euroscepticism and the culture of the discipline of history

8/12/2019 Euroscepticism and the Culture of the Discipline of History

1/21

Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 309328 Copyright British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210506007042

Euroscepticism and the culture of thediscipline of historyOLI VER J . DADDOW*

Abstract. This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse inBritain. I t does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such asEuroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the rst section I situate myarticle in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit myresearch to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I criticallyanalysetherhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support fortheir line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse tonational history of theschool textbook variety. In thethird part I usethis ndingto arguethatthe discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism sopopular amongst theBritish public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramicationsboth for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political e ff orts to counter itspopularity, and I consider all of these in theconclusion.

Y ou can voteY ES F OR A FUTU RE TOGETHEROr NO FOR A FUTURE ALONEAnd what have they lost? Sovereignty? Rubbish!Are the French a soupon less French?Are theGermans a sauerkraut less German?Are the Italians a pizza less Italian?OF COURSE THEY ARE NOT!And neither would Britain be any less British The whole history of our nation is a history of absorbing, and proting by, any Europeaninuences that blow our way.

The Sun , 4 J une 1975. 1

Introduction

As Tony Blair is nding out in his e ff orts to win theBritish public over to theideaof a European future, Euroscepticism is big business. 2 It is certainly much biggerbusiness than in 1975 when Harold Wilsons Labour government held a referendum

* Therst version of this articlewas presented to the BISA 29th Annual Conference, University of Warwick, 21 December 2004. I am grateful to R ichard Aldrich, David A llen, T im Dunne,Christopher H ill, Daniel K eohaneand two anonymous readers for RIS for their questions,comments and constructive criticisms.

1

Quoted in Roy Perry, Priorities in I nformation Policy, Martyn Bond (ed.), Europe, Parliament and the Media (L ondon: TheFederal Trust for Education and Research, 2003), pp. 6376, at 68.Emphasis in original.

2 L Elli tt E i b ttl Bl i t i G di U li i d htt //


2/21

ontheUK smembershipof what wasthen theEuropean Community (EC), theresultbeing a two to one majority in favour of staying in. 3 The majority of Britishnewspapers today expressopinionsabout Europeand theEuropean Union that varyfromapathy to outright hostility, 4 representing a sizeableshift in opinion comparedto 1975 when thepress had been wholly in favour of a yes vote, 5 and a potentreminder that until the 1970s the British press tended to bepro-Community. 6 Thesame might be said of the broadcast media, with both the British BroadcastingCorporation (BBC) and Independent Television News (ITN) being accused byEuropean Union o fficials of presenting European Union activity in a negativelight. 7 Even establishment opinion-forming publications such as the Economist thathave traditionally supported the principle of closer British involvement in asupranational EC/EU, are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the futureprospects for integration and of Britain beingable to play a constructive rolein theprocess. 8

Theparty political context has altered too. Three decades ago therewas a broadcross-party consensus in favour of staying in theEC; today, by contrast, the threemain British political parties and the Labour government are deeply split over thequestion of Britains closer involvement with the EU. 9 Around them, furthermore,movementssuch as theUnited K ingdomIndependenceParty (UK IP, founded 1993)and theReferendum Party (founded 1995) haveshown themselves adept, in secondorder elections at least, at gathering public support by campaigning on anti-European tickets that stress thepolitical motives behind deeper integration and thethreat these pose to British sovereignty and independence. Blairs task is madeharder by a proliferation of individuals and interest groups campaigning againstEurope and the EU using the Internet to spread their message, even if their

3 On the1975 referendum see David Butler and UweW. K itzinger, The 1975 Referendum (London:Macmillan, 1976); R obert J owell and Gerald Hoinville (eds.), Britain into Europe: Public Opinionand the EEC, 196175 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).

4 Peter J . Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?: Discourse and M otivations of theLondon-BasedEurosceptic Press, European Studies , 20 (2004).

5 Brendan Donnelly, ThePolitics of theEuro, TheFederal Trust for Education and R esearch,Conference Report, Britain and the Euro: An Economic or Political Question?, London School of Economics, 20 J uly 2004, 5th page.

6

Sean Greenwood, book review, Britain For and A gainst Europe: British Politics and EuropeanIntegration (eds.), D. Baker and D. Seawright, Journal of Common Market Studies , 36:4 (1998),pp. 6034, at 603.

7 Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?, pp. 16970, gives two anonymous examples. One is that of asenior EU Commission o fficial who said in 2000 that he rarely agrees to appear on BBC radiobecause heassumes that therelevant programme item will begiven a Eurosceptic slant and that hispresence will beused merely to give it a bogus appearance of balance. Theother comes in theformof an o fficial from theEuropean Parliaments audio-visual department telling him that in M arch2000 it proved near impossible to persuade ITN to takean interest in the positiveaspectsof parliamentary business.

8 Charlemagne, A Golden A ge?, The Economist , 28 February 2004, p. 48. On the pastpro-integrationism and pro-Britain-in-Europe stance of The Economist and the EconomistIntelligence Unit, see Oliver J . Daddow, Britain and Europe since 1945: Historiographical

Perspectives on Integration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 8995.9 Andrew Marr counted veor six serious and genuine single currency sceptics in theLabourCabinet holding o ffice prior to the 2001 general election; ThePolitical Battleground, in MartinR b ( d ) B i i d E Th Ch i W F (O f d O f d U i it P

310 Oliver J. Daddow


3/21

popularity and precise impact on public opinion is di fficult to gauge. 10 There is,nally, less of a clear-cut economic case now for Britain moving closer to thecontinent compared to the1960sand1970swhen aspateof Britishdeclinist literaturereected a growing consensus amongst academics, political commentators, interestgroups, non-governmental organisations and policymaking elites that the countrywas in need of a new direction, one that eventually helped force the hands of successiveConservative and Labour governments into applying for membership of theEC. For example, theConfederation of British Industry is today nowherenear askeen on Britain joining the single currency as it was on it joining the CommonMarket in the 1960s and 1970s. 11

