Dr. Stephen Meyer, a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, joined Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday to talk about the impending Brexit vote, where Meyer saw America’s “special relationship” with the United Kingdom at stake.
Meyer explained that relationship dates back to 1941, when “Churchill and Roosevelt met on board ship to formalize an unusually close alliance, in which we have shared intelligence, weapons systems, manuals of instruction, and we were each other’s closest trading partners.”
“Despite that, we can’t have a free trade agreement with England, because they’re not allowed, because of their arrangement with the European Union, to make separate trading deals,” he noted. “Brexit would allow them to function, once again, as a sovereign country. They’re losing much of their sovereignty as a result of the European Union legislation that is imposed on them from Brussels — and, increasingly, a common security and defense policy that will prohibit them from forming their own bilateral alliances with other nations.”
Meyer agreed with Bannon’s suggestion that it was “out of line” for President Obama to not only throw in with the Remain side of the Brexit vote, but essentially threaten Leave supporters, by promising there would be no bilateral trade deals with the United States if they exit the European Union.
“It was not only out of line, it was completely inaccurate,” said Meyer. “There are other European nations, who are not part of the European Union – for example, Norway — who have a free trade agreement with the European Union, but have not relinquished their sovereignty, as is a condition of full participation in the European Union project. There’s absolutely no reason that Britain couldn’t negotiate a similar deal with the European Union, and if they were independent of the political unification project, they would be certainly free to negotiate free trade deals with the United States, with China, with other nations which they currently do not have such deals.”
“It would be entirely in our interest to offer them such a deal, because they’re one of our most important trading partners,” Meyer added.
He suggested that as Americans watch the Brexit drama and other populist revolts in Europe play out, they should remember “there’s a big difference between Europe and the European Union.”
“The European Union is a project of European elites to eliminate nation-states, on the theory that the existence of nation-states is what caused the World Wars,” Meyer explained. “And also on the theory that you can get rid of national interest. One of the ironies of the European Union project is that it’s actually inflaming different national interests, in that people of different countries are being hurt so badly by the European Union project, with the immigration policies and the currency policy, that they’re having to act very decisively in support of their own national interests.”
“The big issue in the U.K. is whether they can have just a free trade agreement, which would be good, or whether they’re going to be stuck with diminished sovereignty, which is inherent in the whole European Union idea,” he said.
Meyer said the Euro elites were “acting true to form” when condescending to their audience and invoking nebulous “expert” authority for the Remain position, even though Bannon argued the hard data leans more strongly toward the Leave side.
“From the very beginning, this has been a project of the European elites. It’s utopian in nature. They want to say let’s get rid of the nation-states. Everything will be better if a few elite technocrats run everything,” Meyer said.
“It’s an incredibly undemocratic arrangement,” he continued. “Between 50 and 70 percent of the U.K.’s legislation is now being imposed on them from Brussels. That legislation is not produced by anything like a democratic process. There are two unelected bodies, the European Commission and the Committee of Permanent Representatives, abbreviated COREPER. These two groups, basically they’re bureaucrats from the member states, the COREPER people are. They work out the legislation, and there’s really no place for it to be voted on by the people.”
“It’s a very elitist project. It’s very socialist. It’s utopian. And it’s pretty anti-American,” Meyer charged. “It was conceived in the beginning as a way of creating a United States of Europe that would be a counterweight to the United States. But because we have such a close relationship with Britain, and because part of this project involves a loss of British national sovereignty, and a common European defense and foreign policy, it means that we will lose our special relationship with our closest ally — unless the Brits exercise their independence tomorrow, and vote to exit.”
Meyer, who went to school in Cambridge, believes many people in the UK fully understand what’s at stake in the Brexit vote — except for younger people.
“There’s a big disparity in the polls between the older cohorts and the younger cohorts,” he noted, describing the EU as ‘something that sounds good in theory, but isn’t working well in practice” — a truth older voters have awakened to more quickly that young students obsessed with theory.
“Britain, of all the countries, has been the most skeptical, because they’ve had their own traditions of law, and their own relationships with their Commonwealth countries, and with nations like the United States and Canada,” Meyer said. “They’re really not like all the other European countries. So it’s hard to say what will happen tomorrow, but I do think, especially the older Brits, are increasingly alert to the loss of their country.”
Dr. Stephen Meyer’s articles on the European Union and Brexit can be found at National Review Online and The Stream.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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