NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE (March 27, 2025) by David Frost:
Just over five years ago, shortly after Boris Johnson won a decisive election victory in Britain and two weeks after Britain finally left the European Union, I gave a speech in Brussels titled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe.”
It hit many British front pages the next day. Partly that was because the speech set out Britain’s uncompromising negotiating position for the next stage of the Brexit talks. But equally it was because it was the first attempt to set out and give renewed intellectual legitimacy to the cause of leaving the EU and of reviving British nationhood. I wanted the British people to hear, after years of being told that to leave the EU was to vote against the modern world, that there was in fact a rational, reputable, and practically deliverable case for national independence. And I wanted Europeans to understand our thinking properly and consider what it meant for them too.
I argued that what we were seeing in Europe was a clash of two revolutions in governance. The first was the creation of the EU itself. As I put it, this was “the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648: a new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation-states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.”
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I don’t of course expect many in Europe to heed my call. The recent European thrashing around on geopolitics, and the refusal to face Europe’s relative impotence to affect outcomes in Ukraine, suggest that the current leadership of most European countries is unable to see things straight or do more than respond to day-to-day challenges. But the problems will not go away. If conservatives don’t put forward their own clear vision for Europe, then the instinctual movements of the EU and its leaders will dominate. European conservatives are unlikely then to find themselves in a “nation called Europe,” but they will be in a political construct that by design will stop them from fulfilling their conservative goals. The sooner they face up to that, the better. Changing things is, after all, a major task. It took the EU 70 years to get to this point. It will take a long time to reverse it. Better start soon.
This article appears as “For a Conservative Europe” in the May 2025 print edition of National Review.
David Frost – Lord Frost of Allenton was the minister for EU relations and chief negotiator for Brexit in Boris Johnson’s government. He is now a Conservative Party member in Britain’s House of Lords. His essay is an edited version of a speech given at the Danube Institute, Budapest, on March 4.