In recent years, we have experienced a sprawling, almost German-style debate about British identity and Europe. What is Britain? When was Britain? Does Britain still exist? Will Britain survive? Britain has been declared “dead” by Andrew Marr and “abolished” by Peter Hitchens. For decades, people have thought of Britain as a classic nation state. Now Norman Davies tells us that Britain was never a nation state. Anthony Barnett says that Britain was never a nation, although England was. But Roger Scruton, in his extraordinary book on England, informs us that England-which he thinks is also dead-was not a nation either, just a country, a land, home. One begins to long for the pellucid simplicities of the German debate about identity, with its elementary distinctions between Staatsvolk and Kulturvolk, and so on.
More prosaically, the answer to the question, “Is Britain European?” may be very different if given from what are now sometimes curiously called “the devolved territories,” of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Indeed, Anthony Barnett argues in his book This Time that British opposition to Europe is really English opposition to Europe.
For some, Britain can only be saved if we have more Europe; for others, England can only be saved if we have less. For both, though, the question is central. Hugo Young, in This Blessed Plot, says that the underlying question for the last 50 years has been “Could Britain… truly accept that her modern destiny was to be a European country?” But what does that mean? If the noun “Britain” is elusive, the adjective “European” is even more so. This is true in all European languages, but particularly in English.
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