Holidays reinforce my love affair with all things European – except its Union

Ismile inwardly when people say Brexiteers are “anti-European”. I’m off to Europe next week, and I confidently expect to have a very good time.

First stop is Biarritz, to see my French family. One of the things I most look forward to is going to the superb covered market for some oysters and a glass of local white wine. I shall browse in one of the excellent bookshops to catch up on recent French novels and history. But of course the sea is the big attraction: a long curved golden beach with big Atlantic rollers. Having learnt to swim (more or less) late in life, I am going to

plunge in and go far enough out to escape the crowd, despite my wife fearing I shall drown.

But before self-indulgence, manners: the French are a courteous people (the flipside to their sometimes startling rudeness) and I learned on Biarritz beach that one has to greet and shake hands with the regulars, who occupy the same bit of sand year in, year out. After Biarritz, we go to stay with friends near Pau. Later, to other friends in Perpignan (more oysters, wine and sea), and a trek in the Pyrenees, sleeping under the stars. Finally, we’ll go to see Catalan friends in Barcelona, that great but now discontented city.

As it happens, many of the people I shall be seeing are not great admirers of the European Union. A young Professor at the Sorbonne (a supporter of the EU, by the way, and an old friend) told me the other day that he was convinced that a referendum on EU membership in France would yield a big majority to Leave; moreover, he said President Macron thought so too. But I’m thinking not so much of the French, but rather of British friends with strong European ties who are Brexiteers, several of whom I shall be seeing in France.

Putting aside for the moment the stereotype of Brexiteers being “anti-European”, what exactly forms the dividing line between lovers of Europe who are Leavers and those who are Remainers?

The most obvious difference is not identifying Europe with the EU. My Europhile Brexiteer friends all know far more than most people about European politics and politicians, and that means that they are not taken in by the starry-eyed rhetoric. Their strongest emotional attachments to Europe are long-standing, personal and local – to friends, to partners, to particular places – not to an abstraction. Some have links with parts of Europe that are not in the EU – Norway and Switzerland. They also have personal or career ties with other parts of the world: Asia, Africa, North America, Australia.

That is my case too. I have close friends in Europe, but also in Sydney and Delhi. One of my favourite European countries is Norway, and one of my favourite European cities is Istanbul.

All this makes the EU shrink in emotional significance, and the rhetoric that equates the EU with openness to the world and international solidarity becomes simply meaningless.

Of course, one can share these experiences and still take different views about the EU and British membership, whether based on economic interest, ideology or various positive or negative emotions about one’s own country. But I suppose the main difference is that Europhile Brexiteers are immune to the emotional blackmail that paints opponents of the EU as xenophobic, insular and racist.