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Kiran Klaus Patel tracks the development of the EU over the postwar decades, considering whether it really did bring peace to the continent
Kiran Klaus Patel, author of Project Europe: A History, tracks the development of the EU over the postwar decades, considering whether it really did bring peace to the continent and what impact it’s had on economic growth.
The big question: has the European Union been a success?
Europe’s ambitious postwar project is considered by some to have been a triumph, ensuring peace and steadying economies across the continent – yet it is decried by others as a bureaucratic nightmare. Written ahead of the confirmation that Brexit will go ahead on 31 January 2020, eight experts assess the achievements and failings of the EU
Denise Dunne The EU is the culmination of a process of co-operation that began in 1952 with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which aimed to make war between its members “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”. Though Europe has not been free from war since, there has not been an armed conflict between member states since the foundation of the EU – a remarkable achievement, given the history of savage conflict in the first half of the 20th century. Maintaining peace among members through economic partnership remains the EU’s primary purpose. The fact so many people are either unaware of this, choose to overlook it, or take peace for granted, is indicative of how successful it has been in fulfilling its primary purpose. Why has Britain decided to leave the EU? EU referendum: how significant is Britain’s vote to leave? Historians debate Brexit lessons from history Since 1952, the integration process has meandered forward. Treaties negotiated between 1957 and 2009 provide the legal scaffolding for the EU’s institutions, with their unique DNA of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism. The deepening of interdependence through treaties has been accompanied by enlargement to 28 members with a combined population of over 512 million. Member states reap the benefits of free movement of people, goods, services and capital, and 19 share a common currency, the euro. EU citizens can live, study or work anywhere in Europe, and their rights are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Yet almost every achievement can be critiqued. Arguably, economic and monetary union is incomplete and unfair. The EU can’t speak with one voice on foreign policy and defence issues. Its institutions and decision-making procedures baffle the public and seem permanently in need of reform. The EU is imperfect – but will go down in history as one of Europe’s most creative experiments in peaceful community building. The EU evolves in response to challenges, albeit slowly. It grapples with the politics of design – what the treaties aspire to – versus the politics of crisis management. We cannot be complacent about challenges it confronts – Brexit, the migration crisis, a militarily assertive Russia. But the EU has proven adept at crisis management, which accounts for its survival. On balance, to date the achievements outweigh the deficits. Denise Dunne is a lecturer in history at Maynooth University, Ireland <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-524654804-cmyk-c85e34c.jpg" width="1025" height="683" alt="Farmers protest pension reforms at the Greek parliament in 2016. Greece has seen many such demonstrations against EU-imposed austerity measures since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. (Photo by NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)" title="Farmers protest pension reforms at the Greek parliament in 2016. Greece has seen many such demonstrations against EU-imposed austerity measures since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. (Photo by NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)" /> John Gillingham Although a powerful inspiration to the generation of Europeans desperate for an alternative to the bitter national rivalries that led to the Second World War, the EU has had its day. Undemocratic to the core, its extravagant claims, policy failures and inability to reform have together undermined its functional credibility, made it a drag on progress and turned it into a source of division and conflict. The institution is thus largely irrelevant to the immense challenges Europe faces today. The public rejection of that farcical overreach of the 1990s – the attempt of Brussels to impose a grotesque so-called constitution on the EU’s member states – put paid to hopes of a future European political federation. Worse yet, the ill-conceived single currency project has plunged the continent into a decade of anaemic growth at a time of rapid advance elsewhere in the world. Within the region, it has aggravated class and generational divisions, as well as set north against south and west against east. Unsurprisingly, the EU therefore lacks both a democratic mandate and a vision of the future. It is, in fact, administratively paralysed, and facing either sudden or prolonged internal collapse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-613502952-cmyk-d4dc708.jpg" width="1024" height="733" alt="Refugees from Carpatho-Ukraine flee Hungarian troops in 1939. "There has not been an armed conflict between member states since the foundation of the EU," observes Denise Dunne. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Refugees from Carpatho-Ukraine flee Hungarian troops in 1939. "There has not been an armed conflict between member states since the foundation of the EU," observes Denise Dunne. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> The world is now entering a period of economic and political upheaval that invites comparison to the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Its motor is technological change driven by the IT giants of Silicon Valley and, increasingly, China. The broad contours of tomorrow’s Europe’s will be determined by the competitive interplay of these trans-Pacific forces and their national governments. The outcome of such a contestation cannot, of course, be predicted, but will entail, in some manner, the creation of a new, global version of corporate capitalism featuring close interdependent relationships – be they amicable or hostile, beneficial or otherwise – between international producers and their governments, as well as between the governments themselves. The stakes in this contest are epochal: they involve a choice between the world of Orwell’s 1984 or, at the opposite extreme, an era of unprecedented opportunity, personal freedom and abundance. Its proclamations and protests notwithstanding, the EU will be a bystander to the now unfolding drama. Europe’s fate is in other hands. John Gillingham is professor of history at the University of Missouri-St Louis Listen | Professor David Reynolds explores how several centuries of British history have fed into the recent Brexit debate Heidi Maurer The EU has mostly been a success. The European Economic Community, formed in 1957, aimed to foster economic cooperation between members. The main tool proposed for this purpose was a common market in which there would be free movement of goods, services, capital and people. When did the UK join the European Economic Community (EEC) and why? Britain decides: the first European referendum Despite this economic focus, at that time European integration already entailed a political purpose: “to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe”. This aim for political integration between European states, but also between their peoples, was taken to a new level in the Treaty on European Union, signed in Maastricht in 1992. The EU has been a success in ensuring cooperation between its member states. Its institutions facilitate diplomatic negotiations in a rule-based and efficient manner. The high intensity of this exchange is unprecedented in international affairs: in 2017, there were 92 meeting days for ministers of the 28 member states, and 3,000 working party meetings, in addition to regular exchanges between presidents and prime ministers. Those meetings provide a unique environment in which to share experiences and to agree on joint policy responses. Nevertheless, the EU can make decisions and shape policies only if it has the required authority, and if member states agree. The EU has been less successful in fostering integration between European peoples. Yet despite the 2005 rejection of the draft constitutional treaty, initiatives further seek to enhance the ownership and identification of citizens with the EU. Today, European citizens care more and know more about the EU, and thus also increasingly critique and contest it. However, the biggest challenge for the EU is its set-up: the treaty specifies when and how the EU can act (if member states and the European Parliament agree), which does not always overlap with what citizens demand (for example, a Europe that also provides social policies next to economic affairs). As a consequence, the EU has not been successful in convincing its citizens that it is not just a bunch of institutions, but that the EU is its member states – and, most importantly, its citizens. Heidi Maurer is EU politics lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford Harold James Europe has always been a site of political and institutional experimentation, and its current experiment has been a remarkable success (in contrast with the disastrous ventures of the first half of the 20th century). Its pre-modern existence, with a proliferation of multiple and competing states or political entities, presented a stark contrast with the imperial systems that dominated the centre and east of the Eurasian landmass. In very recent times, European integration created a postmodern view of the state, moving away from modern concepts of clearly defined sovereignty to offer a superior contrast to the classically modern state, or super-state, offered in particular by the course of American history. The success of this vision of Europe has to do with values, with a commitment to diversity and tolerance, to a diversity of cultures and religions and heritages, rather than with specific, narrowly defined outcomes. Listen | Tom Cutterham describes how the Brexit negotiations compare with America’s departure from the British empire Europe historically was a site of bitterly contested and continually shifting frontiers. By contrast, the core units of the states on the western and eastern geographic fringes of Europe – England and Russia, at the heart of the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation – have had much more continuity, and in consequence may not see the need for a European solution to the problem of sovereignty as clearly as central Europeans. The modern European problem is that its great historic success has been overshadowed by a discussion cast in rather narrow economic terms. It is an easy exercise to contrast the high aspirations of the founding treaties of the European Union, and their emphasis on “ever closer union”, with the rather mixed record of European practice. The first objective set out in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty was “to promote economic and social progress which is balanced and sustainable”, but European economic growth has been disappointing and unbalanced: the credit boom to peripheral Europe before 2008 was not sustainable, and collapsed with disastrous consequences. The challenge today is to fix the economic issues while preserving the profound vision. Harold James is Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University Olivette Otele The integration of new states and the adoption of the euro exacerbated political and economic problems, and led to social unrest. Far-right movements have risen with unemployment in Greece and economic turmoil in Italy, where minority discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiment are also increasing. That trend is noticeable in Germany and France, too. In part, these issues are related to colonial actions and more recent EU policies towards neighbouring regions, notably Africa. The European response to its ‘migrant crisis’ has been to enlarge borders beyond the Mediterranean. Measures taken by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) have made many Africans prisoners in their own countries because of the EU’s approach to economic migration. The EU Emergency Trust Fund For Africa aims to tackle the root cause of migration and help vulnerable populations, but has focused on tightening border controls outside the EU by providing funds to a few African countries. In July 2018, 55 millions euros were given to the Maghreb region (especially Morocco and Tunisia, seen, with Libya, as part of the ‘North Africa Window’). The EU is responding to so-called emergency situations rather than working with countries that are not transit states. Young people continue to risk their lives on dangerous new routes north into Europe. Meanwhile, no sustainable economic and educational measures have been put in place in central and west Africa. The EU’s approach to them is a significant factor contributing to the problems facing these countries. Though research and innovation projects provide opportunities for African and European researchers to collaborate, their impact on the vast majority of the population in the continent remains limited. As to the future, changes in the EU must be sustainable. French president Emmanuel Macron once stated that the EU will soon have to function within three circles. The first would comprise treaties with superpowers such as Russia. The second would be close to the current membership, focusing on freedom of movement and a commitment to research and innovation. The third circle would be the “core of the reactor”, according to Macron – essentially the eurozone, with countries that adhere to a fully integrated labour market and real social convergence. The EU needs those internal changes. It must also re-think its neo-colonial economic and migratory approaches. Olivette Otele is Professor of History of Slavery at Bristol University Alejandro Quiroga The level of success of the European Union has to be measured against the different goals set over time. The founding fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community (1952) and the European Economic Community (1957) aimed to secure peace among member states, promote capitalism and consolidate liberal nation-states in the midst of the Cold War. By the late 1980s, the initial objectives of the European project had been fully met, while the Soviet bloc began to crumble. