The White Cliffs of Dover on the UK coast
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
The memorial to the 1948 Gatow Air Disaster is easily overlooked in a town with more than its fair share of 20th-century ghosts. A simple plaque in Berlin’s Westend district commemorates the mid-air crash that killed 15 people during the early days of the Cold War.
The stone inscription may be unremarkable, 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 pivotal role in shaping post-war European order.
With Brexit Now that it is real, the UK may discover that it is not that easy to shed a European identity so anchored in history and geography. Indeed, that reality – and a political culture eternally haunted by questions about its relationship with its European neighbors – seems destined to tie Britain to the continent for years to come, despite all the government’s efforts to transform the nation. become the world champion of international free trade.
The remains of the Soviet Yak fighter plane that collided with a Vickers plane near Gatow Airport in Berlin on April 5, 1948.
Photographer: Henry Burroughs / AP Photo
After signing a trade deal with the European Union on Christmas Eve, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was time to move on. The UK must “put old, dried out, tired, chewed-over arguments behind” and “keep Brexit going,” he told the House of Commons on Dec. 30, urgently putting the deal into law.
Given Britain’s post-war history, that finality may be wishful thinking. According to Helene von Bismarck, a historian of Britain’s role in 20th century international relations, the pro-Brexit camp has indeed been guilty of downplaying the European dimension of the country’s past.
It provides “a very selective look at British history,” she said. “This whole idea that we’re now free to get back to who we really are – history really doesn’t prove that.”
Britain’s role in post-war Germany gives an idea of the extent of those continental ties. Berlin was a city on the fringes in 1948 when, in April, a Vickers plane from London via Hamburg was involved in a collision with a Soviet Yak fighter on the approach of the British airfield at RAF Gatow, killing all 14 passengers and crew. life came. 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 set the stage for a declaration of the Allied plans to create a West German state, which would anger the enraged Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who ordered Berlin to be cut off from the rest of Germany. . It was British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin who convinced Americans to take the lead in air transport of supplies and breaking through the blockade, historian said. Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book ‘Postwar’. The continent would 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 may have been the main actors of the Cold War, but Britain was at the center of the events that shaped the new European reality – even if it wasn’t until the 1970s that the UK would link its fate to that of the continent by itself join the forerunner of the region’s defining political project, the EU.
In February last year, days after the UK cleared up the 2016 referendum result and officially left the EU, Johnson used a speech on Britain’s future post-Brexit to say that the UK was’ after decades of hibernation was on the rise again and was ready to resume its historic role as the world’s greatest advocate of free trade.
Recent research from the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests that the UK will not be able to take Europe off the air so easily. A majority of UK policy experts from government, think tanks, academia and the private sector view the country’s future role in world politics as a close link to the EU, a study by the think tank found. Leading a “resurgent Commonwealth” of nations was seen as the least realistic outcome, favored by less than 2% of those surveyed.
While the Brexit deal Sealed December 24 outlines the extent of future ties, the study shows there is room for a return to closer cooperation – especially on climate change, EU-UK migration and foreign policy – if London so chooses.
Both parties better not leave it too late. A parallel survey found that Ireland is the only one of the 27 EU Member States to consider relations with the UK a top priority. Overall, the UK was less of a priority for the bloc members than China, Russia, the US – or even the Western Balkans.
“There is a certain amount of fatigue and I think that has an effect on the willingness to participate,” said Jana Puglierin, head of the ECFR office in Berlin and director of the research project. “Those states that have traditionally been close to the UK have moved on.”
That is probably not a luxury for the UK, which has been traumatized since the war by questions about European integration. As early as 1950, when plans were being drawn up for the European Coal and Steel Community, Britain refused to participate due to suspected continental influence in its affairs.
It was also an economic decision: In 1947, the British economy was looking much better than that of its neighbors, aided by trade with the Empire. But by the end of 1951, West German exports sparked a “European economic renaissance,” historian Judt wrote.
Edward Heath, center, at a ‘Keep Britain in Europe’ press conference in London on May 13, 1975.
Source: AP Photos
In 1955, Britain had signed an association agreement and in 1961 it requested to become a full member of what was then the European Economic Community – its application was famously vetoed by French President Charles de Gaulle.
The UK under Edward Heath Conservative government was finally admitted to the EEC on January 1, 1973. But what followed was 47 years of on-off bickering that eventually led to the EU’s departure from the UK on January 31.
Accession was quickly followed by a referendum on membership convened by a Labor government dogged by party struggles over Europe. In the 1980s, conservatives under Margaret Thatcher became increasingly Eurosceptic and Europe played a major role in her demise in 1990. Her successor, John Major, struggled throughout his time at 10 Downing Street for control of his cabinet on this issue.
Prime Minister David Cameron tried to stoke the boil by issuing another referendum on EU membership. The vote to leave cost him his job and that of his successor, Theresa May.
All that controversy “fades into the past,” Johnson said in February. “We have the opportunity, we have the newly recaptured powers, we know where we want to go, and that’s out into the world,” he said. His goal is to forge a “Global Britain”.
Boris Johnson outlines his government’s negotiating position with the European Union after Brexit on February 3.
Photographer: Frank Augstein – WPA Pool / Getty Images
The UK’s dilemma is that it risks being on the wrong side of history by doing it alone at a time of great power rivalry between the US and China that is unlikely to change under a Joe Biden administration.
Turning your back on a half-century of economic and political alliance with Europe seems increasingly risky, especially as Brexit-supporting President Donald Trump leaves the White House and Commonwealth countries of Australia and India are working with Japan to better defend China’s challenge.
Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent in England, says the EU has its own leadership challenges. Now that the UK has the privilege of negotiating trade deals with non-EU partners, the two sides will “increasingly go in different directions,” he told Bloomberg Television.
However, history suggests that those paths are destined to come together again. Even Johnson recognizes that the UK is a European power “by irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and sentiment” but not “by treaty or law”.
In 1948, Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labor government faced a historic decision on the country’s future ties with the continent, choosing to break with previous British thinking in favor of an alliance with Europe.
Again, it was Bevin, his Foreign Secretary, who promised the country to “ work with its continental neighbors in a common defense strategy, a ‘Western European Union’, arguing that Britain’s security needs could no longer be separated from those of the continent, ”wrote Judt.
That union became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in April 1949 by the US, Canada and 10 European countries, and is still the basis of transatlantic relations.
The following year, the foundation stone for St. George’s Church was laid in the British sector of Berlin, replacing an older English chapel destroyed in a wartime bombing raid. The plaque for the victims of Gatow was added later.
For Puglierin at the European Council on Foreign Relations, policy areas of mutual interest hold the promise of future UK-EU cooperation, despite the current UK government’s desire to break free. “Not all is lost,” she said.