IN 1991, BEFORE British prime minister John Major signed the Maastricht treaty, I formed a new political party. It was called the Anti-Federalist League. Two years later it changed its named to the UK Independence Party. I led it until 1997. It was a moderate party with a membership form that stated that it held no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind and would send representatives only to the British parliament. After I stepped down to return to academic life, however, the party came under control of a preposterous mountebank named Nigel Farage, who reoriented it to the far right. The clause about a lack of prejudices was abolished and all sorts of nasty statements were made against blacks, Muslims and gays. Former members of the National Front were allowed to work for the party or become candidates. The party itself has deliquesced into a cult around Farage, whose electoral failure in 2015 has made him an object of scorn in the media and prompted his financial backers to desert him. Farage has become a convenient figure with which to frighten moderate voters about the consequences of fulfilling my party’s original mission—withdrawal from the European Union. But that mission remains imperative. The upcoming referendum promised by Prime Minister David Cameron offers an opportunity for concerned and intelligent citizens to fulfill it.

Most commentators, backed by international elite opinion, write as if leaving the EU would constitute a momentous, historical step for the UK. They’re wrong. Britain’s postwar abandonment of empire, after centuries of colonialism and imperialism, was hardly traumatic, leading to no disruption of its economy or political system or even to any nostalgia. Today, there is scant evidence to suggest that withdrawal from the EU after a much shorter experience of membership would lead to political or economic disruption either, far less any nostalgia for rule from Brussels. Normal self-government would simply be resumed—and it is normal for nations to run their own affairs.

The experiment of trying to fit all the nations of Europe into one polity and one economy, on the other hand, has been distinctly abnormal and historically misconceived. Europe is a state system, not a state. It overtook the rest of the world economically and politically centuries ago precisely on account of its disunity. Elsewhere, the Ottoman and Chinese Empires unified themselves under centralized bureaucracies and suffered decline.

Europe, on the other hand, as a result of its division into a system of separate states with different Christian allegiances, experienced competition and progress. Long before the Enlightenment, commentators and thinkers in individual states examined advances in rival ones before campaigning for their adoption at home. Particularly after the French Revolution and Napoleon, this led to peaceful progress—the abolition of torture and religious disabilities, the spread of constitutions, the extension of the franchise, the legalization of trades unions and the establishment of state welfare systems. Very occasionally, rivalry led to war, but the long period from 1815 to 1914 was overwhelmingly one of peace in Europe. Before 1914 you did not even need passports or visas to travel or study abroad. Then came the First World War, produced by the clash of supranational empires—Habsburg, Russian, German and Ottoman—while the Second World War centered around a clash of supranational ideologies—Nazi racism and Soviet Communism. Democratic nation-states were never a cause of war in Europe. Resistance to their emergence by supranational empires was.

Today the EU constitutes an up-to-date model of a supranational empire. Size again seems to be all-important. The EU is supposed to act as a continental counterweight to the United States, China and Russia. Predictably, this has proved to be a delusion. However, it is vital to note that, just as was the case in the golden age of imperialism before 1914, when Norway and Switzerland enjoyed the highest standard of living in Europe but did not possess empires, today, the two European states with the highest standard of living in Europe are again Norway and Switzerland—both independent and outside the EU.

There is, however, an irony involved for, although the EU despises such nation-states and sees itself as a “postnational” polity, it claims all the trappings of a nation-state—its own flag, passports, diplomatic service, anthem, supreme court and directly elected parliament. It wants all Europeans to think of themselves primarily as European citizens. So, without admitting it, the EU really just wants to be a bigger nation-state with its citizens imbued with a European nationalism, all singing its national anthem and waving its national flag. After all, China, Russia and America—its rivals—are also large nation-states. The EU lacks any vision of a “postnational” world and represents merely European nationalism attempting to unify a continent as Italian nationalists once unified a peninsula during the Risorgimento.