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, new objectives were set. Gaining control of the emerging capitalist markets in former communist countries and consolidating liberal democracies in eastern Europe became the priorities of the European Community. In the 2000s, the eastern enlargement of the EU was a successful project of economic and political expansion. The new historical circumstances also allowed further economic and political integration. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty included a social charter, increased foreign policy, military and judicial cooperation, and laid the foundations of the single currency. The euro became legal tender in 12 countries in 2002, but cooperation in military and foreign policy did not extend to effective intervention in the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia. The 2008 financial crisis led to a redefinition of the EU goals. Austerity, bailouts of banks and direct economic interventions in member states have been implemented in the past decade, prioritising economic performance over social justice. In this context of crisis, the EU values of equality and solidarity have also been challenged by the rise of the nationalist right and the growth of xenophobia all over Europe. This threat, of which Brexit is just one manifestation, is a real menace because it undermines some of the main principles of the common European project. From a long-term perspective, there is no doubt that the EU has been a success. Yet historical achievements do not necessarily ensure success in the near future. Alejandro Quiroga is reader in Spanish history at Newcastle University Katja Seidel Brussels’ Eurocrats are easy targets on which to blame all the wrongs of the EU. They are often seen as conspiring to hatch bureaucratic regulations that enforce conformity between member states, and as attacking expressions of national culture with the aim of creating some kind of impersonal European super-state. Alarm at the appointment of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker epitomised such fears, because Juncker is close to an ideological conviction that is thought by some, in particular in the UK, to be out of place in today’s EU: federalism. During the period of postwar reconstruction and the early years of European integration, being a federalist was the norm rather than the exception, both among politicians and Commission staff. Walter Hallstein, the first Commission president of the European Economic Community (EEC; the predecessor of the EU) from 1958 to 1967, was an ardent federalist. For Hallstein, European integration – leading eventually to a European federal state – was the solution to the continent’s many ailments: excessive nationalism, divisiveness, economic particularism and the threat of the continent vanishing into political and economic obscurity following the rise of two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union. As a law professor, one of the most talented of his generation, Hallstein was an advocate of integration through law; he saw the EEC as a community founded upon law. Through its treaty and the legislation derived from it, the EEC was an emerging autonomous legal order that was entwined with and complemented those of the member states. A strong institutional system with firm and binding rules, this legal order was necessary to pave the way for a stable, peaceful and economically prosperous Europe – something that had not been achieved in the past by blood and iron. A European legal order was thus the way to maintain peace and democracy in Europe. The EU has been a success, but remains a work in progress. The way it functions is complicated and lacks transparency. It will need to reform, particularly because both it and the idea of the peace project have never been under more threat. With the wave of nationalism and populism sweeping the continent, we face an unprecedented challenge to democracy and the rule of law in the EU – not to mention to the idea of a federal Europe. Katja Seidel is senior lecturer in history at the University of Westminster Jane Lewis In 1950, when the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, announced a coal and steel pact between France and Germany, Le Monde dubbed it “une initiative revolutionnaire”. Schuman more guardedly described the project as “a leap into the unknown”. Yet it undoubtedly succeeded in its first overarching aim. Clearly, coal and steel were crucial to rebuilding Europe’s smashed cities and economies, but the drive to establish peace was always the uppermost consideration. Even before two world wars provided urgent momentum, the concept of a democratic union of European states had been advanced (by everyone from America’s founding fathers to the radicals of the 1840s) as the optimum defence against tyrants and of fostering trade and wider prosperity. Dismissed by many as utopian, the EU has, on the whole, delivered. For all its flaws, it remains the most ambitious model yet seen of the pooling of national sovereignty in pursuit of a common good. And, whether by accident or design, it has coincided with an unparalleled period of peace and prosperity among its members. For all that, the EU remains a giant experiment built on rigid institutions which, in the eyes of its critics, are destined to fail. We don’t know if it will be possible to rejig the edifice to resolve the perceived ‘democratic deficit’ of a governing structure dominated by an unelected (and some would say autocratic) Commission. Or whether the euro – a common currency that was supposed to unite – will succeed in fracturing the union further by placing impossible economic burdens on member states. There is also an argument, first advanced by the philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill in the 1860s, that the drive towards unity threatens the historical diversity that has always been Europe’s chief strength, leading to what he called a crippling state of “stationariness”. Some recognise that malaise now. “In the 1940s, the European leaders had a clear sense of direction. Right now, they mostly want to avoid trouble,” observed the veteran US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in 2018. The EU is still a half-built house. It will need more pragmatic, fluid leadership to shore up its foundations. Jane Lewis is the author of All You Need to Know: The European Union (Connell, 2018) This content first appeared in issue 12 (October/November 2018) of BBC World Histories Magazine
Britain decides: the first European referendum
On 23 June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Writing ahead of the 2016 vote, historian Robert Saunders looked back at the first UK-wide referendum, held in 1975 on the United Kingdom's continued membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), and considers what we can learn from its outcome...
On 4 June 1975, just hours before the polls opened in Britain’s first national referendum, two men in top hats and tails fought a duel in St James’s Park. They were there as representatives of the Eldon League, a student dining club whose motto was ‘forwards into the past’, to settle the question of British membership of the European Community. Before a hushed and anxious crowd, the two champions paced out the ground, turned and opened fire – not with pistols, but with champagne bottles handed to them by their seconds. As the heavens thundered to the roar of champagne corks, a lucky shot blew one man’s top hat clean from his shoulders. His opponent, a young lawyer and Conservative activist named Neil Hamilton, was declared victorious, and it was at once agreed that the League would oppose British membership. Britain had joined the European Economic Community – or the Common Market, as it was widely known – on 1 January 1973. After two failed attempts in the 1960s, success was finally achieved by the Conservative government of Ted Heath, who had come to power in 1970 promising “nothing less” than “to change the course of history of this nation”. Joining the EEC was central to that ambition; yet his achievement was almost throttled at birth. When the Heath government fell in 1974 it was replaced by a Labour administration that was bitterly divided on Europe. To hold his party together, the new prime minister, Harold Wilson, made a twofold promise: he would renegotiate the terms of membership, then put them to the people in a referendum. It was an offer that David Cameron would repeat more than four decades later. We’re not in Kansas anymore Comparing the referendums of 1975 and 2016 reminds us just how fundamentally British politics had changed in the meantime. In 1975 it was the Conservative Party that was most enthusiastically supportive of membership. Its new leader, Margaret Thatcher, called for “a massive Yes” to Europe, and stumped the country in a woolly jumper made up of the flags of the member states. The campaign for withdrawal was dominated by the Labour left, under the charismatic leadership of the secretary of state for industry, Tony Benn. Newspapers like The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, which would later become fiercely Eurosceptic, all campaigned to keep Britain in Europe. Every national newspaper backed a vote to stay in, save only for The Spectator and The Morning Star. Vote of no confidence: a brief history Podcast: Brexit and American independence Brexit lessons from history The geography of Euroscepticism was also very different. In 1975 it was England – especially the south of England – that was most staunchly European. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were much more sceptical; indeed, the nightmare for Unionists was that England would vote to stay in, while the rest of the UK voted to leave. In 2016, Nicola Sturgeon has become a key figure in the Remain campaign; in 1975, a young Alex Salmond warned that “Scotland knows from bitter experience what treatment is in store for a powerless region of a common market”. Different issues also predominated. Immigration was barely mentioned in 1975: at a time when Britain was seen as “the sick man of Europe”, nobody thought that German and French workers were anxious to come and work in the UK. ‘Anti-marketeers’ were more worried about outward migration, with young Britons forced to seek work on the continent. Conversely, questions about food, fishing and the Common Agricultural Policy loomed considerably larger for a generation that could remember post-war rationing. Voters were encouraged to think of the Community as “the Common Super-market”: “Well stocked shelves”; “Plenty of choice”; and “just around the corner”. Margaret Thatcher warned of food shortages if Britain withdrew from the EEC, insisting that “most housewives would rather pay a little more than risk a bare cupboard”. Listen | Tom Cutterham describes how the Brexit negotiations compare with America’s departure from the British empire Doomwatch A recurrent theme of the campaign in the 1970s was the memory of war. 1975, it is worth remembering, was closer in time to the end of the First World War than we are today to the Second. Men like Ted Heath, Willie Whitelaw, Tony Benn and Enoch Powell had all seen military service, and the prospects for peace weighed heavily on the campaign. “Nationalism Kills”, one poster declared. “No More Civil Wars”, said another. And yet another reminded voters that “Forty million people died in two European wars this century. Better lose a little national sovereignty than a son or daughter”. Why has Britain decided to leave the EU? The big question: Has the European Union been a success? This was a wartime election in another sense, too. The Cold War was omnipresent in the politics of the 1970s, and the same newspapers that reported the referendum were also carrying the fall of Saigon and the defeat of American power in Vietnam. As the US struggled with the scandal over Watergate, the impeachment of President Nixon and the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, Wilson told the Cabinet bluntly that American leadership