We are with Europe, but not of it

The UK’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, once told Colonel Charles de Gaulle, then leader of the Free French: "Every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose." In case de Gaulle was confused, Churchill added: "Every time I have to decide between you and (US President Franklin) Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt."

The remark was made at the height of World War II, when de Gaulle was in exile in London and France was under Nazi occupation. Much of the rest of the Continent had fallen under Hitler's jackboot, and a desperate Britain led by the plucky Churchill was turning to Roosevelt for help.

It was not just about wartime exigencies, however. Churchill was displaying a British preference for dealing with countries that share a common language and history, and at the same time an aversion, even mistrust, for 'Continentals' and their ways. Indeed, he once wrote: "We are with Europe, but not of it. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed."

Updated to a contemporary, non-World War setting of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump, Churchill's comments may not have the same ring.

But they resonated in Friday's formal British withdrawal from the EU following 47 years of membership in the world's biggest trading bloc. He is no Winston Churchill, but Boris Johnson, who drove the Brexit process over the last 40 months, before and after he became PM, personifies the Churchill attitude to Europe.

UK membership of the EU meant closer engagement with 27 other countries and 450 million people. But while the English Channel is only 34 kilometres wide at its most narrow point, the Strait of Dover, it separates a country with more than 800 years of constitutional history, including the first moves towards an independent judiciary and a parliament, from the more unruly Continent.

It was British jurist Lord Denning who described the Magna Carta – signed between King John and a group of noblemen near what is now Windsor Castle in 1215 – as "the greatest constitutional document of all times".

However, the primacy of EU-made law in areas like trade, combined with the highly charged issue of lack of border controls on EU citizens moving to the UK, ultimately led the core of the British political body to reject the European appendage as incompatible. This was after nearly half a century of the UK profiting from the great benefits of EU membership, like unimpeded commercial access inside the bloc.

Since 1962, however, when Britain first applied to join what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC), to 1973, when London finally signed on to Brussels, the issue of being tied to Continental Europe divided the UK. These divisions continued on until the Brexit election last December settled the matter.

He is no Winston Churchill, but Boris Johnson personifies the Churchill attitude to Europe.

This means that 20 years after the arrival of the new millennium, 73 years after the so-called "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire disappeared with Indian independence, the proud seafaring nation has shown – or, more accurately, a narrow majority of its population have shown – that Britain just doesn’t feel European.

However, the path that led to Friday's rupture was not inevitable – certainly not until after the shock June 2016, referendum result, which voted by 52-48 to leave Europe. After the vote, 'remainers' – British voters who wanted the UK to remain within the EU – still clung to the hope that a subsequent referendum would reverse the Brexit process.

Shock and drama

After all, the 2016 referendum was in fact the second on EU membership. A first back in 1975, or just two years after the UK secured EU membership, voted in favour of continued ties. Forty-four years after that vote, this turned out to be not the case. Tory Boris Johnson thrashed left-wing Corbynite Labour in last December’s election and just over six weeks later, Britain has left the EU.

Brexit dominated Britain after the shock 2016 referendum result. It divided families, occupied whole swathes of Britain's newspapers, and injected extraordinary drama into the UK Parliament. Memories of the late 80s when Margaret Thatcher, that most vehemently 'British' of the UK’s post-war Prime Ministers, was boasting that Britain would "lead" Europe, became dim.

Indeed, the mid to late 80s was a period of stunning success for the EU. Its chief Eurocrat, Jacques Delors, who was president of the European Commission, streamlined the EU's operation with the adoption of a system of majority voting at meetings of the European Council, and by the creation of the single market. The latter made compatible commercial law among member states.

British resistance to Brussels, however, stiffened after the EU launched its ambitious plan for economic and monetary union through the adoption of a single currency and the formation of a Frankfurt-based European Central Bank. Elsewhere, the attraction of this 'new Europe' played a significant role in the collapse of the communist bloc of Soviet Union-tethered central and eastern European countries. Within 15 years the EEC's 12 transformed itself into the EU’s 27.

But it was all too much for many across the Channel. A giant EU, with its inner 19-state eurozone and euro common currency, added to a sense of frustration in Britain. The flood of migrants from other EU countries into the UK, taking advantage of open borders within the EU, further soured the mood, giving political oxygen to figures such as the nascent UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage.

There were other, more complex and more historic, causes. At the height of the collapse of the former communist Eastern Bloc in 1989 – a time when Thatcher was marketing herself as a pan-European leader – the EU came to represent 'Europe' in the wider public imagination. This included the connotations of a rich culture, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and freedom.

Let it rip

Europe’s more 'etatist' system of mixed economies was often compared favourably with the more raw-boned, let it rip, American economic model. However, the recent return of 'Eurosclerosis' has made this comparison fraught.

The 'New Europe' sentiment reached its apogee just weeks after the dramatic November 9, 1989, piercing of the Berlin Wall separating communist East Berlin from West Berlin. I recall booking into a hotel in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, around Boxing Day of that year, at the height of the overthrow of the Romanian communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and the Christmas Day execution of Ceausescu with his wife, Elena.

The manager of the hotel was wearing a red bandana around his head, Rambo-style, and was in a highly excitable state. He said 40,000 people had been killed during fighting between insurgents and Ceasescu’s hold-outs, including the feared Securitate secret police (the actual number was closer to 600). Then he started waving his arms wildly above his head and blurted out: ”But we’re re-joining Europe.”

For him and many others in the former Eastern Bloc region at the time, the EU represented some form of political and economic nirvana.

Just three years later, the mood was different and widespread disillusion had set in. I was in the beautiful Adriatic state of Croatia after the effective break-up of the communist Yugoslav Federation. Fighting had broken out between successor states like Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and a still avowedly communist central government of Serbia and its capital, Belgrade.

Around midnight a convoy of official cars with flashing lights arrived at a government building in the picturesque old town part of Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Out poured the ample form of the then Italian Foreign Minister, Gianni De Michelis, who was acting as the EU’s senior foreign policy coordinator.

Neville Chamberlain-like, De Michelis was waving a document with a "peace agreement" between Croatia and Serbia, but it was completely ignored and the savage fighting on the ground continued. There were many subsequent, EU-brokered, 'peace agreements' aimed at stopping communal bloodshed in the heart of Europe, but they, too, were worthless.

Reviled on both sides

The EU, with all its grandiose plans for an "ever closer union", proved at that point to be little more than a political straw man. It was only the decisive US intervention a few years later, and the signing of the so-called Dayton Accords, that ended the fighting. There have been many twists and turns since then, but the EU has never regained its 'New Europe' lustre.

Many years later, UK Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron, fresh from a resounding election victory, took the fateful decision to hold a second referendum on the UK's EU membership. The conventional wisdom was that the second referendum would also be carried, and Cameron was partly motivated by his aim to silence the growing reports of rebellion among Eurosceptic Conservative MPs.

After the shock result that didn't go his way, Cameron resigned. According to Robert Harris, a one-time political correspondent for the British newspaper The Observer and now a successful writer of historical novels, the once popular political figure is now "reviled more or less equally by both sides of our divided country".

It is now Boris Johnson’s historic responsibility to try and become a healer, or a 'one nation' Tory prime minister. The task is, like Johnson’s ego, gargantuan, but he has already succeeded in cutting what was a tenuous political umbilical cord between the UK and Continental Europe.