The Brexit referendum campaign of 2016 was a dialogue of the deaf, fought by the rival campaigns on different agendas. For remainers, the issue was the economy. For leavers, it was sovereignty, exemplified by the electric issue of immigration. Idealism about Europe was largely absent from the remainers’ agenda, whereas idealism about Britishness was strong among leavers. We should not have been surprised. Perhaps the most important question that a society can ask about itself is ‘Who are we?’ The lesson of the Scottish independence referendum two years earlier had been that even the strongest economic arguments carry relatively little weight with the public. They are far more interested in questions of identity and autonomy.

Brexit was an act of gross economic vandalism. Many leavers understood that at the time. Most were indifferent. When push came to shove, an economic hit seemed, to those who thought about it at all, to be a price worth paying for autonomy. ‘Take Back Control’ proved to be a winning formula. Ten years on, we are in a better position to decide how much control we have really gained, and how much it has been worth to us. Control and autonomy are legal and constitutional concepts, but their value depends on political realities. In a world of huge nations like the United States and China, it is in the interest of smaller nations to join together in powerful multinational blocs like the European Union (EU). Its members have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU.

Five Centuries of European Engagement

The arguments about Britain’s relationship with Europe need to be considered in the light of our long-standing international priorities and current geopolitical position. These show a remarkable consistency. Britain is a European country, sharing the political, economic and intellectual culture of Europe in spite of important institutional differences. Engagement with Europe has been a strategic necessity for Britain for centuries. Ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it has been a consistent theme of British foreign policy to maintain a balance of power on the European continent and to resist the domination of the continent by any single power. This has been driven by a desire to influence the political priorities of European nations and to shape their policies in Britain’s own interest, something that is difficult to do if the continent is dominated by a single hegemonic power. Britain’s single-minded pursuit of this objective has involved the patient cultivation of European allies. Queen Elizabeth I landed armies in France and the Netherlands to contain the hegemony of Spain. In the eighteenth century, when France was the great European hegemon, British governments intervened to resist it with the support of powerful European allies. Britain was the only European power to challenge revolutionary and Napoleonic France throughout the period from 1794 to 1815, at a time when France occupied much of Europe. Britain’s long stand-off with nineteenth-century Russia, at a time when Russia occupied Poland and had ambitions in the Balkans, European Turkey and Central Asia, was guided by the same instincts. The rapid expansion of a newly united Germany in the final decades of the nineteenth century presented Britain with a new challenge. In a famous memorandum of 1907, the Foreign Office mandarin Sir Eyre Crowe described Britain’s pursuit of a balance of power in Europe as ‘almost a law of nature’. His point was that now that the dominant European power was Germany, Britain must follow its traditional policy and contain it. In two world wars, Britain intervened to fight the Kaiser’s Germany and then Hitler’s.

For centuries, the bulwark of Britain was not the Channel, but the Rhine or the Oder. The concern was always that, faced with a dominant European power across the Channel, Britain would lose control over its own destiny. The policy was not simply strategic, but also cultural and economic. It was cultural because the long conflicts with, successively, Napoleonic France, Tsarist Russia and Imperial and Nazi Germany were seen as ways of confronting powerful despotisms and preventing the extinction of a liberal world order. It was economic because a Europe dominated by a single power would be in a position to disrupt British trade and finance as Napoleon’s continental system had sought to do. Historically, these instincts have served Britain well.

There has always been a contrary strand of British strategic thinking which rejected this approach. It can loosely be called Atlanticism, although the expression is geographically inaccurate, for it was based on a far wider view of Britain’s world than just the Atlantic. It stood for a policy of disengagement from the problems of the European continent and concentration on the wide oceans. It presented empire and the navy as alternatives to Europe and the army. It has generally been associated with prominent figures in the Tory party. In his influential tract The Patriot King (1738), the Tory philosopher Bolingbroke, who had been Queen Anne’s chief minister, articulated this view. He urged Britain to avoid getting involved in continental affairs. ‘The water is more properly our element,’ he wrote, ‘and in it we find our greatest security.’ William Pitt the Elder, although not a Tory, had once taken the same view. The Tory romantic Benjamin Disraeli said something very similar in 1866, and Churchill, a liberal at the time but a romantic Tory at heart, said it again in 1901. It was an unwise policy even then, and all three statesmen discarded it when they achieved power. Britain has rarely adopted a policy of ‘splendid isolation’, and when it has done, for example in the 1770s and 1780s or at the end of the nineteenth century, it has paid a high diplomatic and military price and has soon reversed course. European crises invariably become English ones. Reality dawns on statesmen when they find themselves having to grapple with the problems of international relations. Political disengagement from Europe has often been a slogan, but rarely a viable policy.

