The white cliffs of Dover on the UK coast
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
The 1948 Gatow air disaster memorial can easily be overlooked in a city with more than its fair share of 20th century ghosts. A simple plaque in Berlin’s Westend district commemorates the plane crash that claimed the lives of 15 people. during the early days of the Cold War.
The stone inscription may be imperceptible, but its location in St. George’s Anglican Church reflects a long-standing British presence in the German capital, and the events it marks are a window into the central role of the United Kingdom in shaping the European order. post-war.
With Brexit now real, the United Kingdom may discover that it is not so simple to abandon a European identity so anchored in history and geography. In fact, this reality – and a political culture perpetually pursued by questions about its relationship with its European neighbors – seems destined to link Britain to the continent for years, despite all the government’s efforts to rename the nation as world champion of international free trade.
The remains of the Soviet Yak fighter jet that crashed into a Vickers aircraft near Berlin’s Gatow Airport on April 5, 1948.
Photographer: Henry Burroughs / AP Photo
After closing a trade deal with the European Union on Christmas Eve, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was time to move on. The UK should leave “old, dehydrated, tired and over-chewed arguments behind” and “keep Brexit ready,” he told the House of Commons on December 30, while making the deal law.
Given Britain’s postwar history, this purpose may be an illusion. In fact, the pro-Brexit camp has been guilty of downplaying the European dimension of the country’s past, according to Helene von Bismarck, a historian of Britain’s role in 20th century international relations.
It presents “a highly selective view of British history,” she said. “The whole idea that we are now free to be who we really are – history doesn’t really confirm that.”
Britain’s role in post-war Germany allows us to see the extent of these continental ties. Berlin in 1948 was a city in danger when, in April, a London Vickers aircraft via Hamburg was involved in a collision with a Soviet Yak fighter on its approach to the British airfield at RAF Gatow, killing all 14 passengers and crew, as well as the Soviet pilot. Each side blamed the other for an international incident that contributed to the rapid deterioration of East-West relations.
Within two months, London was the setting for a declaration of Allied plans to create a West German state, infuriating Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who ordered Berlin to be isolated from the rest of Germany. It was Britain’s foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, who convinced Americans to take the lead in air transporting supplies and breaking the blockade, historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “Postwar”. The continent would be divided until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The continent was divided until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Photographer: Gerard Malie / AFP / Getty Images
Washington and Moscow may have been the main actors in the Cold War, but Britain was at the center of events that forged the new European reality – even if it was only in the 1970s that the United Kingdom linked its destiny to that of the continent by joining the forerunner of the region’s defining political project, the EU.
In February last year, days after the United Kingdom overcame the 2016 referendum result and officially left the EU, Johnson used a speech about Britain’s post-Brexit future to say that the UK was “resurging after decades. hibernation “and ready to resume its historic role as the world’s greatest defender of free trade.
Recent research by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests that the UK will not be able to remove Europe so easily. Most UK policy experts from the government, think tanks, academia and the private sector see the country’s future role in global politics as closely associated with the EU, a study group study concluded. Leading a “resurgent community” of nations was seen as the least realistic outcome, favored by less than 2% of respondents.
While the Brexit business sealed on December 24 outlines the extent of future ties, the study shows that there is room for a return to closer collaboration – especially in areas such as climate change, EU-UK migration and foreign policy – if London chooses.
Both sides had better not leave it too late. A parallel study concluded that Ireland is the only one of the 27 EU members that sees relations with the United Kingdom as a priority. Overall, the United Kingdom ranked less as a priority for bloc members than China, Russia, the United States – or even the Western Balkans.
“There is a certain fatigue and I think it affects readiness for engagement,” said Jana Puglierin, head of the ECFR office in Berlin and director of the research project. “Those states that were traditionally close to the UK have changed.”
This is unlikely to be a luxury afforded to the United Kingdom, which has been traumatized by European integration issues since the war. As early as 1950, when plans for the European Coal and Steel Community were launched, Britain refused to participate due to the suspicion of continental influence in its affairs.
It was also an economic decision: in 1947, the British economy appeared to be in much better health than that of its neighbors, aided by trade with the empire. But by the end of 1951, West German exports were fueling a “European economic revival,” wrote historian Judt.
Edward Heath, in the center, at a press conference ‘Keep Britain in Europe’ in London on May 13, 1975.
Source: AP Photos
In 1955, Britain signed an association agreement and, in 1961, applied to become a full member of what was then the European Economic Community – its candidacy notoriously vetoed by French President Charles de Gaulle.
The United Kingdom, under the conservative government of Edward Heath, was finally admitted to the EEC on 1 January 1973. But what followed were 47 years of disputes that led to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on 31 January.
Accession was quickly followed by a referendum on accession called by a Labor government pursued by the party’s internal struggles in Europe. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s conservatives became increasingly Eurosceptic and Europe played an important role in her fall in 1990. Her successor, John Major, fought for control of his cabinet over the issue over his time. at 10 Downing Street.
Prime Minister David Cameron sought to launch the furor by granting another referendum on EU membership. The exit vote cost him his job and that of his successor, Theresa May.
All of this controversy is “going backwards in the past,” Johnson said in February. “We have the opportunity, we have the newly recaptured powers, we know where we want to go and that is for the world,” he said. Its aim is to forge a “Global Britain”.
Boris Johnson describes his government’s negotiating position with the European Union after Brexit on February 3.
Photographer: Frank Augstein – WPA Pool / Getty Images
The UK’s dilemma is that it risks being on the wrong side of history by going it alone in a time of great power rivalry between the United States and China, which is unlikely to change under Joe Biden.
Turning your back on a half-century economic and political alliance with Europe seems increasingly risky, especially as President Donald Trump, a Brexit supporter, leaves the White House and the Commonwealth countries, Australia and India, are coming together to Japan to better face China’s challenge.
The EU, for its part, has its own challenges around leadership, according to Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent in England. With the UK’s prerogative to enter into trade agreements with non-EU partners, the two sides “will increasingly move in different directions,” he told Bloomberg Television.
History suggests that these paths are destined to converge again, however. Even Johnson acknowledges that the United Kingdom is a European power “because of the irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and feeling”, but not “by treaty or law”.
In 1948, Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labor government faced a historic decision on the country’s future ties to the continent and chose to break with earlier British thinking in favor of the alliance with Europe.
Once again, it was Bevin, its foreign minister, who pledged the country to “engage with its continental neighbors in a common defense strategy, a ‘Western European Union’, on the grounds that security needs British were no longer separable from those on the continent, ”Judt wrote.
This union became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed in April 1949 by the USA, Canada and ten European nations, and is still the basis of transatlantic relations today.
The following year, the cornerstone of St. George’s Church was laid in the British sector of Berlin, replacing an old English chapel that was destroyed in a bombing during the war. A sign for Gatow’s victims was added later.
For Puglierin, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the political areas of mutual interest promise future cooperation between the United Kingdom and the EU, despite the current British government’s desire to break free. “All is not lost,” she said.