atlanticist. I was 22 and studying in the United States when US president Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and called on Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’. Three years later, I was living and working in West Germany, when I travelled to the same spot to witness the country’s reunification on 3rd October 1990. The Cold War had ended. The free world had won. The alliance between the peoples of Britain, America and Western Europe had achieved its greatest victory.
It is hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia looking back at those simpler times. But the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is right when he says, ‘Nostalgia is not a strategy.’ We in Britain, and our friends in Europe and Ukraine, must face the new reality head-on and free ourselves of the preconceptions that constrained our actions until now.
We have many problems to solve. Britain must repair the damage that Brexit did to business investment and trade in goods so it can restore growth in living standards and invest much more in security and defence. Europe must deregulate its economy and find a way to integrate Ukraine and the countries of the Western Balkans more fully into its economic and political union without unleashing new waves of migration or undermining European unity. Ukraine must prevail in its struggle against Russia, rebuild its economy and forge its political future inside Europe. We must all build a European-led Nato that can survive (but not hasten) an American withdrawal and keep the Russian empire at bay for another 80 years.
We face new problems so we need new answers
We could decide to address these problems individually and devise solutions piecemeal: associate membership status for future members of the European Union, ‘coalitions of the willing’ for Ukraine’s future security guarantees, successors to the Windsor Framework for closer economic ties between the United Kingdom and the European Union, the appointment of a European Supreme Allied Commander in Nato and an expanded role for the Joint Expeditionary Force to combat threats in the North Sea, the Baltic and the Arctic.
To muddle through is the British way. But I believe that we are more likely to arrive at robust and sustainable solutions if we raise our sights and dare to imagine a more ambitious vision for our shared future – just as our forebears did after the Second World War.
What we need is a new deal through which Britain, Ukraine and Europe can address the threats and challenges of the future and find a new way of working with our North American allies (both the United States and Canada). We should establish a new European confederation to give weight and purpose to economic and security collaboration between countries in the European Union and those in Europe’s outer ring.
This new deal should, firstly, recast Nato as a European-led alliance in which the UK and European powers assume ever greater responsibility for providing key defence capabilities. In exchange, they should receive a long-term agreement on tariff-free trade between the United States, Canada and their European allies.
Secondly, it should entrench Europe-wide defence commitments by the most important non-EU countries (the UK and Ukraine) in exchange for full participation in the European single market for goods. Specifically this should include the commitment by the UK to invest at least 3.5 per cent of GDP in the renewal of its naval strengths to defend Europe’s western sea frontier and to extend across the continent (including, in time, Ukraine) the protection of its independent nuclear deterrent. It should also include the commitment by Ukraine to maintain a large permanent army to defend Europe’s eastern land frontier and to share its world-leading defence technologies with its European allies.
Thirdly, the new deal should invite non-European ‘middle power’ nations that share democratic values and a commitment to free trade (Canada, Japan, South Korea, India) to join in agreements covering the defence of critical chokepoints like the Straits of Hormuz, the supply of critical minerals and components and other issues of shared concern like AI security.
A new deal of this nature is likely to involve one or more treaties setting out the commitments of the different countries involved. It may also give rise to the establishment of new institutions. In particular, it is clear that a new organisation will be required to entrench the new economic and security commitments binding European countries and the EU with the United Kingdom and Ukraine.
The British mind has an instinctive preference for ad hoc arrangements. We’ve muddled through pretty well for the best part of a thousand years without a written constitution and find it hard to understand why others can’t do the same. These pragmatic instincts lie at the root of our historic frustration with the bureaucratic legalism of the European Union.
The incompatibility of British and European mindsets partly explains why pro-Europeans on both sides of the English Channel are more nervous than excited about the idea of the UK rejoining the EU. Even if all parties entered into negotiations with the best of intentions and a genuine desire to find common ground, how long would it take? And what is to stop it ending in tears again? Do we in Britain really want to plunge the country back into the political psychodrama that paralysed us for so many years? Do our European friends really want to bend over backwards to take us back in and then spend the next 20 years wondering if we will stay the course? And even if the UK does eventually rejoin the European Union, how does that address the urgent security challenge of a revanchist Russia and an America in retreat?
We face new problems so we need new answers. And we need them soon. For this reason, the leaders of Britain, Ukraine and Europe should prioritise the creation of a new structure which gives equal weight to both security and prosperity, which is open to all Europeans whether inside or outside the EU, and which seeks close involvement by Canada and Turkey. From the outset, it should be designed according to principles which will help avoid some of the pitfalls of previous arrangements.
These principles naturally lead to the revival of an old idea first proposed by the French president Francois Mitterand in his New Year’s Eve address in 1989 and launched at a conference in Prague in June 1991 by Mitterand and the Czechoslovak president Vaclav Havel: the creation of a European confederation. Although it did not gain traction in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was more recently revived by former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In Mitterand’s original conception, the European confederation would ‘associate all states of [the] continent in a common and permanent organisation for exchanges, peace and security’. He envisaged the confederation offering Central and Eastern European countries an organic link with western Europe in the interim period before they were ready to join the European Economic Community (as it then was) and abide by its strict rules. When Letta revived the idea, he saw it as a ‘second circle’ of European organisation that would focus on shared rules for living together and security guarantees, while the European Union would remain the ‘core’.
A few days after Letta’s intervention, President Macron suggested a similar but even looser concept: the ‘European Political Community’ (EPC). This was established later in 2022 and brings together the leaders of 47 European countries to coordinate responses to shared challenges like security, energy and illegal migration. In the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with US president Joe Biden strongly committed to American leadership of Nato and Britain having only just left the EU, it made sense for the EPC to be set up as a forum for leaders’ discussions with no permanent organisation, budget or founding treaty. Four years later, the rapid shift in American policy towards the security of Europe means that it is time for the EPC to evolve into something more ambitious and more muscular. In short, the EPC should become the European confederation.
This proposal for a new deal and a European confederation challenges many of the preconceptions that have guided the actions of every government in Britain and Europe in recent years. It challenges the commitments made by all British prime ministers since Brexit to stay out of the European single market. It challenges the European Union’s historic insistence that the benefits of the European single market can only be shared with countries that sign up to the free movement of people. It challenges Ukraine and other potential entrants to the European Union to accept a staging post on the way to full membership and deny their citizens the immediate benefit of agricultural subsidies or the free movement of people.
Many will ask why any of the governments involved should consider compromises that until now have always been ruled out. My answer is clear: the world has changed and we must change with it. If we insist on sticking rigidly to the formulae that have defined our actions in the past, if we stand back and watch while two rival hegemons tear up the rules and embark on the geopolitical equivalent of a sumo wrestling match, we will be crushed – and the prosperity and security of everyone in Britain, Ukraine and Europe will be crushed with it.
This is an extract from Nick Boles's new essay Beyond Brexit: A new deal for Britain, Ukraine and Europe, published by Demos.
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