Mario Telò is a professor at LUISS and the ULB, and is a member of the Académie royale de Belgique.
Invited by the IEE-ULB, and the UK Mission to the EU, to present for the first time the position of PM Johnson and of the United Kingdom with the upcoming complex negotiations on UK-EU relations after Brexit, David Frost CMG UK Prime Minister’s Europe Adviser and Chief Negotiator, gave a very cultured and ambitious conference entitled “Reflections on the revolutions in Europe”: a true philosophy of Brexit.
What was most striking was on the one hand the obvious contradiction between the extreme kindness and the pragmatism announced by David Frost in terms of negotiation, and on the other hand, the philosophical significance of the historic turning point he wishes to see, as well as the sovereignist challenge posed by the country to the European Union.
We can only welcome the intention, at the time of the separation of the United Kingdom from the EU, to situate Brexit in a long-term historical perspective, and thus to raise the level of the debate by tackling fundamental historical questions and the perspective of political thinking.
The title of the conference explicitly alludes to the famous English thinker and radical critic of the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, and his book “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790). Nevertheless, for two main reasons the reference to Burke is a polemical anti-EU procedural signal.
Read Pr. Telo’s complete analysis (in French) here.
