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UK and France :
Friends or Foes? (Trans)cultural and legal unions and disunions
Edited by Geraldine Gadbin-George
and Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan
Collection Auctoritas Paris : Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2019 Paperback. 365 p. ISBN 978-2304047806. €31.90
Reviewed by Trevor
Harris Université
Bordeaux Montaigne
The title of this volume leads us to expect
another foray into the “best of enemies” territory which has generated a rich
succession of histories of Anglo-French relations over the years. This book,
however, manages to hold the reader’s attention throughout precisely because it
departs from that well-known love-hate paradigm at many points, and builds a
collective and cumulative picture of post-Brexit Britain which is both more
nuanced and more wide-ranging. The opening section of the book –
“Historical aspects of the relationship between France and the United Kingdom”
– adheres most strictly to the announced “friends or foes” theme. Kenneth O.
Morgan, and then Antoine Capet, both emphasise the ambivalence of
Franco-British relations since the Entente of 1904. Lord Morgan sees those
relations as conditioned by events and personalities ranging, in turns, from a
partnership of “winners” (Lloyd George and Clemenceau), through partnerships of
“enemies”, “losers”, “prima donnas”, “bureaucrats”, to a partnership of “ideologues”
(Thatcher and Mitterrand). Capet concentrates on Churchill, carefully unpicking
the great man’s sinuous ruminations which, notably through the experience of
war, consolidated the ambiguous nature of Anglo-European relations.
The next two contributors, Aurélien
Antoine and Andrew Blick, turn their attention to the constitutional dimension
of the Anglo-French relationship. Antoine discusses, first, the fundamental
contrast between British empirical respect for the rule of law and its inextricable
links to the national past and the common law, and then contrasts this with the
rationalist, French concept of the État de droit: “Largely theoretical,
it is not the product of practice as is the case on the opposite side of the
Channel” [83]. Taken all round, Antoine argues that the average Frenchman would
tend to see the law as a permanent threat, while his British counterpart treats
it much more as a useful tool: one of the many things which confers upon
British constitutional practice its fabled flexibility. In spite of everything,
Antoine senses a convergence – almost a form of mutual contamination – between
what seem to be diametrically opposed positions, not least because of “Europe”.
Blick argues – surely he is right – that the flexibilities of the British constitution can in fact be self-defeating.
His telling triangulation of Europe, Brexit and the British constitution shows that
what Peter Hennessy
called the constitution’s “hidden wiring” has now finally caused the ultimate
short-circuit: and, although he could not know at the time he wrote his
chapter, Blick shows himself very prescient on the character of the government he
thought likely to emerge from Britain’s political difficulties through 2019.
The whole of the next section is then
devoted to other aspects of the political mess created by 23rd June 2016,
notably in relation to the Anglo-French security and defence relationship. This
is inspected by Patrick Chevallereau, Elizabeth Sheppard Sellam and Thibaud
Harrois. The importance of the Anglo-French security partnership for the EU,
but also for the West, and the potential weaknesses arising from Brexit – for
example, in relation to terrorism – are explored in detail. Just as Antoine
shows that, beginning from radically different traditions, there is now some
convergence between French and British approaches to the law, so Britain and
France, two sovereign States with highly and deliberately competitive national
self-images, are nonetheless working hard, despite Brexit, to maintain and
develop areas of “genuine interdependence” [168] in security and defence. But Britain’s
departure necessarily raises the prospect of difficulties, or at least
increased bilateral tension, in matters both of procurement and operations.
Other fears in respect of the possible
implications of Brexit are made clear in Part IV (“Economic and Social Issues”)
through the impassioned discussion of human trafficking conducted in the
chapter by Matthias Kelly. Some areas, of course, are already impacted: the
tale of ERASMUS told in the following chapter by Hywel Ceri Jones may not have
a happy ending: much uncertainty still surrounds the future of Britain’s role
in the programme, the Conservative government elected in December 2019, as it
entered upon the transition period following Brexit on 31 January 2020, still seeming
to have no fixed policy on if, or how, Britain’s involvement would continue.
There was already some evidence in early 2020 that European students, faced
with such uncertainty, were preferring to spend their Erasmus year in Ireland…
Anémone Kober-Smith’s contribution on the question of healthcare during and
after the 2016 referendum is seen from the perspective of Britain, or that of British
expats living / working in the EU. Kober-Smith’s limpid and succinct exposition
of one of the most convoluted issues generated by Brexit is admirably level-headed.
The French reference point is more or less absent, true, but the “friend or
foe” motif takes on a nuanced, yet somehow more important role: her careful
plotting of the situation at the time she wrote her chapter shows, rather than the
continuation of any love-hate relationship with France or Europe, that many
people were just hopelessly confused.
