Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I’m an old-fashioned sort of academic really, because I’ve had quite an exotic career, which is harder to do these days. I read history at Cambridge, and then become an African historian and anthropologist. So I spent the first decade of my research life deep in the African bush and writing about the cultural dimensions of an imperial experience from the point of view of a people who had been colonised. At that time, I was living in the middle of civil wars, and it really gets your attention when people are shooting at each other, and indeed (on two occasions) shooting at you! Where I lived and worked in central Africa was encircled by wars simultaneously in Rhodesia, Namibia, the Congo and in Angola. When I came back to Cambridge I became a don and taught there for twenty-odd years. In my research I became increasingly interested in questions of war and peace which had literally shot themselves to my attention. In fact security of all sorts – ‘hard’, ‘soft’ or ‘cultural’ – is the common theme in my career. I bring quite a mixture of disciplines and experience to the table.

I left Cambridge to go into public service. I worked as an advisor for NATO and also for the Ministry of Defence in several capacities. I’ve also advised several other governments and the UN over the years, too. So my career has always had both ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ dimensions. I am the sort of academic who believes that ideas really do matter in the world and that they do have a material impact. That’s why it was logical, after my spell as a practitioner, for me to come to the LSE as a research professor because practical reason is our special raison d’etre as a University too.

For both professional and personal reasons (I’m half Dutch) I have been interested in European unification, but I have been concerned about it for a long time. I voted against the ratification of British membership in 1975 because I thought, as Churchill so aptly put it, that Britain is with the Continent rather than of Continent: it’s a geo-political and a cultural fact.

You recently published an article on the risk of collapse of the European Union, in which you described it as an empire. In what way can we describe Europe as an Empire? What are the characteristics of empire that Europe has?

Well the Commission President José Manuel Barroso himself called the EU an empire in 2007 when somebody asked him! Admittedly he quickly qualified himself and said that it was a special sort of voluntary empire – whatever that means, because it’s a contradiction in terms. The normal criterion is that an empire applies a superordinate power which makes people do things which they may or may not want to do; but if they don’t want to, they don’t have any choice. If you want a reference point for that, see Tony Benn. At the time that Benn opposed our entry into the European Economic Community, he said that if you can’t say no – in other words if you lose sovereignty – then you are a vassal: you have become part of an imperial structure. And I believe that this was the central point at issue in the referendum.

By the way, it is fascinating that there were two ships that passed in the night in the referendum campaign. The Government and the ‘remain’ side never made an argument about these fundamental issues. It made a sort of transactional offer. It told people that they would be worse off and presented it through the notorious ‘Project Fear’. In contrast, the winning side made an argument that was about freedom and sovereignty – very deep, old issues. The fact is that the ‘remain’ side did not understand that then, and as far as I can see, ‘continuity remain’ still do not understand it now. They talk incessantly about the issue as if it were primarily about a trade negotiation. It is not. For the majority that voted it is clear that it was not.

To revert to the question of empire, the EU displays core characteristics. The way that the European Union was set up was by the ‘Monnet method’. The founders were seared with the horror and destruction of a generation of young people on all sides of the First World War. They concluded that the nation state was the pathological cause: so something supranational had to be created to stop this sort of thing from happening ever again. These were noble objectives present in the minds of people like Jean Monnet and his friend Arthur Salter (in his 1932 United States of Europe book). When in 1929 Aristide Briand made the proposal to create a federal European union it was an honest proposition – that is precisely what they wanted to do. When the Briand Plan made no progress, that is when what is now called the Monnet method was adopted. The ‘Method’ is a game of grandmother’s footsteps where you say to people that it is just about a Coal and Steel Community or it is just about trade or common standards for this or that, when actually it is always steps towards a federal state, but not actually saying so. Deliberately duping people – even when you believe that the ends justify the means – is a dangerous game to play.

And so we come to the central argument in my ‘Briefings for Brexit’ article. It is about why complex societies such as empires sometimes thrive and sometimes don’t: because it does not follow automatically that all empires always have to fail. There are good examples where empires come back. By deploying marginal gain theory, which was borrowed from the financial world by Joseph Tainter, an American archaeologist who applied it to many of the ancient empires, I was simply running the same ruler over EU data. This is no black box methodology. It is simply an elegant and powerful thought experiment where you can take pathways of historical events and plot them and make reasoned judgements on the two axes of increasing complexity and increasing perceived benefit (or disbenefit).

