A Cultural History of British Euroscepticism

M. Spiering

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137447555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Why are the British so Euro-sceptic? Forget about tedious treaties, party politics or international relations. The real reason is that the British do not feel European. This book explores and explains the cultural divide between Britain and Europe, where it comes from and how it manifests itself in everyday life and the academic world.

1

The Second World War

Abstract: The events of the Second World War shaped British attitudes to Europe in various ways. Europe is seen as a theatre of war and oppression; Germany and Europe are conflated in the public mind; integration is something for the Europeans, not the British; the US is an attractive partner in a special relationship. Those who grew up during the war adopted a straightforward world view: Europe is darkness and conflict, America is light and excitement. These attitudes persist in the Britain-and-Europe debate, not least because the war only confirmed and deepened an existing and deep-rooted British perspective of Europe as the Other.

Spiering, Menno. A Cultural History of British Euroscepticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137447555.0003.

As in many other countries, the Second World War brought untold misery to Britain. A number of cities were destroyed and an estimated 460,000 British women and men lost their lives. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking that the British memory of the war isn’t all that bad. Popular TV series like Dad’s Army or Allo Allo present the war years as a time of togetherness, jolly escapades and downright fun. Even the official BBC series on the Second World War, Finest Hour (2000), contains an episode entitled ‘A Source of Fun’, showing footage of wartime parties with plenty of dancing and drinking.

The reason for these fond memories is obvious, and entirely understandable. With the exception of the Channel Islands, Britain staved off Nazi invasion (thus avoiding the trauma of occupation, collaboration and deportation), and helped to bring the whole miserable period to a victorious conclusion. As part of the allied forces the country defeated the Nazis, liberated occupied territories and presided over the post-war settlement. It was a job well done, a mission accomplished. Something to be rightly proud of. Something that can, when all is said and done, be remembered as a positive experience, perhaps even as a ‘good time’.

The Grand National Narrative summarizing this British experience of the Second World War runs roughly as follows: a period of misguided appeasement of the Nazis; the nation wakes up at the eleventh hour; a military expedition into Europe; near defeat, but a glorious national rescue of the British troops from the beaches of Dunkirk; for a time Britain opposes the Nazis on its own; a Nazi invasion is thwarted in the ‘Battle of Britain’; bombing raids on British cities (‘the Blitz’) are withstood by a nation united in defiance; invasion of the Continent of Europe; defeat of the Nazis; Victory. Being a strong and positive narrative it bears repeating, which is indeed the case. History lessons in British schools tend to centre on the Second World War (it is sometimes called ‘the Nazification of the curriculum’), and hardly a day passes by without the war being mentioned in the British media. Iconic films about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain (Reach for the Sky) are repeated time and again, with an upsurge in June (D-Day) and during the Christmas period. The Second World War has become a staple of the heritage industry, with countless museums, ‘war experiences’ and battle re-enactments vying for customers. The story of Britain’s war will not be forgotten for a long time. Its shadow has reached into the 21st century and shows no sign of paling. David Cameron’s 2013 speech on ‘Britain and Europe’ immediately opens with a reference to the Second World War, making a distinction between ‘European cities strewn with rubble’ and London with ‘skies lit by flames night after night’. In fact, since the 1960s, every major Prime Ministerial speech on Britain and Europe contains a passage on the war and Britain’s special role in withstanding Nazi Germany.

The memory of the Second World War has had an extremely strong effect on the Britain-and-Europe debate. Firstly, it very much deepened the discourse of British exceptionalism. The idea that Britain is different from Europe has a long pedigree (see Chapters 2–4). Part of that idea is that ‘the Europeans’ make revolutions and war, whereas the British do not. Commenting on the tumultuous events of 1848 the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote: ‘Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila and Alboin were enlightened and humane.’ But, he added, ‘meanwhile in our island the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted’ (Macaulay 1953, 380).