had gone; in future, Western Europe would have to rely increasingly on its own resources against the Soviet Union. Heath claimed that a vote to leave, by weakening the cohesion of Western Europe, might trigger a Soviet invasion, pointing out that the USSR was the only major power to favour British withdrawal. This was also an important issue for the churches: The Church of England Newspaper told its readers that “if Christians are anti-Marxist, they should support an alliance that is anti-Marxist”. Throughout the referendum, The Sun ran the strapline ‘Crisis Britain’ above its news pages. Following the oil crisis of 1973, inflation was running at close to 25 per cent; a balance of payments crisis was placing intense strain on the currency, while labour relations were deteriorating rapidly. From 1970 to 1974, more than 70 million working days were lost in strikes, culminating in the collapse of the Heath government during its struggle with the miners. No democracy had ever survived inflation at that level for a prolonged period of time, and the disintegration of parliamentary government in Northern Ireland increased the sense of impending doom. Tony Benn wrote in his diary in December 1974 that “the final collapse of capitalism might be a matter of weeks away”. The foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan, put it more gloomily, telling the cabinet that “every morning when he shaved he thought that he should emigrate, but by the time he had eaten breakfast, he realised there was nowhere else to go… There was no solution that he could see to our problems”. Both sides in the referendum invoked this atmosphere of doom. ‘In’ campaigners warned that withdrawal would trigger the collapse of the currency, a public spending crisis and massive job losses, while Ted Heath predicted the return of rationing. A recurring image in cartoons portrayed Britain as a sinking ship, with the great ocean liner of the European Community offering the only hope of rescue. ‘Out’ campaigners replied that it was membership that was draining the life from the economy. Tony Benn claimed that 500,000 jobs had been lost in the first two years of membership. Staying in, he predicted, would decimate manufacturing and inflict mass unemployment across the country. Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk on the history of Europe The emphasis on risk probably resonated more in 1975 than in 2016, because it connected with people’s experience. For a generation that had lived through rationing, seen oil prices quadruple in 1973 and queued for sugar in 1974, the prospect of economic catastrophe was not something abstract. Private polling in May 1975 found that more than half of voters expected “an immediate economic and political crisis” in the event of a decision to withdraw – a conviction that strongly favoured a Yes vote. Listen | Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk explore Europe’s history from ancient times until the present day The big battalions Right from the start, the 1975 referendum pitted two very unequal armies against one another. The ‘In’ campaign could call on almost all the leading figures in British politics – from Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams on the left, to Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher and Willie Whitelaw on the right. They assembled a galaxy of actors, sports stars and celebrities, such as the boxer Henry Cooper, the Olympic gold medallist Mary Peters and the former England cricket captain Colin Cowdrey. Football managers Brian Clough, Sir Matt Busby and Jock Stein sent messages of support to campaign rallies, while novelists as diverse as Agatha Christie, Karl Popper and Tom Stoppard signed adverts in the press. The ‘Out’ campaign had some big hitters of their own, such as Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell. The problem was that these were all quite controversial figures – the so-called “men with staring eyes” – encouraging an association between the ‘Out’ campaign and political extremism. It did not help in this respect that the IRA, the National Front and the Communist Party of Great Britain all advocated a vote to leave. Meanwhile, the big battalions of British society were all for staying in. Membership was backed by the Confederation of British Industry, the National Farmers Union and the mainstream churches, while supermarket chains like Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer advocated membership in their customer magazines. Companies like IBM, ICI, Vickers and even Ladybird books campaigned for a Yes vote, canvassing their workers, shareholders and customers. Business support for leaving was almost non-existent. While the Trade Union Congress backed withdrawal, major unions like the GMB broke ranks and fought to stay in. Vic Feather, the former general secretary of the TUC, told voters bluntly that “If we go it alone we will be knackered”. This mismatch was reflected in the accounts of the two campaigns. The government gave each side a grant of £125,000, on top of which they could raise whatever money they pleased. The ‘Out’ campaign raised £8,000 plus contributions in kind from some of the unions. The ‘In’ campaign raised more than £2 million. With all the major newspapers backing membership, the wonder was not that the anti-marketeers lost; it was that they put up a viable challenge at all. Fourteen years of national debate The result of the 1975 referendum was a landslide. On a 64.5 per cent turnout, more than two-thirds of voters opted to stay in. Every part of the United Kingdom voted for membership, save only for Shetland and the Western Isles [the electoral district which includes the Hebrides]. The Daily Express published a celebratory editorial, announcing that the British had declared themselves “decisively” and “irrevocably” European. “What had been made out to be the most doubting and hesitant member of the Common Market has shown that it means business”. After the results were declared, Harold Wilson told journalists that “fourteen years of national debate” had come to an end. As our own referendum makes clear, that prediction was hopelessly optimistic. Just eight years later, Wilson’s own party would run for election on a promise to withdraw from the European Community. Yet the decision made on 5 June 1975 had a lasting impact. For good or for ill, British history since that date has been closely intertwined with the European Union. Membership has affected everything from trade policy and the legal system to gay rights and the Northern Ireland peace process. In this respect, the political commentator Anthony King was right to list the 1975 referendum among the most important decisions in British history since 1945. The vote on 23 June 2016 will almost certainly be closer than in 1975, but its consequences – whatever the result – will be no less momentous. Robert Saunders is a lecturer in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Democracy and the Vote in British Politics (Farnham, 2011) and co-editor, with Ben Jackson, of Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012). He is completing a book on the 1975 referendum and blogs at www.gladstonediaries.blogspot.com This article was first published by History Extra in June 2016
A medieval European union: why the Hanseatic League still matters
Until the rise of nationalism brought it down, the Hanseatic League was one of the most successful trading blocs in history – a union of towns and merchants’ guilds that dominated northern European trade in the medieval period. The League’s innovative methods included information-sharing and sophisticated payment mechanisms. And if that didn’t work? Well, it could always turn to brute force. By Chris Bowlby
The early 15th century was a bad time to be a Russian squirrel. As many as half a million animal skins – mainly belonging to the bushy-tailed rodent – were transported every year from Russian towns like Novgorod. They were packed into special barrels and loaded onto ships in huge consignments – as many as a hundred thousand at a time – before being ferried across the Baltic’s pirate-infested waters to German port cities. The poor animals would then be turned into fashionable garments and trims for western Europe’s increasingly affluent consumers. They were even used as an alternative currency. It was a lucrative business for the merchants at its centre, families like the Wittenborgs of Lübeck, whose trading tentacles stretched from England to Russia. The Wittenborgs would take cloth from, say, Flanders and luxury goods from the Mediterranean, then transport them to eastern markets. In return, they would pick up furs, timber, corn, wax for candles, and fish – especially cod and herring – which they salted and sold on, or devoured themselves. “The Germans are enormous eaters,” one Venetian traveller was said to have commented – and their feasts were famously lavish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/AKG6264283-8daf9d7.jpg" width="3764" height="4896" alt="This painting by Hans Holbein the Younger is thought to depict Hanseatic merchant Hermann von Wedigh III, London, 1532. The English capital was home to a major Hanseatic base, the 'Steelyard'. (Photo by AKG)" title="This painting by Hans Holbein the Younger is thought to depict Hanseatic merchant Hermann von Wedigh III, London, 1532. The English capital was home to a major Hanseatic base, the 'Steelyard'. (Photo by AKG)" /> But this money-spinning operation was not just about enterprising individuals. Lübeck, and families like the Wittenborgs, lay at the centre of an extraordinary medieval trading network. The Hansa, as that network was known, sought to dominate east-west trade in and around the Baltic from the 12th to the 17th centuries. And it largely succeeded: at the height of its power, up to 200 towns and cities were part of this extended network. The scramble for trade The Hansa’s ways of doing business – including innovative payments mechanisms such as offering borrowers lines of credit – seem in many ways remarkably modern. And although its influence waned from the 15th century, its memory is still cherished in northern Europe today – not only in the proudly ‘Hanseatic’ towns of Germany but as far afield as London and King’s Lynn. The cause of the Hansa’s emergence in the mid-12th century was the rise of the Baltic as a powerful trading hub, one that provided new goods for Europe’s expanding, urbanising and ever more demanding population. Such demand created opportunities, but it also sparked tensions, as rival merchants jostled to secure a stake of these lucrative new markets. In 1161, as rivalries grew and occasionally escalated into violence, merchants in the Gotland city of Visby decided to collaborate in a trading network designed to further and protect their interests. The great Baltic trading island of Gotland off today’s Swedish coast had built on older Viking networks to grow wealthy on trade with the east, as can be seen in Visby’s beautifully preserved medieval centre today. Others now wanted a piece of the action. Soon the Visby merchants had been joined by trading towns and cities across Europe (see map overleaf) – from Gotland in the north to cities like Cologne and Krakow in the south, and from the Netherlands in the west to the territory of the modern Baltic States in the east (where Germanic economic influence was already strong, courtesy of the crusading campaigns of the Teutonic knights in the 13th century, which paved the way for aristocratic Germanic settlers.) By 1259, this network had evolved into a powerful transnational group, the Hanseatic League. So what explains the Hansa’s rapid growth? The answer lies, in part, in the benefits it conferred on its members. It created a network of trusted associates in far-flung parts of the European market, a network that any individual Hanseatic trader could turn to for advice and protection. Because they often lived together in trading bases, or convened at Hanseatic gatherings, members could tap into information about the availability of goods for trade – from Russian wax to Baltic grain – and their changing market value. Convoys were formed to defend shipping against piracy. The Hansa also oversaw the manufacture of new ships ideally suited to Baltic trade. