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Ted Heath signs the act of succession to the European Economic Community in Belgium in January 1972<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n
On the Eurosceptic side of the ledger, the idea has usually been that Britain\u2019s exceptionalism meant it would never be able to accept membership of a supranational body such as the one that emerged on the continent after the Second World War. As Anthony Eden memorably put it, to do so would violate the \u201cunalterable marrow\u201d of the British nation. And yet, we did accept it \u2014 for 40 years at least. Harold Wilson similarly cautioned that Britain would never weaken its ties with the Commonwealth for a \u201cmarginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf\u201d. And yet, we did. Hugh Gaitskell even went as far as to argue that joining Europe would mean \u201cthe end of Britain as an independent European state \u2026 the end of a thousand years of history\u201d. And yet, and yet.<\/p>\n
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Sir Anthony Eden memorably warned that joining a supranational body would violate the \u2018unalterable marrow\u2019 of the British nation<\/p>\n
CHRIS WARE\/KEYSTONE FEATURES\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
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British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson cautioned that Britain would never weaken its ties with the Commonwealth for a \u2018marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf\u2019<\/p>\n
EVENING STANDARD\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
On the whole, however, those most attracted to the idea of inevitability have tended to come from the pro-European side of the argument, drawn less to notions of immutable national character and more to what they see as the immutable logic of history. In this account of Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe, Britain\u2019s destiny has always been \u2014 and will always be \u2014 to reconcile the \u201cpast she could not forget with the future she could not avoid\u201d. These were the words of the late Guardian journalist Hugo Young in his masterful account of Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe, This Blessed Plot.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s account was first published in 1998, when so many seemed to believe they could see an end to history. That Europe was the future was not an opinion, Young argued, but an \u201cincontestable fact \u2026 proved by the outcome, Britain\u2019s presence inside the European apparatus\u201d. Back in the late Nineties, Young\u2019s circular argument was more persuasive than today, as we observe Britain\u2019s absence from the European project. Euroscepticism then appeared lost, eccentric, powerless. Moving towards a looser relationship with Europe \u2014 let alone withdrawing \u2014 meant swimming against the tide of history. The fact that Tony Blair<\/a> was then struggling to lead Britain into the single currency was seen as a difficult hurdle, but ultimately part of the same long struggle that would eventually result in the same old fate: eventual, reluctant entry.<\/p>\n It was true, of course, that Britain really did have a history of resisting integration, only to eventually accept its apparent fate. But even in 1998 Young\u2019s account was far from \u201cproved by the outcome\u201d. At this time, and from then on, Britain was already living in an uncomfortable, semi-detached position within the wider European project, inside the single market and customs union, but not yet signed up to the single currency due to come into force the following year. This itself sat uncomfortably with notions of inevitable progress.<\/p>\n Margaret Thatcher expressed fears to John Major, then the chancellor, about the negative effects of a single currency<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n As chancellor, John Major had insisted that joining the precursor to the euro \u2014 the ERM \u2014 was like ageing, as he advised a sceptical Margaret Thatcher. \u201cYou don\u2019t like it, but you can\u2019t avoid it,\u201d he warned. Reluctantly, Thatcher eventually accepted his advice, although she continued her battle against the single currency itself. As prime minister, Major then negotiated the Maastricht treaty, in which Britain secured an \u201copt-in\u201d to the single currency, by which it would not have to enter at the beginning but could do so whenever the time was right. The old historical process would play out again, many assumed.