Britain has never been 'at the heart of Europe' and won't be this time – luckily
As David Cameron fights off an almost entirely self-inflicted Commons rebellion over a referendum on Europe, it's worth noting that today is the anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia, the series of treaties that followed the 1618-1648 Thirty Years' War. It was the first major conflict to engulf the whole of our continent and one which devastated Germany, resulting in the death or emigration of a third of her population (proportionally, even larger than the 1914-1945 disaster).
The war, which had been caused by the struggle between Catholics and Protestants for Germany and Europe, but also over imperial ambitions and France’s rivalry with the Habsburgs, led to the principle of Westphalian sovereignty; so marking the end of the era where identity and power was marked by overlapping authorities, both secular and religious, to one where the nation-state was the primary source of national loyalty.
The most important aspect of Westphalia was the sovereignty of states and their right to political self-determination. No more would supranational authorities, whether the Holy Roman Empire, Vatican or other overlords, be justified in interfering in the affairs of another. At first sovereignty applied to the sovereign – who also decided the faith of his people – but as literacy, transport and various other factors increased the ability of people to identify with those who spoke the same language, the nation became the only legitimate authority of states.
One of the less obviously important aspects of the 1648 treaty was France’s support for the small Electorate of Brandenburg, at the time a poor and relatively backwards part of Germany, which was then divided into 300-odd statelets. Brandenburg, of course, developed into Prussia, and eventually the German Empire, which inflicted a crushing victory over France in 1870-1 to become the foremost power in Europe. Inevitably this rivalry and bitterness would lead to the tragedy of 1914 and, with the fall of the Austrian, Russian and Turkish empires, a new era of nationalist bloodletting that culminated with Auschwitz.
That is where the “European project” began. Post-war academics such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawn agreed that nation-states were “invented traditions” and “imagined communities”, their “boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.
Many of the founders of what would evolve into the European Union were politicised by the wars. Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak, first President of the Council of Europe, had spent most of the Great War in a German prisoner of war camp, while Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi, who brought Italy into the European Coal and Steel Community, had been a keen supporter of Pope Benedict XV’s heroic but doomed efforts to prevent Europe from imploding. British Prime Minister Edward Heath had served in the Royal Artillery during the invasion of Germany in 1945 and had seen that devastated nation first hand.
But it’s worth remembering one thing. At the time of the Treaty of Westphalia England had been a united nation-state for over seven hundred years. It never saw Napoleon’s armies, which brought with them both new ideas about liberalism and nationalism; it never experienced 1848; was less infected by the ultra-nationalism that swept the continent in the late 19th century, if only because their nationality was so obvious to them. England never witnessed, first hand, the ethnic bloodshed that marred most of the continent in the mid-20th century.
So when David Cameron says we should remain in Europe to “drive” it and Ed Miliband argues we need to “influence” it within, they're mirroring the old pro-EU line that Britain should be at the "heart of Europe". But what do they mean exactly? (And I wouldn't particularly want to “influence” a car headed for a ravine if it meant I had to be a passenger.)
Historically Britain has never been at the “heart of Europe”, and we are not going to be this time, when the EU takes the next step forward towards total integration. On this subject I am more inclined to side with Nicolas Sarkozy, just as I’m more inclined to side with Charles de Gaulle than Harold MacMillan on Britain’s role in the world. Our Europeanised intellectuals, who “take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow”, will once again despair of the xenophobia and backwardness of the British population, but I would suggest that this is another period of European history that we should watch from the sidelines. As the EU heads for a pre-1648, and therefore "post-democratic" age, we are best to stick with Westphalia.
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