How the EU shaped Britain
L’Union européenne a, malgré tout, transformé la culture britannique.
L'un des arguments phares de la campagne du Brexit était le besoin pour le Royaume-Uni de retrouver sa culture et sa souveraineté nationale. Cependant, depuis leur entrée au sein de l'Union en 1976, les Britanniques sont devenus bien plus européens qu'ils ne voudraient le croire. Retour sur les conséquences d'un demi-siècle de libre échange...
Despite half a century of belonging to the EU club, most British people say their emotional bonds to Europe are not strong. “Nearly 60% of Britons do not identify as European at all,” says Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London.
2. Allegiance to an abstract notion or a set of institutions is a stretch even for Europhiles. The early weeks of the pandemic in March tested solidarity even among the diehard founding member states.
3. Yet lives and lifestyles across the continent are closer than imaginable in 1973 and in ways that cannot be measured by a survey. Even if no European “society” exists for Britain’s departure to disrupt, an informal convergence of tastes and cultural assumptions that could be called “Europeanisation” has taken place over the last five decades.
4. For good or ill, the boring business of trade – integrated supply chains, the free
movement of goods and common rules for everything from energy to eggs – has shaped their lives too, even if few saw themselves as participants in a post-national experiment let alone expressed it as a form of identity.
5. Britain entered the bloc in 1973 entirely for transactional reasons and not because it “bought into the narrative” of political integration, says Menon. If GDP alone is the benchmark of success, membership paid off. Income per person is approximately 8.5% higher than it would have been had the UK stayed out, Nicholas Crafts, a professor of economic history at the University of Sussex, estimates.
6. Unwittingly, in pursuing its own interests via an expansive “common market”, the UK ended up selling EU citizens a common European lifestyle and perhaps even a common identity.
FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD
7. How Europeans eat and drink in 2020 compared with 1973 is probably the clearest illustration of how the single market influenced habits and at least partially rewired Britons’ expectations. The Daily Mail recently published a pictorial guide to dealing with Brexit-related food disruption. Pizza, brie and avocado could be replaced by chips, toast and mutton, it suggested.
8. The Mail’s much-mocked food chart was an even more useful reminder of the socio-gastronomic transformation that EU membership delivered to Britain. The shift in food quality and the democratisation of Britain’s food culture has been “staggering”, says Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City, University of London.
9. In 1973, the ONS retail price index reflected the pre-common-market British palate: that year’s representative shopping basket included mutton, Smash instant mashed potatoes and tinned corned beef. Olive oil may have been on the tables of the English middle classes, but most people cooked with lard. Wine didn’t figure even in 1977: sky-high tariffs put anything more than the occasional bottle of Blue Nun out of most people’s price range.
10. Muesli, ground coffee, pitta bread, fromage frais, riesling and pesto all joined the ONS shopping basket between 1980 and 2000. “The Europeanisation of the British diet is something even Brexiters have to acknowledge,” says Lang. “Mediterranean foods and pizza-eating cafe culture used to be for the British elite. That completely changed and it is remarkable.”
11. In 1988, domestically produced food accounted for 66% of all food sold in Britain. Today, the figure has fallen to 50% while more than 60% of the UK’s fresh food is imported from the EU. For dairy products, the EU is almost the sole supplier.
12. Post-Brexit, the nutritional range could narrow for poorer British families and as a House of Lords select committee report warned, food inequality could widen with those who can afford it still able to buy high quality local fresh produce.
13. Less palatable, he says, is the concentration of giant food manufacturers – which account
for half of all European food sales. “The single market allowed that process to accelerate,” says Lang. “Tesco, Carrefour, Aldi and Lidl were able to go everywhere and they have done so.”
14. In driving down prices, and making linguistic differences irrelevant – although another legacy of Britain’s membership is English as a lingua franca – the single market, with its network of consumer protection laws helped to turbo-charge a consumer revolution. “It might have happened without EU membership but not at the same pace,” Crafts says. “You expect, with greater integration, that relative prices become similar and that affects consumption.”
A BROADENING OF HORIZONS
15. The soft power of the single market reshaped the culture in other ways. A Milan to Paris airfare cost the equivalent of at least €400 in 1992. Between 1993 and 1997, the EU liberalised aviation. Enter no-frills Ryanair, initially in the UK and Irish markets, now Europe’s biggest airline.
16. Cheaper travel has been a mixed blessing for weekend hen and stag do destinations, and disastrous for the climate. But another genie was out of the bottle: air traffic in the EU trebled in the first 20 years of the single market. Trips within the EU accounted for most British holiday travel in 2019.
17. A “symbiotic” relationship grew, too, between budget air fares and another British institution, says Simon Chadwick, a professor of Eurasian sport at Emlyon Business School in France.
18. Football fans didn’t historically travel in big numbers to continental games, but from the late-1990s, La Liga, Serie A and Bundesliga entered the collective vocabulary as short-haul football tourism exploded. “Europeanisation has been built through football,” says Chadwick.
19. In 1995, a seminal European court of justice verdict revolutionised the hiring and transfer of EU players by insisting on their freedom to work in any member state.
20. Football, it turned out, was also governed by the single market. European mainland fans arrived too, fuelling a football economy for
Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and other UK cities. “Fast forward 20 years, the psyche of English fans had changed,” says Chadwick. “We don’t talk now about ‘foreign players’ ,they are just players. Many people are not aware that this exchange is part of freedom of movement within the EU.”
