Brexit is not an end to Britain’s liaison with Europe. It’s just a new beginning
They are sick of the whole thing. They just want it to be over. No more uncertainty. Brexiteers want resolution. They will be disappointed. Willing something does not make it so. Aethelred wanted Viking raids to stop. The kingdoms of Wales, Scotland and Ireland wished the Norman and Plantagenet monarchs of England would cease their predatory lunges into their territory. Neville Chamberlain hoped that Hitler would be content with Czechoslovakia. Oliver Letwin wished there was an island we could send all migrants to. The hopes of politicians and rulers are whispers in a gale.
There is no end state in our relations with Europe. There is only millennia of collaboration, conquest, disputes, exchange, competition and alliance.
We live on a small archipelago just off the north-west coast of Europe. We are not a tribe cocooned by towering, razor-sharp mountain ridges in the
New Guinea highlands. We are connected. At times, continental armies have marched across the fields of Wiltshire, Wexford and West Lothian. At others, the British have watered their horses in the Seine, Rhine and Danube. The seas around us have facilitated exchange, not prevented it. People, ideas and stuff have crossed the water, mocking the decrees of princes and parliaments.
Before the railway revolution, getting a shipment from Calais to Dover, Antwerp to Ipswich, Hamburg to Hull, was easier than hauling it over the Pennines. Our coastline has been as porous to European brandy and fabric as our culture has been to ideas. It is impossible to think of anything at all that the British and Irish have successfully stopped from arriving. Plague, printing, Protestantism, polystyrene, paper, physics, psychiatry, poetry, pepper, philosophy, Plantagenets, pizza, Prince Philip and pinot grigio have all jumped the Channel, irrespective of politics.
Geography and history have made us heterodox. Religiously, culturally and ethnically diverse. Some of us have felt greater kinship with foreigners than our fellow subjects. The Cornish and the Bretons traded and intermarried long before they were absorbed by England and France respectively. The Belgae tribe settled in what is now Hampshire while staying close to their continental cousins (who would give their name to Belgium). Roman settlers, the Saxons, Jutes and Angles, the Vikings of East Anglia, York, Dublin and
Orkney all told stories of their homelands across the water.
For centuries French-speaking kings sent England’s youth and treasure across the Channel to enforce their rule on the continent. Georges I and II were ever mindful of their German territories, and Victoria and Albert married their eldest child to Fritz, future kaiser of imperial Germany, in an attempt to cement an alliance between the two hegemonic Protestant, Teutonic races. Today the Catholics of Tyrone and Fermanagh carry Irish passports, while the tech businesses of Shoreditch thrum with accents from Corunna to Kiev and huge numbers of resident British pensioners sip gin in southern Spain.
Europe’s fate is our fate. But geography is cruel and while it binds us to Europe it tantalises those who seek a myth of exceptionalism. That shining ribbon of water, lined with its proud white cliffs, is for us what the impassable Pinsk Marshes are for that other, peripheral European, Russia. Both nations trumpet their distinctiveness while aping European art and customs. We despise the European heartland, while seeking its approval. Proud yet insecure.
Ivan the Terrible made himself Caesar, “tsar” in Russian, and styled his empire as the Third Rome. A couple of centuries before, Edward I had built Caernarfon Castle in the style of Constantinople. Both men, on either edge of the continent, claiming the patrimony of Europe’s foundational empire. In the 17th century, while Peter the Great worked thousands of his subjects to death building a French-designed baroque capital in Saint Petersburg, the Stuarts built a mighty new St Paul’s in similar style. They lured Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens to beautify their court and founded the Royal Society to compete with the “philosophical societies” of France. Britain and Russia were both transformed by ideas emanating from Europe – from the writings of Nicolaus Copernicus who fired the creativity of Isaac Newton and unleashed a scientific revolution in the former, to those of Karl Marx that sparked a communist one in the latter.
The capillaries of the nostalgic right fizz with the heady drugs peddled by 19th century nationalists: one people, one nation. Distinct. Neat. An island race. The British Isles. The departure of Eire, the decades long counter-insurgency in Ulster, resurgent Scottish and Welsh nationalism, all inconvenient, all ignored. Splendid isolation, the myth of an imperial Britain standing aloof from Europe in the late 19th century, is their nirvana. Hence the absurd, barely disguised references to empire revivified. There was little splendid about Britain’s isolation just over a century ago. It meant that things happened, without Britain having any control. Prussia forged a German superstate. Britain’s two greatest imperial rivals, Russia and France, became close allies. The neighbourhood got a lot tougher while Britons placed their faith in Royal Navy battleships in the Channel.
Our greatest statesmen and women have understood our vulnerability to what happens on the continent. They have tried to shape events there, rather than watch as spectators, sitting it out and passively accepting the result. Elizabeth intervened to stop the Spanish superpower consolidate its grip on the low countries. William, Anne and the Duke of Marlborough revolutionised the English and British state to thwart Louis XIV’s dream of universal empire. A reluctant David Lloyd George was persuaded that imperial Germany represented an intolerable threat in August 1914. For them, isolation was impotence.
We do not get to decide. We do not get to suspend the lunar pull of Europe. We get to argue, negotiate, win, compromise and lose until the end of time. Leaving the European Union is not an end. It is the beginning of more wrangling, more competition, collaboration and codependence.
• Dan Snow is a television presenter and historian