This Week in Brexitland Extra, A View From Europe: How do the remaining EU member states see post-Brexit Britain? Part 1
FRANCE (Part 1)
A common theme from Remainers in the UK at the moment, something that is at times even weaponised by Brexiters, is that whatever happens in Britain in terms of changing our minds over Brexit, the EU itself will never let us back in. Or, if they would even consider it, that would be under terms so punitive, we wouldn’t be able to take them up.
It’s become a strange kind of defeatism for British Remainers. “What’s the point in wondering about rejoin - the Europeans will never have us now, ever again”. At its worst, it takes on the religious shade that can be characteristic of Brexitism; we have sinned against Europe and the soul of Britain shall be damned for eternity as a result.
I’ve decided to interview people across all 27 EU member states to gauge how true it is that Britain would never be allowed to rejoin the EU. Along the way, I want to answer other questions from within the European Union. How did people in the remaining EU member states view Brexit in 2016, when the UK first voted to Leave? How do they view Brexit now? What, if anything, did Brexit do to Euroscepticism in their own country? And finally, if the UK wanted to rejoin the EU in the relatively near future, what would their countrymen think? Would they allow the UK to rejoin and if so, under what terms?
I’ve decided to begin with France for several key reasons. One is that France infamously acted as a block on the UK entering the Common Market in the 1960s. Add to this the fact that, even though France and Britain have been military allies for the last 200 years, there is a cultural distance between the two countries that continues to create antipathy between the inhabitants either side of La Manche. Surely France would be the country most likely to be glad to see the back of the English (if not the rest of the UK, owing to longstanding Franco-Scottish relations), and keen to stop the meddling Brits from coming back in, should they realise their mistake?
To this end, I interviewed Gérard Araud, who was French Ambassador to the United States of America from 2014 until 2019. Before that, M. Araud was France’s permanent representative to the UN between 2009 and 2014.
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