Beyond Awkwardness: England, Europe and the End of Integration

This chapter suggests that we have moved beyond mere ‘awkwardness’ in United Kingdom-European Union relations into something new.

The United Kingdom’s Challenge to Europeanisation

Chris Gifford and Karine Tournier-Sol (eds.)

‘Beyond Awkwardness: England, the European Union and the

end of integration’

Ben Wellings

Introduction

This chapter argues that we have moved beyond mere

‘awkwardness’ in United Kingdom-European Union relations

and into something new. This argument is driven in part

by a sense that what observers call the ‘Europeanisation’

of British politics has gone so far that European

integration has altered the face of British politics in a

fundamental way. It is also driven by the observation

that it is increasingly difficult to see the politics of

European integration and British disintegration as

distinct and separate processes.

The argument that we have moved ‘beyond awkwardness’

proceeds in two ways.

Firstly that we have witnessed a fundamental change in

British politics caused by European integration but

concomitantly that resistance to European integration

from Britain has altered the EU. Secondly, we have also

seen the beginnings of a British re-orientation away from

Europe and beyond the Atlantic towards the old

It is impossible to understand the politics of Britain’s place within the EU without an understanding of the politics of nationalism within the UK.

1


Commonwealth and the so-called ‘Anglosphere’. Thus this

chapter also argues that it is impossible to understand

the politics of Britain’s place within the European Union

without an understanding of the politics of nationalism

within the United Kingdom. The move ‘beyond awkwardness’

in Europe is driven by the increasing awkwardness of the

United Kingdom itself.

The Anatomy of Awkwardness

The expression ‘awkward partner’, coined by Stephen

George in his book of the same name, appeared first in

1990 with a second edition published in 1998 (George,

1998). The durability of George’s phrase rested upon the

concept of ‘awkward’: a wonderfully British (although

actually a middle class, southern English) disposition.

It is also a concept described in Kate Fox’s

anthropological study of the English and one that she

describes as a ‘social dis-ease’ (Fox, 2004: 400) that

can be mitigated only by alcohol, what the French call le

beuverie express. Like the idea of Britain as a ‘semi-

detached’ member of the EU, the brilliance of the concept

of ‘awkwardness’ rested on a link between the tenor and

history of UK-EU relations with attitudes and experiences

of the warp and weft of everyday life in Britain. And it

was not just the British who saw things this way either.

As Karine Tounier-Sol has pointed out the French press

regularly equated the terms “Britishness” and

“Euroscepticism”, noting in language that would be a


2


credit to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that for

many years the French have characterised the notion of

“Britishness” as ‘involving a certain amount of

reluctance’ towards any form of political integration

(Tournier-Sol, 2011: 151). Similarly for Pauline

Schnapper the UK-EU relationship remained le grand malentendu

(Schnapper, 2000): perpetually fascinating and no less

puzzling.

The real import of this concept was to (perhaps

inadvertently) shift attention onto national identity and

nationalism as a dynamic in UK-EU relations, thus opening

up new conceptual frameworks with which to approach the

question of Britain’s relations with and within the

European Union. In particular the relationship between

nationalism(s) and Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom

is one that should be studied, a case I have tried to

make elsewhere (Wellings, 2012; Wellings, 2010) because

debates about European integration play a strong

formative role in expressions of nationhood. Claudia

Schrag Sternberg argues that ‘the history of discursive

contests over EU legitimacy needs to be seen in dialogue

with the history of contests over related concepts such

as democracy, citizenship and identity’ (Schrag

Sternberg, 2013: 4), all of which get bound up in debates

about EU membership throughout the UK and especially in

England. Similarly, Sophia Vasilopoulou also suggests

that such an approach advances an understanding of the


3


impact of Euroscepticism on what she calls ‘identity’

(Vasilopoulou, 2013: 188), but we might also note that the

process works the other way round: that nationalism or

identity also has an impact on the content and character

of Euroscepticism(s) across the EU.

In a broader sense, regarding the politics of nationalism

within member-states as an important dynamic in the

relations between member-states and the EU fits in well

with the notion of Euroscepticism as a ‘persistent and

embedded phenomenon’ in contemporary European politics

(Startin and Usherwood, 2013), the emergence of which

since the early 1990s correlates nicely with the current

round of nationalist politics within the United Kingdom.

Such a focus would also help address a gap in the

literature on the history of European integration

identified by Wolfram Kaiser. Research on European

integration has, in his view, ‘failed to make sufficient

connections with either domestic contestation of EU

policies or the Europeanization impact of integration on

the member-states, their politics and societies’ (Kaiser,

2010: 48). An analysis of UK-EU relations is well placed

to address these concerns, where domestic contestation of

the EU is high (and not just in relation to specific

policies) and the historical impact on politics and

political parties runs deep. Whilst being distinctive,

the national contestation of European integration in the

United Kingdom is not an exotic outlier, but is part of a


4


picture of contestation and support for the EU that rests

heavily on national contexts [Conti, 2014: 11]. But we

should also note that in the case of the UK, the domestic

politics of nationalism has ‘spilled up’ to impact on the

pace and direction of European integration too. Michael

Kenny notes that ‘populist forms of Englishness signify a

sullen, two-fingered response to the political

establishment and its values … affording a rhetorically

rich framework for expressing a form of collective self-

understanding’ (Kenny, 2014: 118). Much of this

hostility is directed at the European Union, something

that is part of the establishment but increasingly seen

as alien to it. Thus the ‘indifference’ towards European

integration identified by Virginie van Ingelgom (2014:

15) has become more actively hostile in the UK and

especially (southern) England.

