David Cameron, dangerously reasonable

By Robert Coleville

The blithe PM tells Europe to be more like Britain.

Reasonable. That was the word David Cameron kept using in his big speech on Europe this morning. “Eminently reasonable,” even.
The symbolism was clear. Here was calm, sensible Mr. Cameron explaining gently and, yes, reasonably to hotheads in Britain and Europe alike why his demands were necessary and sensible: getting proper protections within the single market for non-euro countries; making the EU properly competitive; beefing up the role of national Parliaments; and preventing migrants from receiving in-work benefits.

Cameron’s position — expanded upon in his letter today to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council — was that he had no preconceived position: He simply wanted what was best for Britain. These were, he said, the things he believed the EU needed to work properly. If they were adopted, he would campaign “with all my heart and all my soul” for Britain to stay in. If not, then he would have no compunction about urging his country to turn its back on Europe once and for all.
As a piece of political positioning, it was impressive. It set Cameron up not just as the bridge between Britain and Europe, but the arbiter of their fate. Yet its tone — calm, measured, factual — reminded me of the memo sent to President Obama by his communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, about where his first term went wrong.
“We made a strategic choice, because you are, to portray you as reasonable,” Pfeiffer wrote. “But in today’s media environment, there is no caucus for reasonableness, with the possible exception of David Brooks.”

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Is there a caucus for reasonableness on Europe? The principle behind Cameron’s speech was that Europe is an institution which can — and must — be fixed. But for many of his countrymen, it is a dragon that must be slain. Sky News cut away at the end of the speech to Nigel Farage of UKIP, who explained (quelle surprise!) that it was all a sham, and that restrictions on benefits were very much not the same thing as the restrictions on free movement that were really needed. The director of the “Vote Leave” campaign tweeted sniffily that the only new thing was an undeliverable promise to restrict the power of the European Court of Justice.
And it wasn’t just the fundamentalists. The lead column in the London Times this morning, by Rachel Sylvester, compared the whole renegotiation process to the story of the emperor with no clothes on. It is, she said, “a fig leaf put in place to save [Cameron’s] embarrassment — but, like the emperor, the prime minister, for reasons of personal vanity and political insecurity, must continue to insist that his strategy is immaculately dressed.” The previous day, Boris Johnson had produced a newspaper column that professed loyalty, but read in places like a billet doux to the Leave campaign.
But even if a caucus can be found for reasonableness in Britain, can one be found in Europe?
The position of much of the British press — as Alex Spence has pointed out in this publication — is that there isn’t, that Brussels is a hotbed of integrationist fanatics. Yet the real problem could be that what appears reasonable in London does not appear reasonable elsewhere.
Throughout this process, Cameron has been urged to couch his demands not in terms of getting a special deal for Britain, but as beneficial to the EU as a whole. Yet the blueprint he set out today would make Europe much more British — in ways that many countries may find uncomfortable.
The think tank Open Europe recently compiled a “heat map” showing how well each of Cameron’s demands was likely to go down in the other member states. It suggested that on some of his demands, there is plenty of scope for agreement — but on others, especially restrictions on migration, there is not. The European Commission has already described the proposed migration restrictions as “highly problematic,” since they would impinge on the internal market.
More broadly, many within Europe — as Lord Liddle, one of the few Britons with a genuine and longstanding enthusiasm for the European project, set out recently — take the view that the EU is already too Anglo-Saxon in its promotion of free market liberalism, not (as Cameron holds) that it is not Anglo-Saxon enough.
Libération has called Britain’s demands “blackmail;” Cameron’s intention to “write competitiveness into the whole DNA of the European Union” will send a further shiver down many spines. Indeed, it is entirely possible that his demand that EU rules can be vetoed by coalitions of national Parliaments — “the real source of democratic legitimacy”, he insisted — could well be applied not to burdensome regulation, but to his cherished free trade deals. Similarly, Cameron’s demand for a package that is “legally binding and irreversible and if necessary has force in the treaties” opens the door to others to make their own demands, which may well cut against Britain’s.

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With this speech over, Cameron and George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, will be putting down the megaphone and getting down to the serious business of negotiating a deal: bilateral talks will, says Tusk, start next week. Left unmentioned in Cameron’s speech was the question of how many of his demands need to be met for him to be satisfied — though he did insist in the Q&A with reporters afterwards that “progress” would need to be made on all four fronts.
As I’ve written before, it’s very hard to see Cameron — for all his talk about “ruling nothing out” — actually campaigning for Out. But those differing views of what appears reasonable reflect a wider gulf in understanding between Britain and its allies.
The key line in Cameron’s speech was this: “We have a different vision for Europe.” It was a difference encapsulated in the Q&A, when he asked for questions from “European” journalists, too. Cue apparent bafflement in Brussels: Don’t the British see themselves as European, too?
Well, no, they generally don’t. That’s why Cameron is couching things in terms of Britain’s economic and national security, rather than Europe’s common interest. It’s also why his message Tuesday was that the problem isn’t us, but you. Britain’s membership of the EU is riding on whether enough of his European colleagues think that’s a reasonable position to hold.