No Brexit please!

 

There’s not much good news from Europe these days.

It’s clear that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has bitten off more than she can chew with her big, big welcome mat for any and all migrants. The Hungarians and the Poles have different ideas, don’t want to take their “share” as Berlin sees it. That could be the death of “Shengen”, movement within the EU as free as it was in the golden years before World War I when a flicking a passport got you anywhere from the Irish Sea to Carpathians.

Merkel & Co. have bared their teeth and not for the first time, talked of solving an EU problem by creating a “mini-Shengen”, in effect two levels of EU membership to maintain free-passage. Then there is the whole mess of the Euro, that common currency which was supposed to eliminate balance of payments. Instead it has been an artifice for pushing German exports down the throats of willing consumers – like Greece – who really didn’t have the wherewithal for all those Mercedes.

European, not to say Obama Administration resolve, to meet Ras’ continued aggression in Crimea, Ukraine, and threats in Belarus and the Baltic States, as well as his blind man’s bluff in Syria, has faded.

But the biggest cloud on the horizon was the possibility that the Brits would pick up their marbles and go home. That old hundred miles of often treacherous water which has given the not-so-longer United Kingdom its distance from Continental troubles is getting wider and stormier again. The growing encampment t of migrants [including legitimate refugees] on the Calais side epitomizes the issue. Britain, earlier than her neighbors was getting indigestion from absorbing unlimited numbers from her former empire to share the bounties of the original welfare state. And there is universal sentiment now in Britain that a Continental surge would tip the boat.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who unexpectedly won a majority in May’s elections, as part of his electioneering, promised what used to be called before Hitler discredited it, a plebiscite, on British EU membership. That is, Brits would go to the polls to decide whether they wanted to continue what has been their limited membership – no participation in the Euro, for example – in the Community. Armed with that, and the possibility that without concessions, the British might really exit, he has gone back to dicker with the autocrats at Brussels.

Now comes word that despite earlier statements on how the Brits would not pass, the EUrocrats are willing to make concessions. European Council president Donald Tusk December 17 opined: “Leaders voiced their concerns but also demonstrated willingness to look for compromise,” Tusk told a press conference, he was “much more optimistic” than before the talks began.

In all the welter of political shoving back and forth at the moment, this negotiation could in the long run be the most important. It goes without saying, Pres. Obama’s problems ousting Winston Churhill’s bust from the Oval Office as an opening gambit in his Administration notwithstanding, that the Special Relationship between Washington and London remains a cornerstone of our foreign policy.

Many, here and there, have seen Britain’s participation in the EU as an obstacle. We never have. That Britain has taken up the cudgels, in fact more forcefully than the Obama Administration, in the fight against Daesh, the Mideast terrorists, as an American ally is just one more example of the relationship’s importance despite Britain’s economic and therefore military travails. Blood, Roberts’ Rules of Order, and Shakespeare do count, you know!

But perhaps even more important, Britain’s presence inside the EU, with whatever limitations, is the best assurance that the tyranny of the clerks in Brussels will be held in check. More than its Continental neighbors,  perhaps for the younger folk out there, British representative democracy is so solid and so well grounded that it cannot but have an effect in Brussels. That is of the utmost importance, not only for the Brits and their EU partners, but also the whole of the democratic West including the U.S.

So please, let’s do have an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon compromise and keep Britain in the EU with no Brexit on the horizon!

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