But the process of imbuing European citizens with an artificial nationalism isn’t working. Whereas people who experienced life under communism until 1990 or Southern European dictatorships till the 1970s still see this process as relatively praiseworthy, the mature democracies of Northern Europe remain unconvinced. Britain and Sweden have remained outside the euro zone while France and the Netherlands in referendums rejected the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. European flags are not unfurled at football matches. The real admirers of European unity are Arabs and Africans, whose own attempts to create unity have hardly got off the ground. And the United States simply sees the states of Europe as equivalents of the colonies of 1776, conveniently forgetting that they have different languages and cultures—and a history of occasional conflict.

THE EU IS essentially a political experiment aimed at creating a centralized, unified state, indeed one already in decline like the old Ottoman and Chinese empires. British supporters of continued EU membership always assert that “to trade with Europe you have to be part of it.” No, you don’t. No one says “to trade with China you have to be part of it.” That would be very scary. No one even says that “to trade with the United States you have to be part of it.” It is simply never suggested that trade with America means adopting its constitution or its single currency, the dollar. Not so with the EU. Here we are told that to continue to trade with it, we must accept EU law, EU passports, EU citizenship, EU policies and EU institutions. We even required an internationally ratified treaty “opt-out” to keep our own currency, the pound sterling. All this is needed so that the EU can continue its political progress towards “ever-closer union.” This has nothing whatsoever to do with trade or economics.

It has been a consciously adopted strategy of Europhiles to obscure the political nature of the European project. Yet in terms of both politics and economics, the EU has proved a bad bargain for Britain. Politically, it has made us part of an entity which is undemocratic. The EU is run by a commission of overpaid, undertaxed and unelected bureaucrats. Although it is claimed by EU supporters that this civil service is numerically small, the real objection should not be to its size but to the power it wields. The Prussian general staff was small in size compared to the total strength of the German army, yet it was the general staff that drew up the plans and strategy of that army and used ordinary units to implement them. Likewise, the European Commission oversees the formulation of EU policies and orders national bureaucracies all over Europe to execute them. Thereafter there is no way that its regulations and directives can be reversed by national parliaments. Nor is it possible to discover how the commission gets its plans approved by the European Council, since discussions in the council are conducted in secret. Moreover, under the Lisbon Treaty, the council is no longer an independent, outside body of heads of government, but simply one more institution of the EU, accountable like all the others to the European Court.

Commissioners, therefore, wield extraordinary power. Yet they are unelected and have usually been failed politicians from member states—including Leon Brittan, Neil Kinnock, Chris Patten and Peter Mandelson—who are rewarded with highly lucrative jobs for previous services rendered and thereby become politically indebted to the EU. The whiff of corruption surrounds the EU as well. This is not just a matter of the low taxes and high salaries of EU bureaucrats (one in every five of whom gets paid more than the British prime minister) but the fact that so many EU leaders have been fingered for fraud or worse—Helmut Kohl, Bettino Craxi, George Papandreou, Charles Haughey and Giulio Andreotti, for example. One head of the European Central Bank had to wait until his trial for corruption in France was over till he could take up his post. And the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the EU accounts for nineteen years running—indeed, if the EU were a trading company, it would long ago have been forced to cease trading.

There is, of course, a European parliament, whose powers have been enhanced. But it has no official opposition, and its elections are quite meaningless. MEPs simply cannot offer manifestos of policies which they can implement once elected. Their elections change nothing. The role of the commission does not change—hence policies do not either—as a result of European parliamentary elections. In any case, only 40 percent of voters take part in these elections. The majority stays in bed. The largest number of votes in France and Britain in fact go to parties (the National Front and UKIP) that oppose the EU. And MEPs are anonymous beings. Even the Eurofanatic Tony Blair was unable to name his. On one occasion the leading administrator of the European Parliament told the European Research Seminar at the London School of Economics: “The only people who listen to MEPs are the interpreters.” An Italian senator said that “only” twelve Italian MEPs were Mafiosi. Caroline Jackson, a Tory MEP for South West England, once discovered that an Italian colleague had been shot and after further investigation told the Parliament: “I don’t think it is fair that members who are dead should claim a salary.” Finally, the system of expenses for European parliamentarians is a scandal. Clearly, therefore, the European Parliament cannot be considered a hub of European democracy.