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/dreamstime_xxl_89341227-1754d6e.jpg" width="5184" height="3456" alt="The gates to Lübeck, the Hanseatic League's pre-eminent city. It was here that the league's court of appeal was based. It was also ere that Johann Wittenborg was executed for failing to defeat the Danes. (Photo by Dreamstime)" title="The gates to Lübeck, the Hanseatic League's pre-eminent city. It was here that the league's court of appeal was based. It was also ere that Johann Wittenborg was executed for failing to defeat the Danes. (Photo by Dreamstime)" /> Key to the Hansa offering was quality control – whether that be in the standard of the goods being traded, the avoidance of counterfeiting, or the standardisation of weights and measures. And, by the mid-14th century, regular meetings of the Hansa were being held to regulate their affairs. Although it had a sometimes fluid membership, and no formal constitution or central government, the Hanseatic organisation did develop a set of customary practices and laws, and from 1373 a kind of court of appeal was based in Lübeck to settle disputes. Resorting to force For all the benefits that Hansa membership offered European traders, it’s important to remember that these benefits weren’t designed for everyone. The Hansa was not aiming to create a free trade utopia but rather to protect its privileges. Members used their collective power to try to negotiate the most favourable terms possible for trade in foreign markets – terms designed to give them an advantage over their rivals. The Hansa as a group could try to enforce its will by boycotting its enemies commercially, notably against Flanders in the 14th century. And if that didn’t work, they sometimes resorted to force. So merchants became not only traders but sometimes soldiers. A 19th-century historian of the Hansa, Helen Zimmern, wrote that in a typical Lübeck merchant’s house “it was usual to see helmet, armour and sword hanging up above stores of codfish, bales of herrings, casks of beer, bales of cloth, or what not besides”. And it wasn’t just rival trading blocs or Baltic pirates that felt the force of such weapons. Often, the Hansa found itself at loggerheads with governments. There’s little doubt that the Hansa’s rise to power was facilitated by the weakness of many medieval governments, a weakness exacerbated by the desire of cities to free themselves of the restrictions medieval rulers placed upon them, ranging from taxes to bans on what kinds of weapons they could carry. In fact by the mid-14th century, with its laws and courts of appeal, the Hanseatic League had itself started in some ways to resemble a government. So, when it found itself at war with the Danes in the 1360s – following the Danish sacking of the strategically vital Baltic port of Visby in 1361 – the stakes were incredibly high. The Hansa did not take any kind of defeat lightly. When one member of that great fur-trading Wittenborg family, Johann, failed in his attempt to defeat Danish forces, he was executed in Lübeck’s market place. In the end however the Hansa prevailed, imposing the 1370 Treaty of Stralsund in which the Danes were compelled to concede Hanseatic privileges. For some historians, this marks the height of Hanseatic power. That power gave the Hansa the scope and the ambition to develop an early version of the logistics chains so prominent in international commerce today. Warehousing was a key to this, providing secure places to store, weigh and assess goods in locations linked to transport networks. One such warehouse can still be seen in King’s Lynn on the Norfolk coast. This is England’s best-preserved part of the Hanseatic network, an impressive beamed building constructed in the late 15th century by merchants mainly from the Hanseatic town of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland). It was, as one historian has observed, a “little piece of Germany in England”, creating a rich trade connection between the English port and merchants from Danzig. Intermarriage between the populations of the two towns helped reinforce the relationship. Grateful English kings London was not a member of the Hansa but it was home to a major Hanseatic base, the ‘Steelyard’, situated on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. The Steelyard was a self-contained community and compound, including storage space for goods, a weighbridge, accommodation, a wine cellar and a garden. Security was tight. Only Hansa merchants were permitted to enter by means of a password (“bread and cheese”), a curfew was enforced, all women excluded. Its traders enjoyed privileges given to them by grateful English monarchs in return for financial favours. Edward III pawned his crown jewels in the Hanseatic city of Cologne between 1339 and 1344 to fund the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. In return the king granted the Hansa privileges including concessions in many of the Cornish tin mines. The German traders – also known as ‘Easterlings’ – had a reputation for sound money and may have given us the name ‘sterling’ for our modern British currency. Given such a strong position and extensive facilities, it’s hardly surprising that many Hansa fortunes were made in England, and that Hansa merchants went on to dominate the country’s cloth export trade. Hans Holbein famously painted the portraits of Hanseatic merchants operating out of 16th-century London (see image on page 59). These men exude status, wealth and, above all, great confidence in their future as well as their illustrious past. However, the privileges that these merchants enjoyed – including freedom from arrest and exemption from many customs duties – caused resentment. The Hanseatic League was accused of “crocodile-like behaviour”, showing only its head and teeth, while the rest of the body remained concealed beneath the water. In England, rival trading groups, such as the Merchant Adventurers, began to flex their lobbying muscles. Worse still, so did the government itself. Fears that Hanseatic dominance of shipping was threatening England’s emerging maritime prowess provoked a backlash from some of the most powerful figures in the land. In 1597 Queen Elizabeth I forced the Hansa to leave the Steelyard – albeit temporarily – and the site never regained its significance before being destroyed in the Great Fire of London. By then, the Hansa’s fortunes were also under pressure in continental Europe. The Reformation led to disputes among its members. And there was the rise of new regional powers, such as the Swedish monarchy: a war between King Gustavus I and Lübeck in the 1530s led to the end of the Hanseatic trading monopoly in the Baltic Sea. New Dutch, Italian and southern German traders – and commercial operators like the Fugger banking family – also challenged the Hansa families’ commercial position. Added to all that was a reorientation of European trade towards new opportunities opening up in southern Europe, Asia and across the Atlantic. And a shift in the natural world had an impact. Due to changes in sea temperature, huge shoals of herring, a staple of Hanseatic trade and diet (and once said to be so thick in places that they could be caught by hand) moved in the 15th century out of the Baltic and into the North Sea. States fight back But it was the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century that perhaps marked the final straw for the era of Hanseatic prosperity, as trade was disrupted by conflict, and newly emerging nation states – no longer cowed by Hanseatic power – asserted their rights ever more strongly. In 1669 the final formal gathering of the Hanseatic League took place in its pre-eminent city, Lübeck. That might have been the end of the story. But, during the Napoleonic invasions of German territory, the memory of the Hansa was revived as an ideal of robust Germanic independence. The Prussians and Nazis also attempted to exploit Hanseatic history as an example of Germanic racial expansion. It is the purely economic achievements of the Hansa that are the focus today, as northern German towns and cities such as Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg proudly proclaim their Hanseatic roots. The name lives on too in the German airline Lufthansa and the football team Hansa Rostock. And along the eastern Baltic coast the memory is still potent. In the Estonian capital, Tallinn, the Hanseatic past is celebrated through architecture and cuisine in a way shrewdly designed to appeal to German tourists. Champions of the European Union have tried to celebrate the Hanseatic League as a kind of prototype version of continental unification. However, historians point out that the Hansa never had the kind of political or economic integration associated with the EU. And it is striking that a group of northern EU members, collaborating today informally under the name the ‘New Hanseatic League’, support ideas of liberal and thrifty economics and freer trade rather than EU centralisation. Meanwhile, memories of a simpler but evocative kind can be found in the remains of Hanseatic architecture, such as elegant old salt warehouses in Lübeck or formidable churches built by prosperous Hanseatic merchants in Baltic towns like Stralsund, decorated with images such as bearded Russians arriving at trading posts with mounds of furs. The squirrel trade, like so much Hanseatic activity, faded over time, due partly to overhunting. The trading network had – in that particular field – been too successful for its own good. But it had shown the enormous potential of linking businesses, families, ports and urban centres, which others went on to exploit. And it reminds us why trade is so significant in global history. Chris Bowlby is a journalist who produces documentaries for the BBC. His BBC Radio 4 documentary on the Hanseatic League, The Hansa Inheritance, presented by Chris Morris, is available on BBC Sounds: bbc.co.uk/sounds. The Hanseatic Trading Empire Feeding Europe's consumer boom: 7 products that greased the wheels of the Hanseatic trade network Pepper was often sourced from southern Europe or markets like Bruges and then supplied by Hanseatic merchants across its northern network. The Danzig merchants based at King's Lynn in England were known locally as pepper sacks'. Grain was collected from farmland around Baltic river systems and supplied to great cities of northern Europe. The Baltic grain trade remained significant for Europe until the opening of the American prairie markets in the 19th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/3567-HANSEATIC-LEAGUE-MAP-final-8c82a35.jpg" width="3322" height="1881" alt="Hansa merchants dominated trade routes, from Russia to England, as our map shows. (Illustration by Paul Hewitt/Battlefield Design)" title="Hansa merchants dominated trade routes, from Russia to England, as our map shows. (Illustration by Paul Hewitt/Battlefield Design)" /> Hanseatic traders brought together fish from the Baltic Sea and salt from cities such as Kiel on the Baltic coast. This enabled the preservation of fish and its distribution to those observing the religious rules of eating fish on Fridays. The image, left, shows a fishmonger gutting herring in the 15th century. Hanseatic networks distributed hops from central and eastern Europe, spreading ideas too about how brewing methods could be improved. This helped reinforce, it's been argued, the dividing line between beer-drinking northern Europe and the wine-drinking south. Timber and wood products were a highly significant Hanseatic product, brought from areas around the Baltic to western European trading markets like Antwerp and Bruges. Wax was transported to the west from Russia and Poland, which may have given us the word 'polishing'. Sweet-smelling beeswax candles were in high demand for lighting, and for ecclesiastical use. This article was first published in the August 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Brexit, the Corn Laws and the Common Market: a brief history of Britain’s trade deals
They allow consumers to buy more, better-quality products at lower prices, and as such are credited with driving economic growth and encouraging innovation. It’s little wonder, then, that the future of Britain’s trade deals post-Brexit are dominating headlines worldwide. Here, Professor Kevin O'Rourke charts the history of Britain’s trading agreements and explains why they have often proved divisive…
On 2 July 2018, Theresa May was preparing for a crucial cabinet meeting to be held four days later in Chequers. The United Kingdom had finally been given the green light to start negotiating with the European Union on the future trade relationship between the two parties, but in order to do so it needed to decide what it wanted. And this was proving difficult, given the huge gulf that existed between Tory Europhiles and Eurosceptics. Broadly speaking, the former group wanted a relationship between the UK and EU that was as close as possible, involving no new barriers to trade or costly border formalities. The latter wanted Britain to be free to make its own laws and regulate its trade as it saw fit. Mrs May’s problem was to find a common position behind which the two warring factions could unite. Robert Peel’s Corn Laws A backbench Conservative MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg warned Mrs May in a newspaper article published that morning (2 July 2018) that unless she held firm to her Lancaster House promise to leave the EU's Single Market and customs union, she would suffer the fate of Robert Peel in 1846. Peel had taken a decisive move towards free trade in that year [1846] by abolishing the Corn Laws. This was surprising, since Peel was a Conservative, and the Conservatives had traditionally been the party of landowners. Allowing tariff-free imports of grain would, everyone assumed, lower food prices and agricultural incomes. And so the Conservative party split; the Liberals came to power; and the Tories were largely excluded from government for a generation. 