Hopes will be dashed: Brexit and the ‘Merkel myth’

ABSTRACT

The United Kingdom’s strategy for negotiating Brexit involved a misapprehension: that the EU-27 would divide and concede to UK demands. In this article, we provide one explanation for this misapprehension: a pervasive ‘Merkel myth’ widely accepted within the British political class. That myth skewed British understanding of the European Union’s power balance and priorities. It privileged an interpretation of Merkel as a decisive influence in Europe, well-disposed to the UK. Alongside this was the belief that Merkel would come under pressure from Germany’s manufacturing giants to grant the UK a relatively generous deal. The Merkel myth reinforced a political strategy that, by all accounts, never came close to success. Yet these beliefs affected the approach of three prime ministers. Employing the distinctive analytical lens of ‘political myth’ to explain the judgements of actors, the article contributes to a growing literature on the role of ideas in political strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Brexit
• Merkel
• myth
• European Union
• Germany

Introduction

Criticising the then British prime minister Theresa May’s approach to Brexit, Nick Clegg – former Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister and an ardent Europhile – confessed (Clegg 2017) that he’d always assumed May

would jump on a plane in the dead of night without telling the press, go to Berlin, have a nice, quiet sauerkraut dinner with Angela Merkel, and say to her ‘listen this is a nightmare for us, I don’t want this, you don’t want this, Europe’s got many bigger fish to fry … let’s try and reach quickly an accommodation’.

A few months later, and just ahead of the 2017 general election, a columnist for the Eurosceptic Sun newspaper encouraged the tabloid’s readers to ‘give Theresa May the landslide majority she says she needs to take on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’ (Kavanagh 2017). May didn’t get that majority, and following the election was forced into minority government. The same newspaper nevertheless reiterated soon afterwards that it was still all about the German Chancellor, with its writers noting that ‘It would be ideal if Ms Merkel realised the damage a “punishment” Brexit will do to German car giants and saw reason’. If Angela Merkel did not agree to whatever it was Britain wanted, Theresa May was encouraged ‘to get serious about walking away’ (Sun 2017).

This was all too typical. Indeed, as soon as the word ‘Brexit’ began to dominate British political discourse, a shared belief united self-proclaimed ‘Remainers’ (those opposed to EU withdrawal) with ‘Leavers’ (those committed to it) – namely that the key to limiting the damage Brexit might do or, alternatively, to exploiting the opportunities it might offer lay with Angela Merkel. Diplomatic success or failure would, ultimately, be decided in large part by the actions of the British and German governments. From the moment David Cameron committed in early 2013 to holding an in-out referendum should he be re-elected as prime minister, right through to the moment Angela Merkel stepped down as Germany’s Chancellor nearly a decade later, British politicians – particularly British Conservative politicians – claimed that the path to whichever outcome they were bent on ran through Berlin. We call the near-miraculous power attributed to Germany’s Chancellor by those politicians, as well as by commentators, the Merkel myth – one that skewed the British understanding of the EU’s priorities, its objectives, and the likely outcomes of leaving. This article, based on a close reading of interviews, memoirs and media content, explores both the content and function of that myth, as well as its scope.

In analysing the Merkel myth, we are influenced both by theoretical and empirical work on political myth (Bottici 2009, 2010; Midgley 2002; 2011; Nicholls 2019; Pike and Diamond 2021) and work considering the Brexit process, particularly the EU’s aims and objectives (Adler-Nissen, Galpin, and Rosamond 2017; Jensen and Kelstrup 2019), and more specifically the political approach of the German government (Langenbacher 2017; Oppermann 2019). We begin by setting out our understanding of myth. We then locate our contribution to interpreting the Brexit process, namely that we provide one possible explanation for something on which many academics and commentators seem to agree – that Britain fundamentally misunderstood or misjudged the EU’s position on Brexit, including the role of individual member states during the negotiation. We argue here that, at least in part, the Merkel myth in British politics motivated and sustained one strategic and tactical error after another by parts of the UK’s political class.

Based on analysis of the UK media, first-hand accounts of the Brexit process (both in the UK and the EU), and via secondary sources that have sought to reveal the hidden (and not so hidden) political drama, we analyse the component parts of the Merkel myth – the meanings that constitute the myth. But we also note that, since the British political class is far from monolithic, not everyone was convinced by one or other versions of the Merkel myth, even if those individuals were often ignored or else came to a different interpretation too late in the Brexit process to make a difference. Overall, we aim to add an ‘interpretive’ analytical approach to understanding the Brexit process, one focused on beliefs and shared beliefs (Bevir and Blakely 2018; Bevir and Rhodes 2012), and on how these affected the perceptions and judgements of the political actors involved in both narrating and negotiating Brexit. In so doing, we aim to contribute to the wide-ranging literature on ideas and policymaking (Peters and Nagel 2020, 3–6) through the distinctive theoretical and analytical lens of ‘myth’.

Political myth

Myth has a rich and long philosophical heritage (see, for example, Cassirer 1955; Midgley 2011) and recent work within social science has continued to think through the concept, seeking to identify myths in our social world that find their expression in literature (Ball, 2022), understanding narratives that seem to take on enhanced significance in political contexts (Nicholls 2019), and analysing the construction and narration of political leaders (Pike and Diamond 2021). Comprehending myth as a useful concept in understanding people’s beliefs, and so political change, means rejecting the ontological position of divorcing the ‘rational’ interests of an actor from the ‘irrational’, emotive or symbolic (Bottici 2009, 10–11). Rather, and in keeping with more ‘interpretive’ philosophical traditions, myths help us understand the different sets of beliefs that people have, and act with (ibid, 13). What makes a myth ‘political’ is the context within which the myth is created – one of political commitment and activity (Bottici 2010, 133).

