Believing that the EU is useful is understandable. But loving the bureaucratic monolith? That's plain odd

There have always been good arguments that the UK should stay in the European Union. Even now, the ‘remain’ side has a reasonable case when it highlights the potential costs, disruption and complexity of leaving.

In the post-referendum political landscape though, there is a less rational, more puzzling phenomenon. These are the remainers who have come to identify strongly with the EU; its vast, impersonal institutions, its greasy mandarins, its deadening, soulless symbols and the centralising project it represents.

Brexit has polarised attitudes across the UK, but it is still decidedly odd to cheer on unelected officials like Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker when they harangue and insult a democratic government. It is jarring to hear ordinary people extol the merits of a bureaucratic monolith that is designed specifically to distance decision-makers from the public to whom they’re supposed to be accountable.

It’s quite possible, sensible even, to believe that the EU is needed, but it’s a form of derangement to believe that the bloc is intrinsically virtuous or to deny that many of its inbuilt instincts are destructive and plain wrong. British remainers, particularly in the Conservative party, who were generally in favour of membership but sceptical of Euro-federalism, used to understand this.

Take, as an example, the prevailing reaction to EU meddling in the Balkans; an area of deep ethnic and political divisions, where a series of barbaric wars are a recent memory. The news that Serbia was on track to join the union was greeted by many remainers as a rebuke to Britain for its stupidity in leaving. Even Serbia, they tweeted, was now on the side of progress.

They didn’t stop to examine the process that is driving the Serbs toward membership; which is a perfect example of EU arrogance and recklessness.

If it is to join the Union, Brussels needs Belgrade to recognise Kosovo as an independent state. To that end, the EU, represented by its high commissioner for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherini, is encouraging the Serbian and Kosovan presidents to negotiate a land swap, that would redraw the border between the two regions in ethnic terms.

This type of quasi-imperial power-brokering is exactly the reason that Brussels should never have been granted a foreign policy function, independent of its member states. There are various unresolved border disputes across the former Yugoslavia, based on the messy distribution of ethnic groups. Bosnia and Herzegovina is governed by two autonomous ‘entities’ reflecting its divisions and the leaders of one of them, Republicka Srpska, have ambitions to break away.

The idea of redrawing borders on the basis of ethnicity is incendiary and foolhardy in the extreme. Yet the EU is driven by an impulse eerily like old-fashioned empire-building to expand into new territory and increase its influence wherever it can. At least since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, but before that, when it extended its tentacles into the former Soviet bloc, it has shown ambitions to be a major player on the world stage.

In Orthodox, Slavic parts of the Balkans there is often instinctive sympathy with Russia and in this region, as in Ukraine, the EU is engaged in a dangerous struggle for dominance with Moscow.

The EU played a major role in encouraging the Maidan uprising, which unseated president Yanukovych’s government and eventually caused a civil war. While much of the coverage of that conflict has focussed on high-profile misbehaviour by the Kremlin, its fault-lines were ethnic, or at least cultural and linguistic. The delicate balance that Ukrainians had maintained, more or less successfully, between these groups, was upset by power-plays by Russia certainly, by the US and NATO, but also by the European Union.

Where there are competing political sympathies, shaped by ethnic differences, the EU shows little reluctance to sponsor clients and use them to advance its interests. The author, Richard Sakwa, described it as “the decay of contemporary diplomacy”. In the Ukraine it has already had bloody consequences. If something similar happens in the Balkans, Brussels will show the same high-handed refusal to accept any of the blame.

The Lisbon Treaty institutionalised an independent foreign policy component at the heart of the EU. One of the neglected aspects of the Brexit debate, was that this created a dangerous and secretive tangle of obligations, that complicated our relationships with countries outside the bloc. Dutch voters showed a grasp of the problem, when they rejected an EU ‘association treaty’ with Ukraine by a resounding margin.

A lamentable aspect of the Brexit referendum is that it has entrenched two political tribes in Britain, one of which looks at the EU increasingly with uncritical eyes. The more nuanced view – that its merits, like the common market and freedom of movement, are undermined by its federalist ambitions and restless desire to expand – has practically been forgotten.

There were always the avid haters and the enthusiasts. Once, far more people saw in the EU some things that they liked, but, with its overbearing bureaucracy, alien legal system and ersatz attempts to replicate the trappings of statehood, they knew that it could never be loved.

Where have all those people gone?