Public opinion pollsters consistently nd evidence to support the thesis thatBritain is Europes reluctant partner. Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak havestudied all of theEuropean Commissions Eurobarometer polls for 2003 and foundthat, on average, Britain ranks lowest in terms of national support for Europeanintegration, and by quite some distance, thesame nding as in 1992. 12 ChristopherAndersen and Braden Smith have used gures for 1995 to 2003 to draw the sameconclusion, ranking Britain, Sweden, Finland and Denmark as themost sceptical of European member statesover thisperiod. 13 Takingall this into account, scholarsarein broad agreement that, by almost any measurement, what is undoubtedly true isthat Britain is one of the most sceptical members of the EU. 14 Measuring publicopinion is one thing, of course, explaining it quite another. From where do theseattitudes come? M uch turnson thedenition of Euroscepticism oneadopts and thedisciplinary paradigmwithin which oneisworking. Political scientistsconcentrateonseveral interconnected facets of Euroscepticism under the general heading of thedomestic politics of Euroscepticism. They seek to explain how opportunities forpartiesto expressscepticismareopened upat European and national levels, andhowparties use Euroscepticism to acquire electoral support. Psephologists and opinionpollsters explore the salience of Europe to voters in local, national and Europeanelections. Media and discourse analysts explore theconstruction of media discourse

10 Thenumber of such groups ourishing in the global information age may outweigh their impact onvoting behaviour: in theday and age of theInternet many is a relative concept. A good numberof these Eurosceptic groups appear only to exist as web pages of single individuals. Theestablishedorganisations, such as theCI B [Campaign for an I ndependent Britain] refuse to disclose theirmembership numbers, a likely sign that the British public arenot exactly queuing on theirdoorsteps. Menno Spiering, British Euroscepticism, European Studies , 20 (2004), pp. 12749, at

1345.11 For more on the growth of support for integration in the CBI during the1960s see Neil Rollings,TheConfederation of British Industry and European Integration in the1960s, in Oliver J .Daddow (ed.), Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britains Second Application to Join theEEC (L ondon and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 11532.

12 Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, Supporting theUnion? Euroscepticismand Domestic Politicsof European Integration, paper delivered at ComparativeEuroscepticism Workshop, Maxwell EUCenter, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, 2122 May, 2004, p. 23; Stephen Haseler, TheEnglish Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 144.

13 Christopher Andersen and Braden Smith, M apping Opposition to European Integration, paperdelivered at ComparativeEuroscepticism Workshop, Maxwell EU Center, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, 2122May, 2004, p. 9. They derive four indicators of scepticism from theEurobarometer questions against integration: Britain 34.5% compared to EU average 22%;

against EU membership: Britain 23.18% compared to EU average 13.12%; no benet frommembership: Britain 41.53% compared to EU average 31.82%; relieved if scrapped: Britain24.75% compared to EU average13%.

14 J h C ti Wh t W Thi k W K i M ti R b ( d ) B i i d E Th

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 311


4/21

on Europeandtherelationship between thiscoverageandpublic attitudesto theEU.Cultural and social theoristshavenot devoted sustained attention to thequestion of Euroscepticism, often tacking it on to investigations of theconstruction of nationalidentity over the longue dure . Here their work overlaps with, and draws upon,historical ideas about the constitution of individual, local, community, regional,national and transnational identities, associating thedevelopment of Euroscepticismwith what has gone before in the life of the nation and how thenation as a wholerelates to its past. 15

This articledraws on work across these disciplines to introducea fresh approachto understanding the phenomenon of Euroscepticism in Britain. I t takes its cue inparticular from recent work on the lessons of history in the elds of intellectualhistory and historical theory. Although it is evident that we can and do make of history what wewant, relatively few scholarshaveyet had theinclination to examinehow the lessons of history become the lessons of history, especially when comparedto the number that have explored the lessons of history themselves. 16 A valuableexception is Mikkel Rasmussen who, in 2003, published an article in Review of International Studies on how historians and policymakers rst constructed and thenlearnt from the Munich lesson of 1938. He was not so interested in charting thesubsequent diplomatic and political uses of that lesson as in how that lesson hasbecome a lesson; how diplomatic events from Versailles to Munich have come toconstitute the received wisdom in the West about peacemaking and securitybuilding, even amongst decision-makers who haveno direct personal experienceof theevents that led to those settlements. We are forever trapped, he implies, by theconstricting ties of history and the sanctity of the common sense lessons wesupposedly learn from it. 17 I concur with Rasmussen about the need for moreresearch into thesocial construction of thepast by directingmy analysis towardsthesu ff ocating weight of history on Britains debates about Europeand theEU.

The analysis proceeds in three parts. Therst sets the terms of reference for thearticle by dening the essentially contested concept of Euroscepticism, and byexplaining how I deploy the term in this article. Having set the parameters foranalysis I examine in the second part the overt and covert ideology at work in thediscourseof twoleadingEurosceptical newspapers: the Sun andthe Daily Mail . Here,I usetheir reportingonEuropean a ff airs ascasestudieswith aview to discoveringthehistorical stories that lend weight and credence to their reporting of Europeanmatters in Britain. In the third part I examine the interconnectedness betweenEuroscepticism and British national history. Theintimaterelationship between stateeducation and nation-building has long been recognised by historians and theoristsof national identity alike. 18 What I want to do is takethis literaturein new directions

15 K rishan K umar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), gives Euroscepticism a one-linemention three pages from theend.

16 Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History forDecision-Makers (New Y ork: TheFree Press, 1986); Will Durant and A riel Durant, The Lessons of History (New Y ork: Simon and Schuster, 1968); M . I . Finley, The Use and Abuse of History(London: Chatto and Windus, 1975); M arc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History (London:Routledge and K egan Paul, 1984).

17

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, TheHistory of a Lesson: Versailles, Munich and theSocialConstruction of thePast, Review of International Studies , 29:4 (2003), pp. 499519.18 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London:

Th J h H ki U i it P 1975) B di t A d I i d C i i (L d



5/21

by arguing that British history, as it was conceived, institutionalised, studied andwritten in the academy in the nineteenth century, may have been an unwittingaccomplicein the riseto prominence of Euroscepticism in thecountry at large. Thearticleconcludeswith discussion of thepotential impact my analysis hasboth for theacademic study of Euroscepticismandthepolitical e ff ortsbytheBlair government toorientatepublic opinion towards accepting a European future for Britain.

