Who the hell does Donald “I feel I am Scots” Tusk think he is?
“I want to stop myself from saying something too blunt. Sometimes I feel I am Scots. I’m very Scottish now, especially after Brexit,” Donald Tusk told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.
The former European council president continued: “Emotionally, I have no doubt everyone would be enthusiastic here [for Scotland to rejoin], in Brussels and more widely in Europe, but still we have treaties and formalities. But if you ask me about our emotions, there’s a genuine feeling. You will witness only, I think, empathy.”
He also commented on the way Europe had been portrayed by the British media and its political establishment as “bogeyman or a whipping boy”. And here was his more generalised reflection on the referendum: “Brexit means the reestablishment of borders.”
The UK government has engaged in a series of early negotiating manoeuvres – on alignment, divergence and sovereignty, Boris is driving at a looser relationship with Europe. EU figures are quite justified in exploring their own vision for the separation and setting out their own negotiating mandate. But it would be right too for the continual background speculation about the British and English national character and what Brexit really means from the EU side to fade away.
Leo Varadkar told the BBC last week: “I don’t think the UK has yet come to terms with the fact it’s now a small country.” He then compared the size of the UK and the European population: “We have a population and a market of 450 million people. The UK, it’s about 60 [million]. So if these were two teams up against each other playing football, who do you think has the stronger team?” Well, perhaps he’s right, depending on your view. Britain may well find it far harder than Brexit optimists advertised to escape the regulatory orbit of the EU with advantages.
It’s possible to look at the issue from another direction – the EU has lost its biggest net contributor, its sole intelligence powerhouse and one of its only two significant military powers – if it wishes to act geopolitically as a single bloc, as 450 million people, it has just lost one of the fundamental building blocks of a new European dynamism.
To return to Donald Tusk on Marr – it is not helpful for a key figure in the first stage of the Brexit process to claim simultaneously that Brexit implies borders, while Scottish independence (which post-Brexit would necessitate border posts in Northumberland) implies “good European feels”. As a Unionist who voted Remain, I have always been sensitive to the threat Brexit poses to the Union – and indeed that is why a new constitutional settlement is needed swiftly – but it is a manageable problem that can be democratically resolved (whether indeed by another referendum or by creativity over the devolution settlement). In any case, the polling on Scottish independence remains pretty stable in favour of staying and dire predictions post-2016 of a sudden resurgence in nationalist feeling have not materialised.
These kinds of arguments are as unedifying and as solipsistic, at times, as the debate in Westminster became last year. Not every facet of British ‘state failure’ should be portrayed as a morbid symptom introduced by the Brexit vote – the Union is a three-hundred-year-old construct which has been in significant trouble before and has found a way to survive. If Brits have at times underestimated the genuine vitality of European institutions and their staying power, then the EU should not kid itself that the complex amalgam of the British state is fatally flawed without EU membership.