Why Britain still wants to fight Europe on the beaches
As D-day reminds us, the EU
was born out of war, and Britain's heroic view of that conflict shapes its
hostile attitude
Jonathan Freedland
Follow @Freedland Follow @guardian
The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2014 /
The beaches are quiet now, every last trace of blood washed
away. When I covered the 60th anniversary commemorations of D-day in 2004, it
was that contrast that struck me most. How rapidly the earth had healed, how
quickly the calm and beauty of Normandy – once noisy with the clamour of war,
the soil once sodden with blood – had been restored.
Today I watched the 70th anniversary events from afar, on
television. I was moved once more by the sight of the remaining veterans, fewer
this time, come to say thank you, or goodbye, to the comrades who fell at their
sides – friends for ever frozen in youth.
Watching on a news channel, it meant I also saw the news
ticker crawling along the bottom of the screen, bringing word of events
elsewhere. The result of the Newark byelection, won by the Tories but with a
majority slashed by Ukip; the rumbling row over Jean-Claude Juncker's ambition
to be the next president of the European commission, escalated by his refusal
to get on his knees to secure British backing. There was a mention of President
Obama's announcement of a $1bn fund to boost the US military presence in
Europe. The ticker is usually a distraction from the main story on the screen.
But not this time. Because these events are connected.
The extent to which the politics of 2014 is still shaped by
the events of 1944, and attitudes to Europe were formed in the shadow of the
second world war, is most obvious in Britain, but it is not peculiar to these
islands. Both the historical pro-Europeanism of the continent and the British
scepticism that opposes it are, in part, the consequences of that epic
conflict.
It's true that anti-EU parties fared well in last month's
European elections, but in most cases that success came in nations long
committed to the European project – with the triumph of Marine Le Pen's Front
National in France the most obvious example. Ukip's 27% in Britain represented
far less radical a break, for this country has only ever been ambivalent at
best about Europe.
France's former prime minister Michel Rocard put it starkly
when he wrote that Britain should leave the European Union – "go before
you wreck everything" – but he put his finger on something real. "You
do not like Europe," he argued, all but adding the words "and you
never have". He explained that when Britain joined, 41 years ago, it was
on a misunderstanding. "You never shared the true meaning of the project
which Winston Churchill, speaking on your behalf, set out in Zurich in 1946
with his incredible words: 'We must build a kind of United States of Europe
…'"
Rocard was surely right on this point – and right to trace
Britain's ambivalence all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the war.
For Britons never felt the urgent need for "ever closer union" that
brought the first European dreamers together. Britons had not seen their land
invaded and occupied; indeed, they were proud that the boots of no foreign army
had trodden British soil for a thousand years. Though the hunger for a new
political settlement was severe in Britain – severe enough to sweep away the
great war leader himself in Labour's 1945 landslide victory – the country did
not see itself as one that had to be rebuilt from scratch.
Put simply, Britons saw "Europe" as the solution
to a problem Britain didn't have. It was a remedy for others, nations whose
previous order had been utterly discredited, like France, or whose very
national identity had to be reconstituted, like Germany. Churchill's call for a
United States of Europe sounds like federalist fanaticism of a kind that would
see him expelled from today's Conservative party, until you read the quotation
in full – and realise that he excluded Britain from this grand design. Britain
would stand alongside the Commonwealth, the US and the Soviet Union as
"friends and sponsors of the new Europe" – but would not be in it.
Of course, there are other causes for British
Euroscepticism, but it is the war that forms its bedrock. Both 1940 and 1944,
the twin pillars of the creation myth of modern Britain, established a national
narrative of apartness – of the solitary Tommy declaring "Very well,
alone" before riding to the rescue of continentals who could not be
trusted to defend democracy.
There are few more seasoned observers of this complex relationship
than Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. He's asked all
the time to explain Britons' tepid attitudes to the EU. Part of it, he says, is
that we "had a jolly good war and think all the others were either on the
wrong side or ran away and were defeated".
This is the gap between us and our European partners. As
Rocard wrote, for Britain Europe was always about trade and not much else. But
for a continent ravaged by war twice in 30 years, and for centuries before
that, the European project was a matter of life and death – of replacing bloody
conflict with co-operation, allowing dilution of national sovereignty to be the
price.
This is why we're so often stroppy and difficult, the
irritant and naysayer – why we're the ones now leading the opposition to the
arch-federalist Juncker. The former Luxembourg PM, who once talked of his
fondness for "secret, dark debates", rails against the Euro-hating
British press, and while we might accuse him of being over-sensitive, we can
hardly say he's wrong.
The British media – and not just the spittle-flecked
mouth-foamers on the right – do indeed reserve a special disdain for the
Eurocrats of Brussels. It's not just Charles Moore referring to "a fat
Belgian" to describe a past European eminence. Take the BBC coverage of
the battle to fill the commission presidency: Jeremy Paxman introduced a
Newsnight item on the contest this week with a sarcasm striking even by his
acid standards, while Today delegated the task of assessing the candidates to …
Terry Wogan.
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