A thousand years seen differently

Jonathan Clark

CONVERGENCE OR DIVERGENCE? BRITAIN AND THE CONTINENT by Jeremy Black Macmillan, £40, pp. 316 Entry into the EEC, said Hugh Gaitskell in 1962,

means the end of Britain as an independent nation; we become no more than Texas or California in the United States of Europe. It means the end of a thousand years of history.

By 1994 the problem seems peculiarly simi- lar, even if the stance of the parties has reversed. Meanwhile, the thousand years of history have been seldom consulted.

One of the more remarkable things about Jeremy Black's audacious synthesis is that no one has managed such a book before. With a dazzling breadth of refer- ence and a nimble command of modern scholarship, Black's survey of cross-Chan- nel relations from Boudicca I to her recent reincarnation implicitly undermines the sel- dom-examined assumptions that some logic of History is either driving us towards fed- eralism or locking us into an alternative Little England.

Like most good ideas, this antidote is cliff-hangingly late. We have many distin- guished historians of continental Europe, but their intellectual engagement with British historians of Britain has traditional- ly been, and often remains, minimal. It is only just dawning on the historical profes- sion that Euro-euphoria rests on no schol- arly foundation.

Even this involves the reversal of a trend. The thesis of British exceptionalism has been hesitantly challenged over the last decade and a half, chiefly by those 'revi- sionist' historians who upset the formerly- dominant Whig-Liberal and Marxist accounts of the British past. If Britain was not special and archetypal, as Whigs and Marxists (with some self-contradiction) both believed, then Britain's similarities to continental European societies could be explored rather than the differences merely celebrated.

Ironically, many of those revisionist his- torians now find themselves in the Euro- sceptic camp. The stripping away of misleading myths of uniqueness revealed some very ancient differences, especially over sovereignty, law, religion and public administration. At the same time, the intel- lectual collapse of the Marxist and Whig- Liberal cases has left their former adherents with no better reply to the chal- lenge of modern historiography than the practical one of submerging surviving dif- ferences beneath Maastricht-style integra- tion.

Yet the alternative to federalism is not, Black establishes, faith in the eternal validi- ty of nation states. They too are no unam- biguous proof of the virtues of unification: the Italian Risorgimento looks less happy in the light of Mussolini, and Bismarck's Germany was not an obvious improvement on the decentralised polity of 1648-1806.

National consciousness, too, is only a hegemonic concept:

states and 'peoples' are rarely united with shared views and a common purpose, although national myths about present iden- tity and past history generally pretend other- wise.

But the same is at least as true of Europe. The missing actor in Black's cast is exactly any sense of a homogeneous 'Europe' which might realistically be united by any religious or political stratagem. Britain has in any senses been 'at the heart of Europe', but not in that sense. Gaitskell, argues Black, forgot 'the extent to which, during its history, England had been part of a trans-Channel polity'; yet this fact points to the absence of a 'Europe', not to the appeal of Euro-federalism.

Nor was this the result of xenophobia. The Reformation divided Britain from Rome, but brought extraordinarily close ties with continental Protestant intellectu- als. The Common law diverged from Roman law, but assembled a 'composite kingdom' like many continental monar- chies. This is a cosmopolitan, not a little- England, account; yet even Black records how often continental involvement has been perceived to sacrifice British interests.

If there are no simple answers, Black's book suggests a host of detailed questions. Is 'Europe' itself a category securely grounded enough for modern political use? Is the fundamental divide between north- ern France, Britain, the Low Countries and Germany, and the Mediterranean world evoked by Fernand Braudel? Do Europe's regions have more historic integrity than its nation states, and, by inference, than a modern federal 'Europe' itself?

The other dilemma of British policy towards the EC emerges from the sweep of Black's vision. Detailed, archival recon- struction of the close texture of daily life shows people living up to the margin, limit- ed and constrained by lack of wealth, skill or opportunity: in other words, ruled by History, the dead hand of the past. Never- theless, it is on this small scale that human- ity registers its achievements.

Overviews of the track records of whole societies across many centuries seem to show an opposite picture of flux, imperma- nence and catastrophe: history loses its capital letter and becomes a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Euro-sceptics share a sense that England and its carefully-constructed achievements is about to be pushed off into a fast-flowing current which will override these ancient patterns in unpredictable ways. This account of unpredictable political variety suggests that they might not be wholly wrong.

Jonathan Clark is a fellow of All Souls and is revising English Society 1683-1832 CUP.