Hugo Young, who wrote a twice-weekly column in the Guardian from the time he joined the paper in 1984 until his death in 2003, is widely considered one of the greatest British political journalists of the modern era. Eloquent, judicious, authoritative and profoundly moral, he was an indefatigable critic of Margaret Thatcher and an equally passionate pro-European.
His final book, This Blessed Plot, published in 1998, ruthlessly dissected what he saw as the failure of successive British leaders to guide the country to its destiny at the heart of Europe. In this essay, published the following year before the launch of the euro, Young explains his journey from “Euro-agnostic” to European.
Some of it is of its time, and on the single currency itself, Young – with the benefit of hindsight – seems to have been proven wrong. But days before a referendum that could eject Britain from the EU altogether, its account of the “demons and panics” of British exceptionalism that have “seduced generations of our politicians into believing ‘Europe’ is somewhere to escape from” seems more relevant than ever.
Jon Henley, European affairs correspondent, the Guardian
As a boy, I was entirely English. There was nothing else to be. This was true even though an education by Catholic monks offered alternative possibilities. Henry VIII, we learned, was a very bad man, and the heretics burned at the stake by Mary Tudor deserved their fate, whereas the victims of Elizabeth were martyrs and saints. The arrival from Holland of William of Orange, displacing the Catholic Stuarts in 1688, far from inaugurating the Glorious Revolution from which, as I now believe, most British constitutional freedom flowed, was a disaster for the one true faith.
This bias in the teaching of history didn’t touch our real allegiances in everything that mattered: cricket, soccer, rugby, the ubiquitous redness of the map, the naturally British order of things. Allegiance, with victory as its quest, was the habit that school instilled in me: gangs, cliques, houses, teams, Sheffield Utd FC, the Yorkshire County Cricket Club and all who played in it. There had to be something to support, and on the international plane Britain, or England, had to win.
This tendency stayed with me for many years. It has never really gone. When Brits do well, it still gives me a warm glow. Cricket continues to matter, especially when Darren Gough plays a blinder, and partisanship defeated all temptations (those swilling lager louts, the union jack as offensive weapon) to forget the World Cup was going on. I’m obscurely glad that Simon Rattle is British. When a great British movie, such as Secrets and Lies, captures the world, its national origin matters. When the SAS took the first Serbian war criminals, I remember feeling quietly pleased it was us.
My esteem for Britishness also stretches into professional fields. We do some governmental things better than other people, and should want to keep it that way. Our public life is relatively honest, our judges are straight, almost all our politicians selflessly industrious. Our parliament is a living thing. As for our history, it is a wonderment, reaching out from this tiny island, producer of a language and a literature and a record of power that the people of pretty well every other nation must regard with awe.
So I can confess to being disgracefully congruent with a typical reader of the Daily Telegraph. And in the early days of “Europe”, this collection of awarenesses sheltered me from the new cause. Voting yes in the 1975 referendum was a routine orthodoxy, shared with two-thirds of the British people, including quite a number who now seem to have changed their minds. For years, I never felt zeal for either side.
But now I do, and I wonder why. What has happened, while the majority allegiance appears to have gone into reverse, to push me effortlessly the other way? The initiation began with a book I wrote about the history of these matters. I started work on This Blessed Plot as a Euro-agnostic, but completed it a few years later in a state of struggling incredulity at the demons and panics I had uncovered: the British exceptionalism that has seduced generations of our politicians into believing that “Europe” is somewhere to escape from: the hallucinations, both positive and negative, that have driven so much of the British debate for so long.
Having begun with the idea of writing a history that might call itself detached, I found myself in a process of self-instruction that now concludes, as the new currency gets under way, with the great simplicity of describing why I am a European.
The most obvious but least relevant part of this is cultural. It’s easy to say how keenly I adore Schubert, and wallow in Proust, and am anticipating my next journey to consort with the shades of Virgil in the Roman Forum. But this is almost completely beside the point. European culture is the world’s inheritance, absorbed on every continent, and the ability to appreciate the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, or even to speak his language, says nothing important about anyone’s sense of “being” a European.
Even Peter Lilley loves Michelangelo, as he and his colleagues never cease to explain, by way of proving that they are not anti-Europe, merely anti-“Europe”: the European Union, the artefact of federalists, the dismal construct that has illicitly purloined the received identity of what Europe is held to mean these days. Lilley has a house in France, and Michael Portillo has roots in Spain, and there’s a cross-party agreement that Umbro-Tuscany is where the British political classes most like to take their holidays. Does this not show their uninsular engagement with the continent, and expose the calumny that they might be Europhobic?
But the test cannot be who has heard more versions of The Ring between Bayreuth and Covent Garden. As the boy becomes a man, the discovery that Shakespeare has a peer-group who write in different tongues may begin to broaden the mind. It is helpful to learn that these are not rival cultures, a zero-sum game of allegiance, but that they mingled and grew together. This discovery makes no demand on anyone’s sense of belonging. Though the Conservative government proposed a ban on Beethoven’s Ninth as the theme music for Euro 96, a football competition staged in England, it’s safest to say that a taste for the Renaissance and Enlightenment is too universal to be significant. Like the travel, it proves nothing.
Very soon, therefore, what raises itself is the political question. About the culture, there is no issue. It may be important to many Eurosceptics to be able to say that because they love Mozart, they love Europe, but this isn’t what the argument is about. The division between the pro- and anti-Europeans is, in the real world, about nothing more or less than the European Union. Everything else is sand in your eyes, an evasion. The EU, enlarged, or not: reformed, or not: with or without all its multiple imperfections, is the only item on the agenda.
