Britain today, in 2008, has been part of the European idea for thirty-five years. The EEC has become the European Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union’s control of the countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, combined with the reunification of Germany in 1990, has fuelled its expansion on an unexpected scale. There are twenty-seven members with three more waiting to join. One of these is Turkey whose candidacy is highly controversial: a former French President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, declared that Turkey was ‘not a European country’ and that its membership of the eu would mean ‘the end of Europe’. Meanwhile the member states have committed, under the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, to strengthen the organisation and institutions of the Union, giving more power to its parliament, appointing a new President of the European Council and extending its activities to include defence. In Britain, and in some other countries, there has been strong opposition to these reforms being introduced without ordinary people approving them through a popular vote. The idea of the war-torn nations of Europe embracing one another in an act of self-protective friendship has grown into a vast multi-national conglomerate. It has turned European history on its head; the historic rivalries of individual sovereign states have been abandoned in a surge of democratic optimism; ‘Europe’ is as influential in the life of the modern British citizen as Britain itself.
Britain has always been a bit unsure about its feelings towards the rest of Europe. It grew out of it and then away from it: its real power came ultimately from an empire which had few roots in the European continent. It also came to believe that its political development was different from its continental neighbours. The Victorian historian Macaulay, for instance, argued that Britain had avoided the upheavals of the revolutions which affected several European nations in 1848 because it possessed a constitution founded on precepts of liberty. ‘All around us,’ he wrote in his History of England, ‘the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations … It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy.’ Macaulay believed the history of England to be a history of progress – beneficial progress at that. In the twentieth century his views fell out of fashion but today they are being reconsidered. Britain did not succumb to either communism or fascism: does this not tell us that an innate belief in liberty lies deep in its roots?
The French view of Britain
In March 2008 the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, paid a state visit to Britain. He was a President in a new mould, very different from the sort of men who had held power in France since the end of the Second World War. To many British eyes the main thing that set him apart from his predecessors was his glamorous Italian wife, a former model and singer, whom he had recently married after his second divorce. But if they had eyes only for his wife, their ears burned with what he had to say about the relationship between France and Britain. In a speech to the combined Houses of Parliament on 26th March, Nicolas Sarkozy spoke in a way no other French President had done before. Ever since Charles de Gaulle had refused to allow British entry into the Common Market, the leaders of France had always displayed a certain froideur in their dealings with Britain – friendly but invariably slightly cool. Sarkozy’s approach was completely different.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant who fled from his homeland to France as the Red Army marched westwards in 1945, the new President instinctively recognised Britain’s wartime achievements, and had no trouble in talking about them. ‘I want to say something on behalf of the French people,’ he said. ‘France won’t forget. France will never forget that when she was verging on annihilation it was Britain who was at France’s side … We haven’t forgotten because we haven’t the right to forget what young Britons did for the freedom of the French people … France will never forget the British people’s heroic resistance, without which all would have been lost.’
With a few passionate words, President Sarkozy sought to blow away the diffidence that had been the hallmark of Franco-British relations for sixty years. Ironically, it was exactly two years to the day since his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, marched out of a European Union summit meeting in disgust after a fellow Frenchman insisted in making a presentation in English because, he said, it was ‘the language of business’. In the European Union, unity has often been a fragile affair: Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech gave new and unusual strength to Britain’s relationship with France.
By the end of the nineteenth century, secure in the wealth of Empire, Britain preferred isolation to involvement. In the twentieth it fought against German militarism and saved Europe from tyranny. But it still harboured suspicion of the motives of some European countries long after that fight was over. Margaret Thatcher, to date Britain’s longest-serving post-war Prime Minister, was determined to prevent ‘a European super state exercising a new dominance from Brussels’. Today ‘Europe’ is still a place which for many British people means ‘somewhere else’.
If the European Union is to succeed it will have to convince not only the people of Britain, but those of other countries too, that they are better off relinquishing some of their sovereignty in return for the benefits of being part of something bigger. To the kings, queens, politicians, writers, artists and historians who helped build the British nation from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the notion of losing national status would have been unthinkable. They devoted their energies to the idea of a Britain which was proud, independent and free. But if you go further back, to the days of Henry II, or William the Conqueror, or even Alfred the Great, it does not seem so incredible. In those days Europe’s regional borders were altogether more flexible. The nation state as we understand it today did not exist. Places and peoples were merged as required under the authority of victorious kings. The European Union marks another great turn in the wheel of history: nobody yet knows to where it might roll.
Each evening at precisely 8 o’clock, three, sometimes four, members of the volunteer fire brigade in the town of Ypres in Belgium pick up their silver bugles and sound ‘The Last Post’ at the Menin Gate. The Gate is a memorial to the soldiers who lost their lives in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and whose bodies were never found. I filmed this ceremony for the BBC some years ago. To stand in front of the memorial listening to the plaintive sound of ‘The Last Post’ as your eyes scan the names of nearly 55,000 soldiers who have no grave is an intensely moving experience. A small Belgian town, a great memorial and a simple ceremony combine to express the colossal sadness of war.
Human beings can probably make no greater sacrifice than to die for their country, however wrongheaded the conflict in which they find themselves might be. In the history of Britain, millions of men and women have died in this way. Sometimes they have died in acts of aggression, sometimes in acts of defence; sometimes they have fought for national salvation, sometimes they have found themselves caught up in futile power struggles. Whatever the reason, their deaths were part of British history. The story of the battles in which they died is a central part of the story of who we, the British, are.
This chapter starts in 1415 with one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Agincourt, which began the last phase of the so-called Hundred Years’ War against France. Britain’s ambitions to rule France declined after Agincourt and domestic problems