Atlanticism received a boost from the experience of the two world wars of the twentieth century, which still have a dominant place in Britain’s conception of itself. Even before the United States joined the First World War, it contributed substantially to the funding of the British war effort and was a major supplier of munitions. Its contribution to Britain’s survival and eventual victory in the Second World War was decisive. The British Empire, and especially India and the old dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, made a critical contribution in both wars. The world wars boosted a certain idea of British exceptionalism. Winston Churchill, who believed in the political unification of Europe but without Britain, encapsulated the idea in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in four volumes between 1956 and 1958. This strongly romanticised account presented Britain’s relations with the ‘old’ empire and the United States as a natural brotherhood distinct from its relations with continental Europe. It stood for the notion, common across the political spectrum in the 1950s, that Britain might act as the godfather of European union, but its own destinies were separate, maritime and global. Yet, if Atlanticism was ever a serious policy option, it was only so at a time when Britain could deal with the United States, if not as an equal, then at least as a comparable power. That depended on Britain’s status as a world power, the ruler of a global empire and a dominant economic force on the trade routes of the world. In the 1950s, when the European Economic Community was born, these conditions were ceasing to apply.

Britain and the Creation of a New Europe

The creation of the European Economic Community and its subsequent transformation into the EU revived all the old geopolitical dilemmas of Britain, but presented them in a new light. British policy after the Second World War was dominated by an obsessive but ambivalent attitude to Germany. At the Anglo-American conference in Quebec in September 1944, the two countries agreed upon a policy of deindustrialising Germany so as to convert it into an economy that would be ‘principally agricultural and pastoral’. The allied occupation authorities drastically limited Germany’s mining and steelmaking capacity, dismantled its industrial plant, suppressed its industrial patents and destroyed the financial relationships between German banks which had been a major factor in Germany’s industrial strength. Britain encouraged the post-war reconstruction of France so as to serve as its bulwark against a reborn Germany. This policy of industrial containment was progressively abandoned from 1947, as the USSR, which was in the process of converting the states of Eastern and Central Europe into satellites, emerged as the principal threat to European peace. In the 1950s, however, the old fear of Germany returned as a result of the spectacular speed of German economic reconstruction. In the course of the decade, West German industrial production increased by a factor of two and a half. Measured by gross domestic product (GDP) per head, West Germany overtook Britain.

The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951. The Messina Conference of 1955 decided in principle to create a Common Market of the six states of the West European continent. The Treaty of Rome gave effect to that decision in 1957. Britain and France both feared a revival of German power, but took precisely opposed views about the implications of these decisions. France regarded European integration as a means of binding an economically powerful Germany into a European bloc which they were confident that they could dominate. France also believed that only an integrated European bloc would be able to stand up to the United States. Britain, on the other hand, accepted the dominant role of the United States in the post-war world order, but believed that the objectives of the six founding members of the Common Market necessarily implied an eventual move to a European federal state dominated by Germany. The prospect rang all the alarm bells that had terrified British statesmen for 500 years. In a memorandum of February 1956, Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that the Messina proposals ‘will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It is really giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.’

