Make Europe Great Again

By David Frost

Thursday, March 27, 2025

 

Just over five years ago, shortly after Boris Johnson won a decisive election victory in Britain and two weeks after Britain finally left the European Union, I gave a speech in Brussels titled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe.”

 

It hit many British front pages the next day. Partly that was because the speech set out Britain’s uncompromising negotiating position for the next stage of the Brexit talks. But equally it was because it was the first attempt to set out and give renewed intellectual legitimacy to the cause of leaving the EU and of reviving British nationhood. I wanted the British people to hear, after years of being told that to leave the EU was to vote against the modern world, that there was in fact a rational, reputable, and practically deliverable case for national independence. And I wanted Europeans to understand our thinking properly and consider what it meant for them too.

 

I argued that what we were seeing in Europe was a clash of two revolutions in governance. The first was the creation of the EU itself. As I put it, this was “the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648: a new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation-states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.”

 

The second revolution was “the reaction to the first”:

 

the reappearance on the political scene not just of national feeling but also of the wish for national decision-making and the revival of the nation-state. . . . Brexit was . . . a revolt against a system — against, as it were, an “authorized version” of European politics, against a system in which there is only one way to do politics and one policy choice to be made.

 

The first revolution, which is still well under way, is justified by the EU’s founding myth: that it was created to ensure peace in Europe. In this view, conflict is caused by nationalism and competition between states; and therefore the only way to ensure peaceful coexistence is to share resources, collectivize decision-making, open the borders, and in the end weaken national feeling and cultural cohesion to a point at which people come to identify with Europe itself as the fatherland — the creation of a European demos.

 

Britain’s vote to leave the EU was of course the first major harbinger of the second revolution. Since then we have seen it grow in strength, driven by broadly national conservative thinking, and find a political outlet in many European countries.

 

Where, now, is the clash between these two revolutions going to take Britain and Europe? Has the British exit delivered what people hoped? And where does it leave European conservatives who want a different kind of policy from most of their rulers?

 

***

 

Britain has indeed managed to stand up national independence in the way that we envisaged — with qualifications.

 

Among the many reasons to be positive, the first is that divergence, and hence competition, between British and EU laws and regulations is under way. Some of the divergence stems from our own reluctance to follow misguided EU rules, most notably the EU’s AI Act and Digital Services Act. But we have also begun to change laws ourselves on issues such as genetically modified foods and gene-editing, financial services, and environmental regulation, and even the Starmer government is exploiting the new freedoms. Two somewhat different systems of regulation — that is, two different sets of rules governing our economies, both aiming at similar high standards — are starting to emerge in Europe, even though one of them is not supervised by the European Commission. It can be done. The sky has not fallen.

 

The second is the economic situation. Bad though it is in Britain, it is certainly no worse, and in many cases better, than in the rest of Europe. Moreover our problems are not connected to leaving the EU. There’s a belief in Britain that Brexit harmed the economy, but it’s hard to find any evidence in the figures that actually backs this up. Indeed, since leaving the transition period at the end of 2020, Britain has grown faster than Germany, France, and the eurozone.

 

The third is in the re-establishment of democracy and the reinvigoration of our political debate. Almost by stealth, Brexit has come to seem normal in Britain. We have got used to the idea that our Parliament is once again the center of national debate, and we are comfortable debating issues that once were left to the EU institutions. So last year’s British election really meant something. There was a distinct choice, and it mattered who won.

 

And the fourth, and final, reason to be positive is that the water has flowed under the bridge. No serious party is arguing to rejoin. The Labour government, all of whose leading members hated leaving the EU and would go back in a heartbeat if they could, nevertheless campaigned on, and has stood by, the propositions of no return to the EU, no return to the customs union, and no return to the single market. This is because Labour leaders can see that the politics of anything else is disastrous and, in particular, that any return to EU-like free movement to and from the U.K. is impossible.

 

Still, there are two major qualifications to this rosy picture.

 

The first is the situation in Northern Ireland. The arrangements unwisely accepted by the Theresa May government, which we in Boris Johnson’s government could not entirely undo (in part because of the vigorous opposition to this policy fomented by the Biden administration), and which were then embedded by Rishi Sunak in the so-called Windsor Framework, mean that the EU’s single market for goods applies in Northern Ireland and that there is a customs barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It also means that, not just uniquely in Britain but in most of Europe too, the people of Northern Ireland have no say in the laws that affect them in these very important areas. This situation damages not just Northern Ireland. It creates a huge incentive for any British government to stick with EU laws in areas covered by these rules so as to minimize divergence between one part of our country and another. Yet it is precisely changing these inherited EU rules that will deliver economic growth in the medium term.

