Our story over the last sixty years has been surprising, even encouraging. In 1945, a damaged France and an exhausted Britain shivered in the post-war chill. Decline stared them in the face: loss of empire, loss of reputation, loss of wealth, loss of cohesion, loss of confidence – ‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.’ Yet, as Adam Smith once said, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. They revived. That both countries would be the most assertive, ambitious and articulate members of a peaceful and undivided Europe, would overtake Russia in usable military power, and be among the half-dozen richest countries in the world, would have seemed fantastic. Whether they have used their new lease of life wisely is another question. Yet although they shared both the problem of decline and the conscious desire to resist it, they rarely showed much solidarity. They have followed very different paths, both internationally and domestically. They have a recent history of rivalry hard to match by any other pair of allies – and it shows no sign of abating.
IT: The core problem has long been obvious: the malaise of a Britain unable to accept its true position in the world, that is, as a country in the heart of Europe. This is the source of Britain’s difficulty with France and its other neighbours, of damaging foreign entanglements, and of domestic political divisions. Like France, it should have realized from the 1950s that it could find a new role – and a means of resisting decline – by throwing itself wholeheartedly into the construction of Europe: a task of truly historic importance. Had it seized the opportunity in the 1950s of being one of the early leaders of Europe, its position in the world and its economic and social solidity would be less uncertain. As Tony Blair put it, ‘We said it wouldn’t happen. Then we said it wouldn’t work. Then we said we didn’t need it. But it did happen. And Britain was left behind.’1 It adopted two demeaning and self-defeating positions: trailing behind the United States and trailing behind Europe – taken for granted by the former, and a burden to the latter. In particular, had it built up a European partnership with France, owing to similarly rooted traditions of representative government, national identity, and engagement with the outside world, it could have helped to make the European Union both more democratic internally and more effective externally. Britain turned its back to the future, and one consequence of that is the crisis Europe is now facing.
RT: This is a very romantic – and in some ways of course a very French – view. It assumes that nations and Continents have destinies, and that history follows preordained paths. But there are no paths to the future: we have to blaze the trail as we go. Even if, for the sake of argument, one accepted the ‘destiny’ idea, one might conclude that Britain had a different destiny from that espoused by France. Britain seems set on an ‘ever closer union’ with the world – de Gaulle’s ‘grand large’. One might even conclude that Europe is likely to choose that destiny too, eventually, and that here British influence has been and will be important. That is what de Gaulle feared and resisted. It is by no means clear in 2005, as it seemed in 1975, that British governments in the 1950s were wrong in staying outside the early Common Market, which would have devastated their world trade and made subsequent economic revival harder. Indeed, from an economic point of view the EFTA strategy of creating a purely trading relationship with the EEC would probably have been more beneficial. But Britain’s motives were always political more than economic. It pursued traditional policies: to prevent the domination of the Continent by a single (in this case collective) power, and to press for freer trade – in effect, to prevent a new ‘Continental System’. In that sense, it has been fairly successful – the events of 2005 even suggest very successful. One might regard this as purblind, or clear-sighted, or just lucky. But these are matters for legitimate political choice: there is no ‘Future’ to which ‘History’ ordains us to conform.