The terrible events of the Second World War gave the perception of ‘British Us’ versus ‘European Them’ a tremendous boost. A famous wartime cartoon by David Low just about sums it up. Published in 1940, after the fall of France and the first bombing sorties of the Luftwaffe, the drawing shows a British soldier standing on the beach and shaking his fist at the bombers coming in from the east, from the continent of Europe. The caption reads: ‘Very Well, Alone’. In later years the cartoon would be used by various Eurosceptic groups, with the Nazi bombers being replaced by EU directives from ‘Brussels’. Britain, so it seems, had not been at war with just the Nazis, not even the Germans, but with Europe. Of course this is a generalization, but the point does bear making. For those who grew up during the war, the finer points of the conflict were lost. In their formative years the generation that would later deal with ‘the European Question’ learnt a simple lesson. Britain was under attack from planes that came from the east, from them, over there, in Europe. In her memoirs Margaret Thatcher declares that her ‘life was transformed by the Second World War. In my case, because I was at school and university for its duration, the transformation was an intellectual rather than a physical one. (...) I drew from the Second World War a lesson very different from the hostility towards the nation-state evinced by some post-war European statesmen’ (Thatcher 1993, 11).

Just how easy it was for Thatcher’s generation to perceive the war in terms of ‘us’ against ‘Europe’ is nicely illustrated in David Lodges’s semi-autobiographical novel Out of the Shelter. Lodge was only a child during the Second World War, making him what Malcolm Bradbury dubbed a ‘war baby’, someone whose identity and sense of ‘the other’ was formed during those fateful years. Focusing on the adventures of young Timothy during the 1940s, Out of the Shelter at one point describes a fantasy of Tim’s as he takes cover during a Nazi attack on London:

Alone in the shelter, under the cover of night, safe from observation, Timothy lapsed into a heroic dream of his childhood. The dark shelter became the cockpit of a Spitfire. Crouched in his seat, he eased the joystick forward. (...) He pressed the button on the joystick and eight streams of bullets converged on the enemy aircraft. (...) Leaning back against his seat, he pulled the Spitfire out of its dive and banked steeply, scanning the skies for his next target. His back was to England, and his face, set in an expression of watchful defiance, was turned towards Europe. (Lodge 1985, 52)

‘His face, set in an expression of watchful defiance, was turned’ – not towards the Luftwaffe, the Nazis or the Germans – but ‘towards Europe’. The enemy are the Europeans. When VE Day finally came, for Timothy’s generation it was not certain whether this meant Victory in, or Victory over Europe. As the war babies’ generation nears its end, the tendency to perceive the Europeans as the aggressors of the Second World War shows little sign of abating. A cultural transfer has taken place to later generations, as witness the continuing habit of the British media to couch EU matters in terms of the war. The Daily Mail’s headline ‘Battle for Britain’ (15 April 1997) – the issue was EU monetary union – is just one example in a long and continuing list of EU headlines and articles referring to Appeasement, Munich, Dunkirk, Vichy, etc.

Just as the British experience of the Second World War boosted the idea of a hostile relationship between Britain and Europe, so it encouraged the notion that European integration is something for ‘them’ not ‘us’. On the one hand, Britain has traditionally viewed all plans for European integration with suspicion. It sits uneasily with the age-old balance of power policy which holds that the Continent should remain divided so as to avoid a strong European opponent (which has prompted the occasional comment that the UK only joined the EEC to break it asunder). On the other hand, European integration was sometimes seen as a way out of the seemingly endless need to send troops across the Channel. Just before the war, Labour leader Clement Attlee called for a federation of Europe that would include Britain. ‘Europe must federate or perish’, he famously stated (Baratta 2004, 82). Winston Churchill disagreed about Britain being part of such a scheme. Surely Britain was too much unlike Europe. In an essay on ‘The United States of Europe’ he wrote: ‘we see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonality. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked, but not compromised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed’ (Kaiser 2005, 11). The events of the Second World War would only deepen this conviction of separateness. The Europeans had again showed their dark side. They needed to get their act together. In spite of the balance of power considerations, their integration was to be condoned, not least because of the special circumstances of the Cold War. But it was never just a question of political expedience. The war had once again thrown in relief essential differences between Britons and Europeans. In 1952 Prime Minister Anthony Eden stated that the British knew ‘in their bones’ that they could not be part of Europe (Salmon and Shepherd 2003, 32). On another occasion he added that Europe was seen by the people as a place ‘where their relatives who had died in two World Wars were buried. People want to forget about Europe’ (Bogdanor 2013).

