Britain and Europe

Great Britain has always been an unfinished nation. Both the outgoing and the incoming Prime Minister have promised to complete it with new constitutional arrangements, all the while still employing the rhetorical force of ‘nationhood’. As phoney debates about ‘Britishness’ are launched and re-launched, in the space opened by the vacuous noise pro-European voices should be making themselves heard. The unresolved status of Britishness yields both the possibility for the birth of a new paradigm and the danger of retrenchment. The current government has, for the most part, preferred the false safety of the prolonged interregnum. It is part of the task of pro-Europeans to foster the conditions for the birth of the new.

There is an argument to say that the debate must start with the status of Englishness, that insecure, nostalgic chimera which conjures the problem of Britishness. But to start here would be always to chase reality with one’s head turned away: Englishness looks only backwards, and it is already outdated and exclusive amongst Britain’s contemporary demographic. Critical national history is undeniably vital and presently lacking, but what lacks above all from the political discourse of all European countries is brave experimentation with future possibilities and configurations: this is what the ‘identity’ debate must become, and the only thing that would genuinely count as having it.

At the beginnings of what is now 10 years in power, the Labour government showed some limited signs of engaging bravely with new European politics: Tony Blair stood beside Jacques Chirac at St Malo in 1998 to introduce the possibility of a real common foreign policy to the European discourse; the government have ceaselessly pushed for CAP reform, and not always for the wrong reasons; only recently has the government’s support for enlargement started to flag (with the closing of the doors to Romanians and Bulgarians). In many ways the government has later undermined many of these earlier achievements, but the most significant failing is to have never promoted a positive, engaged national discourse about Europe. Instead it has allowed the debate to become increasingly poisoned, and at times it has fed itself from that poison.

The clamour for a national referendum on Europe is rising again, with the claim being that avoiding any such referendum is undemocratic. Yet to insist that holding a referendum in the current climate would be democratic is to have too facile an understanding of democracy, as if whatever the majority says at any time should go all the time. What should be promoted is an engaged and intelligent national debate, and a referendum is not at the moment the way to achieve that. The interest of the anti-European lobby in staging one has little to do with democracy, and everything to do with opportunism.

Both sides are to blame. It was from the cowardice of not facing down the Euro-obsessed Tory party in 1997 that the referendum promise arrived: the unfulfilled promise to do the arguing later.

Ultimately the responsibility lies with pro-European civil society and business, which must urgently find new ways of organising itself. In the past these movements have lacked ambition, imagination and breadth. They have also, ironically, lacked trans-national dimensions. Now, in many countries of Europe, they find themselves in increasingly hostile conditions. Paradoxically, these conditions simultaneously offer some of the greatest political possibilities since the end of the Second World War. There is a renewal of politics being attempted once again throughout the Western democracies of Europe. Despite all appearances otherwise, Britain, through its permanently unresolved identity, offers one paramount potentiality for making of this renewal a genuinely new phase in European history. That opportunity will not be open indefinitely, it must be taken now.

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