In what follows, our approach to myth – following Midgley and Bottici – is not to understand it in the ordinary language sense of falsehood. Rather, myths are particular patterns of meaning (Midgley 2011). They are created not by any one person or text, but through elaboration and cumulative exposure (Bottici 2009, 12). What actors in the UK’s ‘political class’ (Allen 2018) saw and took from the political myth considered here varied; what matters is that they ascribed a variety of ‘significant’ meanings to it (see Bottici 2009, 13). Once invested with significance – a concept from Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy of myth (1988) – then a myth, and the ‘story’ of that myth, can provide a set of assumptions through which people understand something about the world (Bottici 2009, 13).

A further point to add is one very well explained by the philosopher Charles Taylor. That is that myth is ‘an integrative form of thought, in which what we define as elements are given meaning in wholes’ (2016, 72). In other words, while each element of a myth may mean something, the meaning of a myth – and, following Bottici, the enhanced meaning of a myth – comes from the elements understood together, collectively. The Merkel myth contained elements of varying plausibility, understood separately. For example, Merkel – we would argue – was an influential head of an EU government and had demonstrated political leadership within the EU. Yet what we call the Merkel myth – formed within the British political class, and in the context of Britain’s relationship with the European Union – was more than the sum of its parts and was understood as a whole. The importance of Merkel’s power, within the myth, was comprehended alongside other elements. This, alongside philosophical work on understanding ‘significance’ and the ‘process’ of making myth, distinguishes myths from other kinds of narrative (Bottici 2009, 13; 2010, 178).

Of course, myths, narratives, ideologies and other interpretive frameworks arguably come from a similar place, subsequent to which we – as people – add analytical distinctions to clarify how we can interpret our different ways of thinking, and our systems of thought. The above concepts are all ‘meanings’ we use to interpret the world, and

a hunger for meaning is central to our lives. It is not just an accidental, irrelevant emotion …. It is the wider motive of which our theoretical curiosity is only a part. It is the impulse of our imaginations to order the world with a view to understanding and contemplating it … . (Midgley 2002, 157)

In addition to the distinction between myths and other kinds of narrative, then, we can usefully add here a distinction with ideologies. For Bottici, the difference between the two is that myths must take ‘a narrative form’, while the way they are produced leads to greater identification with something inherently dramatic (Bottici 2010, 196). For Midgley, myths and dramas also go together (2002, 155), and can be attached to more theoretical understandings of our world (ibid, 4). Commitment to an ideology can also, surely, take on a sense of emotional commitment, and drama. Ideologies, then – and following Freeden – are groups of concepts, organised in relation to one another in different ways (1996, 85). Yet they also come with other kinds of meanings, including those produced and understood through concepts like myth (ibid, 5). Whether those meanings are partnered with or even internalised within an ideology is no doubt worthy of further theoretical consideration. However, they can be kept analytically distinct (Bottici 2010, 196).

In what follows, we seek to elaborate on the Merkel myth – one that was produced over time, was not the product of any one political actor or ‘side’ in the Brexit debates (and so not connected exclusively with any one ideology), and was imbued with significance by some British political elites. We do not suggest, of course that the myth explains each and every decision taken by British Conservative politicians any more than we offer a comprehensive contemporary history of the negotiations. There is a growing literature historicising the narratives and ideas that informed political strategies during the Brexit process (e.g. Glencross 2022), which will contribute to a fuller understanding of the period. Instead, our aim is more modest, namely to add to our understanding of one or two crucial misconceptions at the heart of the Brexit negotiations and, in so doing, to make the case for employing an emerging – or rediscovered – interpretive concept.

Merkel, Germany, and Brexit

There is a growing literature seeking to understand and explain the political and negotiating strategies of the UK and the EU during Brexit – a process that will continue. Of the many points made in this literature, one is particularly relevant to our argument regarding the Merkel myth – namely that the UK government sought to undermine the solidarity of the EU-27 by trying (largely unsuccessfully) to negotiate with individual member states. Jensen and Kelstrup (2019, 33, 36) consider a range of existing theoretical models to explain the EU’s sustained unity during the Brexit process, concluding that aspects of different approaches – be it ‘rationality’, institutional norms or framing – tell us something about the EU’s response.

Taking the ‘rational choice’ lens as one example – and informed by Hay’s understanding of rational choice as a ‘heuristic’ (Hay 2004) – the UK’s logic ran thus: (a) member states will act rationally and (b) some member states will be more affected economically by Brexit than others, leading to (c) those member states seeking to achieve an economically beneficial deal for the UK in order to prevent damage to their own economies. As Langenbacher (2017, 82) concluded soon after the Brexit vote, this led the British to assume that ‘Germany would be more accommodating out of economic self-interest’ – only to find again and again that ‘the Germans have clearly and rationally prioritised the EU, common market, and currency union’. Indeed, such was the priority accorded to ‘the integrity of the single market and to avoid[ing] the disintegration of the EU’, that ‘the German government and Angela Merkel personally [took] the lead in coordinating the positions of the remaining 27 member states to ensure a unified European approach’ (Oppermann 2019, 489).

Yet this should not have come as a surprise: Stefan Kornelius’s authorised biography of Merkel, for instance, was published in English some two years before the referendum and contained an account of David Cameron’s attempts to secure Merkel’s support for his renegotiation priorities ahead of a possible vote. While Merkel listened carefully to Cameron’s pitch, and was broadly supportive of his appetite for EU reform, she was clearly sceptical. ‘Cameron might exploit the fact that the Germans wanted to keep Britain in the EU at any cost,’ Kornelius (2014, 266) observed, ‘because it suited their interests. But Merkel doesn’t like veiled threats. If it reached that state then she would decide whether the price was too high, and if in doubt she would decline.’ Furthermore, she wanted her British counterpart to understand that he ‘should not overestimate his position, he should not count on her being too accommodating’ (ibid.). Yet even after this – and after Cameron’s failed attempt to secure an ‘emergency break’ on free movement that might (but only might) have staved off defeat in the referendum – British politicians still seemed convinced Merkel could be counted on to somehow ‘deliver the goods’.

