Book Review

Continent’s awkward partnership

A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair

Madam, there are 50,000 men slain this day in Europe, and not one Englishman." Sir Robert Walpole's justification of his refusal to embroil Britain in the European quarrels of the 1730s encapsulates the sense of mingled separateness and satisfaction with which the British have traditionally viewed their involvement with the Continent. Since Walpole's day, Britain has fought three major wars in Europe, but these have always had something of the character of interventions from outside: always there has been a sense of Europe as a place from which, at the end of the war, Britain has been glad to disentangle herself, having, in the celebrated words of the younger Pitt, "saved herself by her exertions and Europe by her example".

Behind all the political and economic obstacles - the relationship with the United States and the Commonwealth, the differing patterns of British trade and commerce - this national sense of separateness and superiority was at the root of Britain's reluctance to join the original Europe of the Six and has made Britain an awkward partner in the European enterprise ever since. As the current pressure for a referendum on the European "constitution" illustrates, British membership of the EU is still far from wholehearted. This urbane and informative book by Stephen Wall, who as a senior official was at the centre of Britain's troubled relationship with Europe for almost the whole of his diplomatic career, gives an insider's first-hand view of the course of that relationship under three very different prime ministers.

There are lively pen portraits of each prime minister in action (that of Tony Blair being the most discreet), with a separate chapter on how British foreign policy is formulated through the interaction between politicians, civil servants and diplomats; and Wall concludes with an analysis of the psychological and historical factors which make Britain, after 35 years of EU membership, still feeling and behaving to some extent as "a stranger in Europe". Like most Foreign Office colleagues of the same generation, he is a committed "European", but he has a good, if not altogether sympathetic, understanding of the Eurosceptics' viewpoint. His close and sustained involvement in the negotiating process, and the access he has (unusually) been given to Foreign Office files still covered by the 30-year rule, as well as the clarity and elegance with which he writes, make this book diplomatic history of a high order.

Wall is critical - rightly, I think - of successive British governments for having "done relatively little to explain to the British people what the true nature of the European project actually is". But for all the reasons which he explains, British governments have consistently taken so restricted a view of what the EU's role should be, objecting to every move towards political as distinct from economic (let alone psychological) integration, that it has been difficult for them to describe "the project" in terms likely to kindle enthusiasm. Apart from Sir Edward Heath, no British prime minister has fully shared the vision of Europe as the historic heartland of Western civilisation, at once diverse and yet culturally and politically united, which animated the EU's founding fathers and which, albeit in a muted form, still appeals to many of our partners.

Margaret Thatcher's attitude to the EU was one of deep suspicion; Tony Blair's one of limited and selective support seasoned with judicious rhetoric; John Major's more straightforward but in essence the same. Enlargement to the East, for which Wall rightly suggests that Britain can take much of the credit, has appeared to others as a deliberate policy of weakening the EU's cohesion. Meanwhile, for those outside the inner circle of negotiators, "the project" seems to have dissolved into a jumble of acronyms - POCO, EMU, ERM, SEA, CAP, EP - intelligible only to the expert. (Indeed one of the few faults in Wall's book is the absence of a glossary to remind the non-expert reader what these acronyms actually mean.) 

Wall describes how De Gaulle's veto, the Franco-German hegemony established before Britain joined, the Wilson Government's attempted renegotiation and Margaret Thatcher's brutally vigorous war over the British budget contribution all combined to give Britain's relationship with the EU an adversarial flavour. Today many of Britain's battles have been won; and Wall argues that the contemporary EU "ought to be a very comfortable place for the UK". Clearly, however, the British electorate has still to be convinced. As an expert himself, Wall perhaps underestimates the extent to which, in Britain at least, the benefits of EU membership are markedly less apparent to the man or woman in the street than they are to diplomats, politicians or industrialists. Deprived (for example) of the tangible benefits of a single currency and the abolition of frontier controls (both of which have strengthened the psychological feeling of unity among the participating states), the ordinary British citizen encounters the EU only in the form of the apparently endless stream of regulations issuing from Brussels which, to quote Douglas Hurd, seeps into every nook and cranny of daily life. Until the EU acquires a more favourable image at street level, the omens for an easier British relationship with it are likely to be less favourable than Wall hopes.

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