1846 was a traumatic year for the party, and Rees-Mogg has not been the only Conservative to invoke it at times of stress. In 1961 Harold Macmillan, who was trying to engineer the UK's entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), faced opposition from Tory backbenchers worried that this would undermine Britain's links with the Commonwealth. In his diary he noted that things were “getting terribly like 1846” [see The Macmillan Diaries, Vol II: Prime Minister and After (1957–66) edited by Peter Catterall (Macmillan, 2011)]. Trade deal facts The UK’s decision to leave the EU (by 29 March 2019, under Article 50) will fundamentally change its terms of trade with the 27 other member states, and with the rest of the world As a member of the European Union (EU), the UK is part of some 40 trade agreements which the union has with more than 70 countries. If the UK leaves the EU in a ‘no-deal Brexit’ on 29 March, it will immediately lose these deals The government estimates that about 11% of UK's trade relies on the EU's agreements with other countries Trade policies are about economics, but they are also about a country's place in the world, and they have often proved divisive. By the late 19th century the virtues of free trade had become an article of faith for most British politicians, but some Conservatives remained sceptical. In 1881 the Fair Trade League was founded, advocating an end to commercial treaties with other countries “unless terminable at a year's notice” so as to avoid “entanglements” that might limit the country’s freedom of action. It also argued in favour of moderate tariffs on imports of foreign food, and tariffs on manufactured goods coming from countries not treating British exports “fairly”. The Conservative party was split on the issue of fair trade in the 1885 general election: Sydney Henry Zebel, a historian of the controversy, commented that: “Many found it wiser to declare themselves free-traders and opposed to any reversal of the fiscal legislation of 1846. Others attempted to gain fair-trade support in the constituencies by a frank espousal of that cause. Still others attempted to straddle the issue”. Read more: A brief history of England Scotland on the brink: the nation's final years of independence (exclusive to The Library) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2014/09/GettyImages-51241029-0234700.jpg" width="3560" height="2604" alt="Scottish nobles gathering in the 17th century" title="An illustration showing Scottish nobles gathering in the 17th century to sign the second national covenant in Greyfriar's Churchyard, Edinburgh, vowing to make Presbyterianism the state religion of Scotland. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Imperial Preference The Conservative Party split again over trade after 1903, when Joseph Chamberlain began his famous crusade for Imperial Preference. Chamberlain wanted to use trade policy to promote the political integration of the Empire: he argued that the UK ought to have lower tariffs on imperial than on foreign goods. Since British tariffs were for the most part zero, it would be necessary, in George Dangerfield's words, to “build a tariff wall around England for the single purpose of knocking holes in it, through which Imperial goods might pass” [see The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1966 (first published in 1935)]. Read more: The first British Empire (exclusive to The Library) The ‘Father of History’ and India in the British empire (podcast) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/06/GettyImages-501582611-17c87cf-b3948f5.jpg" width="720" height="479" alt="Gold medallion of Constantius I, from the mint of Trier. It depicts Constantius celebrating his victory over Alectus in AD 296. Constantius is shown on a horse at the gates of London, welcomed by Britannia. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Gold medallion of Constantius I, from the mint of Trier. It depicts Constantius celebrating his victory over Alectus in AD 296. Constantius is shown on a horse at the gates of London, welcomed by Britannia. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> But this meant imposing tariffs on imports of foreign wheat and meat, thus increasing food prices and lowering workers' real wages. The then-prime minister Arthur Balfour sought desperately to keep his party together – in the words of Alan Sykes, a historian of the period, Balfour was a great believer in “verbal formulas as a means of resolving genuine conflicts of belief”. And so he constructed tortuous policy platforms involving inter alia tariffs that did not have protection as their “primary object” – whatever that meant. The Conservatives were trounced by the Liberals in the 1906 general election. It fell to Chamberlain's son Neville to implement the policy of the father: no sooner had he been appointed chancellor of the exchequer, in November 1931, that he set about introducing tariffs. And those tariffs fell disproportionately on foreign goods (as opposed to goods from the Empire/Commonwealth). As he said to the House of Commons on 4 February 1932, with his mother in the visitors' gallery and his half-brother Austen sitting on the Conservative benches: There can have been few occasions in all our long political history when to the son of a man who counted for something in his day and generation has been vouchsafed the privilege of setting the seal on the work which the father began but had perforce to leave unfinished. Nearly 29 years have passed since Joseph Chamberlain entered upon his great campaign in favour of Imperial Preference and Tariff Reform. More than 17 years have gone by since he died… His work was not in vain. I believe he would have found consolation for the bitterness of his disappointment if he could have foreseen that these proposals, which are the direct and legitimate descendants of his own conception, would be laid before the House of Commons, which he loved, in the presence of one and by the lips of the other of the two immediate successors to his name and blood. Read more: Q&A: What was written on Neville Chamberlain's piece of paper? History hero: Joseph Chamberlain (exclusive to The Library) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-3066169_0-a027209.jpg" width="799" height="530" alt="Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces the outbreak of the Second World War in a BBC broadcast, 1939. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)" title="Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces the outbreak of the Second World War in a BBC broadcast, 1939. (Fox Photos/Getty Images)" /> Imperial Preference remained a cornerstone of British economic policy in the aftermath of the Second World War, and it reflected the very real human, economic, political and strategic ties that still existed between Britain and the Dominions and which had been crucial in allowing Britain to emerge triumphant from two world wars. The Commonwealth was the political expression of these ties, and it had functioned effectively before 1945 despite its lack of a formal rulebook. It is understandable that many British politicians should have wished to see these ties continuing into the future. But it is also understandable that many also hoped to create closer links with Europe. There was no apparent reason why Britain should have to choose between these alternative sets of relationships, and alternative identities: loose free trade arrangements and loose political arrangements would allow Britain to enjoy free trade with the European continent while retaining Imperial Preference. Or so many hoped. Read more: Was 1945 the world’s year zero? (exclusive to The Library) The aftermath of the Second World War (podcast) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2017/08/GettyImages-98824358-dbb0f78.jpg" width="5139" height="3648" alt="Night view of people jammed into Times Square, New York, celebrating the end of the war in Europe. (Photo by Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty" title="Night view of people jammed into Times Square, New York, celebrating the end of the war in Europe. (Photo by Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty" /> Customs union But then, in the 1950s, the Europeans decided that they wanted not a free trade area, but a customs union. Not only would goods exported from one member state to another be exempt from tariffs; all member states would have the same tariffs vis à vis third countries. This would mean that there would be no need for checks at borders to ensure that wine being shipped from Italy to France, say, was actually Italian (and thus not subject to tariffs) rather than Argentinian – since all Argentinian wine would be taxed at the same rate no matter where it entered the EEC. And a common tariff policy would also increase the new community’s bargaining power. Read more: The big question: Has the European Union been a success? Britain decides: the first European referendum <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Thatcher-eabd40e.jpg" width="720" height="900" alt="Newly-elected Conservative Party Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher (1925 - 2013) lends her support to 'Keep Britain in Europe' campaigners in Parliament Square, London, on 4th June 1975, the day before voting in the United Kingdom EEC referendum (or Common Market referendum). Thatcher is wearing a sweater featuring the flags of European member states. Britain had joined the European Community two years earlier and the following day, just over two-thirds of voters backed continued British membership. (Photo by P. Floyd/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Newly-elected Conservative Party Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher (1925 - 2013) lends her support to 'Keep Britain in Europe' campaigners in Parliament Square, London, on 4th June 1975, the day before voting in the United Kingdom EEC referendum (or Common Market referendum). Thatcher is wearing a sweater featuring the flags of European member states. Britain had joined the European Community two years earlier and the following day, just over two-thirds of voters backed continued British membership. (Photo by P. Floyd/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> It all made perfect sense from the European point of view, but the decision placed British politicians in a painful dilemma. If they stayed aloof from the Common Market they would face discrimination in Europe’s biggest markets. But if they joined it, they would by definition have to abandon Imperial Preference. Which is one reason why Britain did not join the EEC from the outset, and why Harold Macmillan found himself worrying, in the spring of 1961, that it was all “getting terribly like 1846”. Britain's 19th-century past thus mattered a lot during the critical years when European integration took a decisive step forward. And the fact that Britain initially remained aloof meant that it eventually joined a Common Market that had been shaped by other countries in a way that reflected their own histories. Not only did it make sense for them to form a customs union rather than a mere free-trade area, it also made sense for them to complement that customs union with a range of policies that protected farmers and helped to ensure that the EEC would have a social and a political, as well as an economic, dimension. Read more: Brexit and American independence (podcast) The reluctant Europeans (exclusive to The Library) Ireland’s past and present (podcast) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/10/GettyImages-613512710-1cdbe70.jpg" width="3740" height="2708" alt="Londoners read newspaper headlines about Britain's entry to the Common Market, January 1973. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Londoners read newspaper headlines about Britain's entry to the Common Market, January 1973. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> For while it was important to obtain the economic benefits of continent-wide free trade, it was equally important to ensure that economic competition did not lead to regulatory ‘races to the bottom’: the aim was to create institutions that would accommodate not only markets, but the welfare state; mixed economies; and regulations that were felt to be necessary in order to protect workers and consumers, and avoid a repeat of the disastrous 1930s. This basic function of European integration may sometimes have been honoured as much in the breach as the observance, but it continues to shape European attitudes and ‘red lines’ today. For example, it would be inconceivable for the European Union to allow a country on its very borders, as large as the UK, to freely access European markets without there being constraints on its ability to deregulate its economy. Read more: Britain and the Union (podcast) Why has Britain decided to leave the EU? (exclusive to The Library) A brief history of the Good Friday Agreement It is the interaction between these distinct British and European histories, not to mention the history of Ireland, which produced not only Brexit, but the negotiations that followed the 2016 referendum. A history of Tory party division not only gave rise to the ill-fated (and Balfour-esque) Chequers plan that Mrs May concocted last summer, but the referendum itself: as David Cameron told the leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg in 2012, it was “a party management issue”. History cannot tell us how this story will end. But history is essential if we are to understand how we got to where we are today, and it will also help us to make sense of whatever it is that will happen tomorrow. Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke is Chichele Professor of economic history at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop (Penguin, 2019).