What, then, were the origins of, and the assumptions behind, the strategy pursued by the UK government in the face of what for many analysts was a wholly predictable stance from Germany and one which largely dovetailed with the determination of the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier to prevent, at all costs, the British playing divide and rule (see Barnier 2021, 22)? And why, in spite of UK officials saying ‘very clearly’ that member states (even big players like Germany) would prioritise unity (Seldon 2020, 117), did this negotiating strategy persist, with limited or even zero evidence of success? True, at least some British politicians were (albeit late in the day) disabused of the notion that Angela Merkel would personally deliver concessions for the UK: for instance, following a particularly notable clash at the Salzburg ‘informal summit’ in September 2018, ‘May suspected Merkel was no longer willing to go out of her way to support Britain’ (see Seldon 2020, 479). But the question is: why did May believe this in the first place, just as her predecessor David Cameron had believed it before her?

We argue that the answer lies in what we call the Merkel myth – one comprised of several key components: first, that the German Chancellor (and certainly not Michel Barnier!) was the ultimate decision-maker on the EU side; second, that, in the wake of the Eurozone and refugee crises, both of which had supposedly proved this decision-making power, Merkel would deliver on her inclination to compromise in order to preserve good relations with the UK; third, that German industrial interests would push her in that direction; and fourth, that she was essentially a pragmatist and one temperamentally inclined both towards the UK and to delay deciding until late on in any process. We also argue, however, that: 1) though pervasive, these beliefs were not universally shared, with doubts setting in as time went on; and 2) as we argued above, different elements of the myth had – separately – different levels of plausibility, but as a ‘myth’ relevant to Brexit can only be fully understood as a whole.

The Merkel myth

As Theresa May settled into Downing Street and began to think seriously about how to approach Brexit, one of her officials made it plain that, just as European politicians and officials always guessed it would be (see Desmet and Stourton 2019, 30, 335), ‘the strategy was very clearly to deal with individual countries, and to fight against the monolithic EU response’ to the UK’s vote to leave (Seldon 2020, 117). That, and the fact that May’s first overseas trip as prime minister was to Berlin reflected the underlying assumption of the British political class – namely that the European Union was ultimately an implicitly intergovernmental organisation in which the leaders of Germany and (albeit less so) France were the dominant players, with Germany and its Chancellor seen as more inclined (and certainly more inclined than France and the European Commission) to help the UK out.

This impression owed something to long experience in meetings of the European Council and the Council of Ministers in which Merkel, as leader of the EU’s largest and richest member state, was always among the chief decision-makers. But it also owed much to the role she played in two key episodes prior to the 2016 referendum, the first being the Eurozone crisis, the second the refugee crisis. During the first, Merkel was perceived to have led much of the EU’s political strategy – and, alongside respective finance ministers, the economics – in both managing ‘debt’ and in altering the framework of the eurozone. On the second, again the perception was one of leadership, opening Germany’s borders to people fleeing conflict in Syria and seeking sanctuary in Europe. We cannot examine Merkel’s political decision-making here, nor offer an analysis of these policies. What is important for our argument is that Merkel built a political reputation for leadership within Europe and for taking decisions. That Merkel could exercise power was taken as proof that she always could and would – and that on Brexit, this was good news for Britain.

On this point, British political actors were convinced. The Telegraph – effectively the ‘house journal’ of the Conservative Party – was told by ‘a senior British source’ that, the Commission’s negotiator Michel Barnier was ‘pretty irrelevant’, since ‘[t]he final deal will be down to what comes out of talks between Theresa May and other national leaders, especially Merkel and [Francois] Hollande’ (Ross 2016). And writing later (after the Conservatives lost their majority at the 2017 election), May’s former chief advisor, Nick Timothy, writing for the country’s best selling ‘red-top’ newspaper, the Sun (Timothy 2017), told readers that, while getting a good deal shouldn’t see the British prime minister ‘betting the house on Angela Merkel’s generosity or dealing with her alone’, the British political class should ‘also remember where the big decisions in Europe are actually taken, and that is in Berlin’. May herself was, if anything, even more dismissive of the EU’s Chief negotiator’s clout, noting a week or so later (Merrick 2017) that ‘of course, the Council has delegated with a mandate to the Commission, and the Commission has appointed Michel Barnier. But the decision will always be one that will be taken by the leaders’. Moreover, any straw in the wind that suggested – at least to hardline Brexiteers like Iain Duncan Smith – that the EU was showing a degree of flexibility in negotiations rather than supposedly trying to ‘punish’ the UK for leaving, was put down to the fact that, as the Conservatives’ former leader put it (Mason and Asthana 2017) ‘Germany is becoming much more influential’ in determining its stance with Merkel ‘taking control behind the scenes’.

But the assumption that leaders, and in particular the leader of Germany (and to a lesser extent) France, was what really mattered was by no means confined to Eurosceptics. Talking in 2017 about the chances of a favourable deal for the UK (see Peck 2017), Michael Heseltine, former deputy prime minister and a Tory Europhile par excellence, declared that: ‘It will be up to Ms Merkel’s influence. For people of my generation, you can’t help but reflect that the Germans lost the war, but they won the peace.’ And, a few months’ later, as Merkel faced a tough general election, the Labour-supporting tabloid, the Mirror, informed readers (Beattie 2017), that

While the 27 EU nations have a collective position, it is obvious the two big economies of Germany and France have more influence than smaller states. Were Merkel to depart, the UK would lose a key ally in the negotiations.

