Wellington and Blucher meet during Battle of Waterloo, 1815. Wikicommons/ artist William Heath, 1819. Some rights reserved. With Cameron’s somewhat surprising victory in the general election, the prospect of Britain leaving the EU is no longer a distant possibility; on the contrary if Cameron has nothing to show for his efforts in negotiating a new deal for Britain over the next year or so and is unable to prove that Britain will be able to safeguard her sovereignty against further interference from Brussels in the future the majority of voters in the UK may well vote for leaving the EU altogether in a referendum which Cameron has promised to hold.
For Germany this would be a major nightmare. Although Britain has never been an easy partner for Berlin at the EU negotiating table, a Europe without the United Kingdom would be dominated ever more by governments which are sceptical about free trade, want to fight globalisation by protectionism and which believe in creating economic growth by state intervention and by paying out generous subsidies to potentially non-profitable industries, subsidies for which the German taxpayer would eventually have to foot the bill, or so Berlin fears.
On the other hand a major treaty change to accommodate British wishes is fraught with enormous problems and would allow impoverished southern countries which rightly or wrongly want more financial support from Brussels or Berlin to blackmail the German government, because without their assent such changes would be impossible to implement.
