On Brexit

I dedicate this post to my cat, Angus, a deep lover of the EU despite living in a Little Englander household. I also dedicate this post to my husband, who is carefully monitoring scotch prices now that the pound is so much weaker against the dollar. Lastly, I dedicate this post to a dear old friend (I’ll call him “Joe” to respect his privacy) who thinks I actually know what I’m talking about.

What follows is a mostly fact-checked account of Britain’s involvement in the European Union.



The author as a useless college student, studying abroad,
pointing at famous things, and racking up lots of student debt.

The first man to teach me about the European Union was an unapologetically conservative Oxford don named Leslie Mitchell.  Leslie taught history at University College, Oxford. On my first day of class with him, he told me that the only way to travel is in first class: “If there is one piece of advice I would give a young person it would be never to go anywhere until you are 45.” I did not follow this advice. I spent all of my free time and money booking super cheap travel on sketchy airlines and dirty hostels to see as much of Europe as I could over the weekends. I did, however, realize that this man, in addition to being brilliant, was very quotable.

Leslie maintained that Britain was not really a democracy, and that Britain and America were not really that similar. He was no fan of Tony Blair, calling him “Mrs. Thatcher’s poodle” and a “sanctimonious hypocrite.” A classic academic, he always wore tweed. He did not think much of the Windsors: “They do not read books. They know dogs, and they know horses.” He could not wrap his head around American gun culture or the fact that University College was now offering a business studies degree (if you were pursuing said degree, you were “pond scum”).

Whatever his classist, conservative worldview, Leslie always spoke about Historical Matters knowingly and eloquently. This man knew his stuff and I reveled in listening to him, trying to soak up as much as I could through osmosis and frantic note-taking. I still mine my now twelve-year-old Mead spiral notebook for information and witticisms like the following: “The trouble with the Irish Problem is that every time we find a solution to it, the Irish change the problem.”

This was the man who first described the European Union to me.

Now I am a teacher, and I also wear tweed and go off on random rants routinely. As I tell my students, the main word in history is “story.” Everyone and everything has a story, and you can tell that story from multiple points of view. So here is my story of the EU, in light of Britain’s recent decision to leave it.



Empire: stealing historic stuff and putting it in your own museum.

The European Union was born out of the watershed that was WWII. Though it is now out of fashion to offer a “Eurocentric” version of history, you can make an argument that WWI and WWII were really European civil wars. That said, if you went to war with Britain, you went to war with the empire (nearly 25% of the world’s population at its height) so you had a de facto world war. From 1914-1945, Europe went from being the center of the world to counting for next to nothing. Two non-European powers were competing for global domination, and Europe, divided by the Iron Curtain, wanted its place back at the table.

The recovery and rebuilding required after back-to-back total wars in your backyard is something Americans cannot really appreciate. Britain itself stayed on wartime rations until 1954. That same year, talks began to establish a trading bloc between France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium.  Memories of war would have haunted these leaders as they created this free trade zone. The agreement was really the brainchild of France and then West Germany.  The “quiet generation” of Germany sank most of the money into this agreement, trying to prove that they were now a good parliamentarian state, and oh, sorry about the war. Let’s have peace instead.



Charles de Gaulle be like, NON!

Though they sent representatives to these talks, Great Britain did not enter into this European Economic Community. Their entrance in 1963 and 1967 was vetoed (see left). They were finally allowed in in 1973. The main argument for not allowing the British in was that it would be like admitting the United States.  As one of the original hopes in creating this agreement was to create a trading bloc to rival the economic muscle of the United States, you can see why Britain’s entrance, given its “special relationship” with us, would be undesirable to existing members.

A common currency followed: the Euro, which is only slightly less stupid looking than the money in The Game of Life. Open frontiers followed suit, though Britain never opted into the passport-free travel zone, and can therefore run its own border patrols, independent of the EU.  At some point, EU law prohibited tour bus drivers in all member states from driving more than two hours without a break, causing me to lose my chance to tour Horatio Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, the last time I was in Britain. Thankfully, I have gotten over this.

(This is a lie and I’m still hella bitter. No one needs a break after two hours of driving other than my 70-year old mother, you bastards. To pay lip service to European cooperation I will now translate this insult into French: Personne ne fait pas une pause apres deux heures en voiture. Seulement ma mere, qui a soixante-dix ans).