Tom Cutterham describes how the Brexit negotiations compare with America’s departure from the British empire
Historian Tom Cutterham compares the ongoing negotiations to take Britain out of the EU with those of the 1780s when the United States departed from the British empire.
Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk on the history of Europe
Simon Jenkins’ new book, A Short History of Europe, offers a concise overview of the successes and failures of the continent across centuries. He met fellow historian Kathleen Burk to discuss these highs and lows
Kathleen Burk: Why did you decide to write a ‘short history’ of Europe? Simon Jenkins: Because I didn’t have time to write a long one! But it’s also because I don’t regard myself as – and I’m careful here – a ‘serious’ historian. I’m a popular historian – a journalist by background. When I did the first book in this series [2011’s A Short History of England], I was fascinated to see if there were actually any virtues in such a book being short. It came to seem to me that the exercise of editing and excision, of leaving things out, was a serious activity in a history of any sort. That’s different to, say, the [20th-century British historian] Lewis Namier approach, in which you put everything in, leaving the reader to do the editing and decide what’s important. I do also think that shortness is a virtue in itself in this day and age, when people like things brief. I can see why short books sell. Listen to the full discussion between Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk on the History Extra podcast, available now You write that yours is “a conventional history”, based on power and led by great men – and, of course, the odd woman. Why write it this way? Was it because your intended market would easily recognise and accept such an approach? Yes. When you use the word ‘history’, people think of kings, battles, and dates, and they do so for a good reason. As in a newspaper, history is mostly about those things, along with diseases and divorces. So it does appeal to people. But, much more importantly, I’m trying to tell the story of Europe, which is a political entity. It’s not a geographical entity, really: there’s no real reason why Europe should be a separate continent from Asia, for instance, other than the nature of territorial aggrandisement and the politics of land. I believe – and this is possibly controversial – that all history begins with politics, and with the battle over land and who should occupy it. A key theme of your book seems to be that people are inherently violent. How did you come to reach that view? The development of Europe, since it began two millennia ago, has been dominated by the struggle over land. This relentlessness fascinates me: it was peculiarly violent, and that violence was the dominant factor in people’s lives. I was also fascinated by the efforts that Europe has made over the past two or three hundred years to stop being violent. Europe achieved this extraordinary supremacy over the world – European empires dominated two-thirds of the globe at one point – before blowing it all in the horrors of the 20th century. Out of those horrors came this quest for some sort of union, which we’re in the middle of now, and it’s through that apparent triumph over the history of violence and horrors that Europe is, in a sense, achieving some sort of atonement. You could argue, though, that one of the reasons Europe was so peaceful in the 19th century was that its nations simply directed their violence elsewhere, couldn’t you? Yes, and you’d be right. There are all kinds of ways in which we suppress, overcome and cope with violence: nation-building, diplomacy, and so on. But the fact is that, in the 19th century, European states became very powerful and technologically more advanced than others elsewhere – and were therefore in a position to conquer them. I’m not a defender of empire, but there was nothing we did to other people that could be compared to what we did to ourselves in the Thirty Years’ War – or, for that matter, the First or Second World War. Europe’s capacity for violence against itself was supreme. You write about the teenagers in the ancient and medieval worlds who went out and fought wars because they saw it as a great thing to do. You could perhaps say – albeit not entirely seriously – that there has been more peace of late because statesmen have become older. Read more: The big question: Has the European Union been a success? The Munich crisis: The battle of appeasement Podcast: Charles de Gaulle reconsidered Yes, I do think that. I hadn’t realised until I wrote this book that they had all been young. I suddenly thought: “yet another war caused by a 21-year-old”. Alexander I, Edward III, Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great… they were all young men. They became most belligerent when the hormones were jangling and they were getting up, showing off and being virile young men. I do find it to be a curious feature of Europe’s history – and it’s related, of course, to kingship. People tended to die young, and therefore their sons were even younger when they took power. I was also fascinated by the fact that, when each war came to an end, any so-called peace tended to last two generations – for 50 or 60 years – before the next war would come along, almost like clockwork. That suggests to me that the inclination toward violence has a lot to do with the memory of horror and the memory of war, not just a matter of how politics works. How important were wars in the development of Europe throughout its history? As Frederick the Great said, the nature of power is to want to expand. Europe had very confined borders, lots of people, and growing populations that rubbed up against each other. All of this meant that nations ended up fighting. I was very careful to not be Anglocentric in writing this book, but it was difficult in some senses because Britain’s history in Europe is very different from that of other countries. I believe that’s because we are an island, and therefore don’t rub up against our neighbours in the same way as other nations do. The wars that Britain has fought in Europe since the 17th century were, on the whole, accidental wars in which we were almost mercenaries for other people, rather than wars of aggrandisement. Non-intervention in Europe has been pretty close to an ideology in British foreign policy through history. How do you fit the papacy into this story? One of the problems with writing a short history of Europe is that you end up with lots of easy villains: the late Roman emperors, for instance, or the French monarchy, who made what might be called wrong decisions for something like 300 years. But then I came to the popes. Whatever one thinks of Catholicism, their capacity for causing suffering and getting things wrong was extraordinary. Yet they did have a remarkable ability, through the power of faith, to take over from the Roman empire and provide a sort of glue for barbarian Europe. The papacy provided discipline and gave people a sense of loyalty, secular as well as religious, to a cause. The papacy was a remarkable phenomenon up until the 13th century, when various megalomanic popes lost the plot. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-152197903-cmyk-9ccff2e.jpg" width="1976" height="1963" alt="An ornately decorated dome in the Great Mosque in Córdoba (begun 784), one of the wonders of Moorish architecture in Spain. "Islam was very important to European history," says Simon Jenkins, "because it defined Europe". (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)" title="An ornately decorated dome in the Great Mosque in Córdoba (begun 784), one of the wonders of Moorish architecture in Spain. "Islam was very important to European history," says Simon Jenkins, "because it defined Europe". (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)" /> Continuing with the idea of religion as a glue, how much emphasis would you put on the growth of Islam as a factor that caused Europe to coalesce? Before writing this book, I hadn’t really realised the completeness of the Islamic incursion around the Mediterranean in the eighth century. Almost none of their conquests reverted to Christianity, and they penetrated right through almost to Vienna and up through Spain and into France. They were relatively tolerant – they did not demand that people changed their religion or burned Christians – and they were very successful. North Africa and the Levant converted to Islam. The consequence was that Christendom shrank by about a third. Islam was very important to European history, because it defined Europe. It was after that incursion that Europe decided it no longer included the eastern or southern Mediterranean. Why do you think Islam was less violent than Christianity? Do you think that’s one of the reasons why it was a bit more permanently successful? I don’t know the answer to that; all religions change over time, of course, not least Christianity. But, certainly, the early incursions were tolerant. When they arrived in Damascus, for instance, Muslims shared the church with Christians. They were not interested in conquering faith. The result was that the Coptic Christians in Egypt, for example, loved the Muslims, who told them they could worship as they wished, whereas the church in Constantinople was endlessly excommunicating them and decrying them as dissidents and heretics. You refer to the “growth of authoritarian populism”. Does this have a history in Europe, or is it a recent phenomenon? European states that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries were used to having kings. Kings were useful, because they were a fount of identity and loyalty, and because they defended you against your enemies. People became congenitally attuned to having strong leaders: you saw it strongly, I’m afraid, in the attitudes of even British people to Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s. The idea of a strong leader had tremendous appeal. Even today, when we are supposedly conditioned and programmed to prefer some kind of democracy, the concept of the strong leader comes to the fore when democracy seems to be erring, or failing, or not delivering as promised. What I’m more puzzled by is why it appears to be so much stronger in eastern Europe than western Europe. Slavs seem to have a natural tendency to seek a strong leader, whereas the British, French and Germans seem to be more sceptical. When someone in those countries gets too much power, the people tend to turn against them. Read more: Podcast: Scots and Catalans Europe’s apocalypse: the Thirty Years' War Britain decides: the first European referendum <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Three-documents-for-and-against-published-for-the-referendum-held-in-1975-on-the-United-Kingdom’s-continued-membership-of-the-European-Economic-Community-76a3624.jpg" width="800" height="530" alt="1st May 1975: Three documents, for and against, published for the referendum on the Common Market" title="1st May 1975: Three documents, for and against, published for the referendum on the Common Market. The document 'Britain's New Deal in Europe' (centre) contains a recommendation by the government signed by prime minister Harold Wilson for Britain to stay in the Community. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)" /> Do you think that’s also programmed into Russian DNA? Were they so tired of being invaded by various hordes that they decided – or their leaders decided – that what a disparate, large and threatened empire such as Russia needed was a strong leader? It was certainly programmed into the DNA of Russia’s leaders, yes. It was very explicit: rulers including Peter the Great and Catherine the Great all stated that the rationalism of figures such as [French enlightenment thinker] Voltaire, and possibly even democracy, was fine – but not for Russia. It was so big, as they saw it, that it needed a strong leader and strong central government. You suggest that all of the aspects we have discussed – including the role of violence and the formation of the nation state – brought the continent of Europe close to self-destruction in the 20th century. Yet a greater proportion of the population died in the Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648 than in the wars of the 20th century. So why give pride of place to that recent century rather than to the 17th? The Thirty Years’ War was so horrific because it was at the end of the Middle Ages; when government collapsed, there were huge numbers of deaths from starvation, people went marauding, and so on. So I think the parallel is not very helpful. Just why the wars of the 20th century were so cataclysmic is a much more difficult question to answer. Some people say it’s the nature of the weaponry: in the First World War it was almost impossible for a land army to win, because machine guns were so effective. In the Second World War you had air power, which was useful up to a point but whose massive destructiveness was wilful and meaningless. The other problem in the Second World War was that you had two very powerful dictatorial regimes that were able to mobilise reasonably modern economies to the purpose of war, so that conflict just had to fight itself out until it was finished – across a bigger scale, and a much wider territory, than the Thirty Years’ War. You cite the great treaties of Europe – Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles – and say that they kept the peace for only two generations. Why should current arrangements prove any more durable? That’s a very good question! A pessimist would say they think they won’t, and an optimist would say they hope they do. So we’re back to faith, are we? Well, it’s not entirely faith. If there’s any duty incumbent upon a historian, it’s to try to work out if anything can be learned from history. I do think it’s possible to discern, in the point I make about the recurring pattern of two generations of peace, the aversions that lead people to rely on diplomacy more than they did before. My mother, who was a student at the end of the interwar period and very politically active on the left, always said that no one would ever understand how people approached diplomacy between the wars. She said that it’s impossible to imagine, when all you could remember was the First World War, why anyone would do it again. When [British prime minister] Neville Chamberlain came back from meeting Adolf Hitler in 1938, 90% of the nation were cheering him on, because everyone feared another war and he’d apparently stopped it. Six months later the situation was very different, but at that point in time the horror of war was foremost in people’s minds. How far you can see that echoed in modern diplomatic relations between states, I’m not sure. All I know is that on the few occasions since the Second World War when things became very dangerous, largely due to the incompetence or age of Russian leaders during the Cold War, we pulled back from the brink. I think that’s because people were so horrified by the prospect of a nuclear exchange that they couldn’t bring themselves to instigate whatever process was necessary to precipitate it. We survived those crises, and others since – even the approach of hot war along parts of the Russian border. I can’t believe that the sequence of events necessary to produce another war on anything like the scale of the last one will happen. But perhaps that’s an act of faith! But we are two generations on now... The big mistakes are not always the ones you think they were. I remember the era during which the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 as a time of unbelievable optimism. Between 1990 and 2000 history was at an end, liberal democracy had triumphed; all these things were being said – but we didn’t notice, sitting at the eastern border of Europe, an utterly humiliated major nuclear power: Russia. And we did humiliate them, and we did drive Nato’s boundary eastward into what they regarded as their territory. That was a very dangerous thing to do, and I believe that if anything goes wrong in my lifetime it will be caused by that decision. What are your thoughts on the future of Europe? I’ve always been a sceptic of the EU. I was not in favour of Britain joining, because I think it’s a dysfunctional, ill-formed, protectionist body that is not serving the interests of Europe well. That’s my scepticism. My positivity about it is based on the fact that it’s all we’ve got. Looking at the break-up of Yugoslavia [in the early 1990s], I wonder if it may have been possible to stop the violence if the EU had been more engaged. So I have faith in unions: they are our only defence against the resumption of war. That’s why, over the centuries, Britain has been sucked back in to European interventions designed to avoid open conflict – most conspicuously in the 18th-century War of Spanish Succession, but also against Napoleon and again against Hitler. In my mind, those have been noble interventions by Britain in a good cause: that of a sort of united Europe. These were genuine attempts by good people to find peace. Britain has always gone in and out of Europe: we engage, we disengage, we have nothing to do with Europe and then we find we have a noble reason to get involved again, or we’re sucked back in. We’re part of European culture, and we can’t avoid that. About the authors Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin will be published by Viking in November. Kathleen Burk is a historian and writer. Her latest book is The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783–1972 (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk explore the continent’s history from ancient times until the present day
Author and journalist Simon Jenkins is joined by Professor Kathleen Burk to discuss his forthcoming Short History of Europe, which explores some of the key themes and milestones in the continent’s past. You can also read the full conversation, which first appeared in BBC World Histories magazine, in The Library <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/Simon_Kathleen_013-5c61131.jpg" width="1024" height="603" alt="Professor Kathleen Burk and Simon Jenkins discuss Jenkins's new book, 'A Short History of Europe'. (Photo by David Hampton for BBC World Histories magazine)" title="Professor Kathleen Burk and Simon Jenkins discuss Jenkins's new book, 'A Short History of Europe'. (Photo by David Hampton for BBC World Histories magazine)" />
Why has Britain decided to leave the EU?
On 23 June 2016, Britain voted narrowly in favour of leaving the European Union. In the aftermath of this historic decision, we asked five historians to offer their opinions – about the causes of the Leave victory and what it might mean for the country's future
The panel Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter who specialises in 20th-century international history, especially the Second World War. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian, writer and broadcaster who has presented a number of BBC TV series on postwar Britain, including a forthcoming history of the 1980s. David Abulafiais professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University. He is the leader of Historians for Britain, which argued for changes to Britain’s EU membership. Helen McCarthy is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London who works on modern Britain. She edits the journal Twentieth Century British History. Kathleen Burk is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London. Her interests lie in British and Anglo-American history. Were you surprised by the result, and if so, why? Richard Overy: I was not surprised as the result was always a strong possibility given the long history of populist hostility to Europe and the difficulty of finding a popular political language in favour of a European future. The narrow margin was also entirely predictable. Helen McCarthy: I was surprised because I believed the ‘safety first’ argument of the Remain side would resonate in the final days of the campaign and pull undecideds towards Remain. I underestimated the strength of anti-EU sentiment, even in relatively affluent parts of England, such as Essex, Suffolk and Surrey where many stand to lose a great deal in the recession which almost inevitably will follow Brexit. The result confounds the familiar logic of ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ – which has fitted so neatly with the evidence of general elections in recent decades. Do you see the Leave victory as more the result of short or long-term factors? Dominic Sandbrook: Clearly it’s a bit of both. It was close, after all. One very obvious short-term factor, for example, is the fact that Labour had such an extraordinarily unconvincing leader, which nobody anticipated even a year ago. But I also think this has been a long time coming. Public discontent about immigration has been growing for 50 years; so has the alienation of large swathes of formerly industrial working-class England. And I think it’s crucial to remember that England has a very long history of distrust and even hostility towards its European neighbours. In a sense, and though I’m sorry it happened, the nation’s verdict on 23 June was simply a reversion to our default setting. Kathleen Burk: In the long-term, Europe has frequently been an existential threat, from the French to the Germans to the Russians. During the Second World War, all othe countries in continental Europe, except Sweden, Spain and Switzerland, had been invaded, conquered and occupied; Britain had not, and faith in the state was not shaken. Then in the medium-term the widespread anger arising from the democratic deficit and the volume of regulations became increasingly intolerable. As for the short-term: social and economic chaos and the threat of a surge of migrants were alarming. The desirable policies of the EU, such as funding, were taken for granted, while the undesirable were all too public. David Abulafia: It’s a combination. The aggressive stance of the Remainers proved counter-productive – not that the Leave campaign always conducted itself wisely. The comments by Obama and others were also, I believe, counter-productive, not least because he won’t even be president when the UK leaves the EU. But we are also looking at the release of pent-up anger after so many years during which the public was not consulted about ‘ever closer union’ and ‘the European project’. Jean-Claude Juncker bears heavy responsibility; his refusal to compromise or to introduce democratic reforms left the PM with insignificant concessions. To what extent has Britain historically stood apart from continental Europe? HM: Britain has been closely engaged in all the major events and turning points of 20th-century European history, from the two world wars and the creation and work of the League of Nations in between, to postwar reconstruction and, since the 1970s, the European project. Certainly Britain’s historic relationship with Europe has distinctive features, but that’s true of all member states to a greater or lesser degree. I dislike arguments about how the English Channel, or victory in the Second World War, or the ‘special relationship’ with the US somehow makes it impossible for the British to feel truly European. Historians should use narratives to unpick complex processes of change and continuity in the past, not to shackle politics in the present and the future. DS: Any historian will tell you that we have a long history of entanglement with the continent: the Angevin empire, the Glorious Revolution, and so on. Yes, yes, we know all that. But the plain fact is that Britain has a long-standing self-image as an exceptional country, a cradle of Protestant liberty. Is that just a myth? Maybe. But myths matter. Perhaps even more importantly, we undoubtedly had an exceptional 20th century. Britain was the only major European country not to experience defeat, invasion, occupation, civil war or dictatorship. That meant that we had a unique attitude to the European project. Alone among the major European nations, we entered grudgingly and halfheartedly. Our neighbours hoped to escape their modern history. But many British voters saw no reason to join in the first place, because they had so few of those 20th-century scars. RO: Britain has never stood apart from Europe and it is an illusion to believe that it ever has. Britain (earlier England) has always been a part of the European order and has waged war and made trade in Europe continuously. Influences – cultural, economic, technological, intellectual – have flowed both ways for centuries. How far do you see the EU itself as having been responsible for Euroscepticism in Britain over the years? KB: Europe and the UK are different. They have different legal systems, different business cycles, different approaches to languages, different political cultures, different assumptions about the state. The foundation for Euroscepticism was there, providing a strong base for an increasing dislike of unacceptable interference by unelected institutions. DA: Very much so: the remote institutions of the