The German Chancellor has not wavered from the official stance agreed by the EU27, but she has been instrumental in persuading colleagues not to push Theresa May towards a hard Brexit. Once the negotiations move to the second stage on our future trading relationship, the UK is looking to Merkel to engineer a deal to the benefit of both sides.

Nor, indeed, was the idea that Germany and Merkel were crucial an exclusively British assumption: Yanis Varoufakis, who made a name for himself in left-wing circles in the UK during the Eurozone crisis, also claimed (Thomson and Sylvester 2017), ‘There is only one person in Europe who matters. Her name is Angela Merkel’. What is clear, however, is as the negotiations on a Withdrawal Agreement reached their final stages, the British continued to believe the Chancellor was the key: in the summer of 2018, the Financial Times noted (Barker 2018) that

British officials are convinced that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is helping soften the EU’s approach after a more positive meeting with Mrs May earlier this month. One UK official said the chancellor was ready to give Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, ‘more freedom’ to close a deal.

And towards the end of the year, by which time the Withdrawal Agreement between the EU and the United Kingdom had been negotiated but had run into huge trouble with the parliamentary Conservative Party, the same paper (Barker and Khan 2018) drew what was by now a familiar contrast between, on the one hand, France and its president (and, now and then, Council President Donald Tusk) and Germany and Merkel on the other, who (along on this occasion with Dutch PM, Mark Rutte) was apparently ‘more worried about the eye-rolling, disdain and schadenfreude with which some European capitals have responded to Britain’s trouble’.

That trouble, of course, only worsened in 2019, in spite of the fact that, according to one British official speaking to the Mail on Sunday in March, there was now ‘real movement, with Angela Merkel taking the lead’. Apparently, they claimed: ‘The Germans are making a point of saying to us, “I hope you notice how much more helpful we’re being than the French”.’ This was clutching at an old straw perhaps, although not quite as desperately as the Cabinet Minister, who speaking to the same journalist (Hodges 2019) about the talks on the Irish backstop between the Germans and May’s Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, confided ‘They like him. He fits their idea of what a British Minister should be. They feel they’re negotiating with [the 1950s and 60s actor known for playing the quintessential upper class Englishman] David Niven.’

Ironically, perhaps, Cox (whose job it was to provide a legal opinion on the permanence or otherwise of the backstop) reportedly told May (Seldon 2020, 565) to ‘take the fight yourself to Brussels … . Tell the German Chancellor yourself what is at stake: we’re only asking for a modest change’. Substantive changes were not forthcoming, meaning Cox felt unable to provide the reassurance to Brexit hardliners that May had hoped for, leading in the end to her resignation and replacement by Boris Johnson in the summer of 2019. But as the latter tried desperately to find a mutually acceptable fix to the Northern Ireland issue, ministers were again relying on Germany to get them out of the hole into which they had dug themselves, with Greg Hands (one of the few Tory politicians to speak fluent German) telling the Daily Mail in August (Hands 2019) that he had

presented a report on the issue to a gathering of German Cabinet members and senior German entrepreneurs and industrialists who showed great interest in finding solutions to the backstop.

Unlike the ideological technocrats in Brussels who have refused point blank to consider any way of getting around this seemingly intractable problem, politicians and business folk are more pragmatic – including Chancellor Merkel. She has been indicating her willingness to be more practical on Brexit for some time.

Hands’ words take us, as many readers will recognise, right back to one of the core components of the Merkel myth – namely that German industry, particularly (but not exclusively) in the automotive sector, would be a powerful ‘pressure’ on the politicians involved with Brexit, easing policy disagreements. As David Davis, Theresa May’s first Brexit Secretary, famously put it in a speech (Davis 2016) just before the referendum campaign got going,

We are too valuable a market for Europe to shut off. Within minutes of a vote for Brexit the CEO’s of Mercedes, BMW, VW and Audi will be knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding that there be no barriers to German access to the British market.

And while they are at it they will be demanding that those British companies that they own will have uninterrupted access to Europe. We are talking Mini and Rolls Royce, owned by BMW, and Bentley, owned by Volkswagen.

Easy to laugh at in retrospect, perhaps: indeed, plenty of people have done. But Davis’s view was, as Barnier’s senior adviser Stefaan De Rynck (2023, 117) wryly noted, ‘a recurring meme in London during three and a half years of negotiations’. Mail columnist Dominic Lawson, son of the Conservative Party’s iconic 1980s chancellor, Nigel, reminded and reassured readers a few days after they’d voted Leave (Lawson 2016) that there was ‘a remarkably tight relationship between German industry and the Chancellery in Berlin’. The ‘huge pressure from German carmakers and other industry giants’, confirmed the Times (a few weeks later), meant Merkel was ‘considered by Mrs May to be a key ally’, her stance contrasting with other member states’ apparent ‘desire to make an example of Britain’ (Elliot and Charter 2016).

By the beginning of 2018, however, it was presumably pretty clear that the ‘remarkably tight relationship’ and the ‘huge pressure’ had so far failed to work their magic since the UK’s finance minister and its Brexit secretary saw fit to pen a joint article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Hammond and Davis 2018) reminding Germans that ‘As two of Europe’s biggest economies, it makes no sense to either Germany or Britain to put in place unnecessary barriers to trade in goods and services that would only damage businesses and economic growth on both sides of the Channel’. The Tories’ Brexiteer ultras, however, continued to think there was really no need for such pleas; after all, as Jacob Rees-Mogg (2018) confidently asserted in the wake of a call for a tariff-free deal from one German carmaker that summer,

Angela Merkel has a good track record of backing Germany’s industrial interests. Barnier has got a rather dog-in-a-manger attitude, but … [t]he European Commission’s interests and those of the member states have always been divergent and are becoming more so. The unity of the EU is fraying at the edges.