<\/p>\n But within two years of joining the ERM, Britain crashed out. Black Wednesday \u2014 September 16, 1992 \u2014 was not just a personal humiliation for the prime minister, but a defining moment in Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe. For Major it was the point at which the Conservative Party turned from being merely uneasy with European integration to rejecting any further entanglement, allowing its \u201cemotional rivers [to] burst their banks\u201d. Brexit, in this telling, is the conclusion of this flood.<\/p>\n However, contrary to Major\u2019s analysis, Black Wednesday was not simply a crisis to which people reacted in an overly emotional way; it was one that fundamentally undermined his own grand strategy. Major had consistently argued that British membership of the ERM was as much a diplomatic manoeuvre to protect British influence in Europe as an economic mechanism to control inflation. Britain had joined to remain \u201cat the heart of Europe\u201d, which, after all, was its historic destiny. But once Britain was out of the ERM, what was left of this policy?<\/p>\n For a while after Black Wednesday, even ratification of Maastricht looked in doubt as the Eurosceptic rebels saw their chance, egged on by Thatcher, who demanded \u201cas complete a reversal of policy on Maastricht as has been done on the ERM\u201d. If Europe\u2019s economies could not cope in a single exchange rate, she asked, how could they cope in a single currency? \u201cThere would be chaos of the sort which would make the difficulties of recent days pale by comparison.\u201d Huge fiscal transfers would be required. Unemployment would rise and mass migration would follow. \u201cThe political consequences can already be glimpsed,\u201d she warned. \u201cThe growth of extremist parties, battening on fears about mass immigration and unemployment.\u201d<\/p>\n Events energised Euroscepticism<\/p>\n That speech was far more radical \u2014 and prophetic \u2014 in tone than the one she delivered in Bruges four years earlier, which came to define her (often mistakenly). Whether Thatcher has been proved or disproved by events, it remains the case that it was far more than mere emotion energising the Eurosceptic cause, as Major insisted. It was events.<\/p>\n The combination of Black Wednesday with Denmark\u2019s earlier rejection of Maastricht in a referendum that summer had turbocharged the Eurosceptic cause in Britain. Yet Major persisted. By April 1993, with Maastricht almost certain to be ratified, he delivered a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe, dismissing the sceptics as imperial nostalgists motivated by \u201cfrustration that we are no longer a world power\u201d. To Major, such fantasies were absurd. \u201cFifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and \u2014 as George Orwell said \u2014 old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.\u201d<\/p>\n Even today, it is a curious speech, mocking the politics of nostalgia with a misplaced nostalgia of its own. In Homage to Catalonia, written in 1938, Orwell had raised his fears that exactly such bucolic comfort was lulling the country into a false sense of security. Surrounded by such gentleness, Orwell thought, \u201cit is difficult \u2026 to believe that anything is really happening anywhere\u201d. While the world convulses, the shires remain in \u201cthe deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake\u201d. Major had misread Orwell and indeed was committing the sin he identified by playing down changes around him and focusing on the superficial stability at home.<\/p>\n In the most British of ways \u2014 strikingly reminiscent of today \u2014 by the end of Major\u2019s time in power the country had found itself in a new position no one had designed or much wanted: neither at the heart of Europe nor separate from it. This was the context heading into the 1997 general election. A new settlement had been reached, which voters seemed uneasy about unpicking. Despite huge poll leads, Blair was in \u201ca perpetual motion of reassurance\u201d, as he later put it. It was in this mood that, in November 1996, he matched a Tory pledge not to join the euro without a national referendum.<\/p>\n Blair matched a Tory pledge not to join the euro without a national referendum, unwittingly paving the way to anti-EU populism<\/p>\n MAL LANGSDON\/REUTERS<\/p>\n And with that, Blair made one of the most consequential decisions of his career before he had even become prime minister, joining Major in erecting a barrier he would never be able to surmount. Blair felt it was an important part of his \u201cmodernising agenda\u201d \u2014 not, as many would later see it, anathema to it. Reassuring Middle England was modernisation. As Blair later put it, \u201cThough my general posture was pro-European, I took care not to go beyond what was reasonable for British opinion\u201d.