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The Historical Roots of the ‘Awkward Partner’ Narrative
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Journal Article
The Historical Roots of the ‘Awkward Partner’ Narrative
2019
Overview
[...]active participation has helped promote policies that the United Kingdom favoured – notably the establishment of the Single Market and successive rounds of Community/EU enlargement –, has enabled many British officials in Brussels to gain strong and largely positive reputations and has made the UK viewpoint an important factor in explaining what has and hasn’t happened in the Community/Union ever since 1973. Margaret Thatcher’s strident disagreements with Jacques Delors or Helmut Kohl, or David Cameron’s attempt to veto the Eurozone’s first institutional response to the Euro crisis, have always loomed much larger in journalistic coverage of the European integration process than the constructive day-to-day contributions of less senior ministers or officials. [...]this is where the longer-term history of relations between the UK and its geographical neighbours comes in. Because in explaining why so many in the UK seem to have instinctively interpreted their country’s relationship with its ostensible partners through an adversarial viewpoint, historical tropes about the country’s splendid isolation, brave resistance to continental tyranny and preference for empire or the United States rather than its continental neighbours would appear to have played an important role. Nor is there any sign that the outcome of the 2016 referendum has killed the trope: it is now reported that hard-line Brexiteers, disillusioned with the current Prime Minister’s proposed concessions to the EU, have taken to referring to their party leader as ‘Theresa the appeaser’. [...]more insidiously, the placement of the UK’s European experience in a continuum of conflict all but drowned out the widespread continental European narrative about integration being a process which promoted peace and helped overcome the enmities that had led to European war.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