Euroscepticism: anessentially contestedconcept

It is important when writing about an emotiveand politically charged topic such asEuroscepticism to bear in mind the methodological problems it poses researchers,and therefore to beas rigorous as possible about dening this problematic word soas to prevent confusion arising. I t is impossible to give a convincing denition of Euroscepticism despiteits wideusagein contemporary political discourse. Therstreason is that theword is used by (and about, often pejoratively) people in variouscountries and for whatever motivewho opposeanything fromEuropean integration per se to theinstitutional formintegration hasbeen takingin theEC and nowtheEU. Thesecond reason relates to thenumerousother competingtermsthat havearisen assigniers of opposition to the twin processes of European integration in generaland/or, to steal an invented word from Timothy Garton Ash, things related toEU-rope in particular. 19 As opposition to Europehas grown so has thenumber of potential descriptivedevices on o ff er. In a ve-page section on British critics of theeuro published in 2001, Lord Haskins uses euroscepticism interchangeably withterminology such as europhobes, ultranationalist europhobics and euro critics. 20Euro-agnostic, Euro-realist andEuro-pragmatist haveall entered popular jargonas both individual politicians and political parties jostle to capture their oftenambiguous policies towards European integration in pithy soundbites for popularconsumption.

The endeavour by academics to categorise these myriad and usually woollyattitudestowardsEuropedemonstrates thevery real problemsa word likeEuroscep-ticcan bringitsuser. Thebest known and most cited is thework by Paul Taggart andAleks Szczerbiak who identify hard and soft strains of Euroscepticism, takingEuroscepticism to imply negative evaluations of European integration. 21 PetrK opeck and Cas M udde try an alternative, distinguishing between specic anddiff use support for integration in the EU on the one hand, and for European

19 Timothy Garton A sh, TheGamble of Engagement, in Britain and Europe: The Choices , pp. 3945.20 Lord Haskins, TheBenets to Business, in Britain and Europe: The Choices , pp. 4956, at 514.

Stephen H aseler equates eurosceptic and europhobic in TheCase for a Federal Future, in Ian Taylor, A ustin M itchell, Stephen Haseler and Geo ff rey Denton, Federal Britain in a Federal Europe? (L ondon: TheFederal Trust for Education and R esearch, 2001), pp. 5196, at 71.

21 Developed in Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, Parties, Positions and Europe: Euroscepticism intheEU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe, Sussex European Institute WorkingPaper no. 46 (2001), http:www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SEI /pdfs/wp46.pdf . First accessed February

2003; Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, TheParty Politics of Euroscepticismin EU Memberand Candidate States, Sussex European Institute Working Paper no. 51 (2002),http:www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SEI /pdfs/wp51.pdf . First accessed F ebruary 2003. See more recently

Al k S bi k d P l T t ( d ) O i E ? Th C i P P li i f



6/21


7/21

this articlehard Euroscepticism; K opeck andMuddemay call it Eurorejectionist;Flood would probably opt for rejectionist or revisionist, it being at the former,extremer end of his spectrum.

Hiddenwiring: thehistorical imagesbehindthediscourse

Eurosceptics in the press consistently use words such as sovereignty, 30 indepen-dence, superstate, subsidiarity, federalism, 31 bureaucrats (increasingly Euro-crats) andphrasessuch askeep thepound in their discourseon whyBritain shouldremain aloof fromfurther integration, or withdrawfromtheEU altogether. 32 Likeallwords and phrases they are freighted with connotations and loaded with meaningsgathered from various sources. They generate their currency for Eurosceptics bybeing associated with popular tales concerning a variety of themes: British di ff er-ence from thecontinent; suspicion of themotives of continental leaders and almostunquestioning support for Britains special relationship with the US. 33 The wordBrussels, when woven into Eurosceptic discourse, signies much more than thegeographical location of the Belgian capital city, denoting instead an easy andremote scapegoat for any mishap, leading to more and more such stories and a jaundiced opinion of EU rules and regulations; 34 in other words, the EuropeanCommission. 35 This is just one exampleof thegeneral problem area I am interestedin: how the words and phrases of British Eurosceptic discourse have becomemeaningful, literally full of meaning, through their being woven together innarratives that tell of the myth of a still largely autonomous great (if not world)power constantly threatened by illegitimate intrusion from Brussels which hasbecomepart of thepolitical (folk) cultureof British EU membershipanditsreportingin thetabloid press. 36

It has proved impossible here to incorporate my research ndings on all thenewspapers whosediscourses on EuropeI haveexamined, and I limit myself insteadto showcasing the vigorousand concentrated form of Euroscepticism found in theSun and the Daily Mail ,37 thebrandof nationalist-based Eurosceptic discoursefound

30 On its multiple connotations in theBritish debates about Europesee Haseler, The English Tribe ,

pp. 927.31 For elaboration of themany connotations of federalism, see Taylor, Mitchell, H aseler andDenton, Federal Britain , pp. 1617, 323, 556, 63, 99103, 11213and 122.

32 For instance J ohn Redwood, Sovereignty and Democracy, and William Hague, H armonisationor Flexibility, both in Britain and Europe: The Choices , pp. 8795 and 28792 respectively. Ondisputes over the meaning of sovereignty within theConservative Party see Philip L ynch,Nationhood and Identity in ConservativePolitics, in Mark Garnett and Philip Lynch (eds.), TheConservatives in Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 18297, at 183.

33 Andrew Gambleand Gavin K elly, Britain and EM U, in K enneth Dyson (ed.), European Statesand the Euro (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 2002), pp. 97119, at 10813.

34 Perry, Priorities in I nformation Policy, p. 65.35 Norbert Schweiger, TheCouncil, theMedia and the Public at L arge, in M artyn Bond (ed.),

Europe, Parliament and the Media (L ondon: TheFederal Trust for Education and Research, 2003),

pp. 13355, at 135.36 Wolfram K aiser, What Alternative is Open to U s?: Britain, in Wolfram K aiser and J rgenElvert (eds.), European Union Enlargement: A Comparative History (New Y ork and Abingdon:R tl d 2004) 9 30 t 25



8/21


9/21

it has in the past, to look across the Atlantic for its security and prosperity. 43 Bylinking Euroscepticism to nationalist discourse I hope to show that popularEuroscepticism in Britain is at the hardest end of Taggart and Szczerbiaks hardEuroscepticism. Otherwise, we have to include as Eurosceptics writers such as theeconomist J ames F order who professes enthusiasm for the European project as awhole but who is opposed to British membership of theeuro on economic grounds.If theeuro causes economic instability and unemployment it will, hecontends, leadto acrimony, resentment and hostility to integrationist policies in other areas. Thatis why, from thebeginning of this debate, I havefelt that theeconomicsof theeuroshould make those who hope for political integration and for Britain to be at theheart of Europe its rmest and most determined opponents. I count myself amongthem. 44 Fordersargument is in linewith that of Timothy Garton Ash who isequallysympathetic to theEuropean causebut who has come to theconclusion that it maybebest for Britain to leavethe EU so as not to let its laggardly attitudehold backthe integration process any further. 45 Both Forder and Garton Ash profess a levelof encouragement for political integration that is entirely lacking in popularEuroscepticism and for that reason I would not put them in the same bracket.Popular British Euroscepticism has a radical edge identied by George and others,and does not concern theprocesses and policy competences of theEU itself. In factthe word Euroscepticism in its popular guisemay beconsidered an oxymoron; thatis, it does not really pertain to developments in theEU at all, but to British history,national identity and place in the world.