Although the prospect of a dominant Germany was a particularly sensitive point, the problem would have been the same whether Germany dominated the new group or not. A supranational state comprising the whole of Western Europe would inevitably marginalise Britain. The only solution would be to join it, a possibility which was rejected out of hand. It was rejected partly because Britain was unwilling to subsume its own sovereignty in a new proto-state and partly because of its preferential trading arrangements with the Commonwealth and the British Empire. Instead, the government tried to persuade Germany and France to abandon their plans and urged the United States to withdraw its support for them. It failed in all three cases. In 1956, Harold Macmillan regarded European integration as a recipe for the division of the world into three spheres of influence, American, Soviet and European. This was a profoundly unwelcome development for Britain, because British attachment to sovereignty would inevitably result in Britain’s exclusion, with dire results for its international influence. Two years later Macmillan, now Prime Minister, told De Gaulle that he was convinced that the Common Market would turn into the modern equivalent of Napoleon’s continental system, an economic and political weapon targeted against Britain.

Old Dilemmas Revisited

These debates foreshadowed British arguments for and against Europe for the next sixty years. When Britain eventually did join the Common Market at the third attempt in 1973, there was none of the idealism which had motivated the continental founders of the European Economic Community (EEC). It was seen by the politicians as damage limitation and by the public as a mere trading arrangement. There were many factors involved in the decision to join, including the lacklustre performance of the British economy in the 1950s and the growing dynamism of the European market. But the main geopolitical factor, especially in the eyes of Macmillan, was the desire to influence the development of Europe in Britain’s interest and to maintain Britain’s historic role in European affairs. As a result, fears about the loss of sovereignty on the one hand and exclusion from a dominant European bloc on the other continued to guide British policy under both Conservative and Labour governments.

For a time the dilemma was evaded. In the referendum on EU membership held in 1975, the case made for membership was entirely about trade, and not about political integration. The political leaders who made the case for EU membership fell into two groups. There were those who believed that the European aspiration to ever closer union was just rhetoric, and that it would never happen. This group has proved to be mistaken. And there were those like Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who negotiated British entry, who understood the direction in which the EU was bound to move, but believed that it would happen gradually, and that over the years a new European identity would be created which the British would accept. This group has proved to be over-optimistic.

In the late 1980s, all the old ghosts came back to haunt the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. There was, first of all, the advent of Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission. Delors was a French socialist who presided over a rapid expansion of the competences of the EU. Under his influence, it moved into areas of social policy in ways which were extremely unwelcome to the Conservative governments of these years. Then came German reunification, which revived the old fears of German domination of Europe. France and Britain divided along the same lines as they had done at the foundation of the EEC. Mrs Thatcher was intensely suspicious and publicly fearful. President François Mitterand of France, after some initial hesitation, stuck to the traditional French policy of trying to neuter Germany by binding it into European political structures traditionally dominated by France. Finally, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 provided for a single European currency. Monetary union was in effect a German concession to France’s integrationist agenda in return for French support for German unification. In Britain, the old geopolitical dilemmas now had to be confronted.

The Labour government which took office in 1997 set out to mend fences with Europe after the years of abrasive relations under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, articulated the classic doctrine of British foreign policy. Citing four centuries of history he declared that Britain’s destiny had always been to ‘help shape Europe’. ‘The fact is’, he said, ‘that Europe is today the only route through which Britain can exercise power and influence.’ Enlargement of the EU was the one way in which Britain’s age-old pursuit of a balance of power could be continued. The Labour government continued the policy of its Conservative predecessors of supporting the expansion of the EU to the east, in the hope that this would create informal alliances with aspirant countries in Central and Eastern Europe and dilute French and German influence. The policy of enlargement was successful in one sense. The EU grew to twenty-eight members by 2007, bringing the whole of the west and centre of the European continent into its orbit with the exception of Switzerland and Norway (which accepted EU laws by treaty but declined full membership), and the Balkan states (all of which have current applications to join and are adopting policies converging with those of the EU). Yet, in another sense, the policy of expansion failed. The new members turned out not to have the diluting effect that Britain had anticipated. They quickly signed up to the integrationist agenda of the European Commission, except in the case of Hungary and, briefly, Poland. The solidarity of the enlarged community was spectacularly demonstrated by Britain’s inability to fragment the bloc when it came to negotiating the terms of its exit after 2016.

