Britain’s 47 year uneasy relationship with the EU has come to an end. Was it doomed to fail?
The UK’s relationship with the EU has taken an exceptionally heavy political toll and exposed deep cleavages in British society but it will also leave a mark on the Brussels project.
“The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it’s so anti-Europe. Britain has had the same foreign objective policy for at least the last 500 years; to create a disunited Europe,” says Sir Humphrey Appleby a British bureaucrat. It also brought to the fore other unanswered questions that had been papered over. What was Britain’s place in the world? Britain has been unsure for decades whether it wants a closer relationship with its former colonial possession through the Commonwealth, the US or being part of the EU.
Over and again, Britain has been at odds with EU members states not just when it comes to carving out its own narrow self-interest but also ploughing a different foreign policy even when that undermined the bloc. An early indication of Britain's suspicion towards its European neighbours is when the late prime minister Margaret Thatcherthe Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev against Germany unification in the dying days of the USSR.
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