What began as a trading bloc to help Europe recover, promote peace and cooperation, and ideally, rival the United States, has over time taken on elements of a super-state. The EU is comprised of three main institutions: a commission of appointed officials that meet in Brussels, a European parliament, its members elected by member nations, and an international court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

In a globalized world, nation-states routinely make trade-offs with supra-national organizations (UN, NATO, WTO, HPV…). Navigating these trade-offs is a new challenge in the modern world. EU law takes precedence over British law “unless Parliament expressly says this is not the case or British courts believe that the EU has exceeded its powers” (Damian Chalmers, professor of European Union law at the London School of Economics, as quoted in The Telegraph on June 8).

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is to put the proverbial shoe on the other foot: The European Arrest Warrant allows British citizens to be sent abroad and charged for crimes in foreign courts, often for minor offences. It is hard to imagine Americans, reared in a culture of exceptionalism and patriotic hashtags, being “OK” with such a thing.

The Brexit vote was no landslide, but it did signal that more people in the British Isles don’t want to be a part of this European experiment anymore. These changes won’t happen overnight, but hopefully the bus driver laws are the first to go. British rest stops are about as nice as American ones, so Leslie, that’s one way we really ARE similar.

European stock markets are currently very unhappy with this surprise decision, but “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” tickets are impossible to come by, and “Game of Thrones” is still filming in Northern Ireland (for the time being, still a part of the UK), so that will surely help Britain’s economy in the long-run, no?



If Britain does not buy into the European identity anymore, will other countries follow suit? The EU has forked over billions of Euros to keep train-wreck Greece in it (with another 7.5 billion authorized just recently), and now Britain has effectively dropped the mic. There are huge disparities in the economies of EU member nations. At what point does a non-train-wreck country say ENOUGH?



The author on her most recent trip back to the UK.
Europe, I've turned my proverbial back on you.

To further illustrate this point, I offer the following anecdote (a favorite of my students’ when we talk about the challenges of group work). When I was in kindergarten, the teacher assigned us a partner and as a team we had to guess the number of jelly beans in a large mason jar. I got matched up with Oliva. Olivia took one look at that jar and said, “Five.” I took one look at Oliva and asked the teacher to work by myself. Some people just don’t have a collectivist attitude. Could judgmental little Mary have worked with Oliva and taught her to count past sodding five? Possibly. Or she could just walk away and do it better on her own.



Considering Britain as European in identity, not geography, is a relatively recent phenomenon. To change your identity takes time. You are talking changes in language, culture, history.  History does count for something. Geographically, Britain has always been separated from the continent by the moat of the English Channel. Culturally, Britain has an 800+ year-old tradition of Parliament, a tradition that has placed limits on the king or executive’s power since 1215. The commission in Brussels holds most of the power in the EU, and they are not elected by the people.  The European Court of Justice (ECJ) largely upholds what the commission decides. EU laws can and do take precedence. Historians argue over the first time “England” is really unified as a country, but it’s largely accepted to be the 9^th century. The EU was created in the 1950s. It is almost as if history was stacked against it.



The elephant in the room is immigration. European nationals do not need a visa to enter Britain under the EU’s right of free movement (free trade and all). Most of the people pouring into Europe want a better life for themselves and their families and are willing to risk everything in order to achieve this, but there are those in their midst who want to destroy a Western society founded upon the ideas of Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the social contract, Starbucks…all those important things. It has already happened in Brussels, and it happened in Paris. If someone wants to protect their country from harm by screening who comes and goes, it doesn’t follow that they are racist. This is a real issue, and a real problem, and as yet, the status quo is not offering real solutions.



The author's first trip to England,
killing it in that Adidas coat.

I’ve been an Anglophile since my first visit across the pond in 1998. My fascination has always been with the country, not the continent (The continents are just a myth, anyway. Stay tuned for my next post where I critique metageography).  For most of history and even in some places today, loyalties lie with your family, your clan, your town, your region, and most recently, your nation-state. The bottom line: humans create these labels and identifications. Biologically, we are all the same—science does not acknowledge a definition of “French”, “British”, “German”—we are all just HUMAN. Now slightly more humans of Britain just want to label themselves as British, and not European. The nation-state wins over the super-state, and Bob’s your uncle.