The narrative of this ‘awkwardness’ is well known. The

problems are historical and political rather than

technical, and are not about non-compliance since the UK

was well below the EU27 average for infringements of EU

law up to 2010 (McCormick, 2011: 137). The dominant

narrative of UK-EU relations stresses a profound

ambiguity if not hostility towards the project of

European integration. From Messina, de Gaulle’s veto,

the 1975 referendum, Thatcher’s attitude to the ‘BBQ’

(British Budgetary Question or ‘Bloody British

Question’), the temerity of the Bruges Speech, the ‘Beef


5


Wars’ of 1996, the unwillingness to adopt the euro,

participation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, all the

way through to Gordon Brown’s tardy arrival to sign the

Treaty of Lisbon in 2007 and David Cameron’s EU speech in

2013, it is easy to construct a story of British hauteur

and semi-detachment. In Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes’ terms

(Bevir and Rhodes, 2006: 7-11), when faced with policy

dilemmas (and British participation in Europe was always

framed as a political ‘choice’ of the highest order),

policy-makers opted for traditions such as Atlanticism

and isolation over (European) innovation. The most

important structural consequence of these choices was, as

Chris Gifford has argued, the missing European rescue of

the British nation-state and a conditional acceptance of

the European project (Gifford, 2008). As Jeremy Black

noted, in ideological and ideational terms this meant

that Britons eventually joined the European Economic

Community without ever really buying into the broader,

legitimating myths of European integration (Black, 1994:

267).

Part of this ‘awkwardness’ stemmed from the dominant

interpretation of European integration circulating in

Britain. The current Conservative emphasis on the Single

Market was a product of the historic understanding that

the raison d’être of an integrated Europe was to do with

trade and economics. This, as Andrew Geddes pointed out,

left British understandings of European unity poorly


6


equipped to contemplate or comprehend any sort of finalité

beyond market integration (Geddes, 2004: 192). Perhaps

we should not expect anything more from a nation of

shopkeepers, but the endurance of this interpretation had

political consequences. Writing in Les Echos in the wake

of David Cameron’s speech on Britain and the EU in

January 2013, Jean-Marc Vittori expressed exasperation

that the UK persistently saw the EU as one big market:

The UK has been a brake for the EU for a long time. It now

risks becoming [the EU’s] ball and chain… Europe without

the UK would do better than the UK without Europe. Since

no exclusion procedure exists, we can only hope that the

British themselves decide their eviction by referendum in

2017. With one brake less, Europe will then have more

chances to accelerate (Vittori, 2013).

Vittori was not alone in this view. The former Dutch

minister for economics, Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, wrote

that ‘David Cameron’s speech not only confirmed Britain’s

history of half-hearted EU membership but added a new

dimension to it. He has decided to play Russian

roulette, with the bullet in his revolver being the

termination of UK membership of the EU’ (Brinkhorst,

2013). Cameron, however, was mindful of domestic party

politics as well as media and public opinion. Fearful of

losing both sovereignty and political identity in a

crisis-bound Union that appeared to be displaying

centralizing tendencies, politicians, commentators and


7


voters in the United Kingdom sought to reassert an

autonomy that they feared losing. Ultimately Cameron’s

commitment to a referendum (with all its caveats) left

the EU facing the very real possibility of the secession

of one of its constituent parts and a potential break-up

of the Union in its current form.

Britain [England]: the ‘Scotland of Europe’

All of these concerns had a familiar ring to them. Like

the EU, the United Kingdom was a political and economic

union and one that was undergoing increasing pressures

from secessionist parties, most notably in Scotland.

There, a broad-based nationalist movement that appeared

moribund at the end of the 1970s had revived in the late

1980s. Fearful of losing both sovereignty and political

identity in a crisis-bound Union that appeared to be

displaying centralizing tendencies, politicians,

commentators and voters in Scotland sought to reassert an

autonomy that they feared losing. Although the reform-

oriented versions of Scottish nationalism were divided

between home-rulers and secessionists, the victory of the

home rule movement in 1997 paved the institutional way

for the political victory of the secessionists at

elections to the Scottish Parliament in 2011. Ultimately

David Cameron’s commitment to a referendum on Scottish

independence in 2014 left the United Kingdom facing the

very real possibility of the secession of one of its


8


constituent parts and a potential break-up of the Union

in its current form.

This similarity opens some fruitful ground for analysis.

European integration theory set its own limits of enquiry

at the moment when integration was what was most

interesting about Europe; the so-called ‘dependent

variable’ in analyses of European integration. Today,

understanding the potential for disintegration appears

just as interesting and urgent as comprehending

integration, or at least some sort of movement towards

the inter-relationship between the two. Writing in 2008

on ‘the end of integration’ in Europe, Paul Taylor argued

that a historical understanding of British integration

was a useful comparator and an aid in understanding the

state of European integration today (Taylor, 2008: 107).

Of course, whether we can usefully compare the EU with

anything is an old chestnut in EU studies. Giandomenico

Majone argued that we cannot since such a comparison will

be based on an ‘analogical fallacy’ (Majone, 2009: xx).

Other authors disagreed: Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovani and

Ben Rosamond argued that such thinking leads to an

intellectual dead-end,1 whilst Annmarie Elijah and John

Leslie demonstrated the value of comparative analysis

advancing the notion that n does indeed =>1 (Elijah and

Leslie, 2012). Thus it is important to consider the

1 Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Debates on European Integration: a reader, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 97; Ben Rosamond, Theories of European Integration,


9


politics of British and European disintegration together

as in many ways Britain has now become ‘the Scotland of

the Europe’: vocally different, proud of this difference

and with a significant minority of voters pushing for

secession.

Such comparative analysis reveals Britain is both a

casual factor and a theoretical model when considering

European disintegration. Much of the theorizing about

what we might call ‘British integration’ was generated at

moments when Britain appeared to be in terminal decline

or at some moment of passing, or – in the language of the

New Left – undergoing some sort of ‘crisis’. For much of

the United Kingdom’s three hundred year existence, the

idea was precisely not to theorize its existential

qualities – Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution being the

exception – but instead to concentrate on its functional

qualities; an approach that both reflected and informed

the developing ideology of Conservatism.