I now draw upon the work of Peter Anderson and Anthony Weymouth whoidentify themost prominent Eurosceptic newspapers and establish that thereare twotypesof biasat work ontheir discourse. Therst isovert political or commercial bias,that which setsout to beopenly persuasive. Thesecond is covert bias, that which isimplied or presumed to bepart of theshared lifeworld in themediadiscourse; theunspoken ideology that allows author to connect with reader. 46 Covert, historically-informed biasregularly appears in Sun commentary on European a ff airs, itsreporterstellinga simplestoryabout BritainsEuropean policy. Thecontinent actsout its roleof thethreatening Other across theChannel with those lesser breeds, 47 the Frenchand the Germans, playing the roles of untrustworthy Machiavellian villains leadingitsmachinationsagainst Britain. Compared to thetrustworthy Americans, Andersonnds the Sun depicting the EU as a corrupt and untrustworthy interventionistpredator, driven by a FrancoGerman plot to damage British economic interests,British security and British sovereignty. 48

A succinct illustration of the Sun sbrand of Eurosceptic discourseis an articlebyRichard Littlejohn, who took up arms against Blair in the wake of the PrimeMinisters Warsaw speech on EU enlargement in May 2003. 49 His piece, How dare

43 Morgan, Media Coverage, p. 37. See also Haseler, The English Tribe , pp. 12, 2933 and 55.44 J ames Forder, TheEconomic Costs of Membership, in Britain and Europe: The Choices , pp. 738,

at 73.45 Guardian , 31 October 2002, p. 21.46 Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?, p. 153.47

Geoff

rey Denton, TheFederalist Vision, in Taylor, Mitchell, Haseler and Denton, Federal Britain ,pp. 99153, at 112.48 Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?, p. 154.49 F th f ll t t f hi h htt // b 10 k/ t t/P 3787 d 10



10/21

Tony Blair call us unpatriotic, was themed around his perception that Blair hadequated anti-Europeanism with a lack of pridein nation(it mattersnot whether thiswas actually what Blair meant the point is that Littlejohn read it as such). ForLittlejohn thiswasan a ff ront, a monstrousslander to thepeopleBlair represents. Isimply dont understand why anyonegoes into politics to destroy their own countryand hand it over to foreigners. In the emotive words of Labour leader HughGaitskell, delivered over forty years ago to describe his opposition to the CommonMarket and trotted out time and again in support of the Eurosceptic case, 50Littlejohn chastises Blair for hating this country and for being hell-bent ondestroying 1,000 years of history, in stark contrast to thepatriotism of wanting todefend our borders, pass our own laws and run our own economy. His fairy-taledescription of the non-choicefor theBritish people in a possible referendumon theEuropean Constitution 51 readsas follows: Certainly, given theoption, most Britishpeople would rather live in a free, benign kingdomnominally ruled by a kindly oldgranny than in a federal superstate run by foreigners, with their tidy minds, armedwith their railway timetables and oppressive human rights laws. He even writeshistory backwards by imagining what Blair might have done in 1939: Presumably[he] would havethought thepatriotic thingto do would beto hand over thekeys toHitler. 52

Content analysis of Littlejohns polemic shows a high number of references towords, phrases and images associated with hard Euroscepticism in Britain. Thenumber of appearances of each areasfollows: Brussels: one; independent nation:one; superstate: one; sovereignty: two; Germany/Germans: two; France/French:three; foreigners: three; British monarchy: four; patriotism: ten. Thevehistoricalreferencesareof special interest, comprisingasthey doallusionsto theSecondWorldWar and Hitler, Gaitskells thousand years of British history, to the disgracefulGrocer [Edward] Heath who took Britain into the EEC in 1973, thecoronation in1953 and September 11th, 2001. Littlejohn is ransacking history and playing to hisperceived audience, the more than half of us who want to get out of Europealtogether, by evoking moments of national pride such as World War II and theCoronation to support his case against Blairs vision for Britain.

Michael Portillo, writing in the Daily Mail two years earlier, brought the samecharge against Blair, writing that his European policy showed the premier to havelittle interest in history, 53 as if seeking a European future for the country is anunpatriotic betrayal of thepast, the signicance of which is self-evident. 54 I t is thiskind of argument that leads Anderson and Weymouth to judge that Daily Mail commentary on European politics is strikingly similar to that foundin the Sun . Likethe Sun , the Daily Mail s discourse on the EU was found [in the survey period

50 On Gaitskells opposition to the Common M arket, and his Empire mentality, see Brian Brivati,Hugh Gaitskell (L ondon: Richard Cohen Books, 1997), pp. 40431 and Haseler, The English Tribe ,pp. 53 and 131.

51 This article was written before the resultsof the 2005 French and Dutch referendums on theConstitution were known. Clearly, they signicantly diminish thechances of there even being areferendum in Britain.

52 Richard Littlejohn, How dare Tony Blair call us unpatriotic, http://www/thesun.co.uk/article/

0,,432003251106,00.html , accessed 10October 2003.53 Daily Mail , 31 December 2001, p. 22.54 For a critiqueof this view of theunpatriotism of being an enthusiast for integration see Charles

K d A E d t V ill ti B i i d E Th Ch i 293 7 t 293 d H l



11/21

20002002] to becharacterised by a world full of FrancoGerman plots, threats toBritains sovereignty and security by an advancing European superstate, allegedlyuntrustworthy European partners and a preference for the USA over the EU. Inmediating the EU to its readers, both newspapers freely engaged in omission andmisrepresentation leavingthempoorly served, nomatter what their point of viewonBrussels . 55 On the whole Anderson nds that withdrawal from the EU has notbeen theeditorial policy of any of thesceptical newspapers in Britain, but the DailyMail doesmorethan air thepossibility through articlesbyindividual journalists. Thisposition was evident in a feverish article by Andrew Alexander that appeared in theDaily Mail during the European Council meeting in December 2000, one thatreected theConservativePartysobjectionsto theoutcomeof theNicemeeting. Onbalance, he argued, the time might be right to withdraw from the EU . The Nicesummit is merely serving to underlineour incompatibility with thestructureand theaims of the Union, with the certainty of more di ff erences to come. He went on toclaim that Britain does not depend on theEU economically, politically or strategi-cally. Asa genuinely independent nation wewould beentirely at liberty to makeourown rules. 56