Joseph Tainter’s argument was focused on ancient empires. Is it fair to apply that model to a modern empire? Are the same dynamics still at play?

The short answer is yes. Because what Tainter has produced is a general theory. And as he points out in his famous book, in which he reviews all the other theories about the collapse of empire, starting with Gibbon and his view of the moral disintegration of the Roman Empire, for various reasons all those case-specific explanations are more or less unsatisfactory. From the many examples that he processes through the thought experiment he shows that there is a familiar dynamic: at first strong perceived marginal gain for a certain quantum of increased complexity. But eventually that increasing complexity becoming a disbenefit for the majority, which leads into the zone of the risk of collapse. When I looked at how convincingly Tainter applied marginal gain theory to ancient empires, I reasoned that you could apply it not only in modern circumstances, but also at different scales.

Because, actually what prompted this EU essay was a lecture I gave last month to my current students at the École Spéciale Militaire de St-Cyr – the French military academy where I am the senior academic visiting fellow. We applied marginal gain theory in detail both to the EU and to the Battle of Waterloo, where it works rather well. So, the theory works at different scales. That is reassuring because – a core LSE obsession – I am very interested in the practical application of ideas as well as playing with ideas for their own sake.

I mentioned my St Cyr experience to a friend and former Cambridge colleague Robert Tombs, now Emeritus Professor of French History there and was one of the founders of the ‘Briefings for Brexit’ web-site. (He, like I, had become frustrated by the unilateral group-think about Brexit that seems to have got the university world by the throat.) Robert suggested that I write it up: so I did. Therefore the report came about from a very “LSE” sort of situation: discussion with a group of students who are learning applied thinking skills and who are therefore always looking for ways to answer the first question any soldier (in their case) asks, faced with a new situation: what is the nature of this phenomenon? In our case in point, it was some sort of an empire: a complex, superordinate structure of power. The second vital assessment question is equally plain and simple: how strong or how shaky is this structure? This is crucial to know if you are in a battle. It is Montgomery’s first law of warfare. When he was lecturing at Sandhurst he used to tell cadets, in that high, reedy voice: ‘men, remember this; the first law of war is to identify your enemy!’ (Monty’s Second Law, by the way, is to maintain your aim). ‘Identifying your enemy’ adequately means that to be safe you must know these two characteristics.

That is a useful insight when you are looking at an historical phenomenon too, and especially a contemporary phenomenon such as the EU. You have to see what sort of body it is, and where it stands in the spectrum between being solidly founded and being in the zone of the risk of collapse. The latter is where the EU is now, as I argue in the report. Why so?

I think the evidence shows that the EU has clearly has been on the slide since the introduction of the Euro. It had been moving into an area where strong increases in the complexity of the project have been increasingly strongly rebuffed. That is a fact. You can see it in the crescendo of referenda rejections. These are the direct rejections; but you also have the indirect rejections in the transformations that have been happening in domestic politics in most western European states. We have seen a hollowing out of the old portfolio politics. The centre ground project of Blair or Cameron, which only ten years ago looked as if it was the future, now looks like a smoking ruin. In Cameron’s description of Blair, it was the future – once. Active politics have gone either to the extreme left or the extreme right, which is a frightening precedent if you think back to the 1930s. Donald Tusk, another historian, currently on secondment (!), once wisely observed that when the extremes of left and right connect it is always the precursor to bad things happening in European history.

As the complexity of the EU increases and the rejections continue, why can’t the EU understand this? Is it aware, and if so, why can’t they self-correct?

Those are two absolutely central questions and in a word the answers are that those running the EU cannot see it and they cannot self-correct.

Can they recognise it? Here I defer to Robert Tombs. Robert has argued recently and in the context of Brexit for the modern application of something which Edmund Burke described in his reflections on the revolution in France in 1790, eighteen months after it had happened. Present then and there in those who drove the French Revolution was what Robert has called a ‘vanguard myth’. If you have a strong belief that you have an indispensable truth; that you know by virtue of intellectual superiority or special insight that you know better than the bovine peasantry what is good for them, then of course that translates easily and indeed necessarily into a moral imperative to do good to people, even if they don’t like it – which you explain away as a product of their ‘false consciousness’: blocking the legitimacy of their views as against your own.

