Born in 1951, Michel Barnier joined the French Gaullist party, the RPR, at fifteen. Unlike most high-level French administrators and politicians, Barnier is not a product of the École Nationale d’Administration; in fact, he graduated from the École Supérieure de Commerce in Paris. He first won public recognition in France for coordinating preparations for the 1992 Winter Olympics in the Alpine town of Albertville. He went on to serve as a minister for the environment, and then for European affairs. Later, he became minister for foreign affairs, until losing his job when French voters rejected the European Union’s new Constitutional Treaty in a 2005 referendum. The shock of that result, and a similar one in the Netherlands, might have served as a cautionary tale for Prime Minister David Cameron’s government. (France later accepted a new version of the treaty agreement, after the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, by parliamentary assent.) [...]
This is the reason that the EU is so complex. It’s clearly possible to work here in Brussels with more democracy, less bureaucracy, but it will still remain complex—as it [the EU] wants to be united rather than uniform. This [compromise and negotiation] is the price we have to pay. We don’t want to become one nation or one people. There is no ambition to build a distinct and homogeneous federal state. We are twenty-eight, in a few months probably twenty-seven, with twenty-four languages. [...]
Looking at the causes of Brexit, we also find typically British reasons: the hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the past—nostalgia serves no purpose in politics. In my country, too, some politicians still prefer to live in the past. But there were, also, people voting for Brexit who simply don’t want to accept rules. Some based in the City of London voted to leave, as they don’t want to accept the Union’s regulations on their trading; they want to speculate freely and the Union doesn’t allow them to do so. [...]
t’s a question of the fundamental reality of the single market, which is not a supermarket. Freedom of movement for goods, services, capital and, most importantly, freedom of movement for people are fundamental to the single market. The EU is not only an economic project; it’s also a political project. It’s also much more than a free-trade zone. The single market is a social, economic, and legal ecosystem, where, between twenty-eight countries, we have decided to live together, adopt the same standards and protection for consumers. Therefore, we cannot agree to cherry-picking.
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