The last section of the book deals with
various aspects of Franco- / Euro-British relations mainly from the point of
view of the British “nations with devolved powers”. Stéphanie Bory looks at the
case of Wales and the possible economic and political consequences of Brexit
there; Juliette Ringeisen-Biardeaud tracks Scotland’s painstaking work with
European partners (France, Germany, Ireland) – and the difficulties encountered
in promoting Scotland’s claim to statehood following the 2016 referendum result;
and Philippe Cauvet compares French and British approaches to the referendum as
a political instrument. Bory shows very well how any economic and political
protection put in place may yet prove fragile for Wales in a post-Brexit
Britain, notwithstanding the energy and imagination applied by Wales as it
labours to find an acceptable course through the ongoing constitutional tussle
with Westminster. There is some light at the end of the Brexit tunnel, Bory
argues, to the extent that Wales has a number of projects in the offing with
France, and particularly at regional level with Brittany.
Juliette Ringeisen-Biardeaud
pursues the “whither the devolved powers” theme further, analysing the way
in which Scotland’s paradiplomatic initiatives have been ramped up, not least
through Scotland’s “auld alliance” with France. Rather like Britain’s “special
relationship” with the US, Scotland’s attempt to foster a special understanding
with France is much more “special” for Scotland, the junior partner, than it is
for France. As Ringeisen-Biardeaud points
out, if only because of Spain’s difficulties with Catalonia, or indeed those of
France itself in relation to Corsica, the indivisibility of the nation-state remains
an important criterion for the EU as a bloc: hence, its signal discomfort with
the idea of supporting separatism or minority nationalisms. This means that
although there is lots of goodwill in a number of European countries towards
Scotland, reactions to Scottish paradiplomacy in “Europe” (understood as the
EU) are more ambivalent and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Trying
hard to scent a shift in attitudes floating in the European air, Ringeisen-Biardeaud
is bound to recognise Scotland’s delicate predicament and the consequent necessity
to advance with extreme caution: unofficial support for a (perhaps) soon-to-be
independent Scotland might embolden some to cross the fine line between “paradiplomacy”
and “proto-diplomacy” too soon. “Europe” would not, on balance, appreciate such
a premature assumption of nationhood (nor might some Scots teetering on the
edge of switching to a “yes” vote to independence).
Philippe Cauvet’s engrossing piece on
referendums in France and Britain might have been a good choice to close the
volume since it reintroduces the “friends or foes” motif in its guise of
“convergence or divergence”. Cauvet poses many questions and freely admits he
does not know all the answers. But they are very good questions. Most of all:
why do governments in Western democracies use referendums? By combining a close
reading of the referendums held in France since 1958, those held in the UK
since 1973 and referendums in relation to the Northern Ireland problem, Cauvet sets
out to better understand what he calls the “referendum trauma” [296] from which
the UK is currently suffering, but above all to understand why leaders of
representative democratic governments choose to have recourse to referendums in
the first place. Cauvet shows clearly that, depending on how the referendum is framed,
and above all on who is allowed to vote, a government, any government, can
rationalise an elected Parliament out of existence. In the case of Britain in
2016 Cauvet argues, the referendum, held as a UK-wide consultation, drove a
coach and horses through the all-Ireland democratic solution meticulously put
in place during the Troubles and consecrated by the Good Friday Agreement of
1998. The 2016 referendum, like those organised earlier in Britain or in
France, was in practice a tool used to augment executive power at the expense
of the UK’s devolved parliaments and assemblies: it was un-devolution on a
massive scale, at once relaunching Welsh discontent, Scottish anger and
Northern Irish hate. In short, as Philippe Cauvet says, it was a fundamentally “unionist
instrument” [311].
Reading this book one is drawn to see that
the confusion created by Brexit at every level in fact shows the extent to which the UK and Europe, endlessly caricatured
as diametrically opposed in Britain’s largely anti-European press, have in
practice moved much closer to each other: it is an increasingly Europeanised
Britain which is leaving Europe. And it has only been able to do this by an
executive appropriating a constitutional “flexibility” which, ironically, looks
more European than British; acting, indeed, as if the British executive had the
same constitutional prerogatives as an authoritarian presidential regime similar
to the one put in place by de Gaulle, in 1958.
One might be tempted to feel that Friends
or Foes, concentrating as it does on such an immediate question, has in a
sense programmed in its own obsolescence: the political situation in Britain
which the original conference addressed has already been overtaken. And yet,
the confusion, the incomprehension, the sheer amazement created by the result
of 23rd June 2016 are likely to persist for some time still. Clearing
up the mess created by Brexit requires first and foremost that it be understood,
and this book certainly helps us do that. .
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