The White Rocks of Dover off the coast of Great Britain
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
The memorial to the 1948 Gatow air disaster is easy to overlook in a city with more than a fair share of 20th-century ghosts. A simple plaque in Berlin’s Westend district commemorates the plane crash that killed 15 people in the early days of the Cold War.
The stone inscription may be discreet, 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 UK’s key role in shaping post-war European order.
With Brexit now real, the UK may find it not so easy to throw away a European identity so entrenched in history and geography. Indeed, that reality – and a perennial political culture of questions about its relationship with its European neighbors – seems destined to bind Britain to the mainland for years to come, for all government efforts to rebrand the nation as a free globe trout champion. international exchange.
Remains of the Soviet Yak fighter jet that crashed into a Vickers plane near Gatow Airport, Berlin, on April 5, 1948.
Photographer: Henry Burroughs / AP Photo
After concluding a trade deal with the European Union on Christmas Eve, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was time to move on. Britain must leave behind “old, dry, tired, over-chewed arguments” and “maintain Brexit,” he told the House of Commons on December 30, as he quickly agreed.
Given the post-war history of Britain, this finality can be a thought of desire. Indeed, the pro-Brexit camp has been blamed for reducing the European dimension of the country’s past, according to Helene von Bismarck, a historian of Britain’s role in twentieth-century international relations.
She has a “very selective view of British history,” she said. “This whole idea that we are now free to go back to what we really are – history doesn’t really confirm that.”
Britain’s role in post-war Germany provides a sense of the expansion of these continental ties. Berlin in 1948 was a border town when, in April, a Vickers plane from London via Hamburg was involved in a collision with a Soviet Yak fighter near 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, angered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who ordered Berlin to be cut off from the rest of Germany. The historian was Britain’s foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, who persuaded the Americans to take over air transport and break the blockade. Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postbel. The continent will 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 could have been key players in the Cold War, but Britain was at the center of events that forged the new European reality – even though it was not until the 1970s that Britain linked its fate to that of the continent by joining the forerunner of the project. defining policy of the region, the EU.
In February last year, days after Britain won the 2016 referendum and officially left the EU, Johnson used a speech about Britain’s post-Brexit future to say Britain was “reappearing after decades of hibernation.” and it is ready to resume its historic role as the world’s leading free trade advocate.
Recent research by the European Council on External Relations suggests that the UK will not be able to air Europe so easily. A majority of UK policy experts in government, think tanks, academia and the private sector believe that the country’s future role in global politics is one of close association with the EU, a study by the think tank found. The leadership of a “resurgent Commonwealth” of nations was seen as the least realistic result, favored by less than 2% of respondents.
While the Brexit agreement sealed on December 24 delimits the scope of future ties, the study shows that there is room for a return to closer cooperation – especially in areas such as climate change, EU-UK migration and foreign policy – if London chooses.
It would be better not to leave both sides too late. A parallel study found that Ireland is the only one of the 27 EU members who saw relations with the UK as a top priority. In general, Britain has ranked less a priority for bloc members than China, Russia, the US – or even the Western Balkans.
“There is a certain fatigue and I think it has an effect on the willingness to work,” said Jana Puglierin, head of the ECFR office in Berlin and director of the research project. “Those states that have traditionally been close to Britain have continued.”
It is unlikely to be a luxury offered to the United Kingdom, which has been traumatized by the problems of European integration since the war. As early as 1950, when plans for the European Coal and Steel Community were launched, the United Kingdom refused to participate due to suspicions of continental influence in its affairs.
It was also an economic decision: in 1947, the British economy was in much better health than its neighbors, aided by trade with the empire. But at the end of 1951, West German exports fueled a “European economic renaissance,” the historian Judt wrote.
Edward Heath, Center, at a press conference “Keep Britain in Europe” in London on May 13, 1975.
Source: AP Photos
By 1955, the United Kingdom had signed an association agreement, and in 1961 it applied to become a full member of what was then the European Economic Community – its request vetoed famously by French President Charles de Gaulle.
Britain under the Conservative government of Edward Heath was finally admitted to the EEC on 1 January 1973. But what followed was 47 years of on-off struggles that eventually led to the EU’s exit from the EU. Britain on 31 January.
Accession was quickly followed by a referendum on membership, convened by a Labor government persevering in the parties fighting for Europe. In the 1980s, conservatives under Margaret Thatcher became increasingly Euro-skeptical, and Europe played a major role in its fall in 1990. Her successor, John Major, fought for control of his cabinet on this issue. during his time at Downing Street no.
Prime Minister David Cameron has tried to launch the boil by holding another referendum on EU membership. The vote to leave cost him the job and that of his successor, Theresa May.
All of this controversy “is falling behind us in the past,” Johnson said in February. “We have the opportunity, we have the newly recovered powers, we know where we want to go and that is in the world,” he said. Its aim is to create a “global Britain”.
Boris Johnson presents his government’s negotiating position with the European Union after Brexit on February 3.
Photographer: Frank Augstein – WPA Pool / Getty Images
Britain’s dilemma is that it risks being on the wrong side of history, going it alone in a time of great power rivalry between the US and China, which is unlikely to change under a Joe Biden administration.
Turning back a half-century-old economic and political alliance with Europe seems increasingly risky, especially as Brexit President Donald Trump leaves the White House and the Commonwealth countries, Australia and India. unite with Japan to meet China’s challenge.
Meanwhile, the EU has its own leadership challenges, according to Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent in England. Now with the UK’s prerogative to enter into trade agreements with non-EU partners, the two sides “will move more and more in different directions,” he told Bloomberg Television.
However, history suggests that these paths are destined to converge again. Even Johnson acknowledges that Britain is a European power “by irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and sentiment,” not just “by treaty or law.”
In 1948, the Labor government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee faced a historic decision on the country’s future ties to the continent and opted to break with previous British thinking in favor of an alliance with Europe.
Once again, Bevin, his foreign minister, called on the country to engage with its continental neighbors in a common defense strategy, a “Western European Union”, on the grounds that Britain’s security needs are no longer separable from those of the continent, ”Judt wrote.
That union became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed in April 1949 by the United States, Canada and 10 European nations and which is still the basis of transatlantic relations.
The following year, the cornerstone of St. George’s Church was laid in the British sector in Berlin, replacing an older English chapel that had been destroyed in a war bombing. The plaque for Gatow’s victims was added later.
For Puglierin at the European Council on External Relations, the policy areas of mutual interest support the promise of future UK-EU cooperation, despite the current British government’s desire to break free. “Not everything is lost,” she said.