Time to reclaim Britain's European identity

A lot of what I write on this blog tends towards the analytical. I examine policies and political events and see what lessons can be learned. This ranges from the practical considerations of EU-Russia energy confrontation to largely theoretical questions (like the distinction between a superpower and a superstate).

That all these focus on Europe is not an accident.

For one thing, I live here. What happens in Europe is highly relevant to me.

But I also write about Europe because my analyst brain is matched by an activist heart. My interest in these topics is not distant. It reflects a desire for real-world change.

As much as I am an analyst by nature and by profession, I am also a European. In particular, I am one of those millions of Brits who was born a citizen of the European Union - born, and expecting to hold that citizenship for the duration of my life.

It is in this position, as a member of Britain’s European generation, that I write this.

 

People look at my name and often assume I am at least part French, perhaps even with some German or Dutch. I am therefore followed by a common assumption that I or my immediate family come from continental Europe – a distinction that holds peculiar weight in the British framing of conversations on European identity. A distinction that means my deep European identity is not seen with any great deal of surprise.  

But the truth is that my background has nothing so obvious about it. The last few generations of my family were English, Irish and Canadian. Quebecois heritage excepted for a moment, I would struggle to be more a product of the ‘Anglosphere’ if I tried.

Some might then conclude that I have abandoned my Anglo-Saxon ancestry in order to become a ‘rootless international cosmopolitan’ - that my European-ness is some sort of rejection of my family background and that I have sought to escape the British imperial shadow by casting myself into an alternative identity.

Yet the reality is that my roots could not be deeper. I have always recognised myself as European. I understood being European before I knew what the EU was.  To be British and to be European was never to me anything other than self-evident – it was, after all, on my passport. My European identity is not an escape from the place where I was born, it is its absolute and undeniable product.

The nationalists would have us believe that they have a monopoly on history – that for a Brit to draw on their history would inevitably lead them to the conclusion that a British identity and a European identity are wholly separate. I reject this in full.

Much more than my own family, I look back at our nation’s history and see a long stretch of common European experience and exchange. Starting more than two millennia ago, in the shared foundations of the Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, whose ruins we can find in the parishes of England just as well as we can see them in Italy, we were gifted an enduring legacy of political traditions and philosophical ideas.

Through the intervening centuries the path of our nation continued to twist and wind, moving through, with and under the paths of our European sister-nations. The journey of these creeping vines maps out a nation that has given to, and taken much from, those with whom we share this continent. In the romantic literary movement, the 1848 political revolutions, the religious turmoil of the Reformation, the creative explosion of the Industrial Revolution, even in the family trees of our kings and queens – our path is littered with examples of Europe’s nations shaping and influencing one another. Even the devastating conflicts of the late 19^th century and the early and mid 20^th century re-emphasised the reality that for Britain, just as for other European nations, the affairs of this nation are fundamentally on a continental scale.

My European identity is not some kind of elite project, born in the upmarket 1950s cafes of Brussels and Luxembourg. It is a heritage of more than two thousand years – a long line of ancestors who entrusted in us a cultural and historical legacy.

So though they declared they were claiming back our identity, the nationalists’ narrow vision of our history means they have undermined and attacked so much more of our past then they could ever claim to have protected or saved.

 

For this is the truth of the matter: British national identity was never threatened. Though a new generation in Britain may have become more consciously European than before, they never stopped being British.

Indeed, this is one of the cruel ironies of Brexit. That our place in the EU was tied to our British nationality was given the force of a court of law when judges repeatedly ruled that our former EU citizenship could not be carried over after Brexit.

Being an EU citizen – the very thing supposedly threatening our British identity – did not in fact stand on its own. It could not take over or eliminate the national identity because that national identity was its foundations.

Strike out those foundations and look what we have been left with: a hollowed-out citizenship, with fewer rights, less control and whose shoddy banner is a passport that is the most literal form of plastic patriotism.

We know what they thought would happen. The nationalists believed that the new passport, recoloured and deleting the words ‘European Union’, would prompt a great wave of patriotic feeling, a return to old values as we all welcomed this long last marker.

I feel no pride. As a mere travel document, it fails to even match its burgundy counterparts. Resentment and exhaustion are the only feelings that accompany me through the lengthening queues at border control checks and the glazed-over stares of border control guards.