This, after all, is the basic divide in politics, isn’t it? Whether politics are about doing things for people or doing things to people. Vanguard Myths are very much about doing things to people who are not, in the Guardians’ opinion, clever or farsighted enough to see that their own little pedestrian concerns, if they were to be followed, would lead into the disasters from which we are trying to escape. So Plato’s latter-day Guardians cannot self-correct because they know that they are right and they forge on; and here they encounter the terrible irony. Because, as Rousseau pointed out, there is nothing more difficult in all of politics than to produce legitimacy for actions. It’s the crux of the whole thing, for without it ideas die.

The EU Guardians don’t see this (because they deploy a ‘false consciousness’ blocker) and therefore do not cultivate their subjects very seriously. Nor do they see that this is ultimately self-defeating; for to be able to prosecute their project successfully in the long term, unless they are going to use force (and even then, force is of a strictly limited lifespan) they have to carry the people with them of their own volition. Ignoring the Greek referendum rejection of the 2015 bail-out, seducing the Tsipras government and then imposing even harsher terms were not obvious ways to make friends and influence Greeks, as Yanis Varoufakis spells out in his seminal book Adults in the Room.
Complex supra-national bureaucracies like the EU are like fairies. You’ll remember that in the story of Peter Pan, he has a fairy friend Tinkerbell who, to save Peter Pan, drinks the medicine poisoned by Captain Hook? So we have a dying fairy. What has to happen for fairies to live is that all the children in the world who believe in fairies must clap, which they do: so Tinkerbell lives. The same is true of institutions. If the people don’t clap for a complex political project – invest it with legitimacy – then it won’t be able to live, certainly not longer than the generation of its creators.

So I don’t know exactly when the current EU ‘project’, currently in the zone of risk of collapse, is going to collapse; but on analogy with its sibling conceived at the same time but born a generation earlier, the USSR, which also lacked adequate legitimacy and therefore lasted a human lifespan, I suspect that that this will be the EU’s lifespan too. Remember, the EU is not Europe: it is just a moment in the long history of Europe. And like previous experiments of similar type, lacking spontaneous popular legitimacy, it too will pass and maybe sooner that its supporters can dare to imagine.

Blinded by their Vanguard convictions, the Brussels elite can’t see it, so they keep on driving forward. But that makes the situation worse, because the more that they increase the complexity and the more that they drive forwards the more they produce a pushback from the ordinary people. They produce more alienation, not the legitimation that is necessary to enable their ‘project’ to prosper. All very Hegelian.

Could it be changed – the second part of your question? Well, there are historical examples of where it has been possible. If we go back to Professor Tainter’s use of the marginal gain theory for a moment, what he is saying, and what I would say, is that the Brexit vote, as indeed the political changes occurring now in Germany, Italy, Greece, France, the Netherlands, all across the continent, show that what people are actually doing is to vote for lower levels of complexity where they are willing to invest legitimation and which they believe will produce the public goods which they desire. They want it at the nation state level.

So, could the European Union retrieve itself in the same way with a bit more time? In theory it could. And there is an empire which did. People don’t often remember it but after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West the Byzantine Empire continued. But it was pushed into a position of almost complete disintegration. It retrieved itself by going back to a much lower level of complexity and by devolving power back down to the regions. It then regrouped and came back to a long period of hegemonic rule in east/central Europe and western Asia. So, you can do it; but the cost is very high for those at the top. The Byzantines did it when their backs were up against the wall. I believe that because of its ideology the EU is just not capable of that sort of adjustment. It’s like a shark which has to swim forward to live.

It cannot stand still, and it cannot go backwards. Look at the most important man in the European Union today – Martin Selmayr, Secretary-General of the Commission, who took all executive power into his hands on 1 March this year. What we read in the first circular he sent round to his staff is that it is the duty of the Commission to lead. Technically he is wrong, of course. It is supposed to be a Commission that works with and for all of the member states for their benefit; but Mr Selmayr does not see it that way. He is devoted to the vanguard myth. Anything that stops the forward advance towards the goal of the creation of a federal state is an enemy to him which is why he is so hostile to the British over Brexit.

