essays Why is Britain eurosceptic? By Charles Grant The British have never been terribly popular members of the European Union. Long before they joined, many continentals thought them too different to be constructive members of what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). In January 1963 General de Gaulle held a press conference to set out his reasons for vetoing Harold Macmillan’s application for membership. Some, though not all of his arguments, still resonate today. Britain is insular, maritime, bound up by its trade, its markets, its food supplies, with the most varied and often the most distant countries. Her activity is essentially industrial and commercial, not agricultural. She has, in all her work, very special, very original, habits and traditions. In short, the nature, structure, circumstances peculiar to England are very different from those of other continentals. How can Britain, in the way that she lives, produces, trades, be incorporated into the Common Market as it has been conceived and functions?… It is predictable that the cohesion of all its members, which would soon be very large, very diverse, would not last for very long and that, in fact, it would seem like a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and direction, and that is not at all what France wanted to do and is doing, which is a strictly European construction.
Exactly ten years later Britain joined the EEC. But the British have never been at ease in what has become the EU. They are more hostile to the EU than any other European people. British governments, too, have often used their influence to slow down European integration. Thus Britain has opted out of the euro and the Schengen agreement, and prevented the extension of qualified majority voting into areas such as tax, foreign policy and defence. There is no reason to think that this attitude will change. Gordon Brown’s government is less enthusiastic about the EU than that of his predecessor, Tony Blair. And if the Conservative Party wins the next general election, as seems plausible at the time of writing, a government led by David Cameron will be markedly more eurosceptic than that led by Brown. Some of the British people’s disdain towards the EU and things European is reciprocated. Many Britons would be surprised to know just how fed up many other Europeans are with their attitude to the EU. Years of British leaders preaching – sometimes arrogantly – about the success of their economic model, a foreign policy that often appears subservient to that of the US, a penny-pinching approach to the EU budget and a consistently negative attitude to treaty change have left their mark. The kinds of argument that de Gaulle made in the 1960s can still be heard. People on the continent tend to overlook the positive impact of Britain on the EU. I would argue that Britain is far from being the most eurosceptic member-state, defined as the one that causes the most damage to the EU. The British have a good record of implementing EU directives and of respecting the decisions of the European Court of Justice, while a supposedly pro-EU country such as France has a poor record on those counts. At the level of EU policy-making, British influence has been considerable and often positive. The ‘1992 programme’ that led to the single market was drawn up by a British Conservative commissioner, Lord Cockfield. Tony Blair, together with the then French president Jacques Chirac, wrote the Saint Malo declaration of 1998, which led to the EU developing military capabilities. The ‘Lisbon agenda’ of economic reform, established in 2000, had considerable British input. Britain has championed the enlargement of the Union and the concept of economic openness (though not everyone shares my view that those objectives are desirable). It has made a big contribution to the EU’s regulatory agenda, for example through the idea of ‘unbundling’ (the separation of retail networks from the supply of a public service such as energy).
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