Like those who chose to govern, or who found themselves

in charge of, the EU, the rulers of the United Kingdom

also needed to manage and overcome existential crises in

the polity’s formative years, in addition to managing

potential competing nationalisms developing within its

physical and ideological borders. Democracy was not a

consideration at the time of the UK’s long formation in

the eighteenth century, but as pressures for reform and


10


representation grew after the French Revolution and

Napoleonic Wars, those in charge also need to manage

these social challenges. In historical terms, these

social and national challenges were managed with a degree

of success that stood in stark contrast to the states of

Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Great

War, Irish secession notwithstanding. Added to this was

the survival of the British state in the two great

conflicts of the twentieth century. This history

provided an integrating mythology based on a quality that

only those who are victorious but have teetered on the

brink of collapse can truly appreciate: endurance. As

Oliver Daddow has shown, it was this version of the past

that came to dominate British thinking on political

integration in and with the EU despite – or because of –

New Labour’s attempts to change it (Daddow, 2011: 230).

What the UK had, and that the EU currently lacks, was

time: a piece of good fortune that Enoch Powell called

‘the slow alchemy of centuries’ (cited in Heffer, 1998:

336). The United Kingdom’s endurance allowed its

supporters to impute its survival with proof of its own

legitimacy (Providential or otherwise). The longer the

British state rode out the social, political and military

challenges that it faced, the more legitimacy it accrued,

even if its detractors could point to its longevity as a

sign of approaching senility rather than that of

venerable old age. Over the years, the elements of this


11


survival became known to historians as ‘Britishness’ and

to political scientists as ‘the British Political

Tradition’ (BPT), concepts that both sought to explain

the durability of the British state and its associated

national consciousness and overlapped in their analysis

of the place of Parliamentary sovereignty in binding the

peoples and political cultures of the United Kingdom

together.

In contrast there is only a weak version of what we might

call the ‘EPT’ (or European Political Tradition) that

might hold the EU together in times of crisis. Of

course, we may be witnessing the formation of just such

an EPT as the Eurozone crisis unfolds. But what is

different again if we contrast Britain with the EU is

that the EU’s crises come at a time when support for

integration is at an historic low (Taylor, 2008: 24-49).

[Bruter and Harrison here.] Contemporary European

consciousness, having developed since the War in a

tension between support for state and national

sovereignty and a form of European identity sufficient to

legitimise the emerging political structures of the EU,

has not been able to set down the deep roots that

Britishness was able to do over the three centuries from

the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England that

created the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

European Integration and British Disintegration


12


[Europe: the view from Bedfordshire]

Sovereignty – or rather sovereignties, both competing and

complimentary – are important in all this. Chris Gifford

has identified three dimensions to British sovereignty

that have traditionally framed and conditioned Britain’s

relationship with the EU and that have operated across

party lines. The first is the idea of sovereignty as a

political principle understood as ‘parliamentary

sovereignty’ and incorporating elements of monarchical

sovereignty. The second relates to the notion of popular

sovereignty with connotations of rule by the people,

usually, but not always, within a national community.

The third dimension is that of economic sovereignty

understood as the separation of public power from private

property and the market (Gifford, 2010). The

relationship between Parliamentary and popular

sovereignty, and in turn the relationship between these

forms of sovereignty and nationalism within the United

Kingdom, is the most important one. It is the confluence

of these political streams that frame Britain’s relations

with the EU. Gifford notes that

parliamentary sovereignty in itself is an insufficient

basis for political authority and is increasingly

dependent upon, and should be kept analytically separate

from, the popular legitimation of power… The demands for

greater popular sovereignty have been grafted on to

parliamentary sovereignty without necessarily challenging

its overall supremacy (Gifford, 2010: 323).


13


However, an alternative reading of the relationship

between these two sovereignties might be that popular

sovereignty is in fact now undermining parliamentary

sovereignty (and therefore an important element of the

British Political Tradition) even as popular sovereignty

is invoked in the defence of the British state.

The implications of European integration for British

politics (and in particular parliamentary sovereignty)

were well aired in the decade and a half between the

British government’s first application in 1961-3 and the

referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership

in June 1975. Enoch Powell was most eloquent on the

threat to parliamentary sovereignty – ‘the fact for which

men have fought and died’ as he put it May 1975 (cited in

Wellings, 2012: 131) – but he was not alone. The most

obvious form of political innovation came about with the

use of a referendum to address a UK-wide political issue.

This in itself was both a cause and symptom of a

weakening political tradition. A referendum was only

invoked by the Anti-Marketeers when parliamentary

resistance had failed by 1972 and its eventual adoption

by the Labour Party can be seen as evidence of a

leadership unable to contain the issue within party

procedures as much as an appeal to the People on a matter

of supreme and lasting constitutional importance.

Overall the referendum was seen as something of as un-


14


British innovation usually associated with French

authoritarianism: or, as Norman St John Stevas put it, ‘a

nasty continental aberration’ (cited in Alderson, 1975:

74).

Despite this opprobrium, the ‘continental aberration’ has

recently embedded itself within British politics,

principally via the European Union Act (2011) but also by

David Cameron’s in-out referendum pledge given in January

2013 on Britain’s EU membership. This was because the

referendum offers the potential solution to issues of

popular sovereignty and the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’,

but it has done so at the expense of parliamentary

sovereignty. As Andy Mycock and Richard Hayton have

noted, during their period of opposition in 1997-2010

Conservatives were ‘wary of engaging with an English

nationalist position which could attract accusations of

populism that ran counter to moves to modernise the

party’s image and compete for the political “centre

ground”’ (Mycock and Hayton, 2013: 258). But once in a

power-sharing government, the populism that the party was

wary of entered the British political system as a

response to the politics of European integration in the

United Kingdom.