A third way in which the enduring memory of the Second World War has affected the Britain-and-Europe debate is that it gave rise to a general conflation of ‘the Germans’ or ‘Nazis’ with ‘the Europeans’. Just after the war, when the smoke had barely lifted, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ernest Bevin, asked ‘how can I sell Europe to people who have just been bombed by the Germans?’ (Black 1994, 236). At the time it was a logical question. But as the years progressed the link between Europe and German evil would prove remarkably resilient. An extreme example is provided by the publications of Rodney Atkinson (Rowan’s, Mr. Bean’s, brother). A recurrent theme in his many books and pamphlets on Britain and Europe is the accusation that the European Union is actually a Fourth Reich. Having failed to dominate Europe by military means, the Germans are now using their economic might to subdue the Continent (Atkinson 1996). Nazis also make a regular appearance in the ‘Get Britain Out of Europe’ campaign waged by the patriotic magazine This England, showing the European flag with a swastika at its centre and a snake curled around the flagpole. Similar ideas, however, reside in the political establishment, as witness the notorious claims made by Nicolas Ridley, the Secretary of State for Industry in Margaret Thatcher’s last government. Interviewed by Dominic Lawson for The Spectator, he made a direct link between the Germans in the European Union and in the Second World War. ‘It’s all a German racket. I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler’ (Lawson 1990, 9). In Eurosceptic novels the stock ‘European’ tends to resemble the sinister SS officers of Second World War literature and films. A case in point is The Aachen Memorandum (1995) by Andrew Roberts. The year is 2045 and England (Scotland was tempted by the Europeans to leave the UK) is an insignificant province of a European Union ruled from Berlin. When patriots try to redress the situation they are confronted with blond types on the streets of London shouting Schnell, Jawohl, etc. Nazi characters also make an appearance in Apocalypse 2000 (1987), another ‘what-if’ story on European dominance of Britain. The book is written by the economists Michael Stewart and Peter Jay. The latter was a son-in-law of Prime Minister James Callaghan, and served as the UK Ambassador to the United States between 1977 and 1979. The story revolves around sinister plans of a Europe First Party, led by Olaf D. Le Rith, who is described as a ‘true European’ with a German-Swedish father and a French mother. Olaf’s name, of course, is an anagram.

In Britain’s first Eurosceptic novel, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) by Angus Wilson, there are no overt references to Nazis, though there is no doubt that ‘the Europeans’ are an evil lot. Set in the early 1970s, the story describes how Uni-European troops invade Britain, which has so far refused to join the federation. The Europeans show no mercy with the British nationalists who defy the new regime, propagating a ‘free Britain’ whenever and wherever they can. Eventually the Europeans hatch a plan to feed the nationalists to the lions in the London Zoo in a Roman-style spectacle. When the book was serialized by the BBC in 1983 the story was changed in various ways. For one thing, the Uni-Europeans are explicitly portrayed as SS officers. Apparently it was felt that this is what the audience expected and would understand. One of the main Uni-Europeans (a collaborating Englishman ironically called Dr Englander) is played by Marius Goring, the celebrated actor who specialized in sinister roles, in particular the Nazi officer complete with heavy German accent and shiny jack boots. He appeared in so many Second World War movies that he claimed to have played ‘every rank in the German army from private to field marshal’ (New York Times, 6 October 1998). Cast as the chief Uni-European in the BBC series, Goring wears an SS-type uniform with the SS lightning bolts replaced by a big authoritative E. Dr Englander’s moment of glory comes when he addresses the crowd in the London Zoo during ‘One Europe Day’. Every effort is made to film the event as a Nüremburg Nazi rally. Union Jacks with the big black E in the middle are flown everywhere, while the Uni-European leader pontificates from an impressive rostrum, his voice echoing over London: ‘A greater purpose, as part of One Europe’s plan to re-educate the nation to face the future. To recognize that violence is programmed in man’s nature, as it is programmed in the shark.’ The European rally ends in riots when patriots try to distribute flyers warning against the ‘xenophobic and anti-Semitic philosophy’ of the One Europe Movement. They are arrested and deported to Enfield concentration camp.