It is not possible to be a European, in any meaningful sense, while opposing the EU. And it is not possible to support the EU without also supporting the success of the euro, and the belonging to the euro of every country that wants to call itself European.
I can think of many points which, added together, make a formidable critique of the EU. Its bureaucracy is strong, its democracy is weak, its accountability is seriously under-developed. The complexity of its tasks is always in danger of overwhelming the consensus needed to carry them out. Getting it to act demands formidable energy and patience and willpower from national leaders. Ensuring the singleness of the market it purports to be is work that is far from completed.
Equally, I can make the case against the euro, a project that fills those who support it with almost as much anxiety as it does excitement. Will this risk, which includes a repudiation of nationhood as traditionally understood, pay off? Will its hazards be sustainable? Is the closer political integration, which it undoubtedly foretells, something that the members, with or without Britain, have the wit, will and wisdom to express in acceptable forms? These questions don’t fill me with horror. Their terrain awaits a long unfolding. They assume a process not voluntarily attempted anywhere in history: tampering, by common agreement, with aspects of national identity, and working to create, in limited but significant aspects, a new kind of consciousness. To modify the nationstate throughout Europe is an extraordinary ambition, full of risks and difficulties. Yet if I am ever tempted to despair of it, I need only remind myself of the alternative world summoned up by those, most ferociously in Britain, who devote passion to dismantling it.
They have had a long time to describe this non-European Britain, and the picture, where it is clear, is not persuasive. I conclude that it is not meant to be. Portillo wrote not long ago that even to ask the question was “extraordinary”. All the future has to satisfy, in the minds of many Eurosceptics, is the need not to be “European”. As long as it meets that test, the details hardly matter.
Thus, Little England (Scotland will be long gone from this) is, incorrigibly, a straitened place. Striving to define it, David Willetts, a Tory front-bencher, wrote a pamphlet, Who Do We Think We Are?, which, as well as saying our politics and economics were different from Europe, made much of the changing of the guard and wensleydale cheese, calling in support some ancient paragraphs from TS Eliot and George Orwell to exalt the eternal timewarp in which England must be lodged.
In all these tracts, the mystic chords of memory echo. Betraying history is most unimaginable, while predicting the future is subsumed into fantasy: the dream of an independent Britain, freed to assert her famous sovereignty, throwing herself on the mercy and markets of the non-European world.
So the anti-Europe cave is claustrophobic. It is also being refilled (for we have been here before) with futile arrogance, making it obligatory not merely to criticise Brussels but abominate the Germans, laugh about the French, find nothing good to say about another European country, lest this betray our beleaguered sense of Britishness. A smart-ass headline writer in the Sun can get attention when the BBC finds an item of punning xenophobia so funny as to be worth a mention in the news.
At the heart of this is an impenetrable contradiction in the anti-Europe British mind. It cannot decide between terror and disdain. Britain is apparently so great, as well as so different, a place that she can afford to do without her continental hinterland. But she is so puny, so endangered, so destined to lose every argument with the continentals, that she must fear for her identity if and when she makes the final commitment to belong among them. Studying the movements of sceptic thought, I see in their inability to provide a clear answer on this fundamental point a mirror of the vacillations, pro- and anti-Europe, that mark the personal histories of so many of the characters in the story. Either way, the conclusion points in the anti-Europe direction.
The euro presents massive political challenges, but there seems no point in being outside it, since our future – the only future anyone has been able, with any respect for realism, to describe – is entirely bound up with its success or failure. Far from the development of “Europe” being a conceptual barrier to belonging, it’s the very reason why belonging ought soon to be seen as essential. I know the snags, and will argue for some radical political reform, but the European-ness of the euro is what makes it an exciting and benign adventure. We need to be a part. It should be Britain’s own millennial leap, away from the century of nation-statehood, into a new time. All our neighbours are seeking a different way of bringing a better life to the continent and its regions.
What is so strange about Britain – so particular, so fearful, so otherworldly - that she should decide to withhold her unique wisdom from the enterprise? I can reject the premise of the question because I have grown up. Allegiance, to me, no longer has to be so exclusive. I still need it, as a psychic prop, a way of belonging. But the threat to the national identity now strikes me as bogus. This categorising is what anti-Europe people insist on, but the best evidence of its falsity is to be found in the places that have been part of the new Europe for 40 years, as against our 25.
Would anyone claim that Germany is less German as a result of the experience? We are all invaded by America. If cultural defences are needed, it’s against transatlantic domination. But do I hear a single soul, on either side of the Channel, contend that France is less French than it ever was because of the EU? So it will be with Britain. This reality won’t come easy. Decades of propaganda defining national identity in the language of scorn for other nations cannot be wiped out at a stroke. Persuading the British that they are allowed to be European should be the simplest task, yet the accretions of history, manipulated by frightened politicians, make it difficult.
Though the Queen in parliament already looks like a bejewelled dot on the ocean of the global economy, there are voices that insist the only way of being British is by proclaiming her supremacy.
Redefining identity is not a task for the furtive. It cannot be done by the back door: another lesson of history. Nor will it be easily done by political leaders who still feel obliged to stand aside from the project they think they eventually want to join. But neither should the work be too alarming. In the 21st century, it will be exciting to escape from history into geography: from the prison of the past into a future that permits us at last the luxury of having it both ways: British and European.
This is an edited version of a piece written by Hugo Young, then the Guardian’s senior political commentator, in 1999