Britain’s dilemmas were encapsulated in the argument within the Labour government about the euro. John Major’s government had negotiated an opt-out from the single currency, but that resolved only part of the problem. The Eurozone would inevitably become a centre of European economic decision-making in which Britain, as a non-euro country, would have little influence. Tony Blair wanted to join the euro for political rather than economic reasons. He believed that it would increase British influence in Europe and that it would help to create a European identity in Britain. As a political judgement, that was plainly right. It also reflected the long-standing traditions of British foreign policy. Economically, however, monetary union made little sense. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, supported by senior Treasury officials, believed that the issue should turn on Britain’s domestic economic interest and not on her classic pursuit of political influence in Europe. He considered that the UK should not adopt the euro unless certain exacting economic tests of economic convergence were satisfied. As an economic judgement, that was right too, and it was the view which prevailed. It was a seminal moment.

‘Ever Closer Union’

Britain’s traditional policy had been to maximise its influence in Europe in order to protect its own economic and strategic interests. By the end of the twentieth century, the emergence of the EU as the dominant continental bloc meant that this could only be done from the inside. Viewed in this light, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU in 2020 marked the abandonment of five centuries of intelligent British statesmanship. Without Britain, the EU’s consolidation into a single political bloc, which Britain had always taken the lead in resisting, was likely to accelerate. At the same time, Brexit marginalised Britain, ensuring that it would have no voice and very little influence over the developing economic superpower. There is also a more general sense in which Britain’s departure from the EU was a misfortune not just for Britain, but also for Europe. It detached Britain from one of the most imaginative and fertile projects in the continent’s history. The institutions of the EU are unappealing: remote, undemocratic, bureaucratic and foreign. But the EU has transformed the continent’s economic fortunes. It has brought to states on its geographical periphery, such as Ireland, Poland and Slovenia, a large measure of convergence with the historically more prosperous countries of Western Europe. It has eased the emergence of Eastern Europe from dependence on the controlling hand of Russia, and helped to restore and sustain liberal democracy in the countries which disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in 1945. It has contributed to the maintenance of the longest period of peace in Europe’s history. British Cassandras have been consistently wrong in their forecasts, tinged with hope, that the EU would collapse under its own weight. They were wrong when they dismissed the project as utopian at its foundation in the 1950s. They were wrong when they said that it would be destroyed by the euro crisis after 2009. They have always underrated the political will to sustain it.

Inevitably, the consolidation of continental Europe has marginalised Britain and reduced its ability to control its own destiny. Announcing the terms of departure agreed with the EU in December 2020, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that at 11pm on 31 December Britain would, among other things, ‘take back control of our trade policy’, ‘take back control of our waters, with this treaty affirming British sovereignty over our vast marine wealth’ and ‘take back control of our laws’. These sentiments exhibit a rather primitive attitude to national sovereignty and the ways in which it may be used for national advantage. Entering into a multilateral treaty such as the treaties constituting the EU was not a surrender of national sovereignty. It was an exercise of national sovereignty, involving a partial surrender of autonomy, and therefore of control, in order to obtain advantages which the participants could not have achieved on their own: greater geopolitical weight and friction-free access to a market ten times the size of their domestic market.

Take, by way of illustration, the emotive subject of fisheries, which is presumably what Boris Johnson had in mind when he spoke of ‘our vast marine wealth’. In theory, Britain could restrict all fishing in British waters to British vessels. It now has the legal right to do that. But practical realities are against it. About 40 per cent of fish caught by British vessels are landed in the EU, and well over half of fish landed in Britain are exported, mostly to the EU. Moreover, most fish species migrate between British and EU waters. Collaborative arrangements with the EU are therefore required in order to manage fish stocks in the interest of both sides. Fisheries are an interesting example. Because of the high proportion of European fishing stocks located in British waters, it is one of the few issues on which Britain and the EU have comparable bargaining power. Yet this has proved to be of very little practical value.