The fact that, half a year later, no agreement had been reached didn’t seem to undermine their convictions: called on to comment on a report from academics that supposedly showed that a ‘disorderly Brexit’ would cost Germany over 100,000 jobs, Iain Duncan Smith claimed (see Sun 2019) that ‘Despite all the pomp and nonsense, the reality will come down to jobs lost, business shut and tax paid’ so the UK should play hardball.

The confidence expressed by Conservative politicians that Germany would come up trumps in the end, however, wasn’t based only on their conviction that its businesses would effectively oblige Merkel to concede but also on their certainty that, at heart, she was a pragmatic, open-minded deal-maker, as well as their belief (gained through years of experience as a member state rather than a third country, of course!) that both the EU and Merkel nearly always delayed decisions until the very last minute, at which point they would give in or at least compromise (see Desmet and Stourton 2019, 402). They weren’t alone: for instance, ‘diplomatic sources’ told the Times at the beginning of 2019 (Waterfield and Zeffman 2019) that Merkel was ready to ‘go to the edge of the precipice’ – ‘She thinks that people will need to look into the abyss before a deal is done at five to midnight. That is how she works’. Nor was it only the most Eurosceptic Tories who held that view. Indeed, it was on this basis that, in the summer of 2019, Jeremy Hunt – having talked to Merkel (and Macron) at the D-Day commemorations – argued during the Tory leadership contest that, since he was just such a deal-maker himself, he was best placed to negotiate with her (see Selby 2019).

If Hunt was hinting at, or at least hoping for, some kind of personal connection, he wouldn’t have been the first Conservative leader (or, in this case, leadership aspirant) to whom that applied. David Cameron in particular convinced himself that he and Merkel got on well and, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary (2011’s Fiscal Pact, 2014’s appointment of Jean-Claude Junker), that this would help to secure concessions from the German government (and therefore the EU) when it came to his pre-referendum ‘renegotiation’ (see Sylvester and Thomson 2016). As the FT noted (Parker and Barker 2016) six months before the vote took place,

The British prime minister was proud of his easy relationship with the German chancellor and the weekends at his Chequers retreat watching episodes of Midsomer Murders or taking country walks in the Buckinghamshire hills … ‘When you hear them on the phone giggling and joking, it’s almost flirtatious,’ said one adviser.

To some extent, this apparent camaraderie – leaving aside the gendered language from the advisor – may have reflected a degree of relief on both sides that the relationship between the two leaders had clearly improved hugely after a very rocky start. Merkel had, by all accounts, been irritated, even angered by Cameron’s decision, during his time as leader of the opposition, to remove the Conservative Party from the European People’s Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED) group in the European Parliament – a decision which, according to some, may (by reducing interaction between Tory leaders and their continental counterparts) have contributed to both Cameron’s and May’s inability to achieve more in their respective negotiations with both Germany in particular and the EU in general (see, for example, Davidson 2020, 1; Faull 2020, 5; Lidington 2020, 1–2, and; McDonald 2021, 2–3). Aware of the disappointment the decision had caused, Cameron and his colleagues had admittedly worked hard to recover the situation once in office (Cameron 2019, 149–150). William Hague, who served as Cameron’s first foreign secretary, evinced great faith in Merkel in 2014 – after Cameron’s referendum promise, but prior to the renegotiation that commenced after the 2015 election. According to the then editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber (Barber 2020, 274), Hague believed Germany would be ‘key to a “new settlement” between Britain and the EU’; moreover, Merkel had ‘only let the UK down once’ – when she allowed Jean-Claude Juncker to become Commission President in the face of British reservations.

When it came to the crunch, however, the charm offensive made little difference in the run up to the referendum, and Merkel did not unilaterally author a dream settlement for Britain. The final deal did not include a UK ‘emergency brake’ concession on freedom of movement, that Cameron had briefly hoped Merkel might be instrumental in securing. That Cameron’s aspirations for bigger changes before the referendum were never realised has therefore itself become part of the Merkel myth, the idea (widespread amongst both Leave- and Remain-supporting politicians) being that Germany’s Chancellor let the British prime minister down by refusing to help him out at the last minute when, supposedly, she might have done. Cameron’s communications chief, for example, laid much of the blame for the EU’s unwillingness to grant his boss an ‘emergency brake’ at Merkel’s door, convinced as he was that: ‘Her roots in Eastern Europe told – when the Iron Curtain came down, she and tens of millions of others were reassured they need never be second-class citizens again. That meant freedom of movement’ (Oliver 2017, 401; see also Lidington 2020, 5–6). Late in the referendum campaign, the highly-experienced head of the UK civil service, Jeremy Heywood, approached Cameron’s team with ideas on how a defeat might be avoided, only to be told that while it was judged too late in the process for anything big, another last minute plea to the Chancellor was indeed being considered (Heywood 2021, 454).

In the end, however, Cameron decided – in all probability correctly, given her consistency on the issue and her belief that he could win without such a huge concession – that a last-gasp change on immigration simply wouldn’t work (Lidington 2020, 5–6; McDonald 2021, 4; and; Straw 2021, 26): he did make the call but, as he put it in his memoir,

by the time I talked to Merkel, I told her I was going to push on with the plan we had. ‘But I want you to know … that [immigration] is the major problem – and if we lose, this is why we’re going to lose.’ She simply said that it would be wrong to change tack on migration, and that those who had done so in the German elections had lost. (Cameron 2019, 673)