THERE HAS been another way, however, in which electorates have been involved in European politics. Every so often, the negotiation of European treaties has meant that referendums have had to be held to ratify them. According to the founding treaty of the EU—the Treaty of Rome of 1957—these new treaties are legally amendments to the original treaty and have to be approved by all member states. Yet when Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the treaty did not fail. Denmark was simply forced to vote again until it voted “yes.” The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, told the Danes: “You are just a little people. You cannot dam the Rhine.” When Ireland rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001, it, too, was told to vote again. However, when the French and Dutch voted in referendums against the Constitutional Treaty in 2005, it was felt that France was too big to be bullied or insulted in this way. Instead, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany devised the strategy of tweaking the wording of the treaty and calling it something else. In a letter to heads of government of other member states—it was leaked to the German press—she sought their advice on how “to use different terminology without changing the legal substance” of the treaty and referred to “the necessary presentational changes.”

Thus a long, new, almost incomprehensible document was launched, known as the Lisbon Treaty, and in a speech in London in 2007, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato explained that EU leaders had deliberately decided that “the document should be unreadable . . . Should you succeed in understanding it at first sight there might be some reason for a referendum.” Indeed, even before it was ratified, all the new bodies that depended on it—the European Defence Agency, the External Borders Agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency, the European Public Prosecutors Office, the new paramilitary structures, etc., etc., were put into place anyway. The real significance of the treaty, of course, was to turn the EU from a confederation of independent states into a unitary state with its own legal personality and the right to act as a single state. All this was done without any popular mandate—indeed, had to be done in this fashion after the voters of France and the Netherlands had rejected virtually the same document. So the new treaty was rammed through national parliaments by party whips. There was a constitutional hiccup when Ireland found it necessary to hold a referendum after all. The Irish then voted to reject the treaty, but as with the Treaty of Nice, were forced to vote a second time. Their premier, Brian Cowen, head of Fianna Fáil, campaigned on the slogan Yes to Lisbon, Yes to Jobs, and won a majority. This happened just as the economy shrank by 10 percent and Brussels thanked him with an austerity package. His party was destroyed in the subsequent general election—sometimes democracy fights back in the EU. Still, the EU attitude to voters resembles that of the pig Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm to the other animals: “He would be only too happy to let you make your own decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

Meanwhile, this undemocratic union runs almost every aspect of the domestic policy of its member states. A few years ago, the German Interior Ministry claimed that 80 percent of all domestic legislation originated in Brussels. The then leader of the European Liberal Democrats, Sir Graham Watson, put the figure at 75 percent. Tony Blair’s cabinet website put the regulatory impact of EU red tape on British industry at 55 percent. More recently, Steve Hilton, formerly David Cameron’s policy guru, stated in a seminar at Stanford University that 40 percent of the British government’s time was taken up with EU matters, 30 percent with domestic British matters and 30 percent with unforeseen, day-to-day events. Clearly, given its huge democratic deficit as outlined above, the EU takeover of British parliamentary government should come to an end as soon as possible.

