Brexit could undo 70 years of peace-building

The new Tory Government plans to scrap the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. This is a move in exactly the wrong direction for it implies that British interests should and will replace those global concerns enshrined for us in the European Union.

The purpose of the EU was, is and must remain to keep the peace in Europe. Many so-called “Europhiles”, like their sceptical opponents, see the EU as a giant market in which the various nation states can simply compete and flourish. Whereas the founding fathers of the EU, Konrad Adenauer and the rest, realised that only by pooling national sovereignty in a larger entity could the competition among states which had led to the “long war” of 1914-45 be transformed into a project for peace. Perhaps the fact that they were Catholics had something to do with this.

Any dismantling of the EU would inevitably mean the resurrection of possible war among the European powers. Those states who could afford it would probably decide to acquire nuclear weapons to shield themselves under their own nuclear “umbrella”, thus wrecking the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (one of the most important developments of the post-1945 years). Others would hope to live under the “protection” of their nuclear neighbours. Either way, Europe would be in a perpetual state of “cold”, if not “hot”, war.

Today the concept of “self-defence” is being corruptly extended, for example to the Middle East. In Britain we are worried about one of the problems of Scottish nationalism, namely how to “protect” an independent Scotland. The answer – to become a member of NATO while getting rid of the nuclear weapons at Faslane – is self-contradictory. Yet this self-contradiction is unavoidable precisely because the Scots want to become yet another competitor in the big market of Europe.

Is there an answer? Well, my answer is that the Catholic Church is the sacrament, or sign, of what is required. The visible Church has to become what theologically it already is, catholic – global – down to its roots.

Unfortunately the Church has instead been enmeshed within, and accommodated to, the jungle of competing interests. It is organised along nationalist lines, with the various national conferences of bishops representing the Church’s presence within states. And on crucial teachings, such as the morality of nuclear deterrence, the statements of these conferences have been at odds with each other – and still are!

Even the popes of the post-war years were entangled in the muddle. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union could the papacy announce what it had in mind all along: that the “defence” policies of the big nuclear-armed states were “baneful and fallacious”, as Benedict XVI put it in 2006. Perhaps the appointment of a pope from outside the nuclear-armed jungle is a sign that the Church can transcend competing national interests.

So the scrapping of the Human Rights Act, and its replacement of by a nationalistic version, signals that national interests are to be treated as superior to human ones. I fear that much else that emerges from the general election will be along the same lines.

Brian Wicker is vice-president of Pax Christi

Above: A military parade in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, to mark the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, included Russian-backed separatists. Photo: AP/PA