During May’s tenure, further commentary attempted to substantiate why a good relationship between the occupant of Number 10 and the German Chancellor was possible (see Qvortrup 2016). In the event, of course, Merkel proved no more the key to solving May’s problems than she had to solving Cameron’s, although hope that she might be lasted even into the final few months of her time in Number 10. For instance, government sources were reported in mid-January as suggesting that, following the defeat of May’s Withdrawal Agreement, Merkel was prepared to help, possibly by persuading Ireland’s Leo Varadkar to agree an end date to the ‘Irish backstop’ – a spin that Berlin found it necessary to push back on explicitly by issuing a statement to the effect that the Chancellor had given the PM no such assurances (see Boffey 2019). Predictably enough, that didn’t stop journalists being briefed a few days later that the UK’s finance minister, Philip Hammond, had received some encouragement on the issue when he’d talked to a close Merkel ally at the World Economic Forum (Shipman and Wheeler 2019a). Indeed, it was only in early April, when Merkel, on a visit to Dublin, insisted publicly (Lyons 2019) that Germany was with Ireland ‘every step of the way’ that hopes she might somehow ride to the UK’s rescue finally began to die – only to be briefly revived as Boris Johnson, having taken over in the summer of 2019, began to look for another way out of the impasse.

Illusions and mea culpas

Not everyone was convinced, however, the chief sceptic being Dominic Cummings, the combative campaigner behind Vote Leave who had become Johnson’s closest adviser and was widely (and almost certainly correctly) assumed to be behind a series of anonymous briefings to journalists. In August 2022, ‘a senior figure in Downing Street’ observed (Dickson 2019) that ‘Whitehall has put far too much hope in Merkel for a decade and we have no illusions’. A few weeks later a ‘senior government source’ assured the Sunday Times (Shipman and Wheeler 2019b): ‘I’ve watched SW1 claim for 10 years that Merkel will change the game. She won’t. The most [Germany will] do is nudge the French if Ireland wants to do a deal. They won’t pressure Ireland.’ Then, in the second week of October, and to the chagrin of Berlin, which, not for the first time, felt obliged to issue a corrective, a ‘Number 10 source’ briefed out an incendiary and deeply unhelpful account of an apparently tense phone call between Merkel and Johnson (see Rankin and Mason 2019) just hours after the political editor of the Conservative-supporting news magazine, the Spectator had published a long text from ‘a contact in Number 10’ informing him that ‘Those who think Merkel will help us are deluded’ (Forsyth 2019).

Although clearly intended to reinforce the supposedly ‘do or die’ stance Johnson had adopted prior to his conceding a border down the Irish Sea (a concession made, note, after Merkel made it crystal clear to him that neither she nor the EU had any intention of pressing Dublin to accept customs checks on the island of Ireland), Cummings’ judgement was far from inaccurate. Indeed, it echoed a message that had been out there since at least 2016 – if only politicians, and their supporters in the media, had chosen to listen. Even before the referendum, for instance, the Times carried a warning from the Wall Street Journal’s chief European commentator (Nixon 2016) that Johnson’s confidence that a rapid, mutually-beneficial post-Brexit trade deal could easily be reached was not necessarily shared in Germany because Europe’s industrial superpower would

need to balance its rational self-interest in protecting its UK trade against its rational self-interest in protecting the wider European project, in particular the integrity of the single market. After all, Germany doesn’t benefit from the single market only when it sells cars to the UK; it also benefits from the single market when it makes cars. Germany’s automotive industry sits at the centre of a complex, highly integrated, just-in-time, pan-European supply chain that relies upon open borders and the free movement of people, goods and services.

Moreover, he noted

Angela Merkel’s commitment to keeping the borders of Europe open has lain at the heart of her response to the euro crisis and the migration crisis, and Berlin’s priority after a Brexit will surely be to minimise the risks of a domino effect that could lead to other countries quitting the EU, throwing the single market into disarray.

And, sure enough, a few months after the UK voted to leave, Merkel was reported in the British media (Charter and Coates 2016) as telling the annual conference of the German Industry Federation (BDI) that negotiations would ‘not be easy’, not least because ‘if we do not say full access to the single market is linked to full acceptance of all four basic freedoms, then a process will spread in Europe when everyone will start doing what they want and that would get extraordinarily complicated’.

The message from Brussels, relayed via the Sunday Times a couple of days later, was no less unequivocal, a ‘senior official who will be involved in the negotiations’ telling its reporters (Shipman and Pancevski 2016) that

What some British politicians fail to understand is that the EU is ready to take a hit, because this is not about simple economics - this is about politics. It is about preserving the union and showing that membership does count for something.

Furthermore, they cautioned, ‘Some British politicians appear to think that Merkel will act as their protector, but the opposite is now true. She will be hard, enforcing EU interests. There will be no amicable separation’ (ibid.). Much the same message came from some officials working in Downing Street (Seldon 2020, 117). Analysis from academics, both British and German, provided further warnings: one of the latter penning a column for the Times (von Bismarck 2018) in order to remind politicians in the UK in the plainest possible terms that

The idea that Germany, or rather its government, could somehow sway the EU single-handedly into compromising the single market to accommodate Britain is a profound and risky miscalculation … . Germany may be its largest and economically most powerful member state, but that does not mean that Mrs Merkel is able to dictate her preferences to other governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Even those politicians who confined their newspaper reading to the furiously pro-Brexit Telegraph had no excuse for missing the message (see Huggler 2017): in the spring of 2017, for instance, it reported Merkel telling a meeting of trade unionists in Berlin that

If the British government ends the free movement of people, that will have its price. That’s not malicious. But you cannot expect to enjoy all the benefits and then say there will be an upper limit of 100,000 or 200,000 EU citizens, no more … this will not work.