CURIOUSLY, DESPITE its dominance of member states through its powerful bureaucracy, the EU has never achieved its other political aim of becoming a superpower exerting major influence over international affairs. Quite the contrary. It remains something of a joke or, in the words of the president of the EU Commission in a 2015 interview with Welt am Sonntag: “…in terms of foreign policy, we don’t seem to be taken entirely seriously.” For a start, it cannot agree on major policies, so that major events leave it at sixes and sevens. It split over the First Gulf War, when Germany lied about its constitution to avoid sending troops to aid the coalition led by the United States against Saddam Hussein. France, for its part, joined up in a semidetached way rather late in the day, having first sent an aircraft carrier to the Gulf—without planes. Then, when the French president came round to supporting the war, the defense minister resigned. During the Second Gulf War, both France and Germany opposed the invasion of Iraq, but Britain supported it. Germany later refused to back military action in Libya against the el-Qaddafi regime, which both France and Britain instituted, although they could only execute it with U.S. aid. Today, Germany and France are much more reluctant than Britain to enforce economic sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Indeed, Europe is so dependent on Russian gas and oil that it can do very little to oppose Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Hence, after offering Ukraine a special deal with the EU and prospective membership of NATO, Europe’s leading states can now offer it practically no help in its hour of crisis. Britain has offered up to seventy-five military advisers to train Ukrainian troops, as well as one thousand troops to boost the defenses of Eastern European members of the EU and NATO. None of this is likely to impress the Russians. Having reduced their defense budgets to below 2 percent of gross domestic product, the EU’s leading military states have nothing to fight with. The Dutch army recently ran low on bullets for its infantry; they had to pretend to fire ammunition, shouting “Bang! Bang!” Germany’s military hardware is highly incapacitated, according to papers leaked to the Bundestag. Like most EU member states, it has essentially become a pacifist country. Indeed, according to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Germans would oppose fighting for the independence of the Baltic states or Poland if Russia invaded. Clearly, therefore, the EU is in no position to exercise hard power anywhere. Meanwhile, Russia is spending 4 percent of GDP on defense and renewing its nuclear and conventional hardware.

Despite a large, new and very expensive foreign service, it is by no means clear that the European Union can solve any of its major foreign-policy challenges. For example, it has found it extremely difficult to formulate a policy regarding the influx of more than a million migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East. The established (Dublin) rules were that these desperate people should be registered in the EU member-state where they arrived—usually Greece or Italy. Yet since the numbers involved overwhelmed these countries and since the migrants themselves wanted to be registered almost exclusively in Germany or Sweden, the Dublin rules were rarely applied. The migrants instead were allowed to walk hundreds of miles through the Balkans towards their desired destinations, incidentally encouraging Balkan migrants to join in the trek. Amazingly, no thought seems to have been given to organizing an airlift of these poor people to properly established refugee centers, despite the fact that German chancellor Angela Merkel at one point declared it her duty to open Germany’s borders to any Syrians who wanted to come there. Yet the thousands of men, women and children who took her at her word were simply left to struggle along dirt roads and across borders—sometimes open, sometimes closed—as EU member states argued about what to do with them. Eventually, in mid-August 2015 Germany and its allies forced loudly protesting Eastern European states by majority vote to accept mandatory quotas of migrants (who themselves had no desire to be sent there in the first place). Plans were also announced to offer more aid to Syria’s neighbors and to improve refugee camps in an attempt to stop or slow the influx, while much vaguer proposals were discussed to establish an EU border force and proper reception centers in Italy and Greece. The questions of how so many Muslim immigrants could be integrated within the EU, how costly assisting them would be and how welcome they would be were left unanswered. The net result is an EU with no control of its borders. Individual member states have widely differing policies on immigration, and Germany’s flip-flopping and bullying on the issue has left the EU as much divided as united.

Nor is the EU sure about where its borders should lie. Always happy to expand, there have been calls at various times for the EU to include Ukraine, Russia, Israel, France’s former North African colonies and Turkey. Turkey is still involved in protracted membership negotiations and its EU aspirations are ardently supported by Britain, if less so by France and Germany. Should Ankara enter with its eighty million citizens, it would almost immediately become the largest state in the EU, which, in turn, would acquire a border with the Islamic State. Turkey’s citizens are, of course, mainly Muslims. But then, Brussels itself, the EU capital, is forecast to have a Muslim majority in twenty years’ time.