Looking more broadly at Britain’s relations with Europe, the economic balance is even less favourable. The EU is Britain’s biggest as well as its closest trading partner. It takes about 40 per cent of British exports, whereas Britain takes only about 10 per cent of EU exports, substantially less than the United States or China. As became clear during the Brexit negotiations, Britain depends much more on the EU than the other way round. The political weight of the EU, the size of its market and the asymmetric nature of Britain’s relationship with it means that Britain is bound to be dominated by it whether it is a member or not. The EU sets standards and imposes rules with which Britain is economically bound to comply, even though it is legally a free agent. This has not changed since Brexit. The difference is that Britain now has no say in the standards and rules that the EU applies. A legal dependence has simply been replaced by a practical one. Influence has been traded away for nothing.

The idea that Britain can compensate for this by reorienting its trade towards other markets through trade agreements was much canvassed during the referendum campaign, but it has proved to be an illusion. Almost all the trade deals negotiated by Britain since 2020 have simply replicated the deals that Britain previously enjoyed through the EU. The rest (with Australia and India) are with geographically distant countries and are widely thought to have been dearly bought. The reasons are not hard to find. The move towards global free trade, which seemed so promising a generation ago, has stalled and in many areas has been reversed. Most other markets are at least as protectionist as the EU, and Britain has fewer levers to open them up. International bargaining in this field depends on economic weight.

In any trade negotiation, Britain can offer access to about 70 million consumers, whereas the EU can offer access to some 450 million, more than 6 times as many. We would have been better off negotiating as part of a coalition of 520 million consumers. The one exception concerns Donald Trump’s tariff wars of 2025. Britain was able to negotiate more favourable reliefs from the United States than the EU, mainly because of Trump’s political antagonism to the EU. How much of an advantage that is remains to be seen. Donald Trump is an impulsive and wayward force in world politics, who will observe US treaty obligations for as long as it suits him and not a moment longer. He is already (September 2025) threatening fresh tariffs as political weapons against those whose policies he dislikes: against the European Union over its Digital Services Act, against Britain over the Online Safety Act, against Ireland and Norway over measures that they have taken against Israel. In the short run, Britain cannot allow its economic fortunes to depend on a partner as erratic and unreliable as the United States has recently proved to be. In the long run, the United States is likely to revert to its traditional support for European consolidation, with an agenda in which Britain will have limited weight.

Trade flows are not everything. However, the trade-off between autonomy and collaboration raises dilemmas which affect British policy-making across the board. An ever expanding range of issues, both economic and non-economic, call for international cooperation, in which political weight counts. The EU’s member states have more control and more global power collectively than they can ever hope to have individually. Britain’s own relative position is likely to weaken in the next few years, as powerful pressures push the EU towards further European integration and ultimately towards the creation of a federal superstate. This is because Europe’s ambitions will be impossible to achieve without developing common political institutions superseding national governments in major policy areas. Obvious areas for consolidation include capital markets, fiscal policy, debt issuance, defence procurement and aerospace. There will be more technological joint ventures on a European scale, such as the Galileo project for a European GPS system, to which Britain contributed both financially and technically before Brexit but from which it has now been excluded. There will be determined attempts to achieve European autonomy in financial markets, from which Britain’s financial services industries (currently accounting for 12 per cent of its GDP) will be excluded.

A Dangerous World

This brings one to the critical question of the relations of Europe and Britain with the United States and China, the world’s current economic superpowers.

The advent of Donald Trump is likely to add to the pressure for European consolidation. The foreign policy of the United States has passed into the hands of a man who is determined to use the economic and military power of the United States to demand of America’s traditional friends a relationship based on subservience and clientage rather than alliance and shared interests. Europe is unlikely to accept such a relationship, but, outside the EU, Britain may have no alternative. The end of Trump’s presidency in January 2029 can be expected to bring an end to his highly personal and eccentric style of government, but not necessarily to America’s belligerent outlook on the rest of the world. Insularity in foreign relations has deep roots in American politics. Trump himself made no secret of his plans during the presidential election campaign. It must therefore be assumed that a majority of the American electorate welcomed his destructive instincts. The same voters will be around in 2028. Those bidding for Trump’s mantle can be expected to offer them more of the same. The Democratic Party will no doubt offer a less confrontational style of government, but is unlikely to risk its electoral chances by promising to reverse what Trump has done. The ultimate result will be the disintegration of the current web of international alliances centred on the United States, and its replacement by new networks based on other centres of power.