But I suspect that emotionally the weather has changed. When I talk to my French friends and my Dutch relatives I hear many people who might not articulate the change in the way I am doing now, but who have a sense of one of the most important transitions in all politics which is when an institution ceases to be part of the solution and become part of the problem. In the simplest terms, all over Europe this is what we are witnessing. The EU Constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch in 2005 but was still smuggled in through the back door as the ‘Lisbon Treaty’. The Dutch rejection is particularly noteworthy, because it was an extremely strong turnout (2/3) in the most settled democracy on the continent: the oldest democracy in Europe along with Britain. And it was a decisive vote (62-38). And that vote was disrespected. To have done that to this profoundly democratic society triggered big change. We can date from 2005 the break down of the Dutch consensus, more distrust, the rise of Geert Wilders, and of a much more aggressive, confrontational politics which had not previously been the Dutch way – but is now.

So, here I am making a sad historical point. The original motives for driving towards the federal goal may have been honourable (and I believe that in the minds of the founders, they were) but they have had a fatal, unintended consequence. It was intended to drive away the shadows of the past. What it has actually done is to beckon those shadows forward again. We can see that happening before our eyes. The fragile tissue of democracy, particularly south of the Alps – Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece – is being shredded.

Brexit isn’t an isolated event. It’s part of a mega cluster of crises for the European ‘project’ which started with the contemptuous over-riding of the 2015 Greek referendum. Then there was Merkel’s impulsive, perhaps generous, but rash decision to open the doors to the trans-Mediterranean refugees which opened a Pandora’s box of problems and has set off the crisis in the new east European democracies, the most recent result of which has been Mr Orban strengthening his majority on a harsh anti-immigrant and nationalist platform in Hungary. Then there is Brexit, followed by the attempted bullying of the British which is what we have experienced in this period of mud wrestling which we call ‘negotiation’. The bullying has, if anything, strengthened majority determination to leave.

We will leave, of course. And it is not complicated to do so. Yet we have had a relentless national narrative since the die was cast, promoted by unreconciled ‘remainers’, about how terribly difficult it all is. But this is simply not the case. It is to confuse third order with first order issues. As I said earlier, leaving is not fundamentally about trade. It is about something much deeper, much more fundamental. It is about sovereignty.

You mentioned in your paper that there is a lack of cultural reproduction in the EU. What do you mean by that and why is it contributing to the collapse?

Edmund Burke also makes a contrast between the revolutionary French method which he is trying is assess, and the British constitutional way. It is a contrast between top down and bottom up sources of power and he writes about the emergence of the natural contract in British society in moving terms. He talks about the way in which we create politics from the little platoons within which we associate, among the people with whom we actually live, and that our politics grow organically upwards and outwards from that. But also, it’s a transgenerational transaction – it’s a contact between the living and the dead and those not yet born. This is the vital point. A settled institution which lives beyond the lifespan of one generation of people has to reproduce itself culturally in a such a way that its message, faith and affection for it (and hence the cultural legitimation of it) carries into the minds and hearts of the childrens’ generation and beyond.

If you can achieve that inter-generational transmission of legitimation, then the institution goes on. The best example we have in modern history is the remarkable way in which when it ended as a hub and spoke power structure, formal British imperial rule so successfully dissolved and morphed into a networked grid of power (shown on its flag), a shared enterprise called ‘The Commonwealth’. During the reign of HM the Queen, the Commonwealth has become one of the most solidly grounded global alliances of shared interests. No-where else and in no other organisation does such a kaleidoscope of different nations from all hemispheres freely associate in so many ways. They share what anthropologists would call a ‘thick’ cultural narrative (including cricket). Look, for example, at maps of the destination and volumes of email and telephone traffic from Britain. The ties that bind which stand out are to and between the Anglosphere and its allies.

Many people have been brought up on a kind of shallow anti-imperialist rhetoric (which is true of an awful lot of students these days). That it is a sadness to me because it does not match the reality of the lived experience of the end of empire. The late colonial experience which I have studied was a shared cultural construction, not a place where power was crudely imposed on a Marxist model. In the areas where I was working in central Africa, after the period of ‘welfare colonialism’ in the 1950s, after the British left, there was a transition into political independence. But there was residual goodwill. What I’m saying is that there is a mixed legacy of empire: it’s a kaleidoscopic pattern of brilliant and wonderful complexity, sometimes with cruelty and oppression, yes, but also with positive things too. It really was a shared construction. And the residual affection transmitted into the Commonwealth.

