{"id":226483,"date":"2019-08-11T22:40:35","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T02:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=226483"},"modified":"2019-08-11T22:40:35","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T02:40:35","slug":"island-or-european-nation-rival-views-of-uk-shape-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/08\/11\/island-or-european-nation-rival-views-of-uk-shape-brexit\/","title":{"rendered":"Island or European nation? Rival views of UK shape Brexit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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British history has become a Brexit battleground. (File Photo<\/a>: Modyg\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LONDON \u2014 British history has become a Brexit battleground.<\/p>\n

British voters’ decision three years ago to split from the European Union was fueled by a sense that the U.K. is fundamentally separate from its continental neighbours \u2014 a sceptered isle, rather than a European power.<\/p>\n

Brexit-backing Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg has compared Brexit to historic British military victories on the continent, saying \u201cit’s Waterloo, it’s Agincourt, it’s Crecy.\u201d Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage fires up crowds with air-raid sirens and the theme from World War II thriller \u201cThe Great Escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such patriotic messages strike a strong chord in an era of surging nationalism. But anti-Brexit politicians and historians say that view is too simplistic \u2014 and could end up making the U.K. weaker rather than stronger.<\/p>\n

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued Sunday in The Observer newspaper that \u201ca destructive, populist, nationalist ideology\u201d was leaving the United Kingdom \u201csleepwalking into oblivion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown, who was Labour Party leader and British prime minister between 2007 and 2010, accused current Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson of \u201cconjuring up the absurd and mendacious image of the patriotic British valiantly defying an intransigent Europe determined to turn us into a vassal state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard J. Evans, professor emeritus of history at Cambridge University, lamented an increasing tendency to \u201ctalk about Europe as if it’s somewhere separate, as if Britain is not part of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to Gatwick Airport recently and there’s a huge advertisement there for an airline that says ‘Europe is closer than you think,\u201d’ he said. \u201cAnd I thought, well, it’s closer than you think \u2014 we’re in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evans said the view of Britain as an exception to the European rule ignores \u201cthe multiple connections between England and the continent over the centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at our sovereigns, they have been variously French and Dutch and German,\u201d he said, noting also how culturally intertwined Britain is with continental Europe.<\/p>\n

Like Evans, University of Toronto history professor Margaret MacMillan argues that Brexit is being \u201cdriven by a very false picture of the past\u201d and by nostalgia for the days when Britain’s empire covered a quarter of the globe.<\/p>\n

MacMillan said many people in Britain \u2014 and especially in England, which accounts for five-sixths of the U.K. population and saw the strongest vote to leave the EU in 2016 \u2014 \u201care having an existential crisis about who they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they lost their empire and lost being a major world power and they seem to have accepted that, but I think there has been a lingering sense that ‘We were once great and now we’re not,\u201d’ she said.<\/p>\n

Brexit-supporting historians reject that notion, viewing the EU as an undemocratic obstacle to British sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Cambridge University historian Robert Tombs says the fact that Britain did not experience 20th-century occupation or dictatorship sets it apart from many of its neighbours. But he thinks Britain’s historical differences from the rest of Europe are often overstated, and Brexit was driven by more immediate concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe certainly had less commitment to the whole idea of European integration than countries like France or Germany,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think attitudes to Europe are not really all that different in many EU states. And I think that has a lot to do with more recent events such as the eurozone crisis, the democratic deficit in the EU and the fact that the EU has got so much more important in people’s lives and yet they have very little control over what it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tombs argues that at a time of\u00a0international\u00a0instability, Britain is better off outside the fractious bloc.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a relatively cohesive and relatively democratically governed unit is much more likely to be able to ride out whatever storms may be coming than a really rather ramshackle and unpopular and very weak confederation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Historian Andrew Roberts, a biographer of Winston Churchill, said recently that \u201cthe idea that your sovereignty effectively belongs to somebody else outside your country is just unacceptable for anybody who has any sense of British independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

But others contend, like Brown, that Britain’s democratic institutions are under threat from Brexit.<\/p>\n

As the Oct. 31 deadline for Britain’s departure from the EU approaches, the country is facing a political crisis. Johnson’s Conservative government is determined to leave with or without a Brexit divorce agreement, yet Parliament will try to block him from taking Britain out of the EU without a deal. Johnson’s allies have suggested he could suspend Parliament or refuse to quit if he lost a no-confidence vote, triggering a crisis for Britain’s ancient but partly unwritten constitution.<\/p>\n

Former British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind argued in a letter to The Times of London that if Johnson \u201csought to prevent both Parliament and the electorate having a final say on no deal, he would create the gravest constitutional crisis since the actions of Charles I led to the Civil War\u201d in the 17th century.<\/p>\n

That showdown ended with the monarch’s execution.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Brexit is fraying the bonds tying together the four nations of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n

In Scotland, which rejected separating from the U.K. in a 2014 referendum and then voted in 2016 to remain in the EU, pressure is growing for a new referendum on independence.<\/p>\n

In Northern Ireland, which also voted to remain in the EU, the threat of a heavily guarded border with the neighbouring Republic of Ireland has boosted support for a united Ireland, an idea that has historically been anathema to Northern Ireland’s Protestant, pro-British Unionist majority.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never thought I’d hear people in Northern Ireland talking about how it might be time to reunite with the south in the way they’re talking about it now,\u201d MacMillan said. \u201cThere were always fantasists who said ‘One day we’ll be reunited,’ but you’re now getting middle-of-the-road Protestants saying it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s quite possible that if Brexit happens, the United Kingdom won’t survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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