In 2016, the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. The majority for 'Leave' was small. Yet, in more than 40 years of EU membership, the British had never been wholeheartedly content. In the 1950s, governments preferred the Commonwealth to the Common Market. In the 1960s, successive Conservative and Labour administrations applied to join the European Community because it was a surprising success, whilst the UK's post-war policies had failed. But the British were turned down by the French. When the UK did join, more than 10 years after first asking, it joined a club whose rules had been made by others and which it did not much like. At one time or another, Labour and Conservative were at war with each other and internally. In 1975, the Labour government held a referendum on whether the UK should stay in. Two thirds of voters decided to do so. But the wounds did not heal. Europe remained 'them', 'not 'us'. The UK was on the front foot in proposing reform and modernisation and on the back foot as other EU members wanted to advance to 'ever closer union'. As a British diplomat from 1968, Stephen Wall observed and participated in these unfolding events and negotiations. He worked for many of the British politicians who wrestled to reconcile the UK's national interest in making a success of our membership with the sceptical, even hostile, strands of opinion in parliament, the press and public opinion. This book tells the story of a relationship rooted in a thousand years of British history, and of our sense of national identity in conflict with our political and economic need for partnership with continental Europe.
Green Cowles , Maria . “ Setting the Agenda for a New ... 5 : Risks , Reform , Resistance , and Revival , ed . by Maria Green Cowles and Michael Smith . Oxford : Oxford University Press ... Haaland , Jan I. , and Victor D. Norman .
What impelled British policymakers to embrace a European destiny and why did they take such a cautious approach? These are some of the key issues addressed inThe Reluctant Europeans.
The Reluctant Europeans: The Attitudes of the Nordic Countries Towards European Integration
'WIR SIND EIN VOLK!'We are one people. This was the slogan carried on banners in the demonstrations during the heady days of 1989, as ever larger numbers of East Germans took to the streets of their cities to demand their freedom.
I am not European” – These are the words of a shopkeeper who among a small group of other “metric martyrs” in 2001 refused to attach to the metric system that had been imported to Great Britain.2 This man was not a philosopher, a ...
Markovits and Reich (1997: 37) saw the FRG's pre-unification collective identity as composed of a set of 'myths and collective memories'. They identify five component parts (1997: 37–40): • The FRG arising from the destruction of the ...
In this context, the essays here, while using (de)Europeanisation as a broad theoretical framework, explore the current state of Turkey’s EU accession bid from a variety of perspectives, including discourse analysis, Euroscepticism and ...
This book assesses the EU's contribution to democratization by looking at the failures and states that offered resistance to EU pressure to reform, aiming to understand how the EU overcame or failed to overcome the numerous barriers ...
VIII. A REFUGEE POLICY FOR EUROPE, by the European Consultation on Refugees
Anderson, Jeffrey, G. John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse (eds) (2008) The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Kenneth (2000) 'The Ottawa Convention Banning Landmines: the ...