Finally, the EU has boasted of being ultramodern by exercising “soft power.” This involves the use of foreign aid and the support of human rights as instruments of influence. Unfortunately, there have been too many cases of the aid being diverted (allegedly to terrorists in at least one instance), while at the United Nations, support for human rights has steadily diminished. The result is that few states bother very much about EU foreign policy, especially since its own leading member states can rarely agree on key issues. Israel holds it in contempt. (Polls demonstrate that a majority of EU citizens consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace!) The end result is that the EU cannot defend itself externally, is under growing terrorist threat internally, spends next to nothing on defense and relies on exerting influence through foreign aid and support for human rights—all this in an increasingly dangerous world where hard power is clearly what counts. So bigness brings no security, and Britain’s defenses depend on NATO and the Americans. These have kept the peace in Europe since 1945, with considerable and up-to-date armies and weapons on the ground backed by the threat of nuclear war. The EU, in contrast, has always been—and remains—irrelevant to European defense. This is another reason for Britain to abandon membership.

WITHDRAWAL FROM the EU will mean that immigration as a policy will revert to the control of the British government. But how that control is exercised can be debated once Britain has withdrawn. It is not necessary to debate it here. The economics of EU membership and withdrawal do, of course, need to be addressed.

Harold Macmillan told Britain in the Sixties that discussions over European Economic Community membership amounted merely to “commercial negotiations.” Edward Heath asserted equally mendaciously that there would be no loss of sovereignty involved. By 1970 Heath was so desperate for Britain to join the EEC that the civil servant leading the negotiations followed the motto: “Swallow the lot, and swallow it now.” So Britain accepted all the EEC’s demands, including a new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which surrendered all its fishing rights. All this was done partly to secure “the political leadership of Europe” (which never materialized) and partly to help Tory governments use Europe to end Britain’s relative economic decline. Yet if European states were experiencing faster growth, this was on account of conditions there—the rebuilding of European cities after the war, the reduction of trade barriers within the European customs union established by the EEC and the continuing structural switch from agriculture to industry—a process which had ended in Britain a century before. Britain’s own economic problems at the time were entirely of its own making—militant trade unions, high taxes and high overseas defense expenditure—and would be solved by British government action in the 1970s and 1980s. The EEC brought economic problems, not solutions—like membership in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which cost the country billions; masses of red tape on industry and finance; not to mention the higher food prices caused by the Common Agricultural Policy or the disappearance of Britain’s fishing fleet, fishing communities and fish stocks into the maw of the CFP. These policies also caused Britain to contribute ever-increasing sums annually to the EU budget (£21 billion gross today), while the overall cost of EU membership has been estimated by a variety of experts to be the equivalent of 4 percent of GDP (rising to 10 percent if opportunity costs are factored in). That is a huge sum of money (£40-100 billion annually).

Once again, after the world crash of 2008, it was Britain’s own actions—nationalizing banks and undertaking quantitative easing—that saved the British economy. Had it followed the Europhiles’ advice of adopting the euro as its currency, it would have been in a similar position to Greece and other debtor countries in the euro zone, faced with a policy of austerity and forced to deflate internally amidst social penury and massive unemployment. It was in the euro zone, too, that Berlin and Brussels forced out elected leaders in Italy and Greece and had them replaced by technocrats. Ulrich Beck then wrote his best-selling German Europe, offering Southern European countries the prospect of permanent German neocolonialism—albeit by the “best” generation of Germans ever.

Mercifully, Britain’s unemployment rate is half that inside the euro zone, and last year its growth rate was twice as high. Moreover, the prospects for EU growth are not good due to lack of structural reforms and demographic decline. Yet, while Britain’s success causes hundreds of thousands of Europeans from France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria to come to the UK in search of work, its European partners try hard to undermine it by, for example, attempting to ban the City of London dealing in euro-denominated securities. The European courts have just prevented this from happening, although the European Central Bank may still appeal. The EU is also attempting to impose a tax on all financial transactions, another attempt to undermine the success of the City of London. Finally, Britain suffers economically from the fact that member states of the EU—Belgium, Luxemburg and Ireland for example—provide tax havens for multinational corporations who therefore avoid paying tax in the UK. Indeed, the president of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has recently been revealed as having abetted these corporate giants to achieve their aims when he was prime minister of Luxembourg. (Corporate lobbyists in Brussels, by the way, are much more influential than MEPs.) Clearly, Britain would be better off economically outside the EU.

