Euro Vision - The Future of the Union

Brexit Pannel at the International Women's Forum, Barcelona, Spain.

On April 12th, 2019, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project and The Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship joined a discussion on Brexit as part of the International Women’s Forum together with Anand Menon, Professor or European Politics and Foreign Affairs at Kings College and Director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative and Grégoire Gathem, Associate Professor at University of Barcelona and Senior Legal Counsel at Fusion for Energy.

They discussed the origin and root causes of Brexit, the vision for Europe going forward, the challenges faced by Europe both internally with regards to the wave of populism, and externally from the tariffs that the United States has recently imposed on Europe, and the lack of support the U.S. President has shown for NATO.

Clüver Ashbrook underlined the weakness of the 'remain' campaign, pointing to its inability to "create a positive narrative around remaining in the EU when politicians all over the UK had been beating up on Brussels for 45 years to form a positive interior narrative, highlighting the UK as a country apart. That is the narrative that Margaret Thatcher was using when she claimed “We want our money back.”

On a shifting party landscape across Europe, she noted “we are now finding populist parties either on the left or the right side of the political spectrum, and that is forcing a rethinking of the center: what does the center mean ? Do the fundamental compromises on which the center was built hold? It is a very interesting moment for Europe.”