It took me to study it at university, and even to begin, though sadly never finish, a doctorate study of Charles the Bold, Charles le Temeraire, or the Rash as he is known here in Europe, one of the great Dukes of Burgundy who was himself a unifier of fragmented European territories, who sort of pushed his luck a bit too far and saw his domains disintegrate at the hands of the Swiss.
It was one of the experiences that really gave me a life long love of the history and art of this part of the world, and indeed I have been indulging it this weekend at the great van Eyck exhibition in Ghent, which is amazing if you have the chance to go and see that. Yet there is at least as much evidence that the relationship is the other way around – that it is actually productivity which drives trade. In any case, we aim to manage it down as far as we can through modern customs facilitation arrangements – and I am convinced that other factors will outweigh it.Indeed if we have learned anything on economics from the last few years, and in particular from the British economy refusal to behave as people predicted after the referendum, it is that modern advanced economies are hugely complex and adaptive systems, capable of responding in ways which we do not foresee, and finding solutions which we did not expect.So all this explains why the British government is confident in the strategy we have chosen. The UK "must have the ability to set laws that suit us," the PM's chief Brexit negotiator has said in a speech in Brussels. It was only when we picked up our coat and waved goodbye that it felt like people said “oh, are you going?” as if they hasn’t realised what had been happening.The rejection of the single currency; the refusal to join Schengen; the Justice and Home Affairs opt out; the ambivalent attitude to the Treaty of Lisbon (and still more so to the European Constitution); and finally referendum that year look more like inevitable staging posts on the way out than a random series of unfortunate events.The tactical problem with this approach was obviously time-inconsistency: so nobody knew whether a deal with Britain would stick or whether we were really willing to invest in the contacts and all the underpinning of relationships that make them work over time. It is a really huge pleasure to be here at your university. Another, less obvious advantage, is the ability to change those decisions. So in a country like Britain where institutions just evolved and where governance is pretty deep-rooted in historical precedent, it was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design not than by evolution, and which vested authority outside the country elsewhere. So, how would you feel if the UK demanded that, to protect ourselves, the EU must dynamically harmonise with our national laws set in Westminster and the decisions of our own regulators and courts?Now I assume, many in the EU would simply dismiss the suggestion out of hand.
That’s clear. I think that is why the slogan of the Leave campaign in 2016 ‘Take Back Control’ became such a powerful slogan and had such resonance .Now if I am honest, much of this still does not seem to me to be understood here in Brussels and in large parts of the EU. It is that the model of an FTA and the precedents that exist in actual agreed FTAs are the most appropriate ones for the relationship of sovereign countries in highly sensitive areas relating to how their jurisdictions are governed and how their populations give consent to it.