The EU Act was ostensibly introduced to re-connect the

British people with its political class and processes

following the perceived drift of British policy towards


15


the EU and New Labour’s failure to hold referendums on

the Euro or the Draft Constitutional and Lisbon Treaties,

not to mention the damaging parliamentary expenses

scandal of 2009. The Act itself was designed to prevent

the further ‘ratcheting’ of EU control over British

policy and promised a referendum on any piece of

legislation that the government supported but that was

deemed to involve a transfer of British sovereignty to

the institutions of the European Union. The Act was a

culmination of a trend within Conservative (and in

particular Thatcherite) thinking that had been developing

during the years of opposition, but one that is also

linked to a sense of English (or British) decline

(English, Hayton and Kenny, 2009: 365). As Chris Gifford

noted before the Conservative party returned to power in

coalition with the Lib Dems, ‘At the heart of

contemporary Conservative Euroscepticism is a defence of

the popular sovereignty of the British people against the

incursions of Brussels and against the drive for further

integration’ (Gifford, 2010: 332). Speaking in

Parliament in 2011, Foreign Secretary William Hague

argued that ‘I put it to those who have always enthused

about the prospects for greater European integration that

for this country, the limits of such integration have

been reached - more than reached in my view’ (cited in

Hansards, 2011).


16


This defence of the British people and their way of life

from and expanding EU sovereignty had a paradoxical

effect: it resulted in parliamentary sovereignty being

undermined by popular sovereignty. In seeking to

‘repatriate powers from Brussels’ and reassert

Parliament’s authority in the face of the EU, the EU Act

ensured that Parliament was still no longer the final

arbiter of laws and policy in the land; it merely shifted

that role from the European Union to the people of

Britain at a historical moment when the depth of

Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom might lead one to

assume that any proposal for the further transfer of

sovereignty from Westminster to Brussels was likely to

meet with a resounding “no”. This happy collusion of

assumed public antipathy and Conservative Euroscepticism

was usually justified in terms of an attempt to address

the ‘democratic deficit’ that afflicts the European Union

(and other polities). Speaking in the wake of Cameron’s

referendum pledge, William Hague argued that, ‘We have

reached a point in the United Kingdom where democratic

consent has been gravely weakened by the European Union.

We have to recognise that and deal with that… whatever

the consequences’ (cited in Dominiczak, 2013).

All this could be – and was – interpreted as more

traditional British awkwardness. But something had

changed to make this analysis now only one layer of a

deeper ideational shift that was taking place in the


17


United Kingdom. It would be a mistake to see the

Conservative push for a referendum on Britain’s place in

the EU as coming from a position of strength. Instead it

would be profitable to see the politics of Euroscepticism

in the UK in relation to the historic weakness of

Britishness as this juncture in time. Importantly, the

politics of nationalism in the UK cannot be seen in

isolation from that of Euroscepticism. This claim

applies in particular to the growing articulation of

English nationalism in the past two decades, for it is

here that the politics of British disintegration and

European integration merge.

I have tried to make the case elsewhere that a reaction

to European integration should be seen as the main driver

of contemporary English nationalism. Thus whilst

nationalist movements in other parts of the United

Kingdom, particularly Scotland, were a necessary

condition for the rise of English nationalism they were

not in themselves sufficient; rather the ideological

content of contemporary English nationalism had been

forged in the politics of resistance to European

integration since the 1960s. Thus Euroscepticism can bee

seen as English nationalism by proxy, whereby English

nationalists defend British sovereignty, troubled by

their northern neighbour for sure, but really setting

themselves against the threat to Parliament’s sovereignty


18


and Britain’s way of life from across the Channel

(Wellings, 2012).

In this sense, England’s relations with the European

Union ought to be viewed in the context of the politics

of two forms of integration: British and European. The

rise of English nationalism is most commonly linked with

British disintegration; but it is arguably contributing to

a form of European disintegration too. Either way, if is

increasingly difficult – if not impossible – to view to

politics of the various ‘national questions’ in Britain,

and especially England, in isolation from the politics of

European integration.

For Arthur Aughey, Europe was (and is) ‘a necessary

context’ for contemporary English nationalism (Aughey,

2007: 163). But we have moved beyond the stage where the

EU provides only a context for English nationalism. The

creation of the European of Conservatives and Reformists

(ECR) group in the European Parliament is an example of

the institutionalisation of British Euroscepticism. The

ECR is a group dominated by the Conservatives and a move

made in response to pressure from the Eurosceptic wing of

that party. Similarly, the repatriation of powers from

‘Brussels’ to Westminster was designed, in part, to

mollify the Eurosceptics. The effect of this, however,

was to demonstrate that Britain was now ruled by a party

which could not only dominate its junior coalition


19


partner on this issue, but that the Conservative

leadership was itself accommodating a group of MPs

determined not just to be awkward, but to actively

reverse the direction of European integration.

It is important to note also the constitutive impact that

European integration has on articulations of Englishness.

Some like David Willetts have argued that Englishness is

better equipped to weather the storm of European

integration than Britishness; the latter being ‘a

political identity resting above all on a set of

political institutions … England, at least as a cultural

and social entity, might survive in a federal Europe.

Britain could not’ (Willetts, 2009: 57-9). And this

dynamic should be added to the positioning between

different nationalists in the United Kingdom as they seek

to define themselves against each other. Not unrelated

to the resurgence of Euroscepticism in Britain is the

rise of secessionist nationalism within the UK itself, in

particular in Scotland. Gifford writes: ‘It is

reasonable to conclude that, whether separatist or not, a

pro-Europeanism is being pursued in opposition to the

perceived dominance of what is considered English

Euroscepticism’ (Gifford, 2010: 334). This implies that

we cannot see Britain as the ‘Scotland of Europe’ in a

simple way as Britain itself is changing as a result of

the interactions of different nationalisms and the


20


defence of different sovereignties in different parts of

the realm.

