The road to Brexit

A cultural perspective on British attitudes to Europe

Ina Habermann

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526145109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

This collection explores British attitudes to Continental Europe that explain the Brexit decision. Addressing British-European entanglements and the impact of British Euroscepticism, the book argues that Britain is in denial about the strength of its ties to Europe. The volume brings together literary and cultural studies, history, and political science in an integrated analysis of views and practices that shape cultural memory. Part one traces the historical and political relationship between Britain and Europe, whilst Part two is devoted to exemplary case studies of films as well as popular Eurosceptic and historical fiction. Part three engages with border mindedness and Britain's island story. The book is addressed both to specialists in cultural studies, and a wider audience interested in Brexit.

Part I

Britain and Europe: political entanglements

1

Not with a bang but a whimper: Brexit in historical perspective

Robert Holland

Exploring the nature of Brexit in historical perspective is inevitably like pinning down the proverbial butterfly. ‘Brexit means Brexit’, Theresa May famously declared early in her premiership, and although at the time this seemed to critics merely frustratingly elusive, much later it is surely rather reflective of an inherently ungraspable proposition, impossible to effect in any truly satisfactory fashion. Looking again at innumerable press clippings gathered during the three years that followed the June 2016 referendum, what above all strikes this commentator is how little the debate has shifted. There has not effectively been a substantive ‘debate’ at all, as there was, for example, in the years leading up to the United Kingdom’s original adhesion to the Treaty of Rome in 1973. This failure to resolve the underlying dilemmas lay at the heart of the paralysis gripping the country as the originally scheduled day of departure from the European Union – 29 March 2019 – came and went.

Amidst the hubbub of the impending referendum a desire quickly surfaced to find meaningful historical pointers in a process that otherwise the Electoral Reform Society found to have ‘glaring deficiencies’ as an exercise of democratic will. A pro-Brexit ‘Historians for Britain’ emerged, with its epicentre in Cambridge University whose case for abandoning the EU rested on an exceptionalism defined, as one declaratory statement had it, by ‘the distinctive character of the United Kingdom, rooted in its largely uninterrupted history since the Middle Ages’. Without such a sense that the United Kingdom, by nature and historical experience, is wholly separate from Europe, and that Europe itself constitutes the ‘Other’, Brexit could never have displayed the staying power and ideological mobilisation over the next few years in the face of a host of practical objections. It did not take long, however, for an entirely opposite group to articulate the view that far from being exceptional and uninterrupted, British history has in fact experienced numerous ruptures, most of them connected to similar phenomena on the Continent, with which the UK’s relationship has always been organic and ultimately compelling.

One telling irony was that leading ‘Historians for Britain’ often appeared to be specialists in something other than the history of the United Kingdom itself. A chief spokesperson was the chronicler of the Mediterranean, David Abulafia, who perhaps found in an idealised vision of a seamless British history some soothing counter-point to the bewildering disruptions of the region with which his own work was concerned (Abulafia, 2011). Another example of this tendency was the pro-Brexit historian of France, Robert Tombs, who published a volume entitled The English and Their History (2015), including the judgment that after the Napoleonic wars Great Britain had ‘captured the future’ and secured hegemonic control of the Western world. This was the same Britain which in 1823 could not stop restored Bourbon France from invading Spain, so reversing the effects of Wellington’s triumphs in the recent Peninsular campaigns, or in 1830 from seizing Algiers. A sense of British power hugely out of proportion to any nineteenth-century or, as we shall see, early twentieth-century reality – a long era when Paris far outshone London as the world’s cultural metropole – was a recurring feature of Brexit’s historical underpinning.

Some advocates of Brexit latched onto the English Reformation and the split from Rome as providing a notable sixteenth-century historical analogue, though specialists on the subject were quick to point out that this ignored the fact that the Reformation in England was only part of an international, essentially German-led movement (MacCulloch, 2016). There was also the slight awkwardness, as the writer Peter Frankopan observed, that Henry VIII might have ‘taken back control’, but his actions also sowed the seeds of a later civil war (Frankopan, 2017). As for the reformed English Church and state, the emerging Elizabethan ‘Anglican’ settlement by the 1580s and 1590s had anyway been hedged about with all sorts of compromises and contradictions. Querying how Protestant that settlement was, one expert has recently observed that the outcome was not at all what true or advanced Reformers had really wanted in the first place (Younger, 2018). Theresa May’s ‘deal’ for Brexit as it emerged in late 2018 was surely ‘Anglican’ in exactly this late Tudor sense of desperately balancing antithetical elements in the hope of discovering a workable via media reflecting English particularities. The fact that these latter-day ideals were so intensely English, however, was also a significant weakness when translated into the setting of a wider British Union.

Another reflection of a historicist instinct immediately before and after June 2016 was a temptation to claim the mantle of Winston Churchill. One of the leading Brexiteers, Boris Johnson, sought to literally take on a Churchillian persona, including gruffly-voiced classical allusions and talk of roaring lions. Churchill seemed to be everywhere you looked in Brexit-inclined Britain. There were three blockbuster films in 2017 alone. One leading London bookshop, Hatchards in Piccadilly, devoted a whole corner of their shelves to the great man – more than for the seventeenth century or the French Revolution or China. In history-writing this fixation climaxed during October 2018 with a massive new biography by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts, and although one reviewer complains unkindly about ‘one thousand pages of literary purgatory’,¹ there was no doubt that such accounts of the great man testify to an insatiable appetite for the subject among the mass British public, even when the narrative has been endlessly repeated.