Three years later the paper was taking the same line. It was delighted with theChancellors verdict on 9 J une2003 that theBritish economy had not yet passed the Treasurys ve tests for membership of the euro; nothing Gordon Brown said hasthreatened this proud symbol of Britains independence and national wealth. Thepound has endured for a millennium, built an empire, and, above all, united ourpeople. 57 Thenewspapers pridein thepart thepound has played in integrating thenation and building theEmpireis typical of theway in which theBritish story is toldin the Eurosceptic press, and emblematic of a tendency on thepart of thepress tomerge isolationist British pride with a fear that European integration threatensthis. 58 Mixing discussion of the incompatibility between British and Europeaninterests with a consistent seam of scare stories about the EU and the euro, 59 thehuman interest anglebeloved of British investigativereportingon howtheEU a ff ectsour daily lives, 60 the Daily Mail and the Sun select a limited set of historical factswhich they organise for their readers into stories with a singularly recognisableplotline, centring on a nation continually at war with mainland Europe.

The historical backdrop to both tabloid and broadsheet Euroscepticism is theisland story every British citizen supposedly knows, one that tells of irredeemablediff erences between Britain and thecontinent; onethat adaptsShakespeares tale of a sceptrd isle set in a silver sea ghting o ff the pernicious e ff ects of continental

55 Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?, p. 156.56 Daily Mail , 9 December 2000, pp. 1213.57 Why the pound is quids in, Daily Mail , 10 J une 2003, p. 14.58 Gertrude Hardt-Mautner, quoted in George Wilkes and Dominic Wring, TheBritish Press and

Integration, in David Baker and David Seawright (eds.), Britain For and Against Europe: BritishPolitics and the Question of European Integration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 185205, at1978.

59 In the article on themerits of the pound cited abovethe Daily Mail informs us that, unlike theeuro, thepound is not bad for your health. According to a study by dermatologists at the

University of Zurich, euro coins can trigger skin allergies because they release up to 320 times theamount of nickel allowed under EU safety rules..60 Dougall, British Press Coverage, p. 55. See also Olivier Basne, The(Non-) Coverage of the

E P li t i M t B d ( d) E P li d h M di (L d Th



12/21

intrusions into British a ff airs. 61 This is the kind of commonsense history everyoneknowseven if they arenot historians, thekindparodied in Sellar andY eatmans 1066 And All That ,62 thekindthat tellsusall weneed toknowabout EuropefromBritainsmartial past; itsencounterswith theSpanish Armada, at thebattleof Trafalgar, withNapoleon at Waterloo, 63 after thelet-down of Munich in 1938 and against HitlersGermany during theSecond World War. Aggressivenational patriotismof this kindhas even been linked directly to the English disease of football hooliganism in the1970s and 1980s. Thevoiceover at thebeginningof a May 2005 documentary aboutfootball hooliganism and English national identity made thefascinating point thatFor many, theseaggressivedisplaysof identity would becomethefootball equivalentof Euroscepticism, while one interviewee, singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, ruefullysurmised that I think that these people must get their worldview from theopeningcredits of Dads Army . . . It does say something about English culture, I think,that weclingto thepast in that sense. Wedont havenewandmodern waysto expresswho wethink weare. 64 (It is interesting to note that theLittlejohn article I referredto abovewassupported bya cartoon in which Blair is chastising thecharacters fromDadsArmy for being patriotic). Indeed, eventsin 193945areso regularly calledto mind in popular British discussions about Europe that one commentator haswritten Our attitudetowardsGermanyremainsat theheart of our fear of Europe. 65While this might hold for recent decades, Linda Colley remindsusof thecrucial partmilitary encounters with the F rench, the traditional enemy across the Channel,played in constructing senses of Britishness in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. 66 Theparticular sourcesof angst about thecontinental Other are, however,less signicant than thefact that continental Europe continues to play that role forthe British, and Colley makes the telling point, (ironically?) using Euroscepticallanguage, that the agonies that some British politicians and voters so plainlyexperiencein comingto termswith Brussels and its dictatesshowjust how rooted theperception of Continental Europe as Other still is. 67

On theevidence presented in this section it seems fair to assert that Europe/EUdebates in Britain are, in their popular form, continuously being refracted throughthe lenses of British national history, and a particular reading of thenational storyat that. Popular Euroscepticism, ironically, is not so much the expression of anattitudetowardsdevelopmentsin theEU as therepetitivearticulation of a story that

61

Haseler, The English Tribe , pp. 1415. Arthur Bryant eulogises Shakespeare in Set in a Silver Sea:A History of Britain and the British People (L ondon: Book Club A ssociates edition, 1985).62 W. C. Sellar and R . J . Y eatman, 1066 And All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960).63 A good example of a linkage often madebetween theEU and Napoleons e ff orts to dominate the

continent, thwarted by theBritish at Waterloo, can be found in the Cover story of the Sun , 30March 2004, continued on p. 2: Waterloon: Blair will surrender to EU on anniversary of battlevictory.

64 Thepoint was repeatedly made in this programme that stereotypical conceptions of history whichseem to come from another era were a big factor in causing theEnglish to view their trips to thecontinent in militaristic terms. BBC Four, Timeshift documentary, broadcast 31 May 2005.

65 Haseler, TheCase for a Federal Future, p. 59.66 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 17071837 , 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT and London: Y ale

University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 5, 17, 245, 336, 789, 8690, 99, 172, 198, 21517, 240, 2503,

2859, 3058, 31013, 322, 358 and 36871 (this quote from p. 312). For a contrasting approachidentifying the closeness of F ranco-British relations (at the aristocratic level) in the eighteenthcentury, centring on the European Enlightenment, cultural and intellectual cosmopolitanism andth k f V lt i N Th Ri f E li h N i li 1 18



13/21

sets Britain perpetually against a continental Other. What is missing, critically, is adiscourse which tempers historicism with the representation of how the othereconomies of the other member states, the working of European institutions, anddemocracy itself within theEU, are faring. 68 How have politicians, the public andnewspaper editors and journalists learnt this particular historical lesson and why dothey continue to teach it? And why this story, not another one, identifyingBritainsinternationalist past? Gerald Newman suggests we begin our search for answersin the English historiographical tradition in which the delusion of ProtestantEngland s exceptionalism, uniqueness and separateness from Catholic continentalEurope has came to stand for the British national story. 69 In this spirit the nextsection explores the culture of the discipline that seems to inform so muchcontemporary discourse about Europe.