Nous sommes tous Britanniques

One dimension to the notion of ‘awkwardness’ has been the

nagging sense that Britain’s relations with the EU were

always a bit ‘special’ (in the sense of being

significantly different to those of other countries,

rather than supposedly privileged as in the US-UK sense).

However, reactions to Cameron’s EU speech in January 2013

suggest that British attitudes are not as exceptional as

they perhaps once were. This is another way that we have

moved beyond awkwardness, as English Euroscepticism is

leading the charge of a more general and widespread

critique of European integration in contemporary Europe.

Reactions in France to Cameron’s critique of the European

Union were perhaps the most sceptical of the British

Prime Minister’s motives and his call’s consequences.

Some saw the critique as a violation of community norms

and principles of solidarity. ‘You can't do Europe à la

carte’, stated the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius.

‘I'll take an example which our British friends will

understand. Let's imagine Europe is a football club and

you join, but once you're in it you can't say let's play

rugby’ (BBC News, 2013). Such as response, as we have

seen, sat comfortably within an established French

narrative framework for understanding British


21


Euroscepticism and British national identity more

generally.

However in other parts of Europe there were voices in

support. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called it a

‘strong speech’ with good reform ideas (BBC News, 2013).

The Dutch Foreign Minister, Frans Timmermans, stated that

his own government would investigate which policy areas

should be transferred from Europe back to the national

level (BBC News, 2013), a direct reference to the

Conservative policy of repatriation of competencies. The

Czech Prime Minister, Petr Necas, said, ‘We share the

view with the United Kingdom that Europe should be more

flexible, more open, should strive more for confidence

among its citizens’ (BBC News, 2013). This was perhaps

unsurprising since Necas’ party was part of the ECR

grouping along with the Conservatives. What was more

worthy of note was the impact of Cameron’s speech in

Germany. In a country where the bailouts associated with

the Eurozone crisis had politicized the issue of European

integration, even German public opinion-formers had

something positive to say about the speech. The Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung’s (FAZ) Holger Steltzner argued that ‘The

emotional rejection of David Cameron’s keynote Europe

speech proves that the British Prime Minister hit the

bullseye with his warning on the development of the EU’

(Steltzner, 2013).


22


Such responses suggested that something significant had

happened. In 1997, Gordon Brown had suggested that the

British government’s role was to make the EU more British

(cited in Daddow, 2011: 243). Brown had economic reforms

in mind, but the logic spilled over to an ideational

level too. Although little celebrated on its

tercentenary in 2007, the historic success of British

state was an enviable one. It rested in large part on

the creation of a legitimising narrative of Britishness

that resonated in different ways throughout the Union and

on a politic system successfully reformed many times

since 1707. Although grounded in a Protestant worldview

largely superseded, this political identity rested

heavily on the institutions and processes of government

and was a truly successful blend of political and

cultural identity. Echoing Charles Tilly’s argument that

states make war and war makes states (Tilly, 1990: 67),

the prosecution of warfare undoubtedly played a role in

forging a common sense of British identity out of the

pre-existing and co-emergent senses of nationhood that

existed in the kingdoms and principalities within the

British Isles. Linda Colley famously expressed the

argument relating war to the establishment of a sense of

Britishness between 1707 and 1837:

Time and again, war with France brought Britons, whether

they hailed from Wales, Scotland or England into

confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and


23


encouraged them to define themselves collectively against

it (Colley, 1992: 5).

During the twentieth century, Britishness, according to

Paul Ward, was similarly a product of outside, coercive

forces (war prominent among them), but like Colley he

stressed the popular character of the construction of

Britishness, a character that gave it its peculiar

durability [Ward, 2004].

War, or the collective memory and remembrance of it,

certainly plays an important part in the construction and

maintenance of a common European identity too. However,

unlike the British case, it is not so much war against an

identifiable other (be that France, Germany or the Soviet

Union), but war itself that is articulated as the Other

against which Europeans are encouraged to identify as the

foundation of their collective polity. Nor have

Europeans been quite so actively involved in the

construction of a European identity as were Britons in

Colley’s and Ward’s accounts (see Schulz-Forberg and

Stråth, 2010: 26). The awarding of the Nobel Prize for

Peace to the European Union in 2012 is perhaps the best

example and most important endorsement of this long-

standing argument:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it

sees as the EU's most important result: the successful

struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy


24


and human rights. The stabilizing part played by the EU

has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of

war to a continent of peace (Norwegian Nobel Committee,

2012).

The idea that European integration transformed Europe

from a continent of war to a continent of peace has been

criticized on historical grounds (there are other reasons

for the end to inter-state conflict in Europe since 1945)

and for its post hoc ergo procter hoc logic (Majone, 2009: xx).

Nevertheless, linking peace and European integration is a

key component of the EU’s legitimacy and forms the

bedrock of its foundational mythology.

But making the European Union ‘more British’ in this

regard would not be easy. Establishing a ‘European

Political Tradition’ comparable to the BPT and thereby

helping foster a sense of ‘European-ness’ that could

serve the same legitimising function as Britishness in

the time of the EU’s most serious existential crisis to

date, may lack that crucial element of time. Although

there were and are plenty of candidates against whom or

which a European identity could be constructed (the USA,

Russia, Turkey, Islam and possibly now China), such a

sense of identification was unlikely to be forged by

warfare in the way that Britishness was, despite a

growing role for the EU in regional conflicts such as

that in Libya in 2011.


