BRUSSELS
— Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon, banners waving,
cannons firing, trumpets blaring. That is how the country’s voluble
foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, likes to describe it.
But
Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean. Having voted
to leave the European Union, it is unmoored, heading to nowhere, while
on deck, fire has broken out and the captain — poor Theresa May — is
lashed to the mast, without the authority to decide whether to turn to
port or to starboard, let alone do what one imagines she knows would be
best, which is to turn around and head back to shore.
I’ve
lived and worked for nine years in Britain, first during the Thatcher
years and then again for the last four politically chaotic ones. While
much poorer in the 1980s, Britain mattered internationally. Now, with
Brexit, it seems to be embracing an introverted irrelevance.
The
ambitious Mr. Johnson was crucial to the victory of Brexit in the June
2016 referendum. But for many, the blusterings of Boris have lost their
charm. The “great ship” he loves to cite is a nationalist fantasy, a
remnant of Britain’s persistent post-imperial confusion about its proper
place in the world, hanging on to expensive symbols like a nuclear
deterrent while its once glorious navy is often incapable of patrolling its own coastline.
Britain
— renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political
stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of
shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies.
“People
need to look again at Britain,” said Daniel Brössler, a correspondent
for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It’s no longer the country
they understood it to be their whole lives.”
The
divorce negotiations with the European Union start another round this
week, but they are not going well, to say the least. The most visible
fight is over the cost of the divorce. But other difficult and
essentially political issues about the authority of the European Court
of Justice and a customs border
with Ireland must also be clarified before the other 27 member states
agree to move on to the next stage, Britain’s future relationship with
the bloc. That decision next month once seemed pro forma, but no longer,
with some even predicting a breakdown in the talks.
Mrs.
May’s Conservative government is now so split that some Brexit
supporters are calling on her to simply quit the bloc with no deal at
all — probably the worst alternative for the country, but just the kind
of populist, tub-thumping gesture favored by the Brexit elite and the
right-wing tabloids.
Meanwhile,
with the Conservative government so riven and rudderless, the old hard
lefty Jeremy Corbyn is leading the opposition Labour Party back into an
equally fantastical socialist past.
Britain
is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. It is a “hollowed-out
country,” “ill at ease with itself,” “deeply provincial,” engaged in a
“controlled suicide,” say puzzled experts. And these are Britain’s
friends.
“The
sense in the rest of Europe is bewilderment; how much worse can it
get?” said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak diplomat who lived in Britain
for many years and now directs Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based
research institution. “After Brexit, no one is trying to help now.
They’ve given up. Nobody on the Continent really cares that much about
Britain anymore. Even worse, people feel the country will fall into the
hands of Jeremy Corbyn and that will do more damage than Brexit itself.”
More
chilling, perhaps, is the impact on countries less rooted than Britain
once appeared to be. “Britain is an example for all of us, as a
longstanding democracy, with centuries of the rule of law and
traditional institutions,” said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who
runs the Bruegel research institution here. “And if such a country has
such difficulties, most of us wonder how our own countries would handle
such political upheaval — whether we, too, are so vulnerable.”
Some
make the comparison to that other great Anglo-Saxon country, the United
States, under President Trump, who saw Brexit as a harbinger of his own
election. But however politically divided the United States seems now,
Europeans have never considered it a touchstone of stability the way
they have Britain.
Jan
Techau, a German who has traveled extensively in England and ran
Carnegie Europe, sees Britain as a tragedy. The European country
considered the most outward-looking and globalized is fractured by the
backlash against the very model that made Britain strong. “It’s very
sad, but Brexit is a controlled suicide,” he said.
There
are many who see Britain as having suffered a sudden nervous breakdown,
said Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for
European Reform. But he believes that Britain’s political culture and
economic stability have been eroding for some time, hidden by the
longstanding willingness of others to give it the benefit of the doubt
as a pragmatic democracy with a strong civil society and civil service.
He
too blames the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloids that support
them for much of the erosion. “The readiness of the political right in
particular to lie and peddle obvious untruths, to place their party
politics and party unity over and above the national interest, has been
going on for a long time,” he said. “The harrumphing nationalism masks a
country ill at ease with itself.”
Rather
than a vote for a global Britain and economic liberalism, Mr. Tilford
said, Brexit was a vote for protectionism, and its political system now
“is deeply provincial and introverted at a time when Britain is supposed
to be heading out into the world.”
The
divisions in the society — over Brexit, over politics — are both a
function and a result of Britain’s confusion about its identity and
global importance. The 19th-century myth of Britain as the “workshop of
the world,” a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an
empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II
reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark
Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Britain
became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped
identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived,
and with her, Mr. Leonard said, “there was a last gasp of this old
identity — an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of
Englishness.”
However
successful, it also excluded an increasingly large number of Britons —
black, Asian and Muslim — who felt disenfranchised from “the national
story.” Tony Blair and New Labour moved toward more inclusiveness and
cosmopolitanism and openness to Europe, too.
But
those validated by the old identity then felt like strangers in their
own land, Mr. Leonard said. “Their revenge was Brexit.”
Confused
and divided, Britain no longer has an agreed-upon national narrative,
said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “In the
2012 Olympics we had one,” he said. “Global Britain, open Britain,
generous Britain.” But now there is a competition between that narrative
and the nativist one.
Mr.
Grant, like others who have spent their careers watching British and
European politics, predicts rough seas for Britain as it casts off
nearly 45 years of intimate trade and legal ties with those annoying
Europeans.
“Everywhere I go,” he said, “people are asking me, ‘What’s wrong with your country?’ ”