History in Euroscepticism; Euroscepticismin history?

It is intensely di fficult to trace with any degree of precision a direct line of descentfrom Victorian historiography to Eurosceptic discourse in thepopular press today.However, it is clear from theabovethat themes and images from nationalist historyin thenineteenthcentury continueto featureprominently in early twenty-rst centurydiscussionsabout Britainsrolein Europe. 70 I want to arguein this nal section thatin our e ff ortsto explain thelineageof thisdiscourseit is crucial that weexaminethepart played by history education in shapingnational identity construction, and thatit will befruitful to take this research in two complementary directions. First of allweneed to consider what I label theovert bias towardspatriotic/nationalist historyin university, public school and state school history syllabi from the nineteenthcentury onwards. Thisformof biashasalready received attention in theliteratureonBritishness and Englishness, if not always with Euroscepticism directly in mind. 71Secondly, I suggest we concentrate more than hitherto on the implications of thinking about and doing history the positivist way, about the ideology inherent inthemethodological and epistemological foundations of history when it was institu-tionalised as a distinct discipline in the leading universities across Western Europeand North America in thethird quarter of thenineteenth century. This covert biasis harder to discover and has received relatively little attention in the literature onhistory and national identity; it is more the province of historical theory. But it isnecessary to explore covert bias because of the silent and hidden mechanisms of ideological power in our current social formations that, by weighing us down withhistory, destineusfor a futurethat, arguably, is merely a replication of thenow andthepast. Perhapsthelongevity of nationalist discourseabout Europein Britain is, in

68 Anderson and Weymouth, Insulting the Public? , p. 91.69 Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism , prefacepp. 213.70 A s an historian I regard theabandonment of our sovereignty as being as dangerous as it is

needless, proclaims Count Nicolai Tolstoy, UK Independence Candidate for theWantageconstituency, in his campaign leaet for the 2005 General Election.71 On thecentricity of thenation-state in early professional historiography, and on theassociated

i f liti l d di l ti hi t Ri h d J E I D f f Hi 2 d d



14/21

fact, a case-study in what K eith J enkins identies as the tendency for historicallyconscious policymakingelites and societies to endlessly repeat what historianstell ushas gonebefore. 72

Let us turn rstly to overt bias against things European in British historyeducation, in terms of the thematic content of that education. It was the rstgeneration of professional historiansin thenineteenth century that shaped theformin which [the Whig story of British liberty, progress and exceptionalism] enteredschool textbooksandturned it into acentral elementof theEnglish tradition. 73 Itdidso on theback of thenew disciplines claims to beableto teach ussomething aboutthepresent using thefactsof thepast. History, construed as diplomatic history withall themethodological andepistemological commitmentsimplied bythat focuson thenation-state as the unit of analysis, 74 was to act as a source of moral lessons tostudents and simultaneously as a source of wisdom and practical advice forpolicymakers; 75 a school of statesmanship . . . the school of public feeling andpatriotism washowJ . R. Seeley put it in his inaugural lectureasRegiusProfessor of Modern History at Cambridgein 1869. 76 Hiscall washeeded byhisfellow historians,and in therst third of thetwentieth century school textbooks reected thepatrioticand in some cases jingoistic history they produced. Philip Dodd calls the ancientuniversities custodians of thenational culture but they were arguably more activethan this in propagating national myths, becoming in Eric Hobsbawms words themost conscious champions of nationalism in the nineteenth century. 77 Takingnational trends in historiography more generally, Gerald Newman concurs. Morehistory-writing tends to theperpetuation of national beliefs than to their dissection;in fact it is an integral part of those very myths which hold nations together. 78

By the early postwar years books that sold in largenumbers both popularly andamong political elites were taking a vividly patriotic line on Britains past. Wellknown historians such as Arthur Bryant, who went on to campaign for a no votein the1975referendum, 79 and GeorgeMacauley Trevelyanpenned storiesexplainingEnglish exceptionalismwith referenceto itsseparation fromthecontinent, a countryof uniqueexibility and stability, that had only found its truedestiny when it turnedaway fromcontinental Europe. 80 A. J . P. Taylorswartimeasidethat What iswrong

72 K eith J enkins, Reguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London: Routledge, 2003),pp. 1718.

73 K umar, The Making of English National Identity , p. 203.74

Finney, Introduction, pp. 56. Thus, notes Nigel Gould-Davies, we can argue that muchdiplomatic history is underwritten by an implicit Realism, implying that history was realist beforetheInternational Relations Realists were realist. See his I deology, in Finney (ed.), International History , pp. 10535, at 112.

75 Beverley Southgate, Why Bother with History ? (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000); Georg G.Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientic Objectivity to the PostmodernChallenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), p. 2.

76 Quoted in K umar, The Making of English National Identity , p. 219.77 Quoted in A nderson, Imagined Communities , p. 71 and Haseler, The English Tribe , p. 41. On public

and state school education and thespread of Englishness see thelatter, pp. 415.78 Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism , p. 51.79 Forster, Euroscepticism , p. 51. On Bryants involvement in theproduction of and promotion of a

romantic sense of Englishness, see David M atless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion

Books, 1998), pp. 1201.80 Anne Deighton, ThePast in thePresent: British I mperial Memories and European Question, in J an-Werner Mller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of theP (C b id C b id U i it P 2002) 100 120 t 103 S l K Th



15/21


16/21

too often vitriolic reactions to theoretically inclined investigations of the historicalenterprise. 87

Given the logocentrism of history (the assumption that historians are rationalindividuals on a voyage of discovery) and the concomitant perception that it is adiscipline that can produce reliable and empirically testable knowledge about thepast, it is littlesurprisethat politiciansandmediacommentatorsregularly usehistoryin support of their arguments about Europe as if history is a given, something weknow, a certainty. The word history has in fact come to stand for a body of knowledgeweread to get our bearingsin lifethrough therepresentation of thetruthabout what the past was like. In fact the positivist, nationalist history that wasproduced by, and in turn helped further, this belief is just oneway of telling thepast,one reading of it, one historiographical representation amongst many, though verylittle of that uncertainty comes through in the historical telling. Thewhole point of history done the positivist way is that it sacrices uncertainty at the altars of continuity and narrativecoherence, theneed to put everything into a neat story witha beginning, middleandend. Crooked storiesdo not go down well in thediscipline,whereas straight ones most certainly do. 88