Would this mean losing jobs? Europhiles claim three million would be lost, but this is a deliberate distortion on their part of research published in 2000 by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). An annual report about the research merely stated that up to 3.2 million jobs were “associated directly with” the export of goods and services to the EU. The then director of the NIESR, Martin Weale, denounced the Europhile spin as “pure Goebbels.” Indeed, the same paragraph in the report stated:

In conjunction with the potential gains from withdrawing from the Common Agricultural Policy and no longer paying net fiscal contributions to the EU, there is a case that withdrawal from the EU might actually offer net economic benefits.

The Europhiles claim that withdrawal would lead to a major tariff war between the UK and the EU, a pure fantasy on their part. Why? Because 6.5 million jobs in Europe are directly associated with the export of goods and services to the UK. The EU sells far more to us than we do to it. So why would political leaders risk ten million jobs in a tariff war? What would be the point? The global average tariff is less than 3 percent, according to the most recent World Bank data. In Europe and the United States, the respective figures are 1.04 percent and 1.46 percent. Switzerland charges zero and Norway 1.09 percent. The rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), moreover, follow the principle of the most-favored nation, which means that member states cannot impose arbitrarily high tariffs on one another. Hence a trade war would be illegal. Even if one occurred against WTO rules, who would possibly benefit? The UK, as already seen, would be in a more advantageous position than the EU. But why bother? In reality, a free-trade treaty would be signed; probably one that abolished tariffs altogether. There is no need to examine Swiss or Norwegian arrangements either. The British economy is so much bigger, and trade with the EU so much greater, that any deal with the UK would be unique.

Once unfettered from EU membership a number of benefits would accrue to the UK. As a normal, self-governing democracy again, it could negotiate its own free-trade treaties with other countries and trading blocs; it could represent itself in international trade organizations (presently, being only one of twenty-eight EU member states, its own interests are submerged and overlooked); it would not have to impose EU health and safety regulations on the 95 percent of companies that are not involved in trade with the EU; it could concentrate on boosting its already growing exports to the wider world (where it has a trade surplus); it could reclaim its fishing grounds; and its government would not have to spend 40 percent of its time on EU business. Certainly, exporters to the EU would continue to have to abide by EU regulations, but they already have to do this with regard to the regulations of any external single market, whether it is that of the United States, China or Japan.

THE VESTED interests that support British membership of the EU are large international law and consultancy firms, including City ones, which make a fortune arguing over every comma of regulations and contracts; large multi-national companies, which use EU regulation to keep small companies out of markets and decrease competition; and international corporations, which use various parts of the EU to avoid paying taxes elsewhere. There are also the political dreamers who fail to see the economic misery the EU has already caused millions of its citizens, not to mention its lack of both democracy and international influence. All these people and institutions expect David Cameron to conclude some deal with the EU by which the UK will be granted some nominal concessions (e.g. legal exemption from “ever-closer union” as an aim of membership) or trivial ones (permission to stop EU immigrants claiming welfare benefits, which very, very few claim anyway) before leading a campaign to persuade the British people to remain within a “reformed” EU. This will be an insult to our intelligence—a repeat of 1975—but the No campaign will point this out. There is always the remote possibility that Cameron will feel snubbed by the EU and advise people to vote in favor of an exit, in which case he would go down in history as a second Churchill. So far, however, Cameron has more closely resembled Anthony Trollope’s prime minister Mr. Daubeny in Phineas Redux, who declares, “See what we Conservatives can do. In fact we will conserve nothing when we find that you do not desire to have it conserved any longer.” Whether or not Cameron fails to conserve Britain’s traditional rights and prerogatives, however, may be becoming a moot point. Across Britain, the European dream touted for decades by its champions increasingly resembles a chimera.

Alan Sked is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics.

Image: Flickr/Daniel Coomber