[Mace Magazine] The Meaning of Brexit

Britain never meant to entangle itself in a continental march towards federalization and has seized on Brexit as an opportunity to project power, argues an erudite book by eminent historian Robert Tombs.

This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. By Robert Tombs. Allen Lane; 224 pages; 16.99$.

“The future of Europe and its peoples”, declares Robert Tombs in the preface to This Sovereign Isle (2021), “now worries me more than that of Britain”. What are the odds he’s sincere? A more cynical version of this argument — that Britain stood to gain from leaving an unworkable supranational chimera — loomed over the 2016 referendum on Brexit, which Tombs was among a handful of British academics in openly supporting. But with the drawbridge finally pulled after the EU-UK withdrawal deal of January 2020, why should a Brexiteer pity Europe’s fate, if not to thumb his nose at it? Isn’t Tombs’ self-professed worry for the continent somewhat tongue-in-cheek, at best a mental contortion to retroactively vindicate the gamble him and 17 million Brits took by voting to leave? Reading his book — a succinct and lively account of why Brexit happened — persuades one this is not the case. Tombs, who is too enamored of Europe to wish it…