The trouble with Churchill as an inspiration for Brexit was that his long career pointed in so many different directions before trailing off into complete enigma in the last few years of his life. The prominent historian of contemporary times, Vernon Bogdanor, remarked on the eve of the referendum that Churchill’s ambivalence towards European unification, far from signifying any firm conclusions on his own part, merely tracked the uncertainties of British people over a long period, with many ebbs and flows along the way (Bogdanor, 2016). Bogdanor’s instinct was that, had Churchill possessed a vote in 2016, he would have thought hard, and reluctantly voted Remain on the grounds that Europe was inherent in the United Kingdom’s physical security. But to this might be added something more. It was a key belief of Churchill that there was no greater error than to pretend to a position, and degree of leverage, that you did not actually have, since you would surely be found out. Such a deep fragility was to show up painfully as Theresa May’s negotiation with the EU evolved.

A Churchillian streak embedded in the British public mind was surely not unconnected with a somewhat older stereotype of a distinctively English ‘apartness’: that of John Bull. This fitted a long-standing pattern when periods of growing involvement with, or vulnerability to, the adjoining Continent have been interlaced with phases of sharp nativist reaction. Such a phenomenon might be traced back to the struggles to fend off marauding Vikings – the last true English army had been destroyed by King Cnut at the battle of Assandun on an Essex hillside on 18 October 1016 – and the stories of Robin Hood and his Merry Saxons hitting back at arrogant Norman-French overlords after the conquest of 1066. The anti-foreigner figure of John Bull arose from the much more modern context in which a new Dutch king after 1688, William III, involved his freshly-acquired English kingdom in European wars, culminating in the War of Spanish Succession after 1700. John Bull, with his fierce predilection for warm beer, quietness and Protestantism at home, and all entanglements beyond the sea to ‘go hang’, was the cutting edge of a new political satire. Boris Johnson’s call for the EU in mid-2017 to ‘go hang’ in insisting that Britain pay for all outstanding liabilities as a departing member was in this edgy mould.

It must also be said that, however confected the figure of John Bull might have been, his prejudices were not without a good deal of historical validity. When John Major became prime minister in November 1990 following the dramatic fall of Margaret Thatcher, he said that Britain must thereafter be ‘at the heart of Europe’ and not just sulk on the sidelines. Yet on a long view the brutal truth has been that Britain’s attempts to be an effective power-player at the heart of Europe have rarely, if ever, turned out well. The Anglo-Normans fought to keep their territories in France but even Calais was lost in the end under Queen Mary; her heart, she said, would on death be found to bear the imprint of the town’s name. Later attempted interventions on the Continent invariably ended badly, as with the disastrous campaign in 1791 on the island of Walcheren and the attempt in 1793 to sustain the French Royalist hold on Toulon against the republican forces including a very youthful Captain Napoleon Bonaparte. The field of Waterloo in 1815 offered some kind of compensation, though even then only with last-minute help from the Prussians. In the mid-nineteenth century, when British ascendency was expanding elsewhere, key issues on the European mainland, such as the Schleswig-Holstein Question, were resolved with minimal reference to British views as the power of a unifying Germany took shape. The British got on fine so long as they kept to their ships, but once they got on land – at least on European land – strategically speaking their swagger seemed to disappear, as fighting in the Crimea during the 1850s cruelly exemplified.

The twentieth century only confirmed this skewed reality, but at greater cost in blood and cash. After August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force was soon on the ropes, and the reason why it was placed away from the French coast in the panic of the retreat towards Paris during those early months of the conflict was that it was rumoured that the British army under Sir John French might be preparing to make a dash back home (Cassar, 1977: 286). Afterwards Lord Kitchener’s conscripted New Armies represented a massive attempt to prove that the British could be a truly continental force when they put their minds to it. But by the spring of 1918 it was the British army that was closest to cracking, which was why General Ludendorff’s ultimately failed offensive was aimed primarily at their lines (Holland, 1991: 82–3). Only the arrival of large-scale reinforcements from the ‘associated’ power of the United States saved the day. Even then it was a French Supreme Commander, Marshal Foch, who presided over the Allied forces on the Western Front in the final phases of the war. In its last weeks, French power flooded into eastern Europe whilst the British Army of Salonica under General Milne diverted to Constantinople and remote parts of what was now increasingly termed ‘the Middle East’. This is what best suited British capacities and instincts. Suggestively, the biggest British legend of the 1914–18 war was the distantly exotic one of Lawrence of Arabia – there was nothing comparable on the Western Front.

1939–45 simply reconfirmed the same underlying lesson. From the start there was little possibility of the British making the same attempt to ‘continentalise’ themselves as they had unavailingly tried after 1915–16. The British expeditionary...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and table
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Understanding the past, facing the future
• Part I Britain and Europe: political entanglements
• Part II British discourses of Europe in literature and film
• Part III Negotiating borders in British travel writing and memoir
• Index