Just how much the memory of the Second World War has created a routine link between European union and Germans is illustrated by the famous ‘German episode’ of the popular comedy Fawlty Towers, first aired in 1975. Hotelier Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese) gets in a flap when a group of German guests make their appearance. He desperately does not want to conflate Germans with Europeans and the war, but this proves as impossible as consciously not thinking of a pink elephant. After his welcoming words, ‘May I say how pleased we are to have some Europeans here now that we are on the Continent’ (the show was made a couple of months after the British confirmed EEC membership in the 1975 referendum), Basil proves unable not to mention the war, driving the German-Europeans to tears with references to piano wire, Hermann Göring and a grotesque imitation of Adolf Hitler. Of course, all this was satire. In a 2003 BBC interview (With Friends Like these: The Germans) Cleese declared that his aim was to poke fun at the British tendency to associate European integration with Germans and the war, but this point was largely lost on his audience. Most heartily agreed with Fawlty and complemented Cleese, to his dismay, for delivering some home truths about Europe, the EEC and Germany.

Commenting on the First World War, George Orwell bluntly states: ‘During the war of 1914–1918 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired’ (Orwell 1941, 28). The second part of Orwell’s observation was questionable even then, but it is certain that the Second World War did nothing to abate any existing distrust of ‘Europeans’. Lest the point be missed, this is not to say (let alone prove) that because of the war all Britons detest all Europeans. To blindly accept Orwell’s claims about the British attitude to ‘all Europeans’ would result in an absurd caricature of Anglo-European relations. We are dealing, however, not with statistics but ideas, images, a culture of perceptions and attitudes, that may not be accepted by everyone, but are certainly present as idées reçues and thus influential.

For the war babies in particular Europe was by no means an inviting place. The Second World War cast a deep shadow over their perception of the Continent and its inhabitants, as is borne out by another passage in David Lodge’s novel Out of the Shelter. After the war has finally ended, the hero of the book, young Timothy, is invited to join his sister for the summer holidays in occupied Germany where she works for the American army. Timothy’s train journey across the Channel and into Europe takes on epic proportions. The Europhobia of this young Englishman, formed by the war, flares up the further he moves from England. The deeper the train penetrates into Europe, the more stifling the atmosphere, and the darker it gets. After Brussels the evening rapidly falls. When the train finally reaches the German border it is pitch black outside. Timothy ‘had a sense that in Europe life had always been like this, like an endless train journey through the night.’ Sitting on the floor, for the European train is massively overcrowded, the young Englishman yearns for the nightmare of his journey to pass, and to be restored to ‘the ordered, English-speaking daylight world to which he belonged’ (Lodge 1985, 82). Eventually his prayers are answered. Dawn breaks and Timothy finds himself opposite a man reading an English book. It is a friendly American. Saved! If there is one thing this war baby knows, it is that Americans are a whole lot nicer than Europeans. Just as British war memories tend to show distrust of Europeans, so they tend to be extremely positive about Americans. Timothy remembers how one day in London his sister brought home an American airman called Rod. ‘He was sun-tanned and his uniform was very smooth and soft. Rod had chewing gum called Juicy Fruit in great long strips. Timothy liked Rod and was glad the Americans were fighting on the same side as England’ (Lodge 1985, 42). Why get mixed up with the Europeans, if the Americans provide such a pleasant alternative?

The story of how the Second World War has affected Anglo-European relations would not be complete without a reference to how that same war has shaped Anglo-American relations. Not surprisingly, Americans, as opposed to Europeans, play an important and positive role in the British narrative of the Second World War, which roughly runs as follows: the British hold out against the Nazis on their own (Very Well. Alone!); at the end of 1941 they are at long last joined by the Americans; Anglo-American cooperation proves effective and convivial, culminating in a shared and successful invasion of Europe on beaches called Utah, Omaha, Sword and Gold (and one Canadian Beach, Juno).

The story of the brothers in arms is told and frequently repeated to this day in films like The Longest Day (1962) or A Bridge too Far (1977). After the war Winston Churchill was quick to dub Anglo-American cooperation ‘the Special Relations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Second World War
• 2  The European Other
• 3  The Island Story
• 4  The Invention of Europe
• Conclusion
• References
• Index