Review: EUtopia. How Europe is Failing and Britain Could Do Better, by Ross Clark

While the United Kingdom left the European Union in 2020, it shares with its near neighbour a host of problems that are, according to Ross Clark, features of a ‘European civilisation’ that is in grave danger. Clark identifies the UK and the EU as economically ‘stagnant’ and poorly equipped to respond to military aggression in the absence of support from their NATO ally, the USA. Clark also argues that democracy on the model that has won favour in Europe blunts responsiveness to the problems it faces. Europe is, he argues, a context in which politicians are more interested in a ‘vision’ (the ideal of an egalitarian end-state) than they are in responding to pressing practical difficulties. Thus, he finds in the EU and the UK a less than vigilant response to the economic and geopolitical terrain that Europe has to negotiate. But while this is the case, he argues that the British are somewhat better placed to respond to the difficulties that confront them than are their former partners. This is, as we will see, a point that Clark could usefully have developed by reference to the distinction between ideal and non-ideal political theory that John Rawls draws in A Theory of Justice (1971).

Clark identifies the EU and the UK as ‘locked’ in a ‘cycle of decline’ in which economics has a central place. He points to a range of considerations that explain this decline. Prominent among them is a commitment to a social democratic model of society that encourages ‘regulatory overreach’ and stifles innovation in, for example, the tech industries. On Clark's analysis, these points go a long way towards explaining ‘the gulf that is opening up between the US and European economies’. Here, he notes that, while the US economy grew by 58 per cent between 2000 and 2022, the figure in Europe was 41 per cent. Clark also points towards a decline in Europe's share of global GDP. In 1960, Western Europe's share was 26.8 per cent while, by 2018, it had decreased to 14.7 per cent. Over the same period, East Asia's share of global GDP increased from 10.6 per cent to 23.3 per cent. These figures lead Clark to contrast the ‘drive’ he finds in Asia with a Europe that is ‘becoming a backwater as ‘the spirit of innovation’ collapses.

The picture Clark presents on defence is no more prepossessing. He argues that ‘Western Europe has not been taking defence seriously since the end of the Cold War’. However, he recognises that, in the Cold War's immediate aftermath, ‘there was genuine hope that Russia was rapidly evolving into a Western-style democracy’. Clark argues that, in this context, European political leaders grew complacent. Consequently, Europe's ability to defend itself from military aggression has diminished. Clark notes that, before war began in Ukraine in 2022, the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that, while NATO's European component had 100 armoured brigades, three quarters of them used ‘obsolete tanks or other … vehicles’.

If Europe is to regain the military strength it has allowed to attenuate over recent decades, it must, among other things, spend $288–$357 billion to make up the ‘capability gap’ that now exists between it and Russia. Clark sets alongside these points Donald Trump's criticisms (in his first term as American president) of those European NATO members who failed to discharge their defence-related spending obligations. He notes that European spending on defence has increased since Trump berated his allies at the 2018 NATO summit. However, he adds that Trump (when campaigning for the presidency in 2024) made clear to NATO's European members what he expects from them when he declared ‘You gotta pay’.

When Clark goes in search of answers as to why the EU and the UK are in a torpid state, he focuses on a ‘model’ of democracy that ‘has evolved in Europe since 1945’. He identifies this model as placing emphasis on individual rights that constrain a majoritarian democratic process that Europeans could use to confront the challenges they now face. These rights have the purpose of securing interests of fundamental importance on an enduring basis. To the extent that they do this, a commitment to what Derek Parfit has called ‘objective list theory’ informs European democracy. Objective list theory assumes that we can identify interests that merit protection in order for people's lives to go well (D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 1984).

Just as objective list theory informs European democracy, so too does a tendency to repose undue confidence in law as ‘an engine of social and moral improvement’ (Lord Jonathan Sumption, ‘The Limits of Law’, 2013). Clark clearly takes the view that Europe's political leaders assume too readily that the rights he refers to can settle controversial questions—for example, how to specify the limits of the democratic process. In combination, objective list theory and the overestimation of law as a tool of governance throw light on a belief that, according to Clark, many Europeans hold. This is the belief that ‘Europe is a place of freedom and democracy, a relative haven of civilised values in an imperfect world’.

We can develop Clark's analysis of ‘the place of freedom and democracy’ he describes by reference to Rawls's distinction between ideal and non-ideal political theory. Rawls tells us that ideal theory ‘works out the principles that characterise a well-ordered society under favourable circumstances’. More particularly, ‘[i]t develops the conception of a perfectly just basic structure and the corresponding duties and obligations of persons under the fixed constraints of human life’. By contrast, non-ideal theory has to do with the pursuit of justice in ‘less happy conditions’. Thus, it takes as the object of its concern societies in which ‘historical contingencies’ threaten to undermine order and impede the pursuit of justice.

The features of Clark's analysis on which we have focused make it apparent that he sees Europe's political leaders as seeking, in a non-ideal context, to satisfy (or at least approximate) the requirements of ideal theory. This explains why Clark thinks that the UK is somewhat better placed than the EU to respond to the circumstances it faces. When the proponents of Brexit looked forward to the UK becoming, among other things, ‘a Singapore on Thames’, they were groping towards an understanding of the state as a ship that can tack and trim on a sea of contingency. As visions go, the idea of the UK as a Singapore on Thames is sketchy. But this vision does at least have the virtue of prompting people not to mistake a refractory real-world context for ideal circumstances.

If this analysis is correct, Clark's critique of contemporary European civilisation provides support for the conclusion that it is in the grip of a vision that, while appealing, is undermining its ability to engage vigilantly with the circumstances it faces. But this state of affairs is not uniform across Europe. The agonies of Brexit have made apparent in the UK some interest in movement in the direction of non-ideal political theory. To the extent that this is the case, we might see the UK as a model for an EU that opts to pivot away from vision and in the direction of vigilance. However, Clark's analysis supports a more general conclusion: European governments cannot afford to take a ‘holiday from reality’.

EUtopia: How Europe is Failing and Britain Could Do Better, by Ross Clark. Abacus Books. 298 pp. £22.00.