If we leave the EU, other countries will think we're a bunch of spoilt children. They'll be right

Seen from outside the UK, Britain’s Brexit debate has taken on an otherworldly quality. Foreigners struggle to see how a country so adept at power politics could flirt with something so destructive to its own interests. The UK tends to split opinion at the best of times, but rarely is it seen as fundamentally unserious, as it is now.

Eurosceptics dismiss the overwhelming international consensus in favour of Britain staying in the EU as the lobbying of "vested interests", or as evidence of foreign governments’ determination to use Britain for their own ends. But there are good reasons why the only international figures in favour of Brexit are those that wish the West ill. Everyone else rightly sees it as an unprecedented act of self-harm and international vandalism.

It is easy to see why the rest of the world finds it so hard to understand what is happening in the UK. Although British Eurosceptics are determined to see things differently, the UK does extremely well out of the EU. Thanks to its negotiating skills and brinksmanship it enjoys special status: the country is a full member with unimpeded access to the single market – the most successful bit of the EU – but is not a member of the eurozone, which is without doubt the EU’s greatest failure. The rest of the eurozone has not foisted damaging policies on Britain, as they have on Italy and Greece. Nor is Britain a member of the Schengen passport-free area, though one would be hard put to know this from the hysterical coverage of the refugee crisis in the British press.

Despite this à la carte approach to the EU, Britain has been hugely influential within it, at least until Cameron’s January 2013 announcement of the referendum. Only in Britain was the country seen as powerless in the EU; elsewhere its success at pursuing its interests was widely envied. Moreover, the Atlantic alliance, the most important pillar of UK foreign policy, is strengthened by British membership of the EU. Sentimentality will not sustain the "special relationship"; outside the EU Britain will be of dramatically diminished importance to the Americans.

Stumped for explanations of why a country would sabotage itself in such spectacular fashion, some foreigners are visiting the past. For many, it is evidence that Britain is still caught up with its imperial history, imagining itself to be a major power that could straddle the world if not constrained by the EU. They thought this delusion had ended with the 1956 Suez crisis, and are perplexed at the tone of the current debate. Others see the country’s Brexit campaign as confirmation that the British have never seen themselves as European and simply do not trust other Europeans. Britons would rather retreat into insularity than share any sovereignty with them. For a third group, what is happening in Britain is part of a broader loss of confidence in elites evident across the developed world. Electorates have been lied to too many times, and have lost confidence in the establishment. 

Nostalgia for the past certainly seems to be part of British Euroscepticism. And it explains why older voters are most eurosceptic, whereas younger ones are strongly in favour of continued membership. Brexiteers like to argue that Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world and a major military power, and as such does not need to submerge itself in the EU but can make its own way in the world. They see EU membership as a constraint on the exercise of British power rather than an opportunity to amplify it. To anyone who understands the UK’s success in using the EU as a vehicle for its own interests, this is perplexing. But it clearly resonates with a chunk of the population.

There is certainly a jingoistic, "anti-European" element to the Eurosceptic campaign too. With a short hiatus during the Blair years, a sizeable chunk of the Conservative Party and the majority of the UK print media coverage has been relentlessly negative about the EU and the allegedly excessive influence of other member-states (principally France, but increasingly Germany) within it. Of course, the EU has many weaknesses, and much criticism of it is warranted. But that does not explain the bilious and unconstructive character of so much British media coverage. The lack of proportion, and readiness to attribute home-grown problems to EU membership, points to a readiness to engage in populist demagoguery. Indeed, it is perhaps a wonder that a majority of Britons probably still favour membership.

Britain, like almost every developed country, is struggling with a loss of popular confidence in its politics and with popular alienation from "unaccountable" elites. A central Eurosceptic charge is that the EU is "undemocratic". But Eurosceptics are not motivated by a desire for a better, more representative politics at EU level – or in Britain for that matter. There is no indication that Eurosceptic voters favour domestic political reform, while the Conservative media devotes strikingly little time to the ways in which the UK’s political system and governance could be improved. Indeed, for much of the Eurosceptic right it is impossible to improve upon Britain’s form of government, with its unwritten constitution and parliamentary sovereignty portrayed as things of genius.

This explains how Eurosceptics can on the one hand denounce EU leaders as unelected, while defending profoundly undemocratic things such as an unelected second chamber and a hereditary head of state at home. Or how they can claim that the European Parliament has no democratic legitimacy, while at the same time opposing reform of Britain’s unfair electoral system, which resulted in a majority government elected by 37 per cent of the popular vote (and 24.5 per cent of the total electorate). 

The outside world is right to be bemused at what is happening in the UK. If Britain leaves the EU it will be an act of extreme folly. The country’s current arrangements within the EU are as good as they are ever going to be: whatever replaces membership will be nowhere near as favourable to UK interests. The damage Brexit will inflict on the EU and on the broader Western international order will be seen by the EU and the US as an act of strategic vandalism, and the UK will not easily be forgiven for it. The country will rightly be seen as unserious and unreliable. 

Simon Tilford is deputy director at the Centre for European Reform.