As for the conventional wisdom on ‘German carmakers’, that was challenged on any number of occasions by people who knew what they were talking about. Speaking in the summer of 2017, the chief executive of the UK trade body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, was at pains to point out (Conn 2017) that: ‘The European market and to a certain extent the European project is more important to them than the UK, so they want to safeguard the four freedoms which benefit them.’ And writing a year or two later, a British lobbyist with impeccable connections (via the Konrad Andenauer Stiftung) both to Conservative and CDU politicians declared (Anderson 2019, 56) that

Never once did I hear before or after the referendum that a major German business would intervene with Germany politicians to say: ‘We need the UK market so let’s cut a great deal with Britain.’ It was a fundamental misreading of the psychology of German business leaders by UK politicians to ever expect that … .

David Davis was still clinging to this idea in an interview with the London Evening Standard (Cecil and Edwardes 2018), conducted not long after he’d walked out of May’s Cabinet in protest at her ‘Chequers’ deal, though he seemed to have changed his tune on Germany more generally. ‘Other than Macron,’ he opined, ‘Merkel is the most emphatic in Europe about us not being seen to succeed.’ May, he continued should not see Merkel as a ‘champion’ who would deliver for the UK in the face of French opposition. Indeed, he declared, with all the chutzpah at his command, ‘I don’t think Merkel was ever really going to be our champion, ever, ever’. Other Tory Brexiteers were at least a little more willing to own their mistakes. As one of them, Owen Paterson (2021, 19) put it, speaking some five years after the UK voted to Leave,

I think, probably, at the beginning, we were at fault. We always thought that ultimately German businesses would use their clout on the political system. We had all these figures, ‘One in seven German cars is sold here’, and all the rest of it. There are huge German interests in continuing to sell goods to the UK. I think we could be criticised, as we always felt that those interests would turn. I think we underestimated the extraordinary grip the political project has. They didn’t budge.

But, in the view of one or two of his fellow Tories, there was more to it even than that. According to Philip Hammond (2020), who, unlike Paterson, didn’t vote for Brexit but who, as May’s finance minister, was charged with trying to deliver it,

David Cameron would himself admit that in the early stages he overestimated the supportiveness of (Angela) Merkel. I think we all did. We all interpreted German pragmatism as support for a more British view of the future of Europe. That was clearly not correct … .I think the other thing that the British establishment – at least the British political class – has systematically done is underestimated the influence of the French … .Viewed from London, it has been a cliché to say that the EU is a German-dominated institution. The Germans obviously play a very, very important role, but the Germans are diplomatic novices compared to the French.

Discussion: ‘Very special expectations’

That great significance was attached, by some in the British political class, to Angela Merkel’s views on Britain and the EU was not lost on the then German Chancellor. In her speech to the Commons and the Lords during a visit to London, Merkel (2014) alluded to the attention being given to her remarks.

I have been told many times during the last few days that there are very special expectations of my speech here today. Supposedly, or so I have heard, some expect my speech to pave the way for a fundamental reform of the European architecture which will satisfy all kinds of alleged or actual British wishes. I am afraid they are in for a disappointment. I have also heard that others are expecting the exact opposite … I am afraid these hopes will be dashed, too.’

But while the Chancellor herself seemed to recognise the power of the Merkel myth in the UK, many sitting in the audience that day nevertheless fell prey to the idea that she would be the key EU actor in the drama to come.

That Merkel had agency and influence in the Brexit process is not, of course, something we would wish to deny. We recognise, too, that Merkel had opinions on British politics – often aired privately. She once reportedly reassured an under-pressure Theresa May that ‘I want your success and not your rivals’ (quoted in Barwell 2021, 294), suggesting she viewed May’s political approach as preferable to the alternatives on offer from those looking to replace her – most obviously, Boris Johnson. Rather, our argument is that Germany’s consistent position on Brexit was effectively blotted out by the Merkel myth – that a nuanced political strategy from a German Chancellor which prioritised the continued integrity and strength of the European Union, was overlooked in favour of a mythical strategy that British political actors created.

Myths are stories (Bottici 2009, 13), so here we bring together the different elements of the myth – the mythologeme – and discuss how the Merkel myth contributed to a fundamental misconception of the Brexit process. We also discuss some of the contradictions in the myth – though far from all of them. It should be recounted, here, that both the usefulness and potential importance of political myth as a concept within political analysis is that it involves comprehending a powerful story – one imbued with ‘significance’. The Merkel myth, we contend, contained meanings for political actors which they often turned to when accounting for many things within the Brexit process. These included a rationale for negotiating strategies, reassurance at moments where the UK’s approach did not appear to be succeeding, and rhetorical strategies to explain and substantiate ideological viewpoints. Much of this appeared to ‘paper over the cracks’ – in other words, offering the appearance of coherence and substance, but rarely addressing flaws. For ‘Remainer’ voices – as with Nick Clegg at the opening of this article – that meant the Merkel myth providing cause for a simpler, ‘pragmatic’ resolution to the Brexit impasse, and acting as a rejoinder to ‘Leave’ voices that said there was no going back after the referendum. For ‘Leave’ proponents, the meanings were often more plentiful, but the centrality of Merkel remained. An overarching story, too, is possible to identify.

The Merkel myth conveniently dovetailed with Britain’s understanding of the EU as an intergovernmental organisation often overtaken by supranational pretensions. As such – and to avoid being ‘captured’ by ‘Brussels’ – Britain needed a strategy that sidestepped the ‘bureaucracy’ of the EU Commission. Such a strategy rested upon allies – and the Merkel myth presented a story of Britain’s most formidable, and effective ally. Why Merkel, specifically? In addition to some of the (well-founded) shared policy objectives of a competitive EU, Merkel was a sympathetic political partner of the UK, with a powerful industrial sector (principally carmakers) who would insist on the economic benefits of keeping the UK market close. Merkel had demonstrated her political power within the European Union – through the Eurozone and refugee crises – and, having established strong working relationships with leading British politicians, had the necessary influence to ensure Britain’s interests were realised.

