RE: “Ten years after the EU referendum, Britain is more European than ever” (The Economist, March 14th) and “Destination Brussels” (The Economist, March 21st). Apparently, after realising that the hit to Britain’s GDP may be as high as 8%, Britons would vote to rejoin the EU by a margin of 52% to 29% (YouGov poll). According to the magazine, London is searching for a rapprochement with Brussels, but with a certain vagueness. The European answer could thus be, as before, “charming sentiment, now tell us what you really want?”. That is the problem because the UK doesn’t really know what it wants. Being out of the EU, it felt rejected, then being in, opting out and asking for its money back it felt trapped, when leaving it felt so relieved, and now, after ten years in the wild world it feels lost and wants in again. That is, not really in nor really out, but closer somehow. Where does this particular British state of mind, that Victor Hugo would have described as tempête sous un crâne, comes from?
In his 1998 book, “This Blessed Plot”, Hugo Young describes the political situation of the UK in 1949, just after WWII. “On the one hand, there was Churchill’s word. Proud nation. Inventive people. Stubborn, stoical, self-confident people. Future stretching indefinitely ahead. Second great power of the western world watching with sympathy, seldom and alarm, the efforts of its neighbours across the Channel to remake themselves. Europe a place to which the British felt ineffable superiority”. On the other hand, there was the world of Henry Tizard, chief scientific adviser to the ministry of defence: “We persist in regarding ourselves as a Great Power capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties. We are not a Great Power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation”. Excruciating dilemma: a Great Power could not join the EU as a mere member, but a great nation could be one of its most important members and influence it. In 1959, Harold Mc Millan, then Prime Minister, put the “awful truth in worlds”: “ For the first time since the Napoleonic era, the major continental powers are united in a positive economic grouping which may have the effect of excluding us both from European markets and from consultation on European policy. The common market, it has to be admitted, is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future; the question is, how to live with it economically, and turn its political effects into channels harmless to us”.
Maybe Great Britain could get some help from Marx as regard its uneasy relationship with the European Club. Not Karl, the bearded German philosopher, but the other one, Groucho, who once said “I would never joint a club that would accept me as a member”.