Britain and Europe: backing into the future

Notes internacionals CIDOB, núm. 80

My working title for this Nota Internacional was "Britain's European problem". To many Anglophone ears the phrase will sound easy, plainly descriptive of the often unsettled relationship between London and the European Union. From the other end of the telescope, though, "Europe's British problem" would be equally accurate, even if to the same ears it might sound discordant or vaguely insulting. So used are the British public to their politicians and media depicting Europe as an irritant or threat, it's hard to consider that - as the conspirator Cassius says in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves..."

In one sense, though, even to frame the issue in either of these terms no longer works. For if Britain was for many years the European Union's "exception", that is arguably no longer the case. In today's EU, beset by multiple challenges - from the eurozone's dysfunction to institutional tensions, from divisions over reform to the growth of populism - it can seem that everyone has a "problem" with Europe. The evidence of widespread discontent with the EU in successive Eurobarometer and Pew Research polls, and of the rise of populist parties and sentiments in many member-states, suggests that Britain - the home of euroscepticism, its political class and public the main source of criticism of the European Union in the name of the nation-state - appears more of a pioneer.

There is, though, a fundamental reason for "the British file" to occupy its special place on the shelf for at least a few more years. This is that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - to give this multinational state its conventional title - is the only EU member-state where powerful elements of its public, political elite and media have never reconciled themselves to the fact of its membership, even forty years after accession.

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