<\/p>\n Once in power, Blair largely stuck to this mantra. At his first Labour Party conference as prime minister, he told the audience that, while he believed Britain was destined to lead the continent into its future \u2014 \u201cto be nothing less than the model 21st-century nation, a beacon to the world\u201d \u2014 the economic conditions had to be right before it would join the single currency. Britain, then, was both the dashing new face of modern Europe, fated by history to lead it into a bright new future, and the same old cautious partner it had always been. Today, of course, it is darkly comic to imagine Britain fulfilling some \u201cdestiny\u201d to lead Europe. It has returned to its old conservative caution under Sir Keir Starmer<\/a>, offering cautious engagement without provoking public opinion.<\/p>\n Nigel Farage addresses the media on June 24, 2016, when the Brexit referendum result was declared<\/p>\n MARY TURNER\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n If there is any sense of dramatic inevitability hanging over the long story of Britain\u2019s struggle with Europe, then, it is of a darker, more tragic variety than the one Young and others assumed would play out. In 1990, when moving against his leader, Geoffrey Howe saw in Thatcher a rogue figurehead who could become an icon of Eurosceptic resistance if she was not stopped. And yet, by helping to remove her from power, he only served to turn her into exactly what he feared. It was not Thatcher who created the conditions for Britain\u2019s eventual withdrawal, after all, but those who ignored her warnings about the risks they were taking with their policies. Britain did not radicalise itself in a vacuum. Had international markets, the single currency and freedom-of-movement immigration been more conservatively managed, the conditions for Britain\u2019s eventual Brexit rebellion would not have existed.<\/p>\n Why did only Britain leave?<\/p>\n Still, the waves that crashed over Britain from 2007 to 2016 crashed over much of the continent too. So, the nagging question remains: why did Britain alone choose to leave the EU? Beyond arguments about the euro and the Social Chapter lies a more elemental truth. Membership of the EU and its institutions demands a political commitment to the European Union. \u201cEurope\u201d is a project animated by a principle, as Clement Attlee told MPs in 1950: \u201cA principle of the supranational authority\u201d. As Attlee was clear, the question was therefore always: should Britain accept the principle? For some reason, Britain never quite could \u2014 and it remains to be seen whether it has changed enough to do so in the future.<\/p>\n For Roger Scruton, one of the leading conservative opponents of European integration, the reason it could not accept that principle lay in the unique circumstances of Britain\u2019s history. Its island home, its language and common law, its Crown and its parliament, each a layer of sediment creating a nation that could not feel at home in the Europe of Jean Monnet. As Hugo Young put it, Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe is, in the end, a story about \u201can attitude to history itself\u201d. On the one hand, there is the Young view of history, the progressive account: a country struggling against its past to reach its future. The alternative story is the conservative one: \u201cThe proud people, who defended their \u2018sceptred isle\u2019 for a millennium,\u201d as Scruton put it. As Scruton himself acknowledged, both stories contain essential truths and, just as importantly, \u201cboth look backwards, in order to offer a story of how we have become what we are\u201d.<\/p>\n Migration continues to influence Britain\u2019s relationship with the Continent, years after it became the driving force in the Brexit referendum<\/p>\n DAN KITWOOD\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n The story of Britain\u2019s relationship with Europe is not a story of geography, but of history; a process that is neither ordained nor ordered, but rather chaotic and contingent, shaped by character and chance and circumstance. The story never settles, for it cannot. New dilemmas emerge, new crises unfold, new individuals demand new answers. Today, the battle has morphed from membership of the EU to membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, and with it the Good Friday agreement and Starmer\u2019s entire \u201creset\u201d with Brussels. In time, it will be about something else, as Europe itself continues to morph and change.<\/p>\n The story of Britain and Europe, then, is not one of destiny, in or out. It is one of timeless moments washing over the country. The tide will roll on, the same dilemmas repeating themselves, each new and yet each familiar; Britain standing between the waves of a past it half remembers and a future it cannot know.<\/p>\n![\"Margaret](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/19a7f20b-c197-4500-8e22-a963a3cd03f5.jpg\")
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