[A-List] 'Britain' and Europe

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The English should get out of Europe

But not the Welsh and Scots: they don't have the same hang-ups

Hywel Williams
Friday June 27, 2003
The Guardian

For friend and foe alike, "Europe" has meant everything to the English. It's
been a place of warmth and fun - an escape from the class-bound hierarchies
of the grey insular state they call home. And it's also been a place where
laughing Latins break the rules. On one side of the street, the chic of
style; and on the other, the stench of corruption. Europhiles and
Eurosceptics have been equally active fabricators of the mythologies.
Liberal Europhiles with stars in their eyes, and sour sceptics with sneers
on their lips, are really in the same boat. They parody to suit their own
purposes.

Thirty years after the passage of the legislation which took the former
United Kingdom "into Europe", the role played by that place in English
imagination and politics is as weird as ever. It's always the function of
the culturally other to be parodied - so it can be controlled. Western
pictures of the Orient as a sensual parade of passivity helped the
imperialising mission. But the English use their "Europe" in a different,
deeper way.

There is an imaginative frenzy about European classlessness, cultural
greatness and sexual openness; while another fantasy about "abroad" instils
horror about rule-breaking in banking, politics and law. But the innocence
of the liberal and the bigot share the same root: the suppressed national
psyche.

"Europe" is how the English would like to live - if they could get away with
it - but think that they can't or shan't. And so they attribute to the
invented other - the people over there - those qualities they suppress in
themselves. While supposedly talking to and about "Europeans", they are
really in dialogue with themselves - doing psychoanalysis, not diplomacy. No
wonder the political consequences of the past 30 years have been so sterile.

The film footage of 1973 dispels any idea that the British were tricked into
joining what they thought was only a trading block. They were told that this
was a revolution in their constitution, law and politics. The basis of the
very vigorous campaign against entry was the revived Gaitskellite panic
about 1,000 years of history going down the pan. Wales and Scotland have
more than reconciled themselves to the new dispensation. In those countries
there are fewer fantasies and fewer fears.

But if you want to find out what the English majority think of Europe, look
at the TV schedules. Night after night viewers vote in an informal European
referendum by switching on documentaries about Hitler and his dogs,
Mussolini and his mistresses, Churchill and his generals. This is what
Europe means to the English: ancient battles and irrationality. They have
never quite got the hang of it all.

No political structure can survive if it is so out of step with social and
mental attitudes. There will be no 50th anniversary celebration of the
British treaty of accession. By 2023 the English will be out. And the first
stage in the withdrawal was Britain's role as a native bearer for the
American warlords in Iraq. That diplomatic fracture in Anglo-European
relations revealed the deeper cultural loyalty. England is a significantly
more American place than it was in 1973, with the subtly imperial power of
film and merchandise, books, music and advertising confirming the
Atlanticist tastes of the English.

The withdrawal will be a sticky business because in relation to Europe the
English have a silly habit of saying yes when they mean no. In referendums,
polls and elections they are dragged towards theoretical approval. But in
practical consequences there is a deep-seated English refusal to assimilate,
an impish delight in going against the current.

Best then to avoid yet another referendum which would merely repeat that
sterile pattern. The withdrawal will have to be forced on the English. There
will need to be a new European treaty simply confirming all previous ones
but excluding the English from its provisions.

One complicating factor is that the Welsh and the Scots undoubtedly do want
to remain. And so the new European configuration will allow those countries
to stay - an arrangement which will accelerate the dissolution of the UK.
But for their own sake the English really do have to go.

Some of us will miss them. But they have work of a politico-psychological
kind to do in dealing with their inner selves. And they can only do that if
they are stopped from indulging in these infantile parodies of the other.
For that very old country is now well past its senescence. It has entered
into a kind of second childhood in its relation to the adolescent US. Out of
Europe, the English have a better chance of regaining their realism and
maturity - qualities for which they were once celebrated.