The easy transmission of nineteenth century historical ideas around the Britishpolitical establishment, in its schools and in much public presentation of historypresents real problems for the Europeanistswho try to priseopen passionately heldassumptions about Britains purportedly uniquepast. So far they havenot been upto thechallenge. Their e ff orts are worth exploring, however, because they reinforce just how hegemonic theEurosceptical readingof Britainspast hasbecome. Thersttactic has been to attempt to convince theBritish of their internationalist past. Thishas been a theme of New Labours attempts to modernise Britains identity since1997 by recognising that Britishness is a plural identity that embraces local andnational allegiances and that as a plural rather than ethnic identity, British culturehad been enriched by immigration. 89 Chancellor Gordon Brown took this tack in1999: I n the 1980s a very narrow view of Britishness was popularised by Margaret Thatcher, a Britain built on self-interested individualism, mistrust of foreigners andan unchangingconstitution. I believethiswasbased on amisreadingof our past. Ourhistory shows Britain to be outward-looking and open. It is not true that Britishhistory is dened by mistrust of foreigners. The past shows Britain to have beeninternationalist and engaged. 90 Liberal Democrat M ember of theEuropean Parlia-ment Nick Clegg follows suit by recommending that Britain begin to accept itself asa European nation from head to toe. That for a large trading nation with a longtradition of international engagement and inuence, our standing in the world isentirely dependent upon our standing in Europe. 91 It is commonplace to ndproponents of Britain taking a moreactive part in the EU to back their argumentsby showing the porous nature of the British nation, its historical openness in

87 For instance Arthur M arwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); K eith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past (New Y ork: TheFree Press, 1997).

88 Hans K ellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (London: The

University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).89 Lynch, Nationhood and Identity, pp. 185 and 194.90 In interview with SteveRichards of the New Statesman and Society , quoted in K umar, The Making

f E li h N i l Id i 241



17/21

cultural terms to trends in continental European philosophy, political thought, artand architecture and scienceand technology. 92

Much of theevidencethat could beused in support of this story can bediscoveredin works of cultural history and the invention of British identity, for instanceK umars The Making of English National Identity andColleys Britons . They tracethecontinual confusion that has arisen between English and British and shows howthelatter has regularly been used in place of the former, obfuscating any sustaineddebate about the component parts of a specically English national identity. M oreimportantly for our purposes here, they knock away the foundations of argumentsabout England/Britain being isolated from the continent for time immemorial(Gaitskells thousand years) and replace it with a story about thedevelopment of English/British identity that, where it is identiable at all as a distinct construct, isinextricably European. Haseler pointedly remarks that the English came originallyfrom Germany in the fth century: from J utland, the Anglen in Denmark andLower Saxony. 93 For K umar, I n virtually every respect England from theeleventhto thethirteenth century was a part of Europe, to an even greater extent than it wasat thetimeof Roman Britain hewrites of thethreecenturies following theNormanConquest. 94 For Colley, contrary to the received wisdom, the British are not aninsular peoplein theconventional sense far fromit. For most of their early modernand modern history they have had morecontact with moreparts of the world thanalmost any other nation it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise. 95 They systematically show theEuropeanist and internationalist preoccupations of thekey gures and great eventsthat star in the supposedly English story: literary gures such as Chaucer,Shakespeare and Milton, sovereigns such as Queen Elizabeth I and the Tudors,military leaders such asLord Nelson, and momentsof Englishness inspired by suchoccasions as theGreat Exhibition of 1851. 96

Thesecond tactic, sporadically used by politicians to undermine the Euroscepticcase, hasbeen to tacklehead-on Britainsrecent relationswith Europebypublicisingthe argument that by staying out of European initiatives such as the euro Britain isagain missing theEuropean bus. Theproponentsof this interpretation of the pasthavedrawn on developments in British, European and global history since1945 totell a new story about Britain and Europeand to informthepublic of developmentsin contemporary history which they do not know as much about, certainly whencompared to developments in the more distant past: kings and queens, wars andconquests, Hitler and Stalin and so forth. Blair took this approach in a speechto mark the opening of the European Research Institute at the University of Birmingham. Drawing on postwar developments in European integration hearguedthat [t]hehistory of our engagement with Europe is oneof opportunities missed inthe name of illusions and Britain su ff ering as a result. He went on to chart the

92 Haseler, TheCase for a Federal Future, p. 93. See also Ian Taylor MP, Seen from theConservative Camp, in Taylor, Mitchell, Haseler and Denton, Federal Britain , pp. 1121, at 18.

93 Haseler, The English Tribe , pp. 911.94 K umar, The Making of English National Identity , p. 52.95

Colley, Britons , p. 8; Haseler, The English Tribe , pp. 11215.96 Ibid., pp. 57, 1179, 1289, 93103, p. 187, pp. 1923 respectively. For a reinterpretation of thebizarre yet widespread reading of theNorman Conquest as a moment in the invention of theE li h A d I i d C i i 201 d N Th Ri f E li h



18/21

succession of integrative schemes Britain refused to involve itself with in the 1950s,and Londons gradual but reluctant admission in the1960s that it needed to bepartof the integration process, rather than marginalised from it. He ended with theclarion call that Britains future is in Europe. 97 Advocates of federalist modes of governance in both Britain and the EU read Britains past relations with Europe inthesameway by tellinga story of Britain missingout economically and strategicallybynot beingin Europesintegrativeschemesfrom thebeginning. 98 Blair may notbea federalist even in its watered-down form, but in telling this alternativestory heisusing federalist rhetoric that has a long heritage in Britain, albeit one conned toscholarly circles and the margins of news reporting and political debates on thegovernance of Britain and theEU. 99

Theproblemwith this attempt, liketherst, is that it too confronts a tradition of Britishhistory rooted in thenineteenthcentury wheretheEuropeansarepresented asmendacious and European schemes are portrayed as hostile to British traditions.Historyappearsto havecometo standfor reality in manypeoplesminds, rather thanthe exercise in literary representation it is, and Europeanists are nding it corre-spondingly di fficult to inject a badly needed shot of uncertainty into the stories theBritish tell themselves about their past as a means of destabilising the historicalfoundations of Eurosceptic discourse. As we have seen, it is all too easy forproponents of the orthodoxy, such as Portillo and Littlejohn, to accuse thosepresentingwhat could belabelled a revisionist version of Britainsnational past of being unpatriotic or having an unhealthy disregard for history. As Hugo Y oungremarks at thestart of his book on Britain and Europesince1945, Tamperingwiththis blessed plot [of the scepterd isle] was seen for decades as a kind of sacrilegewhich, even if thesophisticates among thepolitical class could accept it, thepeoplewould never tolerate. 100 Talkingabout post-1945developmentssimplywill not strikea chord with the British public if one accepts the view that the core themes andpedagogy of British national history inform their understanding of what it is to beBritish and European. Thefacts of post-1945 British-European history (about thesteps in European integration through the 1950s, through the European Coal andSteel Community, the abortive European Defence Community and the EuropeanEconomic Community) form the backdrop to the missed bus discourse but thosefacts are not widely known in Britain. Even less do they constitute a persuasivealternative to Eurosceptic discourse.