25


This is partly because since 1945 we have entered a new

era in the conduct, political economy and culture of

warfare that Mary Kaldor has describes as ‘new wars’

(Kaldor, 1999). The type of warfare that Charles Tilly

identified as ‘state-making’ and which arguably

contributed to the creation of a sense of Britishness

that Linda Colley revealed through historical research,

appears to have waned. But there are further ideational

reasons. But despite the EU’s Nobel Prize, the narrative

about war remains harder to promote in a changing Union

[Hutchinson, 2014]. Furthermore, as Cecile Leconte has

pointed out, ‘the meta-narrative relying on Franco-German

reconciliation as the normative cornerstone of the

integration process now finds limited echo in an enlarged

EU’ (Leconte, 2011: 272).

This is not to argue however that a European identity is

totally absent. Michael Bruter established that there

was such a thing as mass European identity that was

observable from the 1970s onwards, although this remained

overall rather weak when compared to national

identification (Bruter, 2005). In a different approach,

Monserrat Guibernau argued that it was the very nature of

European identity itself – a ‘non-emotional identity’

(Guibernau, 2007: 115) – that meant that resulted in a

sense of European collectivity being regarded as weaker

that national identities that were assumed to be

emotional.


26


Perhaps the best-known and most politically inspired

sense of European identity drew upon the post-War German

experience and the principle lesson of European history

as a rejection of war. Jürgen Habermas articulated a

specific and pacific European identity as the product of

the European past: ‘the historical rots of a political

profile’ as he (and Jacques Derrida) dubbed it (Habermas

and Derrida, 2005: 10). This built on his notion of

‘constitutional patriotism’, in itself no novelty to the

British in whose Empire such a political concept had

operated, but that disappeared from the rest of Europe in

1918.

The overall sense from these accounts is of a weak

identity in terms of its legitimising function and one

that often appears to compete with national identities

despite rhetoric otherwise. Of course, much the same

could be said of the United Kingdom today. Seen from

Europe, the notion of the BPT or the strength of

Britishness as a robust legitimizing form of identity is

open to question. Those historic elements that sustained

Britishness in the modern era – Empire, industry,

Protestantism, war – have either disappeared, declined or

transformed to such an extent that they can hardly be

seen as solid pillars of the contemporary British

edifice. In this way, the EU and the UK resemble each

other more and more as polities incorporating diverse


27


locations of sovereignty and multiple levels of

governance. Both, as the elections to the European

Parliament in May 2014 showed, display increasing levels

of Eurosceptic mobilisation.

There Is An Alternative: Euroscepticism and the

Anglosphere.

The Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party scored a

major victory when David Cameron conceded to demands to

hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership if the

Conservative were re-elected at the General Election

scheduled for 2015. A corollary of this prospective

disengagement from the EU has been the search for new (or

renewed) political communities to help ease the

transition from Europe to something and somewhere else.

A notable feature of this debate has been the return of

the former Empire and Dominions to British political

consciousness. An increasingly vocal strand of opinion

on the right of British politics regards the

‘Anglosphere’ as a ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ political

community to which greater attention should be devoted

(Sheridan, 2007). Writing in The Spectator, James Forsyth

argued that the rise of what he called the ‘New

Colonials’ such as Mark Carney, Lynton Crosby, Ryan

Coetzee and Andy Flower, in British public life was ‘a

reminder that we are part of a broader English-speaking

world’ (Forsyth, 2013). Noting that ‘you need to go back


28


to wartime Britain, 1940, to find an era where there was

such an influential group of the Monarch’s overseas

subjects’, Forsyth argued that

These new colonials are filling an intellectual gap in

British public life created by the return of the old (and

not much improved) ruling elite. They bring with them a

sense of the frontier spirit, something which has been

largely lost from Britain since the end of empire.

Indeed, in many ways, they represent the discipline,

ingenuity and confidence that were once this nation’s

hallmarks (Forsyth, 2013).

The more complicated the world is, he concluded, ‘the

stronger the bonds of language and the common law become.

In the end, culture trumps geography’ (Forsyth, 2013).

Within political parties, such views were not the sole

preserve of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP),

but were also promoted in the Eurosceptic wing of the

Conservative party too. Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan

passionately promoted the idea of the Anglosphere in a

tour of Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia and New

Zealand in 2012. This trip confirmed for him that ‘the

Anglosphere isn’t fanciful or romantic or passé’.

Rather, ‘there is a continuity of values that is

immediately palpable to anyone who has travelled

elsewhere’ (Hannan, 2012). Listing those values as

‘common law, representative government, private property,


29


control of the executive by the legislature, equality

before the courts, free enterprise, habeas corpus,

residual rights, trail by jury [and] limited government’,

Hannan gave these values as constitutive effect in the

political histories and developments of a common family

of nation-states: ‘Anglosphere values are why Bermuda

isn’t Haiti, why Hong Kong isn’t China, why Singapore

isn’t Indonesia’ (Hannan, 2013).

Some of this could be dismissed as a post-imperial

“fantasy echo” of the Monday Club and US neo-

conservatives given a boost by the military cooperation

between English-speaking countries during the initial

phases of the 2003 invasion of Iraq (the US, the UK and

Australia). However there has been some shift in policy

that gives some substance to the idea of enhanced

cooperation amongst English-speaking countries.

Importantly, some of these mirror EU policies that are

designed to show increasing levels of foreign policy

integration and cooperation.

Speaking in London in 2012, Herman van Rompuy noted that

‘In the past months, a handful of Member States have

asked whether EU Delegations could represent their

countries in certain capitals and, mind you, not only

debt-struck governments! An issue like ‘co-location’ of

Embassies may sound prosaic, but such signs reveal

something essential: that mutual trust is there and


30


growing’ (van Rompuy, 2012). The point made by

supporters of the Anglosphere is that the mutual trust

that needs nurturing in van Rompuy’s account is already

extant amongst English-speaking countries. Indeed the

after 2010, the British government sought especially to

translate the shared understandings and common values

outlined above into concrete policy [ref BJPIR Daddow et

al, 2013].

This renewed emphasis on long-standing and stable (if

somewhat neglected) political relations chimed with calls

for a political re-orientation away from Europe. David

Cameron’s EU speech in London was preceded by a speech by

William Hague in Sydney. Speaking only days before David

Cameron, Hague argued for even greater political

cooperation between Britain and Australia, exemplified by

the regular ministerial-level meetings inaugurated in

2006 under the name of AUKMIN and pursued with enthusiasm

by Hague during his tenure as Foreign Secretary (Hague,

2013). The two speeches were not unrelated. They were

part of a wider strategy that sought alternatives to the

EU as a politics of disengagement and repatriation played

out in Europe. The Singapore FTA was uncontentious and

sat well with the Conservative adherence to free trade

and its narrow understanding of the worth of European

integration. The same was true of the proposed free

trade agreement with the USA (TTIP). However the sharing

of diplomatic premises with Canada and New Zealand (with


31


Australia expected to follow), the sharing of diplomatic

premises in Africa during Australia’s term on the UN

Security Council, and cooperation in new capitals such as

Naypitdaw in Burma was novel and was a privilege

previously restricted to EU partners. As van Rompuy

noted, this kind of cooperation revealed something

essential about mutual trust, this time amongst these

English-speaking countries with shared historical

memories and ones that some within the Conservative party

hoped could constitute a balance or even an alterative to

European integration.

Conclusions

This chapter has sought to argue that Britain – and most

notably England – has moved beyond ‘awkwardness’ in its

relationship with the European Union. It is impossible

to understand the politics of Britain’s place within the

European Union without an understanding of the politics

of nationalism in the United Kingdom. The first way that

Britain has moved ‘beyond awkwardness’ is that there has

been a fundamental shift in relation to Britishness or

the British Political Tradition (BPT) whereby the

politics of European integration have both altered the

BPT and resistance to European integration from Britain

has altered the EU. The second impact, which is a

corollary of the re-orientation away from Europe, is an

attempt to reinvigorate the Commonwealth and the so-


32


called ‘Anglosphere’ as a meaningful political community

and an alternative policy horizon to that of Europe.

But is has also sought to show that the impact of Europe

on Britain is not a solely one-way process. Policy

positioning in regard to European integration is helping

to create and facilitate highly distinct nationalisms

within the United Kingdom. At the same time the politics

of those nationalisms – and England’s in particular – is

altering the course and pace of European integration.

[The European Union is becoming more ‘British’ just at

the moment when Britain itself has been hollowed out.]

7065 words/8051

BibliographyAlderson, Stanley. 1975. Yea or Nay? Referenda in the United Kingdom.

London: Cassel.Aughey, Arthur. 2007. The Politics of Englishness. Manchester,

Manchester University Press.Aughey, Arthur. Nations and Nationalism, 16, 3, 2010:BBC News Europe, ‘David Cameron Speech: UK and the EU’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21158318, accessed 24January 2013.

BBC New Europe, ‘EU Viewpoints on Cameron’s Europe Speech’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21140766, accessed 24 January 2013.

Ben Rosamond. 2000. Theories of European Integration. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Bevir, Mark and Rhodes, Rod. 2006. Governance Stories. Routledge: Abingdon.

Black, Jeremy. 1994. Convergence or Divergence? Britain and the Continent. London: Macmillan.


33

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21140766

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21158318


Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan. 2013. ‘The Unintended Consequences ofDavid Cameron’s demarche’, Europe’s World, Spring 2013: 25-7.

British Futures Olympic Report, 2012.Bruter, Michael. 2005. Citizens of Europe? The emergence of a mass

European identity. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons. Forging the nation, 1707-1837. London:

Pimlico.Conti, Nicolò (ed.). 2014. Party Attitudes to the EU in Member States.

Parties for Europe, Parties Against Europe. London: Routledge.Daddow, Oliver. 2011. New Labour and the European Union. Blair and

Brown’s logic of history. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Daddow, Oliver. 2004. Britain and Europe since 1945: historiographical

perspectives on integration. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Dominiczak, Peter. 2013. ‘William Hague: EU leaders back our referendum, The Telegraph, 7 February 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/9853949/William-Hague-EU-leaders-back-our-referendum.html, accessed 8 February 2013.

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Mette. 2006. Debates on European Integration: a reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elijah, Annmaire and Leslie, John. 2012. ‘Does N=2? Trans-Tasman Economic Integration and a Comparator for the SingleEuropean Market’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50, 6, 2012: 975-993.

English, Richard; Hayton, Richard; and Kenny, Michael. 2009. ‘Englishness and the Union in Contemporary Conservative Thought’, Government and Opposition, 44, 4: 343-65.

Forsyth, James. 2013. ‘The New Colonials can raise our sights beyond the Channel’, The Spectator, 18 July 2013, http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/07/the-new-colonials-can-raise-our-sights-beyond-the-channel/, accessed 18 July 2013.

Fox, Kate. Watching the English,Geddes, Andrew. 2004. The European Union and British Politics.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.George, Stephen. 1998. An Awkward Partner,Gifford, Chris. 2008. The Making of Eurosceptic Britain. London:

Ashgate.


34

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/07/the-new-colonials-can-raise-our-sights-beyond-the-channel/

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/07/the-new-colonials-can-raise-our-sights-beyond-the-channel/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/9853949/William-Hague-EU-leaders-back-our-referendum.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/9853949/William-Hague-EU-leaders-back-our-referendum.html


Gifford, Chris. 2010. ‘The UK and the European Union: Dimensions of Sovereignty and the Problems of Eurosceptic Britishness’, Parliamentary Affairs, 63, 2: 323.