EU, largely unaccountable, have generated Euroscepticism not just in the UK. The insistence on creating a ‘European identity’, based on a false notion that being European transcends national identities, has created an enormous backlash that has taken unpleasant forms, as in Hungary or France. The British public, with its milder political temper, has by and large avoided extremist positions, but the EU is now paying the price of its extraordinary arrogance, combined with impenetrable bureaucracy and corruption. Moreover, the European Court has stamped on national parliaments and supreme courts. RO: It is not the EU as such that has been responsible for Euroscepticism (a phenomenon by no means exclusively British) but the failure of national governments to make clear enough the nature of the union and the benefits derived from it, or to counter popular but ill-informed prejudice about the Union’s practices. Why do you think the result this time was so different from the Remain victory of 1975? KB: Forty years versus two years of experience. DA: Joining a loose trading association was one thing; being part of an increasingly monolithic United States of Europe would be quite another, and the concessions won by the prime minister simply did not go far enough to meet the worries of the British public. Had he managed to position the UK within a new Europe built around the old idea of a common market, he would have won the support of the vast majority of voters. DS: The answer’s very simple. Britain was at a low ebb in 1975, its confidence shattered after 10 years of terrible news. The empire had gone, the pound had been devalued; there had been five states of emergency in four years. Inflation was heading towards 30 per cent, and all the talk was of Britain being ungovernable. So Europe seemed a way out, a bulwark, even a panacea. If we had been better off in 1975, though – if we had been a more united, confident, prosperous country – I suspect the vote would have gone differently. So perhaps it is only a slight stretch to suggest that Britain was always likely to reverse the 1975 referendum once it recovered its self-confidence. How much do you think an awareness of history played a role in people’s voting decisions? HM: Some older voters seem to have been influenced by what might be described as a ‘myth of betrayal’ surrounding the 1975 referendum. In other words, they believed that they had been misled by elites promising access to a single market rather than membership of a nascent European ‘super-state’, and this second referendum presented an opportunity to settle scores. Some Leave voters also appeared to subscribe to a politics of patriotism rooted in a rather generalised but nonetheless historic notion of their nation’s ‘greatness’. This created fertile ground for Leave’s claim that the UK would thrive outside the EU, but barren soil for Remain’s more nuanced arguments about the merits of pooled sovereignty in an interdependent world. DA: For some people, I don’t doubt, there was some romantic notion of recovering an Olde England characterised by village cricket greens and so on, but I don’t think it counted for much. The debate was about the future, which is uncertain, to put it mildly. The recent history of the EU – stagnant growth, a disastrous common currency, the Schengen crisis – was surely in some people’s minds, but it was strangely ignored in favour of vapid speculation about what ‘might’ or ‘could’ happen to the economy, security and so on. RO: It is difficult to gauge this, and historians would like to think it did. It mattered less for the Remain camp, though there was some sense that union was a better future given Europe’s bloody past. It mattered more for the Leave campaign because it traded on the myths of 1940 and Britain alone against the European threat. This was, of course, a complete distortion. Alone, Britain had no prospect of winning the war. Moreover the war itself had been about saving Europe from fascism, a commitment that tied Britain more to Europe, rather than less. KB: I cannot think that an awareness of history played much of a part: not even the Remain camp pointed out that the EU in its early guises was set up partly to balance and constrain Germany, bringing to an end 75 years of European civil war. DS: History undoubtedly mattered a great deal. Not, curiously, the kind of history written by historians, but a version of history that’s very deeply embedded in the popular imagination – the island nation, standing alone against a succession of continental bullies. In many ways it’s a myth. But through our popular culture, as much as anything, it’s so tightly woven into many Britons’ sense of themselves that there’s probably nothing historians can do to shift it. People can write as many books as they like about our European inheritance or the ‘invention’ of our national identity, but you just can’t change a nation’s character and assumptions overnight. How does this referendum fit into the history of British democracy? HM: Direct democracy in the form of referenda has not featured prominently in Britain’s modern political history. To the contrary, popular plebiscites were generally regarded as the mark of immature polities not yet sufficiently advanced to practise the art of representative democracy – of which the British were the supposed masters. Of course there is much Whiggish nonsense in this; arguably what this referendum has exposed is the lamentable state of political leadership in this country, which utterly failed to convey to voters the magnitude of what was at stake in a ballot of this kind. We’re witnessing the fallout of this failure in the regret subsequently expressed by many Leave supporters who didn’t think their vote ‘would count’. DS: In democratic terms, there’s never been anything like it. Personally I think it was the worst campaign in our history, with both sides reaching a terrible low. What’s also true is that the electorate have probably never rebelled so overtly (if narrowly) against the massed ranks of the political and economic establishments. I don’t even think the Labour landslide of 1945 comes close. But the referendum also represents something that few of us have really come to terms with – the eclipse of the idea of representative parliamentary democracy by a kind of populist plebiscitary version. Has a Leave vote shifted Britain’s historical trajectory? KB: The Leave vote appears to have shifted Britain’s historical trajectory back to that of 1970: 1971–2016 appears to have been an aberration. DA: It means we won’t be in at the kill when the EU disintegrates. Unless its leaders take the British vote seriously, recognising the strength of Euroscepticism across the Union, the EU is doomed. In the very long term, though, leaving the EU may well position the UK between the EU and the rest of the world, very much to Britain’s advantage as a trading nation. We have the chance to make connections across the globe that the EU has failed to pursue. So this is an opportunity that has to be seized enthusiastically. DS: I think this is the biggest turning point in our modern political history. Not everyone will agree, but I don’t think the elections of 1945 and 1979 were turning points; I think the changes they unleashed were always coming. But this is different, a real lurch into the unknown. Half a century after Harold Macmillan made our first bid to join, Britain seems to have definitively turned its back on the European project. Never before has our political future been so utterly unpredictable, and never before has our national destiny seemed so uncertain. HM: While some Leave supporters might welcome Brexit as a return to glorious isolation, in truth it marks a fundamental break with the liberal internationalist traditions present within British foreign policy throughout the century. Britain was a major architect of the League of Nations and a founding member of the United Nations, and, despite wavering levels of enthusiasm on the part of postwar British governments, has found in Europe a welcome source of global influence to compensate for the loss of its own superpower status. In 50 years’ time, how will historians look back on this result? RO: Historians will have many explanations for the outcome of the referendum, and a clear view of its consequences, which we lack. It is impossible to pre-judge, since historians are themselves deeply divided now over the issue. In 50 years’ time they are not likely to be less so. HM: Assuming Brexit actually takes place, historians will look back at the EU referendum of 2016 as the moment when Britain slipped from managed into unmanaged decline in terms of her global influence and economic muscle. Even – or perhaps especially – if parliament finds a way to prevent it, the referendum will mark one of the ugliest and most divisive chapters in the history of British democracy. Unless the Labour party finds a way to renew itself, historians might be talking about 2016 as the year in which a fundamental realignment took place in British politics favouring the far right. I sincerely hope I’ve got that one wrong. KB: I suspect that it will be looked back on as a dirty, dishonest, history-changing episode. Very few of the leading lights will have come out of it well. DS: It’s genuinely impossible to say because it depends so completely on what happens next. That’s what makes it so uncertain, and at once so exciting and so terrifying. We just have no way of knowing what Britain’s future relationship with the EU will look like, or even what the economic impact will be. We don’t even know whether Britain will exist as a political unit. Sadly, I think there’s a good chance now that it won’t, and that historians will look back on 23 June as the day that the United Kingdom died. DA: As another stage in the disintegration of the EU, coming on top of the failure of the Euro project and the mishandling of the very real refugee crisis. From that perspective, it is more a sharp tremor than an earthquake – one of a series of tremors whose effect will be cumulative. Even if we had voted the other way, disintegration would still be on the cards, though not quite so rapidly. And how will history remember David Cameron as prime minister? RO: He might well have been remembered as a reasonably successful premier, given the major problems the country has faced. But it seems inevitable that history will see him as the man who failed to stop the wave of populist revolt in Britain over Europe, and who may well have opened the way for the rest of the European right to follow suit. HM: As Lord North is remembered for losing America, Cameron will take his place in the history books as the premier who unwittingly led us out of Europe and, in all likelihood, ensured the secession of Scotland from the UK. It’s hard to recall any notable achievements, except perhaps the legalisation of gay marriage, which come anywhere near mitigating Cameron’s car-crash decision to call a wholly unnecessary referendum. DA: David Cameron has been a very capable politician, and at the peak of his career won considerable popularity. This was his big mistake politically – he didn’t expect to have to hold a referendum, because he didn’t expect his party to win enough seats to govern on its own. Then he miscalculated by not standing above the fray but throwing himself into bitter arguments that (on both sides) sometimes stretched the evidence and reason. So something of a tragic figure: a charismatic leader who gambled and lost. KB: He is likely to have joined Neville Chamberlain in the hall of those politicians whose political careers ended in a huge and incontrovertible failure of a policy of national and international importance. A lack of judgment, a lack of familiarity with the wider electorate and a focus on tactics rather than strategy did for him. DS: I think that until 23 June, Cameron was a good, solid, moderate prime minister. Certainly he handled the economy far better that most people predicted. But even I have to face facts. Nobody is going to remember him for anything but the referendum. I’m genuinely sorry to say this, but in the space of a few hours Cameron plunged from a well-deserved place in the top half of the prime ministerial league table to an equally well-deserved one in the relegation zone. He joins Chamberlain, Eden and Callaghan as men remembered, perhaps unjustly, for just one word. In his case, not ‘appeasement’, ‘Suez’ or ‘strikes’, but ‘Europe’. These answers were compiled by Rob Attar. This article was first published in the August 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine