Introduction

On 2 July 2018 the British Prime Minister Theresa May was preparing for a crucial Cabinet meeting to be held four days later at Chequers, her official country residence. Her hope was that she could persuade the warring factions within her Conservative Party to unite behind a common vision regarding what sort of a future relationship the United Kingdom should have with the European Union. In order to negotiate with others you first have to decide what you want yourself, but this was proving extremely difficult: Brexiteers accused her of betrayal. A backbench MP named Jacob Rees-Mogg warned her in a newspaper article published that morning that unless she stood firm to her promises to leave the EU’s Single Market and customs union she risked suffering the fate of the Conservative Prime Minister in 1846, Sir Robert Peel: by adopting free trade in that year Peel had split his party and lost office, and the Conservatives found themselves excluded from power for a generation.

What on earth did that have to do with Brexit? And many commentators immediately explained why Rees-Mogg’s historical analogy was deeply flawed. But there was a tradition within the British Conservative Party of reaching for just that analogy. In early 1961, as debate raged about whether or not the UK should apply to join the European Economic Community, several Conservative MPs fretted that this would undermine Britain’s historic links with the countries of the former Empire. The Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan noted in his diary on 19 May that things were ‘getting terribly like 1846’.1

What is going on here?

Brexit did not emerge out of nowhere: it is the culmination of events that have been under way for decades and have historical roots stretching back well beyond that. As we will see, even the history of the nineteenth century has something to tell us about why British attitudes towards Europe evolved in the way they did. But the European Union also has a past that explains why it operates in the way that it does today, and this past naturally shapes the ways in which the Union has responded to the challenges posed by Brexit. And finally there is Ireland, the member state (other than the UK itself) most affected by Brexit and a country where history continues to matter politically. The issue of the Irish border is at the very heart of the current Brexit negotiations. If the UK leaves the EU without a deal because of Ireland, which at the time of writing (December 2018) seems entirely possible, then citizens all over Europe will be affected.

My aim is thus to give readers the historical background they need to understand Brexit. I cannot predict what will happen next, but hopefully this book will provide some understanding of how we got to where we are today, as well as of whatever it is that will happen in the future.

I do not make any great claims to originality: the individual parts of the story are well known. For readers who want to know more I can give no better advice than to read Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot for the backstory; Tim Shipman’s All Out War on the decision to leave the EU; and Tony Connelly’s Brexit and Ireland on the negotiations that followed. I have drawn on all three, and on many other authors, in writing the account that follows. But I hope there is some merit in bringing the different parts of the British story together, and even more in telling the story not only of the UK, but of the EU and of Ireland as well. For it is the way in which these three different histories are interacting that is shaping the negotiations currently under way.

It is impossible to write about Brexit completely dispassionately and so it is important to be open about one’s potential biases. I was born in Switzerland to an Irish father and a Danish mother and grew up in London, Dublin and Brussels; I live in Ireland, work in England, and am a municipal councillor in Saint Pierre d’Entremont, a small village in France. In other words, I am what you might call a European, and my background inclines me to sympathy with the European project.

At the same time, as an economic historian of globalization and deglobalization I am deeply conscious that international economic integration doesn’t benefit everyone, and that I am precisely the sort of person who has tended to do well out of it. As an economist and middle-of-the-road Keynesian, I have been a frequent critic of European Monetary Union in general, and its crisis management since 2008 in particular.fn1 As a citizen I share the concerns about Europe’s democratic deficit that were so brilliantly expressed by my late compatriot Peter Mair, and I have said so in print.2 Perhaps these personal and professional considerations cancel each other out to some extent. But it is the fact that I am Irish that makes it most difficult for me to be dispassionate, since the implications of Brexit for my country are truly alarming. And so I have tried to strike a balance between trying to be objective and saying what I think: how successfully I have done so you will have to judge for yourself.

After a chapter on why it was that Europe developed supranational institutions after the Second World War, and why the UK has traditionally been so hostile to these, successive chapters deal with the ways in which the globalization and imperialism of the nineteenth century continued to influence twentieth-century Britain, and how the UK reacted to post-1945 European integration. The narrative ends with the formation of the Single Market in the 1980s and early 1990s, a largely British achievement that continues to define the European Union today. There is then an Irish interlude, telling the story of how EU membership transformed the Irish economy and played a major role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland: this will hopefully help to clarify why it is that the Irish border has become such a central issue in the Brexit negotiations. I then describe and analyse the British decision in 2016 to leave the EU, and provide an account of the negotiations that followed. The book ends with a brief discussion of the possible futures towards which Brexit may be headed as of today (19 December 2018).

Before examining British attitudes towards Europe it is important to understand why European integration took the form that it did, so that is where I will begin.