Guibernau, Monserrat. 2007. The Identity of Nations. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Habermas, Jürgen and Derrida, Jacques. 2005. ‘February 15, or what binds Europeans together; plea for a common foreign policy beginning in core Europe’, in D. Levy, M. Pensky, J.Thorpey (eds.). Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: transatlantic relations after the Iraq War. London: Verso.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Post-national Constellation,Hague, William. 2013. ‘Britain and Australia – making the most

of global opportunity’, 4th John Howard Lecture, Sydney, 17 January 2013, http://bartondeakin.com.au/briefs/2013_John_Howard_Lecture.html, accessed 2 August 2013.

Hannan, Daniel. 2012. ‘I’ll go to the ends of the earth to argue against the EU’, The Telegraph, 6 June 2012, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100162842/ill-go-to-the-ends-of-the-earth-to-make-the-case-against-the-eu/, accessed 2 August 2013.

Hansards Parliamentary Record, 2011, Vol. 534, Part 1, Col. 52.Heffer, Simon. 1998. Like the Roman: the life of Enoch Powell. London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kaiser, Wolfram. 2010. ‘From Isolation to Centrality:

contemporary history meets European Studies’ in Wolfram Kaiser and Antonio Varsori, (eds.). European Union History, Themes and Debates. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: organized violence in a global age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kenny, Michael. 2014. The Politics of English Nationhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leconte, Cecile. 2011. Understanding Euroscepticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Majone, Giandomenico. 2009. Europe as the Would-be World Power: the EU at Fifty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McCormick, John. 2011. Understanding the European Union: a concise introduction, 5e, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.


35

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100162842/ill-go-to-the-ends-of-the-earth-to-make-the-case-against-the-eu/



http://bartondeakin.com.au/briefs/2013_John_Howard_Lecture.html

http://bartondeakin.com.au/briefs/2013_John_Howard_Lecture.html


Mycock, Andrew and Hayton, Richard. 2014. ‘The Party Politics of Englishness’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16, 2: 251-72.

Norwegian Nobel Committee, ‘The Nobel Peace Prize for 2012’, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/press.html, accessed 9 August 2013.

Schnapper, Pauline. 2000. La Grande-Bretagne et l'Europe: le grand malentendu. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Schrag Sternberg, Claudia. The Struggle for EU Legitimacy. Public Contestation, 1950-2005. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Schulz-Forberg, Hagen and Stråth, Bo. 2010. The Political History of European Integration. The hypocrisy of democracy-through-market. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sheridan, Greg. 2007. ‘Beginning of a more beautiful friendship’, The Australian, 27 December 2007.

Startin, Nick and Usherwood, Simon. 2013. ‘Euroscepticism as aPersistent Phenomenon’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 51, 1: 1-16.

Steltzner, H. 2013. ‘Die EU braucht Britannien’, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/cameron-rede-die-eu-braucht-britannien-12038057.html, accessed 27 January 2013.

Taylor, Paul. 2008. The End of Integration. Anti-Europeanism Examined. London: Routledge.

Tilly, Charles. 1990. Coercion, Capital and European States: 990-1990. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Tournier-Sol, Karine. 2011. ‘Britishness and European Integration since 1997 in the French Press’, in McGlynn, Catherine; Mycock, Andy and McAuley, Jim, (eds.) Britishness, Identity and Citizenship: the view from abroad. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Van Ingelgom, Virginie. 2014. Integrating Indifference. A comparative, qualitative and quantitative approach to the legitimacy of European integration. Colchester: ECPR Press.

Van Rompuy, Herman. 2012. ‘The Power of the Union: Europe, itsneighbourhood and the world’, speech delivered at Chatham House, 31 May 2012, http://www.chathamhouse.org/events/view/182937, accessed 19August 2013.

Vasilopoulou, Sophia. 2013. ‘Book Reviews: Ben Wellings, English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: losing the peace, in Nations and Nationalism, 19, 1, 2013: 187-88.


36

http://www.chathamhouse.org/events/view/182937

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/cameron-rede-die-eu-braucht-britannien-12038057.html

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/cameron-rede-die-eu-braucht-britannien-12038057.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/press.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2012/press.html


Vittori, Jean-Marc. 2013. ‘Que vive l’Europe sans le Royaume-Uni!’, Les Echos, 29 January 2013, http://www.lesechos.fr/opinions/chroniques/0202530089252-que-vive-l-europe-sans-le-royaume-uni-532979.php, accessed 30 January 2013.

Ward, Paul. 2004. Britishness since 1870. Abingdon: Routledge.Wellings, Ben. 2012. English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: losing the

peace. Oxford, Peter Lang.Willetts, David. 2009. ‘England and Britain, Europe and the

Anglosphere’ in Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (eds.) Britishness: perspectives on the British question, (London, Wiley-Blackwell in association with the Political Quarterly.

Since 1990 the percentage of Eurobarometer respondents

believing membership to be ‘a good thing’ has declined by

approximately 20%, while those claiming it as ‘a bad

thing’ has more than doubled from around 8% to 18% in

2011 (Eurobarometer 2014a). Using his own measure of

identity similarly based on Eurobarometer data, Michael

Bruter also charts the emergence of a mass European

identity without similar progress in support for European

integration (Bruter, 2011, 149).


37

http://www.lesechos.fr/opinions/chroniques/0202530089252-que-vive-l-europe-sans-le-royaume-uni-532979.php

http://www.lesechos.fr/opinions/chroniques/0202530089252-que-vive-l-europe-sans-le-royaume-uni-532979.php

Documents

Beyond Awkwardness: England, Europe and the End of Integration