 

The second qualification stems from the EU’s continuing gravitational pull. The current government may be firm on the EU in public, but it is not so robust in private. Indeed my own belief is that it is aiming to negotiate something rather like the Northern Ireland arrangements for the whole of the U.K., that is, partial participation in the single market and different customs arrangements, even if that comes at the price of thinner or less valuable trade agreements with third countries, including the U.S., and even if that replicates the democratic problem so visible in Northern Ireland. In doing this, the Starmer government is going with the grain of much of the British political and commercial establishment. Such a relationship, not unlike that of Switzerland with the EU, would be the first move down a slippery slope that would leave Britain formally independent but in practice very much subject to decisions taken elsewhere.

 

So the Brexit job is over but not complete. There’s a constant risk of backsliding. And both Leavers and Remainers are disappointed — the first because we haven’t diverged enough, the second because we haven’t suffered enough. This is not a stable and settled position. Events will still matter.

 

***

 

Why should any European country care much about the U.K.’s pain, about the twists and turns of U.K. thinking on our national life outside the EU? After all, many Europeans who are friends of the U.K. might quite like us to drift gradually back.

 

There’s an important reason for Europe to care: If Britain — a G-7 economy, a country with a deeply embedded tradition of national decision-making and indeed a national myth of resistance to events on the mainland of Europe, a country with huge global economic, cultural, and political connections — if such a country cannot resist the EU tractor beam, fails to achieve escape velocity, and slips back into orbit around Brussels, then certainly no other country can hope to.

 

That would mean that the nation-state model would be over in Europe. The nation-states might continue to exist formally, legally, on maps, but their driving force as discrete national arenas for debate, for culture, for cohesion and mutual support, would disappear. If the U.K. can’t sustain this outside the EU, how is any country going to sustain it inside it?

 

This matters because the strength of Europe, politically, economically, and culturally, still comes from its nation-states. And the balance of forces is changing. Brussels may still be progressive, but not all the member states are, and the number of dissenters is slowly growing. A quarter of the European Parliament’s own members are now open defenders of national sovereignty. So perhaps at some point in the coming decade that second revolution I mentioned will put national conservatives in the majority across Europe and even in the EU institutions.

 

This forces a real question on national conservatives, to which they need a genuine answer now that they are potentially in the ascendant. To put it bluntly: Are they seeking to restore the strength and power of the existing nations at the expense of the EU, or are they seeking to capture the EU and turn its policymaking in a different direction? When some European politicians talk about MEGA, “make Europe great again,” which do they mean?

 

The progressives have an easy answer to this. All they have to do is push on with that first revolution in Europe. They still believe in the power of the founding myth of the European Union, the view that over time the nations would happily cede power and trust Brussels as the repository of collective interests. Yet this really isn’t good enough, because surely the real-world evidence proves the contrary. The time of least friction between West European states was in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, when EU power was at its weakest. Even the fact that some countries were authoritarian dictatorships did not stop them from being in NATO and did not create constant friction. Yet ever since the end of the Cold War and the Maastricht Treaty, which created the current EU in 1992, and the long period of integration that followed, the level of friction and internal conflict has increased, whether it is over economics and the eurozone debt crisis, over migration and borders, or over Ukraine. The act of making common rules has actually increased the friction and the tension. That is because so much is at stake, and because once the powers are given away, they are lost for good.

 

It’s less straightforward for national conservatives. The second European revolution, the counterrevolution, is a conservative one. The new and emerging political forces are all broadly in favor of national culture, national borders, governments that operate for their citizens first. They are suspicious of decisions taken by technocrats and by politicians who seem to have become disconnected from a firm democratic and national base. This isn’t surprising. Conservatism is a fundamentally national force. Indeed it must be so, because it is rooted in real experiences, history, culture, the landscape, language, and solidarity among a specific group of people. Every version of conservatism is somewhat different from every other, for exactly this reason. Socialism and social democracy, which are constructed ideologies not based on real experiences, and which at least purport to appeal to cross-country class solidarity, do not have to be national. Conservatism does.

