Brexit: Isolating fog blankets the English Channel — and it’s no joke
The Sunday Times 29 Μαΐου 2016
There is an enduring myth that The Times of London once published the headline: “Dense fog in the Channel: Continent isolated for three days”. In reality, this was always a joke — “just the sort of story that is invented by an Englishman and told by Englishmen to amuse other Englishmen”, in the words of a letter to the newspaper published on November 3, 1939. The principal reason this joke evolved into a false “fact” is that it was being cited at that time by Nazi propaganda as evidence of insufferable English arrogance and “the absurdity of a small island imagining itself so important that the continent should be isolated from it”.
Cartoonist David Low turned the tables. In April 1943 he published “Fog in the Channel”, which depicts Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt peering across the Channel into a bank of dense fog, trying to work out whether an Allied invasion of German-occupied western Europe is imminent.
These days “Fog in the Channel: Continent isolated” has reverted to being a joke — at the expense of those who argue the UK would be “better off out” of the EU. Not many historically informed people believe this, judging by how easy it was to get 300 of Britain’s leading historians to sign an anti-Brexit letter last week.
There are, of course, some historians on the other side, among them my old friends Andrew Roberts, Alan Sked and David Starkey. But if only historians got to vote in this month’s referendum, I am confident the result would be a landslide for “Remain”.
Just under a fortnight ago about 70 historians gathered at No 11 Downing Street to affirm their support for EU membership. My own presence probably came as a surprise to some. Back in the 1990s I argued against pegging the pound to the German deutschmark under the exchange rate mechanism. (Those were the days when Nigel Lawson was a Europhile — or a “federast”, as Noel Malcolm liked to say.) Later, I opposed British membership of the economic and monetary union. Yet today I argue for continued British membership of the EU on the same basis: the basis of applied history.
Pah! I hear you exclaim. What do a bunch of tweed-clad, dry-as-dust historians know?
Well, let me refer you to the late, great Oxford philosopher of history and archeologist of Roman Britain, RG Collingwood. It was Collingwood who clarified for me the difference between real history and the “scissors and paste” variety. And it was Collingwood who taught me that the historian’s mission was the re-imagining of past thought, for the purpose of better understanding the present. “Historical problems arise out of practical problems,” Collingwood wrote in his autobiography. “We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.” That book was published in 1939, on the eve of World War II. It ends with a fierce denunciation of the policy of appeasement, which pretended that Czechoslovakia (not to mention Spain) was a faraway country of which we knew nothing. Were Collingwood still around, I think he would dismiss the arguments for a Brexit as classic scissors-and-paste history, clipped from the pages of HE Marshall’s Our Island Story, with a blithe disregard for modern scholarship.
The Brexiteers love to conjure up visions of a European “superstate”, the heir (according to Boris Johnson) to the misbegotten empires of Napoleon and Hitler. But Alan Milward argued that European integration after 1945 was really all about the “rescue of the nation-state”. He was right. Far from being a mighty superstate, the EU’s main function is to enforce the multiple regulations against non-tariff barriers that ensure it truly is a single market. And which government was it that pushed so hard in the 1980s to create the single market? Why, the British government, led by one Margaret Thatcher.
In the 90s, the utopians were the pro-Europeans with their fantasy of federalism. Today, by contrast, it is the proponents of Brexit who are the utopians.
To us Anglosceptics, the lesson of history is that British isolationism has often been associated with continental disintegration. The Prime Minister was not taken seriously enough when he asked in his speech on May 9: “Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt?”
His point was that history should discourage us from over-estimating the stability of the European continent. One might have thought the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea two years ago would have served as a sufficient reminder of that, to say nothing of the arrival in Europe last year of more than one million refugees and migrants, or the evidence that Islamic State is recruiting in Britain as actively as on the other side of the Channel.
Yet the tone of the “Leave” campaign remains doggedly parochial. When pressed on the security implications of what they are proposing, the Brexiteers insist that the EU is at best irrelevant; NATO is the key institution. When the President of the US, who leads that alliance, advised against Brexit, Johnson shamefully attributed his view to the Anglophobia of his Kenyan father. In fact, US administrations since the heyday of Henry Kissinger have consistently favoured British membership of the EU.
And it should be scant consolation to Johnson that Donald Trump, his American doppelganger, favours Brexit because Trump also has said that he regards NATO as obsolete.
Like “fog in the Channel”, “splendid isolation” is a phrase that has come to be quoted out of context. The term was first used in 1896, at a time of mounting international condemnation of Britain’s policy in southern Africa. As Roberts himself has shown, however, the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, eschewed it. For British foreign policy at that time was neither splendid nor isolated. As Roberts says: “Far from being unattached to the continent of Europe ... Britain was heavily pledged there.”
That is even more true today than it was 120 years ago. Moreover, we can be thankful that today we can be pledged to the continent without having to make the choice that bedevilled British foreign policy in Salisbury’s day: France or Germany? No one can seriously deny that the process of European integration has brought an end to centuries of Franco-German conflict and has settled the German question for good. Is anyone arguing that Europe would have been more stable without European integration? If not, then we have a responsibility to make sure the EU does not unravel.
The lesson of history, then, is clear. The EU is, to paraphrase Churchill, the worst of all ways of bringing prosperity and peace to Europe — except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
Between now and June 23 — for as long as the campaign for Brexit continues to breed uncertainty in people’s minds — I am afraid there will be fog in the Channel. But it is not the continent that is isolated; and there is nothing splendid about the isolation we risk by ignoring the lessons of history.