As a statement of identity, it is worse. We have not regained anything lost. No valued possession has been returned from the international community’s lost and found. Their black passport is foreign to me. It holds no emotional or physical connection to my life nor to those of my peers. The border stamps I must now collect inside this scrapbook are nothing but the reminders of the insular elite that seek to control our lives.

We all are and all always have been British. Only one side has sought to damage our identity, to disregard our inheritance and to overwrite our past. In Britain, the guardians of an inauthentic history, those who are truly rootless and disconnected, have torn down the statue of Europe from our national garden, in the hope that they could cultivate a new identity for themselves in the ruins.

They have taken from us and failed to even gain what we had.

 

This is a failure that is unsurprising to the point of being banal, for to be British and European is no aberration, it is normal and natural.

Our preferred form of society is the European economic model – a market system flanked by strong social protections, with the necessary taxes and contributions from all segments of society in order to pay for it.

We want high standards, strong regulations and a protective state. The American model of low regulations and low taxes, recently experimented with during the very brief stint of libertarian government in this country, is something that most Brits instinctively reject. It’s not even a question of growth models or public services – it’s simply not who we are.

We are more likely to speak another European language than to speak Mandarin. We are more likely to have been to provincial towns and villages in Europe than to major capitals in the Americas.

And in 1947 it was that most famous of Brits, Winston Churchill himself, who said: “Britain will have to play her full part as a member of the European family.”

Though not always consciously identified as such, Britons are European by nature and by instinct, immersed in the shared culture of Europe and seeking out the European way of life. A part, undeniably, of the family.

Recognising this, the nationalists could only ever reduce, not enhance, what it means to be British.

 

Of course we know what the nationalists will say to all this. They will tell us that none of this matters because they already possess the ultimate proof that Britain is not European at heart: the 2016 referendum. They will tell us that the outcome of this single vote outweighs thousands of years of shared history; that a snapshot of public opinion in a single time counters the weight of lived experience for millions of people in this country; that one decision to separate from Europe is of not just equal but greater worth than the dozens, hundreds of decisions taken over decades to form a closer union with our neighbours.

Or, in their language: you lost, get over it.

But the truth is the opposite. What the referendum has left in its wake is the most vocal and proactive movement for European unity to be found anywhere in the continent. A force able to mobilise hundreds of thousands in a country that has rarely given itself over to mass protests.

 

This may seem like a contradiction but is nothing of the kind. Though Britain has long had a deep European identity, stemming from its history and culture, rarely has it actually been named as such. What is European in Britishness is often ignored, taken for granted or subsumed into a more generic ‘Western’ identity.

The referendum, in posing a sharp contrast between being European and being anti-European, broke that identity out of its shell. As millions of people, who may never have considered themselves European as such, saw the face of Brexit, of the antithesis of that unspoken part of themselves, they realised that they really were European.

The 2016 result crystalised European identity in Britain, demonstrated what it was and what it wasn’t.

Like turning on a light in a dark room, nothing that was shown under that new exposure was a sudden arrival – Britain did not happen upon a large swathe of European identity up and down the country simply overnight. Rather, we learned to give a label to something that had long existed.

It is no wonder that so much of our politics and media, so certain of its conviction that Britain’s people had no European feeling to speak of, have been wrongfooted by the growth and strength of our pro-European movement.

 

British identity was never threatened. But European identity has been subject to a systemic attack over the last six years.

An attack prosecuted not by the representatives of Britain - as they would wish to be known - but by an elite minority, the true heirs of perfidious Albion, who would set our ship adrift without wind, anchor or port. From cabinet ministers to partisan activists, from news editors to social media commentators, whether you are shouted down as a North London elitist, decried as an enemy of democracy or generally accused of ‘helping the other side’, to be openly pro-European has been to willingly invite scorn and accusation form the loudest and most powerful voices of our public life.

Many of our leading opposition politicians have been successfully intimidated by these tactics. None will speak the truth of the disaster Brexit has been nor will they answer the country’s call to reclaim what has been taken.

But in spite of that sad fact, there is no cause for despair. Through the storm of this disaster, the great majority of people in this country have held firm, seen the situation for what it is and turned their backs on the nationalists. It is there that hope lies.

Today there is a protest to call for the UK to rejoin the EU. It is neither the first pro-European protest, nor will it be the last. It will remain the task of us, the average people of Britain, to uphold and defend the simple fact and existence of our European heritage and identity. In the end, they cannot shout us down forever.