Many British people must be asking themselves, "Why on earth are we in a situation like this?"
Britain is less than a month away from its withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit. On March 29, 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the basic agreement of the EU, formally notifying the regional bloc of her country's intention to quit it. Under the article, Britain is set to leave the EU on March 29, or two years after she served notice.
Article 50 requires a member country intending to quit the EU to negotiate with the bloc a withdrawal agreement incorporating specific "divorce" arrangements and a political declaration on future relations, including trade, between the country concerned and the union. Nonetheless, in the ongoing case, London still has yet to strike a deal with Brussels.
Relations between and among countries of late are extremely complicated. For the 46 years since Britain joined the EU, then known as the European Economic Community, it has served as a core member state alongside Germany and France.
Pascal Lamy, who was the director-general of the World Trade Organization in 2005-13, has said extracting Britain from the EU was as difficult as "getting an egg out of an omelet."
If the British government remains unable to have a withdrawal agreement come into force less than a month from now, a "no-deal" Brexit will be inevitable. This means Britain will be faced with a series of devastating and chaotic consequences no other developed country has ever experienced -- an across-the-board absence of arrangements with the EU on tariffs, various systems and procedures, mutual recognition of certificates and licenses, dispute settlement mechanisms and many others.
Last-minute negotiations for amending the withdrawal agreement are underway while there continues to be talk about a possible postponement of Britain's departure from the EU beyond March 29. But what will happen, or not happen, on and beyond that date is yet far from being clear.
Different from 'Iron Lady'
As Britain's prime minister, May invoked the Lisbon Treaty's "exit clause" almost two years ago and won EU approval for a withdrawal agreement in November last year. However, it is not she who has caused Britain to be trapped in the desperate Brexit turmoil. During the campaign for the June 2016 referendum to determine whether to remain in or leave the EU, May, then serving as home secretary, stated her support for Britain remaining in the European bloc.
When May successfully ran for the post of Conservative Party chief to succeed then pro-EU Prime Minister David Cameron, who resigned in the wake of the "leave" decision in the referendum, she stated her support for the withdrawal from the EU. She thus took the helm of government knowing how tough the course would be. In British society and elsewhere, there are some people who see her as another "Iron Lady" -- the nickname given to Margaret Thatcher.
However, Britain's second female prime minister is very different from the first in many ways, even though both are from the Conservative Party.
Whereas Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, put her coherent political beliefs at the forefront and liked a confrontational style, May is good on administrative matters and is unafraid of making political compromises.
The Thatcher-May comparison is interesting enough, but we should look at a far more important Brexit-related development in historical terms. That is the fact that the current prime minister is, by chance, bringing an end to the era of Thatcherism by struggling to finally withdraw Britain from the EU.
Why does May's Brexit policy mean a break with the era of Thatcherism?
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of Thatcher as Britain's prime minister in 1979. In his 2013 book, "Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century," U.S. journalist Christian Caryl characterized the year 1979, when Thatcher came to power, as a "pivotal" year that changed the course of history.
Caryl wrote: "If the pope [Pope John Paul II] and the Islamists [led by Ayatollah Khomeini] stood for the rising assertiveness of religion, the ascendancy of Thatcher signaled a new shift with equally profound global implications: she was a missionary of markets, zealously determined to dismantle socialism and restore the values of entrepreneurship and self-reliance among her compatriots."
Once Thatcher was elected as prime minister, she moved to demolish Britain's welfare state structure, the very basis of the longstanding consensus between the Conservative and Labour parties. Since economist William Beveridge's "Social Insurance and Allied Services" report, also known as the Beveridge Report, was published in 1942, the British population was guaranteed security "from the cradle to the grave." Thatcher began the process of doing away with this system and pursued her belief in free competitive economic enterprise.
Thatcher espoused a new sense of values referred to as "neoliberalism," based on market fundamentalism and her ideological adherence to free-market liberalism.
She advocated a neoliberal market system in which trade barriers impeding cross-border economic transactions should be eliminated to the fullest possible extent. In the 1980s, market integration, enthusiastically supported by Thatcher, progressed in the European Community (EC), the immediate predecessor of the EU.
Thatcher's political goals in the 1980s included liberalizing markets, abolishing tariff barriers and consolidating the alliance among Western countries.
On the other hand, the British leader vehemently loathed the EC's move to have member states give up much of their sovereign power to strengthen the political power of Brussels as if it were the region's de facto central government.
In 1988, Thatcher said in a speech in Bruges, Belgium, "My first guiding principle is this: willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community."
May trying to build 'wall'
Now, May is going in a direction completely different from the one Thatcher espoused three decades ago.
The current leader aims to separate the British market from continental Europe and build a "wall" between them. What she is doing is causing cracks in the Western alliance.
May also believes that excessive economic liberalism and market fundamentalism have caused income inequality and social instability. Therefore, she has pledged to fight wealth inequality. In fact, she launched a Conservative manifesto for the June 2017 general elections with the aim of "making Britain a country that works, not for the privileged few, but for everyone." But voters dealt her party a devastating blow, depriving it of its parliamentary majority.
As a result, May has been having difficulty winning enough support from members of Parliament for her Brexit agreement with the EU while failing to secure sufficient public backing to proceed with her fight against wealth inequality. It needs to be pointed out again that May is good on administrative matters, but she is incapable of offering new visions that can supersede Thatcherism.
Given the extent to which economic globalization has progressed, it hardly makes sense to keep clinging to sovereignty as Britain is doing now. If Britain really aims to restore its sovereignty through Brexit, it will find that such a goal is almost impossible to achieve in today's world. In the meantime, it is true that excessive economic liberalism has caused uneasiness among many British people.
Thatcherism is not perfect in that it has a major inherent contradiction between the principle of realizing economic liberalization to the fullest possible extent and the principle of regarding national sovereignty as a matter of absolute importance. Both excessive income inequality and national divisions caused by Thatcherism have culminated in the Brexit vote.
That said, the real problem with Britain is not Thatcherism but the failure on the part of its leadership to formulate a new way of thought for solving its national predicaments. Perhaps, one of the most serious crises we face today is poverty of thought.
Hosoya is a professor of international politics at Keio University and the author of numerous books on British, European and Japanese politics and foreign affairs.
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