In Asia, the alternative centre of power is likely to be China. Seventy years ago China’s GDP was smaller than Belgium’s. Today it has the second-largest economy in the world, with a combination of relatively cheap labour, plentiful natural resources and impressive industrial and technological skills that enable it to undercut other advanced economies. Under Xi Jinping, it has immeasurably expanded its geopolitical ambitions in the Asia–Pacific region and its economic reach worldwide. Xi Jinping’s China, like Trump’s America, looks for relations with other countries based on political clientage. This can descend, in China’s case as in America’s, into crude bullying. Its Pacific neighbours, such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan, and its African clients, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Angola, Djibouti, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, have learned this lesson to their cost. In Europe, meetings with the Dalai Lama, protests against China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or of democracy activists in Hong Kong, or official dealings with Taiwan are met with trade sanctions.

Integrated political and economic blocs such as the EU have a better prospect of defending themselves against the suffocating embrace of the United States and China. The EU has proved to be too fragmented to stand up effectively to the United States in the tariff wars of 2025 as China has successfully done. This was cruelly exposed when the EU’s programme of countermeasures was undermined by ideological differences among member states, by the economic vulnerability of some of them and by their common dependence on the United States for the defence of Ukraine against Russia. Europe is likely to pay dearly for that weakness. Trump will come back for more. It is difficult to believe that subservience will remain the EU’s policy for long.

In dealing with China, the EU has not faced the same difficulties and has been much more robust. Lithuania, for example, has been able to stand up to persistent Chinese bullying and trade sanctions provoked by its decision to allow Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius. This is because, although Lithuania is a tiny country, it is a member of the EU, which can hit back hard and has done so. The EU is China’s largest trading partner, with a volume of trade in 2024 eight times larger than the UK’s. Britain is not as well placed to resist Chinese pressure over, for example, China’s demand for a super-embassy on Tower Hill, the presence in Britain of Hong Kong dissidents or its universities’ freedom to study China’s human rights record.

The UK has traditionally made the American alliance the cornerstone of its foreign policy and has opted out of the political structure of the European Community. Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. It was critical in the Second World War and in the Cold War. It still is critical to Britain’s security in the fields of nuclear weaponry and intelligence. But it has come at the price of distorting Britain’s view of itself and its place in the world. It has allowed the UK too often to turn away from the reality of being a regional European power some twenty miles off the French coast, with a European history, culture and sensibility. It has also encouraged Britain to forget that the United States is some 3,000 miles away and has a hard-nosed view of its own national interest. The special relationship helped lull Britain into taking a more detached view of moves towards European integration in the 1950s and 1960s than was in its national interest. It also offered the Brexiters an opening to argue in 2016 that Britain’s links with Washington might provide an alternative to its participation in an integrated Europe. By promising a quick bilateral trade deal (which never materialised), they suggested that Britain could abandon the EU with equanimity on the hardest of terms. Britain has now discovered that the American comfort blanket is threadbare. As a result, its subservience to the United States seems likely be more complete and longer lasting than that of the EU.

Another Destiny

It is of course possible that national ambitions among the countries of Europe will prise Europe apart again and prevent the economic and political consolidation that the continent needs. But Britain has too often counted on this happening, while ‘ever closer union’ slowly became a reality. History has borne out Jean Monnet’s prediction that ‘Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.’ Barring a major crisis in Britain’s own affairs, it is unrealistic to expect Britain to rejoin the EU. What is more likely is a succession of ad hoc agreements for cooperation with the EU in defined areas including economic regulation, international trade, migration, defence procurement and foreign policy. Europe will be in a position to dictate its terms. Some of these agreements will involve substantial British contributions to European budgets. Some will involve accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in specific areas. The red lines of the past are likely to fade. In this untidy fashion, Britain will obtain a modest degree of influence over European policy decisions, but it will be substantially less than the control that we might have exercised as members.