And as it happens, the ‘Anglosphere’ of which the Commonwealth is part, contains three of the top eight geopolitically most competent powers in the world: that is, the US (the principal hegemon); the UK, which is the second most geopolitically competent state in the world; and India (which is 6th, ahead of Japan and Russia). India is not only a rising power but a rising democratic power. The ‘Anglosphere’ as a whole is a rising bloc in contrast to the EU which is not. Why not?

In my paper, I observed that the accelerated introduction of the Euro was the act which really incubated the wasting disease which is destroying the EU’s legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people, particularly south of the Alps. The move into the zone of risk of collapse contrasts with the increasing complexity of the Anglosphere, both the Commonwealth and the US, which are both vibrant and strongly legitimate: for you can increase complexity and at the same time increase positive gain. And the indispensable variable is Rousseau’s requirement for spontaneous legitimation for power. If you do not have this, then you will decline and fall, as I fear the EU is now doing.

So as a country we are doubly lucky, thanks to the good sense of ordinary people (who did not go to the LSE or indeed any other university), ‘the wisdom of unlettered men’, as Edmund Burke put it. Ordinary people understood that they needed to take back control to a level of complexity where they were prepared to confer legitimacy. That is what we have done, possibly just in time to avoid the cliff edge of accelerating collapse in the EU, for I’m afraid the future of the European project looks rather bleak. Luckily, as we leave it we are able to re-join a globalized world as part of a network which shares a thick cultural inheritance which is the Anglosphere in general and the Commonwealth in particular. It should not be understated as one of the great assets we have. And of course, we can build not only on trade and cultural links but also military ones too, because the Anglosphere contains our most important security alliance which is the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

Finally, do you think that the Government’s ‘Global Britain’ campaign is just a marketing slogan, or does it contain some real substantive potential to enhance those important links we have with the wider world?

I don’t know what is in the government’s mind. What I would hope is that somebody in government will understand the evidence I put forward in the report and stop being so timid.

In certain parts of the British elite, particularly in the media and academia, there is an ugly streak of ‘declinism’ which is always seeing the country as being smaller, weaker, morally worse than it is. If you contradict that view, the immediate reaction you get from the declinist line is ‘oh, you’re a jingoistic imperialist.’ Of course, I’m not. I’ll stand on my record. What I am saying is that this is a quite extraordinary country. We are richly blessed with our human endowment. We are a remarkably creative people, a world centre for finance, invention and innovation and we are well positioned to reengage the main leading edges of the world’s economy.

Therefore, recognizing that we have those strengths, I would have preferred a much different conversation with our neighbours in the EU since we decided to leave it. One which started from an understanding of the problems they’ve got, standing as they are within the zone of the risk of collapse. We don’t want to push them into that collapse, of course (unless they want to do us harm, in which case they turn themselves into enemies). What we do want to do after this 45-year diversion is to be able to resume our role as Europe’s major outward looking power with geo-political competence ahead of all the rest of Europe. We are not the supplicants here and we’ll be just fine. So if you want to trade with us, then come with your proposals. That should be the conversation. In my opinion far too much has been ceded to the weaker party.

How have we got entangled in this declinist sabotage? In his brilliant book The Road to Somewhere David Goodhart reckons that there is a tiny minority in Britain who he describes as the ‘global villagers’ and who Mrs May described as the ‘citizens of nowhere’, which is maybe five percent of the population. But they are an important 5% because they are so overrepresented in universities, the media and politics. They are the source of this relentless ‘declinism’ and they are fuelling a morally reprehensible attempt to reverse the will of the people. That must not succeed. The consequences don’t bear thinking about. The silent people of Britain – the 17.4 million majority who spoke – they’d speak again were there any risk of that. And we don’t want that sort of national conversation. Surely what we want is a positive conversation? I just wish that those who lost this referendum would get over their grief and accept the result, just as those of us who lost the 1975 referendum accepted that result, and now get behind the opportunities that the country has.

We have an enormous range of bright opportunities. We have an appropriate level of complexity, and we are part of international institutions in the Anglosphere and in the Commonwealth, which, like us, are also on a growth path. They are continuing to increase their net positive marginal gains as they increase their complexity. This is all good news.

Professor Prins’ paper on the EU risk of collapse can be found on the Briefings for Brexit website: https://briefingsforbrexit.com/the-eu-is-at-clear-risk-of-collapse-and-the-remainiacs-just-dont-see-it/