Conclusion: playingthehistory game

Threeprincipal conclusionsemergefromtheprecedinganalysis. Therst two pertainto the academic study of Euroscepticism; the other is policy-oriented. First to thetheory. Thesimplest conclusion I o ff er isthat it is increasingly di fficult to talk without

97 http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1673.asp . First accessed J anuary 2004.98

Denton, TheFederalist Vision, pp. 1512.99 On thefederalist heritage of missed opportunities discourse about Britain and Europe, notably therole of theFederal Trust for Education and Research, see Daddow, Britain and Europe , pp. 8690.

100 H Y Thi Bl d Pl B i i d E f Ch hill Bl i (B i t k



19/21

severe qualication of a transnational phenomenon of Euroscepticism. Nationalcontexts remain all-important for understanding and explaining the phenomenonbecause it is a word that does not pass untrammelled across national borders. Theabsenceof a cohesiveEuropean party systemand thedearth of pan-European issuesaround which public and media opinion can coalesce are both reected in poorturnouts at European elections. The absence of a widely watched pan-Europeantelevision channel or a widely read dedicated European newspaper adds fuel to theimpression that the EU will continue for the foreseeable future to be mediated toEuropean publicsthrough strictly national lenses. It still, to my mind, makessensetopay attention to the national political and societal contexts of Euroscepticism.Comparativework on thesubject is valuablebut thetwo strands of research need tooperate in parallel, with information generated in the one strand constantlyinforming, and being informed by, data generated in the other. Delving into thenational arenas for contestation over Europeon a comparativebasis should enhanceboth our understanding of Euroscepticism and our ability to explain its appeal anduses in discourseson Europeboth in andoutsideEU member states. That thereis nosinglecomprehensivedenition of Euroscepticismmakesit all themorepotent a toolof political discoursebecauseit can beas meaning ful or meaning less aswewant it tobe, a classic means of clouding the issues and detracting attention from theideological agendas advanced by adopting Eurosceptical positions in contemporarypolitics. However, the fact that Euroscepticism is an essentially contested conceptshould not deter useither from trying to dene it or from studying it. Thefact thatsomething does not exist in reality (whatever that is) does not mean it is notmeaningful, or that it has no power and inuence over our lives. As Spieringconcludes, it does not matter if Britain is di ff erent from thecontinent or not, whatmatters is that the idea of British di ff erentness is widely accepted. It forms part of received opinion, and as such it is real just as reactions are real. Imaginedcommunities they may be, but people liveand die by them. 101

My second conclusion is that in Britain the term Euroscepticism maintains adistinctly radical edge; the hint of withdrawal from theEU always seems to be thelogical conclusion of thenewspaper articles I haveexamined above. How far this isthe case in other countries is certainly an interesting question but not one I cananswer here. What can be established with more certainty is that it will bevital forscholars to try andunderstandandexplain thephenomenon of Euroscepticismon aninterdisciplinary basis. Political scientists, historians, economists, philosophers,psychologists, cultural theorists, media analysts, discourseanalysts and linguists all,potentially, havelight to shed on thepolitical structuresand societal contextswithinwhich Euroscepticism (and its national variants) is produced and received. These inturn should inform, and be informed by, the study of theEuropean context withinwhich nominally Eurosceptical parties, pressure and interest groups make knowntheir opposition and canvass support for their arguments.

My third conclusion is policy-oriented and pertains to the various strategies thathavebeen and are being used by politicians in Britain and at European level to tryand counter the appeal of Eurosceptic discourse. These strategies seem to be

predicated on theassumption that to win British hearts and minds thegovernmentmust win theintellectual battlefor history as well as showing theBritish people that



20/21

it is in thenationseconomic interest to join such venturesas thesinglecurrency, andthey may well be right on that count. But Euroscepticism is morethan a product of myopic nationalism or the wrong historical stories being told. It is both wider anddeeper than that. I t iswider becauseEuroscepticismmakescommercial sense, not justintellectual sense. How else do we explain the outpouring of pro-Europeansentiment by the Sun , the Daily Mail and the Telegraph before and after the 1975referendum on British membership of the Common Market and their oppositeopinions today?Havingexplored the commercial interests lying behind theproduc-tion of Eurosceptic discoursein the Sun, Times, Express and Telegraph at theturn of the century, Anderson argues that only in the case of thelatter can we say that itsdiscourse was the product of belief Conrad Blacks well known views on Americaover Europe and the benetsof Britain joining NAFTA. 102 In the others it was theproduct of economic considerations. Eurosceptic discoursein thosepapers is beingused to increase reader numbers, a form of hypocrisy whereby readers of theEurosceptic pressarebeingsold a nationalist lineon theEuropean Unionbypaperswhich arenot most fundamentally driven by a belief in thenationalismthat is beingespoused. 103 This, he says, is a cause for concern in the context of democraticaccountability in Britain. In the context of this article it can be seen how basiccommercial decisionsdictatethenarrativefocusin newsreporting, seriously preclud-ing the kind of informed debateabout Europeso often being called for by politicalparties across the spectrum in Britain. Blair or his successor may well win areferendum on the euro question, but this will be more to do with timing,management, andthemachinationsof party politicsthan thefact that hehaswon thehistory game. Haselers 1996 judgement that British sensibility will expand toencompasscontinental European history aspart of its own 104 is, it seems, still wildlyoptimistic.

102 Conrad Black, TheAtlantic Community, in Britain and Europe: The Choices (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2001), pp. 25562.103 Anderson, A Flag of Convenience?, p. 169. On themanifold commercial considerations of Pressoutlets, see Roger Fowler, L anguage in the News: Discourse and I deology in thePress (London:R tl d 1991) 19 25



21/21

Reproduced withpermission of the copyright owner. Further reproductionprohibited without permission.

euroscepticism and the culture of the discipline of history

Documents