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Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.

Margaret Thatcher, Bruges, 20 September 1988

The idea of Britain existing separately from Europe is a familiar feature of modern British culture. In daily speech, from football matches to weather forecasts, the two terms are often used to denote distinct entities. This has also been a trope of political rhetoric, from the long debate in the 1960s about whether Britain should ‘join’ Europe, via the 1975 referendum about whether to ‘stay in’, and on to the Brexit vote in 2016 to ‘leave’. Of course, ‘Europe’ here signifies a specific political organisation – the EEC or the EU – but much of the political debate has drawn on a narrative about Britain’s historic and special character compared with the Continent.

One of the most celebrated speeches about Britain’s non-European identity was delivered by Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, to the party’s annual conference in Brighton in October 1962. He spoke at length about the conditions that would have to be fulfilled before Labour could agree to join the ‘Common Market’ – especially changes to the Common Agricultural Policy, which he denounced as ‘one of the most devastating pieces of protectionism ever invented’ – and he stressed Britain’s obligations to the Commonwealth. Gaitskell’s conclusion was that the arguments for British entry were ‘evenly balanced’ and that ‘whether or not it is worth going in depends on the conditions of our entry’. He did not conceal his anger at the way Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government seemed hell-bent on joining, despite the costs to the Commonwealth. Yet what caught the headlines was not Gaitskell’s judicious weighing up of pros and cons but his emotional soundbites.[1]

For instance, he warned about a two-faced Europe, of which Britain had good historic reasons to be wary. ‘For although, of course, Europe has had a great and glorious civilisation, although Europe can claim Goethe and Leonardo, Voltaire and Picasso, there have been evil features in European history, too – Hitler and Mussolini … You cannot say what this Europe will be: it has its two faces and we do not know as yet which is the one which will be dominant.’ The ‘ideal of Federal Europe’ also stuck in the Labour leader’s gullet. This meant that ‘if we go into this we are no more than a state (as it were) in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California … it would be the same as in Australia, where you have Western Australia, for example, and New South Wales. We should be like them. This is what it means; it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state.’ And with that transformation would come, Gaitskell believed, a repudiation of Britain’s historic identity: ‘It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say “Let it end” but, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought … For we are not just a part of Europe – at least not yet. We have a different history. We have ties and links which run across the whole world.’[2]

A couple of months later this kind of British rhetoric about a thousand years of history and a global destiny was picked up by Dean Acheson – who had served as US Secretary of State of State in 1949–53 at height of the Cold War. Acheson’s line about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role – quoted at the start of this book – has now become notorious, but the background story is important. In 1962, Acheson – now a crusty elder statesman – was asked to deliver the keynote address to a student conference at the US Military Academy at West Point on 5 December. He made his usual pitch about the importance of the Atlantic Alliance, and the speech attracted little attention in the United States. But embedded in a section about some of the problems facing Western Europe, was the single paragraph on Britain that proved incendiary:

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength, and enjoys a precarious economic relationship by means of the Sterling Area and preferences in the British market – this role is about played out. Great Britain, attempting to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power. H.M.G. [Her Majesty’s Government] is now attempting – wisely, in my opinion – to reenter Europe, from which it was banished at the time of the Plantagenets, and the battle seems to be about as hard-fought as were those of an earlier day.[3]

That whole paragraph is worth quoting both because of its contemptuous dismissal of the Commonwealth, the Sterling Area and Britain’s Cold War diplomacy and also because of its (now rather uncanny) prediction that Britain’s attempt to enter the EEC might presage another Hundred Years’ War. Above all, however, it was the epigram about Britain losing an empire without finding a role that caught the eye in London and provoked an outcry in Tory circles. The Express denounced this American ‘stab in the back’ of its devoted ally; the Telegraph observed snidely that Acheson had always been ‘more immaculate in dress than in judgement’.[4] And because the former Secretary of State was deemed to be close to President Kennedy, the Prime Minister himself felt it necessary to offer his own capsule narrative of British history, to placate his party and what he called ‘the “patriotic” elements in the country’. Macmillan declared that ‘Mr Acheson has fallen into an error which has been made by quite a lot of people in the course of the last four hundred years, including Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler.’[5]

An Evening Standard cartoon showing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan begging President John F. Kennedy to let him be the back legs of the American pantomime horse, while Dean Acheson looks on from the wings.

Acheson never retracted his argument but he did later express regret about how he had expressed it – albeit in a typically sardonic manner. ‘The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull,’ he told an interviewer in 1970, adding that this was ‘not always easy to achieve’. He admitted that the controversial sentence in his West Point speech suffered from being too epigrammatic and quotable. ‘If I’d taken twice the number of words to express it, it would have been inoffensive and recognised as true at once. Since then it has been adopted by almost every British politician, though they have never given me credit for it at all.’[6]

Acheson was right: his one-liner about losing empire and not yet finding a role became almost a cliché of British commentary, especially for those who wanted Britain to join ‘Europe’.[7] Yet the emotional invocations of national history by Gaitskell and Macmillan reflect an abiding counter-strain, which re-emerged, for instance, at the time of German unification in 1989–90. ‘We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,’ Margaret Thatcher exclaimed during a European summit in December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall was breached.[8] Her close friend Nicholas Ridley vented similar feelings splenetically to a Spectator journalist, calling the European monetary union ‘a German racket, designed to take over the whole of Europe’ and exclaiming that, as for handing over sovereignty to the EC, ‘you might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ The Spectator gleefully ran the interview as a cover story, graced by a poster of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl daubed with a Hitler moustache, and Ridley was obliged to resign from the Cabinet. So Boris Johnson’s battle cry in 2016 that the British must again be ‘heroes of Europe’ and stand up to German domination was more of the same. The Telegraph headlined that story: ‘Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did’.[9]

To make some sense of these potted narratives we need to take in more than the Second World War and its aftermath, and look across the broad sweep of Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years’. An appropriate way to do so is by reflecting on the ‘English Channel’. Although this figures much less in the narratives of Welsh or Scottish history (defined by the Marches or the Borders) and hardly at all for Ireland (across the Irish Sea), the Channel has come to symbolise the Britain–Europe divide: a maritime frontier etched out in the White Cliffs of Dover. But we need a more fluid understanding of the Channel within ‘our island story’ – a more nuanced perspective on Britain’s changing interactions with a changing Continent.