Britain, Europe and "liberalism" (in the classical sense).

[Kirkhill]

This article, by a German, puts squarely what so many of us have wrestled with  on this site in trying to define Britishness and the value of Britishness and why it is important, not just to Europeans but to Canadians.  And it also tries to explain the two solitudes....

Britain, don't leave us! We Germans need you in the EU – and we'll bend over backwards to keep you

For Angela Merkel to lose the British on her watch would be a disaster for a country which has so long regarded it as an indispensable part of Europe

By Thomas Kielinger9:43AM GMT 17 Dec 2015

Deep is the well of the past. Thus the opening sentence of Thomas Mann’s monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph and His Brothers. We ought to allow ourselves to be similarly guided to plumb the well of history when it comes to a seminal question: Is Germany at all committed to keeping Great Britain anchored in the EU? It is the opinion of this author to answer in the affirmative, and to do so emphatically.

By God, haven’t we wrestled with Britains’s “Europe-compatibility“ over the years! Long is the record of our complaints and disappointments in this regard. The following dialogue between Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, and Winston Churchill at a meeting in Downing Street in December 1951 was typical. Churchill: “You may be assured, Great Britain will always stand by Europe’s side.” Adenauer: “Prime Minister, you disappoint me somewhat. England is a part of Europe.”

That was standard German thinking. The feeling of closeness to our British “cousins” was much too ingrained in the German psyche, and so was the awareness of the British input in European history to allow for anything other than that the island nation belonged in Europe. Without Great Britain, Europe’s future could not be conceived. As early as December 1946 Adenauer confided in a letter to a friend that Britain’s institutional stability and its liberal tradition “which stand in clear contrast to Continental Europe” were indispensable for the unification of Europe.

“The English can only maintain their global position as leaders of an economically united and politically balanced Western Europe”
Konrad Adenauer

In a letter of the same year he framed the issue very much in the way it stares us in the face in connection with the Brexit conundrum: “The English can only maintain their global position as leaders of an economically united and politically balanced Western Europe”. Well, to replace “leader“ with “participant” would already go a long way to satisfy our hopes today.
Yet the German Chancellor had his doubts whether he could convince the islanders of their European vocation. At a meeting of his Christian Democratic Union party executive early in 1950 – London had reacted cooly to the Schuman Plan, the nucleus of the soon-to-emerge concept of a unified Europe – Adenauer lamented: “Britain is obstructing all efforts for European integration. She regards herself more as a neighbour of Europe than as a European nation.” Which in his eyes the meeting with Churchill in December 1951 seemed to confirm.

That complaint rings familiar through decades: the British who always want special exemptions for themselves in Europe, who put on the brakes on future progress, etc. How long do we have to suffer these shenanigans? At least we now know with David Cameron and his negotiating list for a reformed EU what it is he wants: definitely no participation of Britain in an “ever close union”. To him, as to most Britons, the continent beckons as a large trading area, no more. To them it is certainly not an act of faith of supranational integration.

Come to think about, it’s not all that difficult to understand why Britain is more cooly detached from the continent than, say, Germany, abutted as she is by the land mass of nine neighbours. A look at the geography could easily open our eyes: An island is an opt-out to the continent. Therein lies the simpler truth of Britain’s relationship with Europe. You can’t point this out often enough to those who regularly conjure up the ghost of “perfidious Albion”. It is not perfidious, it is just different. Period. And it will always insist on opt-outs as its nature is wired differently from that of continental Europeans.

Great Britain hails from a maritime history, its national DNA. On land there obtains a different regime from that on the high seas, where flexible reactions are called for towards ever-changing conditions of wind and weather. “Something must be left to chance, nothing is sure in a sea fight,” Lord Nelson instructed the captains of his fleet on the eve of the battle of Trafalgar, October 1805. There you have it: The opt-out as a reminder to his band of brothers to be ready for independent decision-making and flexible reaction should the situation call for it. There is no room for irreversibility, that European bugbear. Trafalgar developed along different battle lines from Austerlitz.

Whatever the British learnt in their history was gleaned from the sea and on the sea: liberalism, independence, occasionally systematic muddle, the readiness to take risks. As well as the aversion to subjugate the future to pro-ordained decisions set in concrete, decision from whom there is no going back, which preclude all chances of learning from trial and error. It was George Orwell who succinctly summarised these character traits in his England Your England (1941): “The English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophical or systematic ‘world view’.”

Resisting the concept of “the state”, the étatisme in French thinking, for example, is England’s trump card – and the reason why to Germany, Britain is indispensable within the European concert. She is the co-guarantor for making sure that the EU does not succumb to its inability to reform. Let me remind you of what Angela Merkel, in her speech before both Houses of Parliament on February 27 2014, had to say: “Germany and Great Britain both aim for a strong, competitive European Union. Together and determined we can make our values and interests relevant to the modern world. To reach this aim we need a strong United Kingdom with a strong voice within the European Union. That way we achieve the necessary changes – for the good of all.”

Being prepared for change is a maritime principle, the key to the British sense of being. That Mrs Merkel embraced it in London was more than a polite bow before her hosts. It is interesting to note, by the way, that Nelson, too, thought his resistance to Napoleon to have been to the good of all Europe. On the eve of Trafalgar he records in his diary the following prayer: “May the Great God whom I worship Grant to my Country and for the benefit of Europe in General a Great and Glorious Victory.”

Sixty years before Angela Merkel, Konrad Adenauer was given to more drastic language when expressing his desire to have Britain involved in the European architecture. It was in 1953 when discussions about the planned “European Defence Community” (EDC) were rife and the German Chancellor placed high hopes on Great Britain’s participation. Again before his party‘s federal executive in March 1953 he made his ideas plainer than would be advisable for politicians in the modern era of all-present social media: “I should very much welcome Britain having a certain influence in the future EDC so that we are not alone with the more or less hysterical French.”

"A British EU-exodus would be a catastrophem robbing Germany of a brother in arms for free trade and reforms"

Such is the pedigree of Germans’ belief in Britain as a European partner. When Adenauer eventually turned to Paris, with the Treaty of Friendship with France signed in January 1963, he encountered strong dissent in the German parliament, where members insisted on adding a preamble to the Treaty. On April 6 that year Fritz Erler, leader of the opposition, challenged the government with a sarcastic question in the Bundestag: did one have to pay for the friendship with France “with the alienation of Great Britain”?

Adenauer was upset, de Gaulle deeply wounded. Treaties, he enjoined, are like the fragrance of young girls – they quickly evaporate.

The preamble approved on May 16 1963 contained a passage stating that the unification of Europe had to be continued “incorporating Great Britain and other states willing to accede”. That was clear enough. The German political elite was not prepared to sacrifice its appreciation of Great Britain on the altar of reconciliation with France, however coveted, or to exclude the United Kingdom from further consideration of the future of Europe.

That’s exactly where the Germans stand even now, after all the wrangling with the British wish list for negotiating new terms of London’s EU membership. Looked at from Germany, a British EU-exodus would be a catastrophe robbing us of a brother in arms for free trade and reforms; a valuable co-combatant, too, for the survival of liberalism. Quite apart from the fact that “having lost Britain on her watch” would be a big blot on Ms Merkel’s record in history. No way are we non-committal about Brexit. Far from it. We will bring a lot of flexibility to the negotiating table to avoid such an outcome. And so, one hopes, will the British themselves.

Thomas Kielinger OBE (Hon.) is an author and correspondent for the German daily Die Welt. He has recently published a biography of Winston Churchill

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12055450/Britain-dont-leave-us-We-Germans-need-you-in-the-EU-and-well-bend-over-backwards-to-keep-you.html