Historians and Brexit

Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Co-operation. By Brendan Simms. Allen Lane; 352 pages; £20.

The EU: An Obituary. By John Gillingham. Verso; 281 pages; $19.95 and £12.99.

NEXT month Britons will vote on whether to leave the European Union. In the debate, some now use history to support their view. This week the British prime minister warned that Brexit posed a threat to peace. David Cameron cited the battles of Blenheim, Trafalgar and Waterloo and even the Spanish Armada as evidence that Britain can never afford to turn its back on Europe. But Michael Gove, the pro-Brexit justice secretary, wants Britain to disentangle itself from the continent. He prefers to rely on “Our Island Story”, a children’s history book from 1905 by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall that plays up the British Empire.

In his spirited new book, “Britain’s Europe”, Brendan Simms, a historian at Cambridge University, argues that the whole notion of an island story is wrong. Britain’s history, he says, is above all about continental Europe. This is not just harking back to the Romans and Normans, or the 100 years’ war. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries, Europe mattered above all. Through repeated wars, the British found that the Low Countries were a vital national interest, that security was to be found on the Rhine or even the Elbe—and that the continent must never be allowed to fall under single control.

Mr Simms makes a powerful case. He quotes Edmund Burke, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, as saying that Britain, far from being an island, was always part of Europe. Even its empire, the world’s biggest, was largely a product of European rivalries. In 1759, a glorious year of British victories from Canada to India, Britain still had more troops in Europe than anywhere else. And British concerns to stop any particular country dominating the continent were at the root of the Napoleonic wars and, a century later, both world wars.

The question this raises is why Britain then chose in the 1950s to stand aside from the nascent European project. As Mr Simms tells it, the answer lies partly in post-imperial illusions and partly in nervousness over sharing sovereignty. It may also have been because the club was dominated by France, and Charles de Gaulle was bent on keeping out baleful Anglo-Saxon influence. Contrary to claims by Mr Gove and his fellow Brexiteers, such influence has indeed grown further since Britain belatedly joined in 1973.

Only at the end of Mr Simms’s book does he become less persuasive. He describes Britain as the last European great power on the strange basis that France and Germany cannot be because they are locked in a failing single currency. He goes on to argue that the euro zone must become a full federation reorganised on Anglo-American principles, what he calls a “British Europe” (albeit without Britain). He is right that Britain is unlikely to join the euro, but the odds of a full-blown European federation seem almost equally tiny.

John Gillingham, a longtime American historian of the EU, is much more of a Eurosceptic. His two villains in “The EU: An Obituary”, both French, are Jean Monnet, the project’s first guiding spirit, and Jacques Delors, who as president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995 pushed for the single currency. Mr Gillingham homes in on Europe’s economic woes, suggesting they cannot be ended unless the euro is abandoned. Unlike Mr Simms, he concludes that Brexit could be helpful because it would have a cathartic effect, forcing a rethink of the entire EU, which cannot otherwise be reformed.

His thesis might be more persuasive if his book were not littered with errors: Economic Council for European Council, Caucuses for Caucasus, Fritz Fischler for Franz Fischler. But even without these, it seems too apocalyptic to declare that the EU is dying or even already dead. As both authors say, it is certainly in deep trouble. But the political commitment to keeping both the euro and the EU going remains very strong—and it would surely survive even a vote for Brexit on June 23rd.