And not just its future; also its past. How should we tell the story of British history in the light of the referendum? Had the turn to ‘Europe’ in 1973 been just a blind alley? Or was the 2016 vote mere nostalgia for a world we (thought we) had lost? Bemused by both future and past, Brexit-era Britons feel challenged about their sense of national identity – because identity has to be rooted in a clear feeling about how we became what we are.
This is not a book about Brexit – its politics and negotiations: these will drag on for years. Instead, I ponder how to think about Britain’s history in the light of the Brexit debate. Because the country’s passionate arguments about the European Union raised big questions about the ways in which the British understand their past. About which moments they choose to celebrate and which to blot out. And about how to construct a national narrative linking past, present and future. Or, more exactly, national narratives – plural – because a central argument of this book is that there is no single story to be told – whatever politicians may wish us to believe.
For a century, there was a dominant national narrative: about the expansion of Britain into a global empire. In 1902 – after victory over the Boers in South Africa – the poet A. C. Benson added words to Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance ‘March No. 1’, extolling the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’:
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,
God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet
But after two world wars and rapid decolonisation, the ‘ever-mightier’ imperial theme rang hollow. In 1962, Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, declared that Britain had ‘lost an empire’ but ‘not yet found a role’.[1] Over the next decade British leaders – Tory and Labour – tried to join the European Economic Community. But two French vetoes from President Charles de Gaulle blocked their way and it was not until 1973 that the UK (together with Ireland and Denmark) eventually became a member of the EEC. Even though Britain was always an ‘awkward partner’[2] – protesting about the size of its budget contributions and the EEC’s obsession with farm subsidies – for the next four decades or so the narrative did seem clear: the British had lost a global empire but found a European role.
But in 2016 that new role suddenly also seemed to be lost. During the referendum debate, various historical precedents and patterns were invoked to help frame Brexit Britain’s historical self-understanding. Much cited was ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Second World War. Leaving the EU ‘would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had’, declared billionaire Peter Hargreaves, a financier of Brexit. ‘It will be like Dunkirk again … Insecurity is fantastic.’[3] Developing the 1940 theme, Tory politician Boris Johnson asserted that the past 2,000 years of European history had been characterised by repeated attempts to unify Europe under a single government in order to recover the continent’s lost ‘golden age’ under the Romans. ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,’ he claimed. ‘The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.’ The villains of the piece, in Johnson’s view, were once again the Germans. ‘The Euro has become a means by which superior German productivity is able to gain an absolutely unbeatable advantage over the whole Eurozone.’ He depicted Brexit as ‘a chance for the British people to be the heroes of Europe and to act as a voice of moderation and common sense, and to stop something getting in my view out of control … It is time for someone – it’s almost always the British in European history – to say, “We think a different approach is called for”.’[4]
Also touted as a historical guide for Britain’s future was the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’ – influenced by Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples from the 1950s – and even the concept of an ‘Imperial Federation’ with the ‘White Dominions’, as proposed by Joseph Chamberlain in the 1900s. Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts was one of those advocating CANZUK – a confederation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – as potentially ‘the third pillar of Western Civilisation’, together with the USA and the EU. He argued that that ‘we must pick up where we left off in 1973’ when the ‘dream of the English-speaking peoples’ was ‘shattered by British entry into the EU’. Theresa May spoke in a similarly expansive vein when outlining her government’s vision of Brexit. ‘June the 23rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.’ Although stating that she was ‘proud of our shared European heritage’, May insisted: ‘we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union.’[5]
Here were hints of how Brexit might be seen in historical perspective: as the latest attempt to resist a continental tyrant, or as the chance to resume a global role that had been rudely interrupted by joining the EU. But neat historical analogies are not adequate. Nor are simplified benchmarks like 1940 or 1973. We need to probe more deeply what is still often called ‘our island story’ – and to do so with greater geographical breadth and over a longer time span – in order to gain some perspective on the Brexit malaise.
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Our Island Story was the title of Henrietta Marshall’s best-selling History of England for Boys and Girls, first published in 1905. In 2010 the education secretary Michael Gove told the Tory party conference that he would ‘put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum’, so that ‘all pupils will learn our island story’. In 2014 Prime Minister David Cameron lauded Marshall’s stirring account of the country’s inexorable progress towards liberty, law and parliamentary government.[6] But today a simple ‘Whiggish’ narrative is implausible. This is a book about ‘stories’, plural – about different ways in which to see our complicated past. In particular, we need to move beyond the idea of a self-contained ‘island’, portrayed as adopting various roles over the centuries – empire, Europe, the globe – as if these could be tried on and then taken off, like a suit of clothes. In reality, ‘we’ have been ‘made’ by empire, Europe and the world as much as the other way round.
And the ‘we’ – the United Kingdom – has also been a shifting entity, a historically conflicted archipelago, comprising more than six thousand islands, and not a unitary fixed space occupied by a people whom many in England still tend to call, interchangeably, ‘British’ or ‘English’. [7] In particular, ‘our island story’ omits Ireland – ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as George Bernard Shaw entitled his satirical comedy of 1904 about an English con man who dupes Irish villagers into mortgaging their homes so he can turn the place into an amusement park. Ireland was brought under English rule in the Norman period but never really subdued, despite the Acts of Union in 1801. Its centuries of turmoil and tragedy, in turn, had a profound impact on the island of Britain.
This, then, is a book about history, framed by geography. But it is also a book about ways of thinking, because being ‘islanded’ is a state of mind.[8] The English Channel did not always seem a great divide: for four centuries the Anglo-Norman kings ruled a domain that straddled