British Intellectuals and the European Idea After the Suez Crisis (1956): Narrating Europe Between History and Politics

Journal of British Identities 1 (September 2017), pp. 1-18 ISSN: 2515-7000 British Intellectuals and the European Idea after the Suez Crisis (1956): Narrating Europe between History and Politics Marzia Maccaferri Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project has been a vast subject of scholarly interest, but in the British context this attention has often been restricted to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK’s reluctant approach to the process of European unification. According to the recent historiography, intellectuals and intellectual public discourse have been an essential condition for forging, shaping and (re)creating the idea of ‘politics’ and ‘identity’ in Britain during the post-WWII phase. After the Suez crisis and the first referendum about European membership (1975), the international roles of Britain changed dramatically (from world-imperial power and main actor in the Concert of Europe to middle-ranking European state), while the international scene as well as the European economic miracle forced intellectuals to rethink themes and categories by which public discourse perceived and interpreted Europe – perceived here as a historical as well as a political subject. This article draws attention to the debate on Europe in Britain from 1957 to the 1970s, fostered by intellectuals – understood as cultural actors engaged in public and/or political debates developed in journals or newspapers. It considers, on the one hand, how intellectuals narrated Europe as an autonomous cultural subject; on the other, it deals primarily with the response to the profound transition taking place in the intellectual environment. The article illustrates how British intellectuals pursued a new international role for Britain as a champion of freedom and as an example of democracy. In this discourse British identity and the idea of the European political project are central, and the contradictory debate about the role of Britain in Europe is a striking example of how national and European identities can interact and, eventually, collapse. Key-words: British intellectuals; European Community debate; 1975 referendum. Introduction Perhaps the most common assumption about any consideration of ‘British intellectuals and Europe’, to paraphrase Stefan Collini, is that it will be very 1 British Intellectuals and the European Idea short.1 This very idea is well encapsulated in the caustic remarks offered by the Nobel Prize-winning English playwright Harold Pinter on the subject. When asked to comment on British membership of the European Community during the debate following Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s first attempt to join in 1961, Pinter affirmed: ‘I have no interest in the matter and do not care what happens.’2 The non-existence of (proper) British intellectuals, on the one hand, and the Euro-scepticism, if not anti-Europeanism, on the other, are certainly two of the most mistreated and at the same time tenacious themes of British history and post-WWII public debate (not to mention the recent political agenda). On the first theme of the ‘question of British intellectuals,’ although John Naughton still wrote in 2011 in The Observer that ‘As far as the Brits are concerned intellectuals begin at Calais and gravitate to Paris,’3 the historian Collini, however, has masterfully challenged this cliché. According to him, the ‘absence thesis’ – i.e. the inexistence of a ‘proper British intellectual’ – is the expression of the ideological belief in British ‘exceptionalism’: an obstinate Whig interpretation of history, which sees the course of British history as being exceptionally smooth – with its adaptable aristocracy, (relatively) tolerant Church, apolitical military and reformist bourgeoisie, constitutional monarchy willing to accept institutional transformations, a precocious party system, and a political and electoral system able to accept and incorporate new classes. 4 Therefore, the peculiarities of English society and culture, and their historical developments have effectively blocked the emergence of classical (meaning ‘continental’) intellectuals and prevented the creation of an oppositional intelligentsia. A recent application of this argument can be observed in the last book of Robert Skidelsky, though the most noteworthy example is John Carey’s study on literary intelligentsia.5 As for the second point, the European ‘affair’ and political ambitions, the scholarship hitherto produced is possibly more overwhelmed by clashing interpretations than the literature on intellectuals. In some respects, it could be similarly argued that the discourse on Europe has been portrayed as a form of trial in absentia. Vernon Bogdanor confirmed this: ‘Popular enthusiasm on European matters has been noticeable in Britain only by its absence;’6 and also historical accounts as Skidelsky’s book or Paul Addison’s No Turning Back lack extensive analysis on the relationship between Britain and Europe.7 What in fact has generated and reinforced in the last decades the supposed anti-European British identity has not been a lack of interest in Europe as a subject, but the 2 Journal of British Identities relative waning of an impassioned debate on ‘the European issue’. Starting from the 1990s, according to David Marquand, Europe as an idea and especially as a political project has been taken off the agenda, establishing a sort of moratorium, which the leaderships of main political parties have been trying to impose on public discourse. Certainly, this situation changed dramatically during the months of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. However, apart from the ‘transient infatuation’ with Europe of the first Blair government, divisions over European questions had become so bitter in the late 1980s and 1990s, leading to a sort of Westminster version of Pax Europaea whose principal condition was ‘not to talk about Europe.’8 There is no doubting the perceptions of Britain’s past and the national historical narrative – whether Liberal-positivist or conservative-traditional reconstructions or whether Marxist or post-colonial historiography – have both played a major role in the tormented relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe. The belief that Britain (meaning, more often, England) was the quintessentially liberal and democratic nation surrounded by, if not inferior, at least very different countries and cultures, first shaped by the Reformation, the industrial revolution and later framed by the Victorian values, was then extensively reinforced by the experiences of WWII.9 Nonetheless, when we link the intellectual discourse with the idea of Europe in the post-WWII years, and even before, the English ‘isolationism’ and its sense of ‘uniqueness’ should not be exaggerated. First, England (not to say Scotland) was very much part of European movements, developments, and networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 10 Ideas and projects aiming at different form of federations, supra-nationalism or European unity date back to nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and British politicians and intellectuals have had their part in it, either as a federalist European project or, unsurprisingly, as a way to preserve Britain’s influence in a post-imperial world.11 Although Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project had been a vast subject of scholarly interest, in the English context however this attention has often been limited to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK reluctant approach to the process of European unification.12 And so the dominance of positive or empirical social sciences, mainly functionalist sociology, has had hardly any distorting effects in the narration of the European question.13 Europeanization – a concept adopted by anthropology and critical studies, and recently introduced in historical research14 – has been described as 3 British Intellectuals and the European Idea an asymmetrical and pluriverse process, rather than a unidirectional and teleological progression. It is a process that denotes a complex, multidirectional degree of entanglement, exchange and cooperation, which also comprises counter-tendencies and that cannot be adequately analysed without taking the ‘non-European’ dimension or ‘non-pro Europeanism’ into account. Building upon the concept of ‘imagined community,’15 the intellectual narration of and response to the political and cultural idea of Europe, thus, appears as a ‘category of practice,’ which has been projected and performed, experienced and exported, labelled and legitimized in a range of contexts. In this sense the British intellectual debate on ‘the European issue,’ once a concrete and real prospect of European unity of some form was on the political agenda is entirely part of the process of Europeanization as well as part of the re-shaping of British identity occurred in the post-WWII era. In the following pages I will offer a concise overview of British intellectual discourse from the time when the European issue acquired political concreteness (at the end of the Suez crisis) to the 1970s, the time when the turning point of the first referendum took place and, therefore, when the idea of Europe intertwined with the notion of national identity experienced a dramatic shifting in meaning and values.16 Regarding periodization the terminus a quo, 1957, is certainly self-explanatory: on the one hand, from the perspective of the European historical reconstruction 1957 coincides with the Treaty of Rome and, on the other,

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