Britain has forgone the right to whinge about European federalism
I am probably in a minority of one, but I shall regret the passing of Jean-Claude Juncker. He was a big beast, an animal at least as large as Boris Johnson. Yes, I know: he drank wine with lunch (absolutely none of us does that); he kissed people of both sexes (even Nigel Farage) and he played with men and women’s hair (even men who had none); oh, and he pulled Theresa May up on the nebulosity of her thinking, even if he later denied it. No one could accuse Theresa of nebulosity. Love him, despise him, you will surely admit: he always made for good copy.
Martin Selmayr, who the British press was itching to brand a closet Nazi, has been seen off. Now they’ll be ferreting around looking for some good dirt on the new President of the European Commission, Dr Ursula von der Leyen. Her credentials appear impeccable: Ursula von der Leyen is to the manor born; that is to say, in Brussels, in 1958, a year after the signature of the Treaty of Rome. Her father Ernst Albrecht, later Minister President of Lower Saxony worked with the European Coal and Steel Community that evolved into the Common Market. In the year Ursula was born, he was cabinet chief to Hans von der Groeben, the German representative on the European Commission. He continued to work for the Common Market until he entered local politics in 1970. In the eighties Ernst Albrecht was seen as a political rival to Helmut Kohl and viewed by many as a possible German Chancellor.
The Albrechts are not little people. They are very big cheeses in the city of Bremen that once upon a time belonged to the Hanseatic League, the trading federation that bound the ports of northern Europe. Like Hamburg, Bremen is famed for its independent thinking and the pride of its Senators or grande bourgeoisie, who in no way believed themselves inferior to the nobles, like Ursula’s husband’s family: smart, silk weaving industrialists from Krefeld in the Ruhr. Ernst Albrecht’s father was a prominent psychiatrist, his grandfather an important wholesale trader. Ursula’s uncle Georg Alexander and her first cousin Marc are both conductors.
Ursula von der Leyen’s CV is even more impressive than her father’s. She lived in Brussels until she was thirteen and studied archaeology and economics (at the LSE) before shifting to medicine in 1980. In the meantime she had seven (yes, seven) children. She graduated doctor of medicine eleven years later in 1991. In 2015, a German plagiarism watchdog VronIPlag accused her of cheating in her dissertation. The following year the Senate of the University of Hanover upheld her doctorate, although they criticised her for a number of errors in the text. The examination of ministers’ doctoral dissertations was all the rage at the time. Angela Merkel’s blue-eyed boy, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg stepped down as Minister of Defence in 2011, after his thesis had been similarly sieved for borrowings. Germany’s insistence on correct academic titles must appear arcane in a country like Britain where many politicians take pride in the fact they never went to university at all.
Dr von der Leyen lived in California for four years in the 90s, while her husband Heiko was Professor of Medicine at Stanford. She joined the centre-right CDU in 1990. Fifteen years later she was made Minister for Families in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first government. She was Minister of Labour in her second and these past six years she has been Minister of Defence, for what it’s worth: as long as Theresa May was Home Secretary or Jeremy Hunt Minister of Health. In her role as Minister for Families she developed a reputation for being a bit of a prude. German Ministers of Defence don’t have easy lives either: many left-leaning Germans would like to do away with the armed forces, and react furiously to any German involvement in peace-keeping forces or any form of overseas deployment. She has ridden the storm, and recently put down a bad case of recruit bullying by sacking the person or persons in charge.
The British press have already pointed out that Ursula von der Leyen is in favour of political union. It is probably not surprising. It is an idea that was certainly in the minds of those who signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, even if it was left out of the text. It was uppermost in Kohl’s mind at Maastricht, after reuniting Germany. With Ursula head of the European Commission, the ‘European Superstate’, complete with its European Army will become reality they say. Dr von der Leyen is therefore bad for Britain because she is going to take the European Union even further away. What’s more, her appointment stresses the Franco-German core of the Union, without acknowledging the doubters on the southern and eastern periphery. The message is: keep the Union strong, and don’t give in to centrifugal forces.
To complain about this, however, would seem to be a bad case of ‘cakeism’: we are told repeatedly we are leaving, and as leavers what the rest of Europe chooses to do is hardly relevant. We have made our bed and we must lie on it. The truth is that with Britain out of the EU, there will be fewer sceptics around who will have the power to apply the brakes.
The past three years following the Referendum of 23 June 2016 have demonstrated that European Union is less about politics or ‘deals’ than about administration by suitably qualified civil servants. As such it will always find itself in opposition to our rather more amateur approach to politics. We have witnessed how hard it is to find common ground. With the departure of Juncker we descend from the epicureans to the stoics. Ursula von der Leyen promises smoother times ahead, but don’t expect pyrotechnics. There will be less fun, but for those who remain there might also be less friction.
