As the war between the U.S.A.
and C.S.A. (1861-1865) attests, the secession of a state from a political union
in which governmental sovereignty is “dual” (i.e., both the union and the states
are vested with it, such that it is divided, albeit not evenly) can be arduous.
Although a “velvet” secession sans warfare, the secession of the state of
Britain (UK) from the E.U. required lengthy and painstaking negotiations. In
the case of a union of states, something more than integration occurs not only
economically, but also politically. Anti-federalist rhetoric, such as in
referring to the E.U. (or U.S.) as a “bloc” with “members,” and even with
potential “associate members,” does absolutely nothing to counter the political
reality of federalism wherein governmental sovereignty resides both with the
union itself and the state governments. Officials in the E.U.’s Commission were
prudent, therefore, in being hesitant regarding the possible re-accession of
Britain as an E.U. state as talk on that possibility swirled in Britain in 2026
just after Andy Burnham became the prime minister and suggested that he would
be open to a referendum. This occurred exactly a decade after the referendum on
“Brexit” had passed and only six years after the actual secession. Between 2016
and the end of January, 2020, E.U. and British officials—federal and state,
respectively—engaged in painstaking, even traumatic, negotiations. That
this harsh characterization came from the E.U. side is consistent with my
thesis that the vote in Britain to secede, or “exit,” from the E.U. was based
on a rejection of the governmental sovereignty held by the E.U. rather than its
states. E.U. officials would not have taken kindly to even the subtle
suggestion that the E.U.’s portion of sovereignty did not really exist.
Speaking at a meeting with Britain’s
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting ahead of the more formal meeting slated for
November 20, 2026, the E.U.’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, said that some
E.U. officials were still traumatized by what the media outlet Euronews
characterizes as “the difficult and often bitter negotiations that followed”
Britain’s referendum in 2016.[1]
Reading between the lines, I suspect that Kallas meant that the British
negotiators had behaved rudely and perhaps even in a hostile manner—essentially
burning their bridges and thus making it more difficult for the E.U. to welcome
the British back should they once again seek to become a state in the Union. Hence,
while Kallas was meeting with her counterpart, Wes Streeting, her message was
for the British to ”focus on participating in the EU’s existing defence
frameworks in the short term rather than opening talks” on possible accession.
The old adage, what goes around comes around, may apply here. There’s “a lot of
traumatized people in Brussels over Brexit,” she said at the time.[2]
Just one year prior, in 2025,
Britain had opted out of the E.U.’s €150 billion Security Action for Europe
(SAFE) defense loan arrangement because the UK government had concluded that
the estimated €4 billion to €6 billion entry fee “didn’t represent value for
money.”[3]
Besides the fact that the refusal is not in line with Kallas’s suggest that
both sides prioritize “practical areas of cooperation before considering more ambitious
steps,”[4]
the transactional approach excludes the broad political judgment that would be
necessary for the British to treat accession as a political rather than
merely a transactional or even financial decision. Put another way, the
financial cost/benefit analysis does not include the political judgment of
whether to become a semi-sovereign state in a union that is as much political
as it is economic and social.
In fact, the British treating
relations with the E.U. as primarily or exclusively financial may itself be residue
from the category mistake in having incorrectly viewed the E.U. as an economic
network rather than a political, semi-sovereign union when the UK was a semi-sovereign
E.U. state, and thus subject to federal law, directives, regulations, and ECJ
rulings. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s statement while in office
that the E.U. was just one of the international networks to which Britain
belonged demonstrates just how mistaken the “Brexit” faction in the UK was
regarding categorizing the European Union. Were the E.U. merely a network, then
of course it would be a mistake for the E.U. to claim or have any governmental
sovereignty, and it was precisely this perceived mistake that was being
the vote to secede from the Union. That E.U. officials knew otherwise—that the shared
and exclusive competencies (i.e., domains of governmental sovereignty) of the
European Union were valid and lawful under E.U. Basic Law—may account for why
at least some of those officials felt traumatized by the mistaken British
negotiators who were ideologically beholden to E.U. being instead in the “network”
category. Such a cutting category mistake based in ideological denialism
doubtlessly would not have gone down well even if only subtly as subterranean inuendo
during the secession negotiations.
Accession should only proceed
if enough of the British as well as their Parliament accept the validity of the
E.U.’s shared and exclusive competencies as enumerated domains of governmental
sovereignty, and thus that the E.U. is indeed an empire-scale federal Union of
semi-sovereign states rather than sovereign countries. This is the bottom line
for accession. If this stipulation is not met, the E.U. would be stronger without
the British, and they in turn would be better off staying out of the European
Union rather than going back to being serial objectors within the Union. In
other words, the ideological fault line that prompted the secession must be dealt
with in the UK before any accession-proposals are made. To be sure, going
historically from being the host kingdom of an empire to a state in a federal
empire-scale union is a difficult pill to swallow; it could be decades from 2026
before the British are psychologically ready for accession, even though Britain
as a host kingdom (with the king rather than Parliament having the
imperial power) and a semi-sovereign state (with the E.U. having the
imperial role) bears a certain equivalence rather than being so much a step
down.[5]
2. Ibid.
