What future for the EU?

Let us be in no doubt, the UK is a huge loss to the European project. That’s true in economic terms: the UK is a major economy with which the EU would ideally seek the closest economic ties possible. It’s true in security terms: the UK is a nuclear power and spends 2% of all GDP on its military. With Putin casting avaricious glances at the EU’s easternmost states, the loss of the UK must count as a concern.

Most fundamentally, though, the loss is important because it signals the end of the EU as a growing model for international governance. Since its earliest inceptions in the 1950s the European project has believed in itself as a new model for international politics, one that would grow, adding more and more likeminded civilized states to itself. That dream now seems over. If the EU is not, as the British have decided, something which is good for powerful countries, then its hope to be the model of the future is finished.

The British vote is only the confirmation of this trend – the losing sight of the purpose and hope of a European project. In its origins, owing much to Catholic Social Teaching and the vision of its founding fathers, the European project was not, primarily an economic project. It was a great experiment in a new political morality that would base politics on solidarity, subsidiarity and the concern for workers. Economics was the tool that would be employed to accomplish this greater aim.

Over time the European project has lost sight of that vision, which has been taken over by an ever greater economic orthodoxy.

This was apparent in the British case. Both sides reduced the conflict to a clash of economics (the slogan on the side of the Leave battle bus was the £350 million for the NHS). Leave, in addition, played on narratives about immigration and sovereignty.

Remain, by contrast, provided no positive or moral conception of Europe at all. They staked the house on economic pragmatism, and lost. Watching their vision for a Europe of solidarity and moral purpose reduced to a debate about Japanese car manufacturers must have left the founders spinning in their graves.

It’s too late to rerun the campaign. But it isn’t too late for the EU to learn the lessons of what has happened in the UK and radically change how it conceives of its raison d’être. The economic consensus holds no water as the Eurozone crisis approaches its eight year. Populist parties are on the march across the West, an establishment committed only to the single market is doomed.

Only by restoring a sense of the moral purpose to the EU is there any hope for the Union to survive its current travails. It is time to relegate the economic aspect of the European project to its proper place – a tool in the greater moral task of establishing a new solidarity between peoples and the defence and advancement of the lives and rights of Europe’s citizens. This has become an existential crisis – without a positive case for the Union it may not see out the decade. Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are already on the cusp of achieving the unthinkable – taking two of the original six out of the European project altogether.

About the authors

Ben Ryan is a Researcher at Theos. He first joined Theos as an intern in September 2013 and graduated to a researcher in early 2014. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge and also has an MSc in European Studies from the LSE European Institute. He is the author of A Very Modern Ministry: Chaplaincy in the UK.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos. He is the author of several Theos reports and a number of books, including Darwin and God (SPCK, 2009) and Freedom and Order: History, Politics and the English Bible (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011) and most recently Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury). He is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London

The Theos report A Soul for the Union is available here http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2016/01/21/a-soul-for-the-union