 

This means that the national conservative forces within the EU have to face up to what seems to me to be a real choice. How are you going to make Europe great again? How is Europe going to revive itself? Do you really believe that the EU itself can be a nation, with all the solidarity, and common worldview, that that implies? If so, you have to buy into the theory that more integration can build a nation. To repeat: If you want national conservatism to be a mainstream political force at EU level in Brussels, that means you have to be prepared to impose it, as currently structured, on others through the EU institutions — and find a way of dealing with dissenters.

 

I am skeptical about this route. I think “make Europe great again” is a good slogan and a desirable goal. I am a European even if I am not a citizen of the European Union. I am tired of seeing Europe turn itself into a gradually declining museum, a region more often mocked by the rest of the world than admired by it. Europeans won’t be taken seriously until we get richer again, stop blocking innovation and change, and invest seriously in our borders and our defense. But I can’t see that making the EU stronger is the way forward. Rather, a strong Europe can be built only on a recovery of the nation-state, because the nation-state is the most successful way humanity has found to organize politics so as to allow political and economic freedom, political debate, and the necessary degree of cultural, social, and economic solidarity required to make common institutions work. Its atrophy in Europe is a sign of decadence, not of modernity. I believe that an increasing number of Europeans are coming to think the same thing. This means that change has to come.

 

***

 

If you think this way as a European, you must ask some pretty fundamental questions about the European Union itself. The EU is not a nation-state and almost certainly never will be. It wasn’t designed to be a democracy. It was designed to gradually suck powers from the member states and thereby weaken them too. That’s why hijacking it to deliver national conservative goals is not going to work. Those conservative goals are fundamentally based on nation-states. They can’t be delivered by an organization that is not a nation-state, that is inimical to national solidarity and culture, and that has as a result generated rather than reduced conflict between its nation-states. To try it is a fundamental category error.

 

So there is only one solution. It is that genuine conservatives in Europe who want to restore European greatness face up to the need to take back fundamental powers from Brussels to their nations. That doesn’t involve dismantling the European Union. But it does involve tackling that teleological view of the EU that I spoke of at the start: that powers can only ever go one way, because it is only the gradual dissolution of national feeling that can stop Europe from regressing into nationalism and conflict. And it surely does mean allowing member states that want it to decide for themselves on fundamentals such as who comes into the country, citizenship, asylum, border control, social policy and values, tax levels (why the rigid control over VAT, for example?), judgments about civil liberties, language and culture, free speech and digital rights, how much to regulate the labor market, how to achieve the right balance between environment and infrastructure, how member states organize their institutions, and much more. It would probably involve different thinking about the EU institutions, especially the Court of Justice, and the role of EU law.

 

This is more than technocratic constitutional tinkering. It’s about the fundamental tension between progressive globalism and conservative national feeling. The reality is that, without the powers I have described, conservatives can’t create conservative countries, or at best can create only ones that are under constant attack from those who don’t like conservative values. Unless a concerted effort is made to shape the debate and change the EU much more into a confederation of nation-states, not just in words but in actual powers, the current erosion of autonomy and nation-state capacity will continue. European greatness won’t come around again if that happens.

 

Some may suggest that it is no longer the role of a Brit to tell the EU how to run itself. The easy debating-point answer to that is that plenty of Europeans are still telling Britain how to run itself and have certainly not lost the appetite to pull us back into the Brussels maw. The more serious answer is that we in Britain have a huge interest in encouraging the right developments in Europe, and we conservatives in Britain shouldn’t be frightened of saying so. The same should be true of American conservatives. And equally — to repeat — conservatives in Europe have a huge interest in Britain’s making a success of Brexit. After all, if anything would help revalue the cultural salience of nation-states, it would be a visibly successful United Kingdom outside the EU.

 

I don’t of course expect many in Europe to heed my call. The recent European thrashing around on geopolitics, and the refusal to face Europe’s relative impotence to affect outcomes in Ukraine, suggest that the current leadership of most European countries is unable to see things straight or do more than respond to day-to-day challenges. But the problems will not go away. If conservatives don’t put forward their own clear vision for Europe, then the instinctual movements of the EU and its leaders will dominate. European conservatives are unlikely then to find themselves in a “nation called Europe,” but they will be in a political construct that by design will stop them from fulfilling their conservative goals. The sooner they face up to that, the better. Changing things is, after all, a major task. It took the EU 70 years to get to this point. It will take a long time to reverse it. Better start soon.