Britain’s referendum on the EU marks another step in the country’s long and troubled history with its European neighbours. Divorce or not, Europe will continue to have a huge influence over British politics and society – history has a few lessons for us here.
Europe made the UK. The emergence first of England as a nation state was the product of European pressures – to defend itself against Viking raids. So was the formation of the United Kingdom, which rallied England and Scotland against the France of Louis XIV.
Moreover, Europe has almost always been more important to us than the rest of the world. The 18th century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, for example, spoke of a “Commonwealth of Europe”, long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of.
The nature of the European challenge varied greatly over time. It was always strategic. In the Middle Ages the main enemy was France. In the 16th century and early 17th centuries it was Spain. From the late 17th to the early 19th century it was France again; in the mid to late 19th century it was Tsarist Russia. Then, in the early and mid-20th century it was first the Kaiser and then Hitler’s Germany; and then Russia again – with a brief interruption after the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the end of World War II to the present day.
Very often, the danger was also ideological. From continental heresy in the Middle Ages, through counter-reformation Catholicism (which also become a synonym for absolutism and continental tyranny) in the 16th and 17th centuries, French Jacobinism in the late 18th century, right and left wing totalitarianism in the 20th century, to Islamist terrorists arriving from Europe as migrants today.
Furthermore, Europe has profoundly shaped domestic politics in the UK. It has been the subject of argument without end for hundreds of years.
Image: The Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler II
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Brendan Simms, Professor in the History of International Relations, University of Cambridge
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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