As David Cameron took the decision to have a referendum, that meant the German Chancellor keeping the door open to significant changes to Britain’s membership of the EU; during the post-2015 election renegotiation, Merkel was seen as the politician who would adjudicate on the plausibility of different reforms; following Cameron’s exit, and a vacuum in terms of substantive British policy positions, the German Chancellor appeared as the obvious sounding board – how could this situation be fixed? When British policy positions gradually emerged, Merkel remained Britain’s strategic hope. As the process neared its end, new elements to the story were added. From those who wanted either no Brexit, or a ‘softer’ Brexit, Merkel had not done enough. From some of those who wanted ‘out’ – on trading terms deemed inconceivable by the EU’s Brexit negotiators – came either ‘told you so’s’ from actors who claimed (like Dominic Cummings, for instance) that they had never bought into the myth or else partial mea culpas (from, as we have seen, the likes of Owen Paterson) for their having overstated the influence of German industry and understated Germany’s attachment to the European project.

No such humility, however, has so far been forthcoming from others who had made exactly the same mistake, be they journalists or politicians, such as Jacob Rees Mogg or, indeed, David Davis (in spite of the fact that, as we noted above, after two failed years as Brexit Secretary he was labelling Merkel one of the biggest obstacles to a deal favourable to the UK). Meanwhile the UK actor from whom it would be most useful to hear – Theresa May, who initially had high hopes that her German counterpart would help her find a way through the impasse but soon came to realise, as David Cameron had, that there were limits to what she was prepared to do – has said little so far. As such, the ‘story’ of the Merkel myth has no clear beginning, but some kind of ending, albeit not a particularly satisfactory one, especially when it comes to the sort of honest self-reflection that might prevent British politicians making the same mistake again.

The Merkel myth, in and of itself, cannot provide us with anything like a comprehensive explanation for the failure of the UK’s negotiation strategy. But it does at least help us to understand some of the meanings that actors believed substantiated that strategy. The myth contained the substance to reinforce a political strategy that, by all accounts, never came close to success. In (Merkel’s 2014) address to the UK Houses of Parliament, Germany’s Chancellor presented a positive, reforming case for working within the European Union. She was at pains to stress her commitment to the European project changing, yet one could be in no doubt that change at the European level was based on a shared understanding – at least among the other 27 member states – about what was preferable and possible amid different political views. Revealingly, the most specific and authoritative section of her address that dealt with EU reform related to the Eurozone, where Merkel moved from an analysis of the problem (monetary union without necessary economic integration) to the changes she foresaw as necessary to strengthen the Eurozone.

Within the Merkel myth there was a leap of logic related to this: that, since Merkel exercised political power in relation to the future of the Eurozone, she would likewise exercise political power to help British politicians avoid Brexit, and then maximise British interests after the referendum. But there were always two significant flaws in this assumption. The first is that, while the integrity and survival of the Eurozone was an obvious political priority for Merkel, leading EU efforts to accommodate Britain’s reform agenda was not. Second, British politicians had already seen that Merkel would not live up to the meanings so often assigned to her leadership. Indeed, Cameron himself noted that during disagreements at the end of 2011 regarding the putative EU ‘Fiscal Compact’ – which ended up as a separate Treaty following a UK veto – he had been ‘wrong to think that, at a time of crisis, she [Merkel] would expend German political capital to help Britain out’ (Cameron 2019, 339).

This is not the only contradiction very apparent within the Merkel myth. A focus on Merkel the supposed ‘anglophile’ (ibid.: 99), and the premium put on her apparently warm relationships with successive British prime ministers often ignored the obvious – namely that Germany’s Chancellor had many, equally strong working relationships around the world and within the European Union. Michel Barnier is but one example, having known Merkel since the mid 1990s. An anecdote Barnier shared in his ‘Brexit diary’ is illustrative. Heading to London in summer 2020 for trade talks with Boris Johnson’s representatives, he recorded (Barnier 2021, 339)

In the car, my phone rings. It’s Angela Merkel, who wants to give me a detailed report on the phone conversation she just had with Boris Johnson. ‘I made our positions clear, and said that we were all behind you.’ Just a few words, but messages that count.

Conclusion

Our stress on political myth, of course, feeds into a long-running debate within political science and public policy about the judgement of political actors and the institutional and ideological context, as well as the psychology of decision-making (e.g. Simon 1997). Myth, we have argued, is a useful tool in analysing politics and policymaking. It has a place within political analysis alongside research that has sought to understand the role of ideas – and the judgement of actors – much more generally. We have sought to present an interpretive analysis of a key aspect of the Brexit process – namely that of the Merkel myth as partly constitutive of British political strategy both before and after the Brexit referendum in 2016. Our argument is that this, at least in part, explains why British political actors – including three prime ministers – seemed to continue with a strategy of ‘divide and rule’ in relation to the EU27, despite evidence and expertise strongly suggesting it would not succeed.

Bottici’s important insights (2010:178–179) on how myths differ from other narrative forms is our final point of reflection. While it is often readily accepted that rhetoric, narrative and methods of ‘framing’ affect how people both perceive and seek to change the world, contemplating the work of myth within public policy moves us towards bigger questions. As Peters and Nagel (2020) showed with their analysis of ‘zombie ideas’, actors return to some ideas even when much evidence points to their inefficacy. Some of these ideas speak to wider, more paradigmatic comprehensions of how our social world works, perhaps explaining their resilience and ‘stickiness’ in the minds of policymakers. With myth, and the case of the Merkel myth, we are left with a connected, and in some ways more fundamental, question: just what were the origins of this particular myth and why, at least when it came to a hugely important section of the British political class, did it override other beliefs, many of which could be described as more ‘rational’ or at least more evidence-based? This question surely merits additional research – and not, we hope, solely on our part.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Sarah Tustin for research assistance, the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London for supporting that research assistance, and the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).