21. The single market has allowed the proliferation of football broadcasting rights and any free trade impediments created by Brexit could also undermine the lucrative nature of Premier League TV deals with EU countries, says Chadwick.
22. The EU is today far more than the marketplace Thatcher helped to craft. It has a single currency, legally binding environmental standards, worker protections, social policies, a budgetary policy that attempts to level out regional disparities and a human rights charter. Its critics say the pandemic and the need for a green recovery should be the impetus for a more progressive, less “Anglo-Saxon” EU political economy to emerge.
23. Will the same realities drive the UK’s direction, or will the conscious repudiation of a European identity built on seamless trade and integration become tangible?
24. Perhaps, as the Lithuanian novelist and historian Kristina Sabaliauskaitė predicted, the moment that Britain starts to experience life outside the EU is the moment it learns “with a shock, how very European it was after all”.
free movement of goods libre circulation des marchandises / rule loi, réglementation / experiment expérience (scientifique) / let alone encore moins.
5. to buy, bought, bought into adhérer à / narrative ici, vision, perspective (aussi, récit) / GDP = gross domestic product PIB (produit intérieur brut) / benchmark indicateur / membership adhésion, appartenance / to pay, paid, paid off être payant, réussir (à) / income revenu / had ici, si.
6. unwittingly sans le vouloir / to pursue poursuivre, viser / own propre; ici, national / expansive vaste, ambitieux / citizen citoyen / perhaps peut-être, voire.
7. (the) single market (le) marché unique / habit habitude / at least tout du moins / to rewire ici, modifier (aussi, recâbler) / expectation attente, aspiration / to deal, dealt, dealt with ici, réagir face à / -related lié/associé/ici, dû à / to replace remplacer.
8. chart ici, guide illustré (aussi, graphique, schéma, tableau) / reminder rappel, évocation / to deliver apporter, permettre / shift évolution; ici, amélioration / staggering sidérant, incroyable / policy politique, réglementation.
9. ONS = Office for National Statistics / retail price index indice des prix à la consommation / palate palais; ici, goûts / (representative) shopping basket panier de la ménagère / mashed potatoes purée de pommes de terre (to mash écraser, réduire en purée) / tinned en boîte/ conserve / lard saindoux / sky-high exorbitant / tariff droit de douane / to put, put, put sth out of sb's price range rendre impossible/difficile l'achat de qch pour qn.
10. ground coffee café moulu (to grind, ground, ground moudre) / diet régime alimentaire / to acknowledge reconnaître, admettre, avouer.
11. domestically ici, dans le pays, au Royaume-Uni / to account for représenter / figure chiffre, pourcentage / while alors que / dairy products produits laitiers / almost quasiment, pour ainsi dire / sole seul, unique, exclusif / supplier fournisseur, approvisionneur.
12. range gamme, variété, choix / to narrow être limité, s'appauvrir (fig.) / (the) House of Lords (la) Chambre des Lords (Chambre haute du Parlement britannique) / select committee ici, commission parlementaire spéciale (temporaire); aussi, comité restreint / report rapport / to widen ici, se creuser (fig.) / to afford se permettre (financièrement) / still encore / produce produits.
13. palatable agréable, bon, acceptable / manufacturer producteur /
to allow permettre à / so ici, cela. 14. to drive, drove, driven down faire baisser / to make, made, made ici, rendre (fig.) / irrelevant peu important / legacy héritage, contribution, conséquence / network réseau, système, ensemble / consumer (des) consommateur(s) / law loi / to turbo-charge accélérer / to happen arriver (fig.), se produire, survenir / pace vitesse.
15. to broaden one's horizons élargir ses horizons / soft power puissance douce / airfare billet d'avion / no-frills ici, sans extras (frill froufrou).
16. cheap bon marché, low-cost / to be a mixed blessing comporter aussi bien des avantages que des inconvénients / hen do enterrement de vie de jeune fille / stag do enterrement de vie de garçon / the genie is out of the bottle la situation est hors (de) contrôle / to treble tripler.
18. late fin de / short-haul court-courrier / through ici, grâce à.
19. seminal sans précédent / hiring embauche, recrutement / freedom liberté.
20. to turn out s’avérer / European mainland (du) continent européen / to fuel alimenter, contribuer à / fast forward avance rapide; ici, plus tard, après / psyche état d'esprit, mentalité / foreign étranger / aware conscient.
21. broadcasting rights droits de diffusion / free trade libre-échange / impediment entrave, obstacle / to undermine faire du tort/nuire à, compromettre / deal accord, contrat.
22. far ici, bien / marketplace marché / to craft créer / single currency monnaie unique (réf. à la zone euro) / legally binding contraignant (to bind, bound, bound lier); ici, vis-à-vis desquelles les pays se sont engagés / standard norme / to attempt to tenter de / to level out niveler, homogénéiser, réduire / recovery rétablissement, renaissance, retour / impetus impulsion, déclic, élément déclencheur.
23. to drive, drove, driven ici, influencer / seamless ici, réf. au libre-échange (seam couture).
24. novelist romancière / to experience faire l’expérience de, connaître, vivre / how ici, à quel point.