Second paragraph of third chapter:
As early as 1940 there had been proposals in Britain for sharing sovereignty with another European country, namely France. Jean Monnet was yet again working to coordinate the economic efforts of the two allies, and convinced the British government to seek political union with his native country. On 16 June de Gaulle transmitted the offer to Paul Reynaud’s French government in Bordeaux, but Reynaud lost power to Marshal Pétain on the same day. Pétain, who favoured an armistice with the Germans, asked why France would wish to ‘fuse with a corpse’.² And so it is perhaps not so surprising that Winston Churchill emerged after the war as one of the leading champions of a united Europe. Out of power since July 1945, in September of the following year he gave a speech in Zurich in which he called for the construction of ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. ‘The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe … In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together.’ (At this stage, it must be said, the French doubted the wisdom of giving the Germans such a role.) Over the next two years Churchill tirelessly advocated for a united Europe, which he regarded as being fully compatible with Britain’s imperial commitments. Indeed, Britain’s claim to continuing great-power status lay precisely in the fact that the country, uniquely, lay at the centre of ‘three interlinked circles’: the first and most important was the British Commonwealth and Empire, the second was the English-speaking world, and the third was a united Europe.³
² Ibid. [Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016)], p. 18.
³ https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-160/articles-wsc-s-three-majestic-circles/.
I know Kevin O’Rourke from many years ago when the two of us were invited on a residential seminar in Tuscany by a mutual friend, and I also vaguely knew his father, a senior Irish ambassador, but we have not met in 35 years. Since then he has become a prominent economic historian, currently teaching in Abu Dhabi, but in Oxford at the time this book was being written, during the death throes of Brexit in the summer of 2019.
Because of its timing, the book misses the excitement of the end of the chase – the hasty just-before-Christmas deal of 2019, followed by the Johnson and then Truss governments’ attempts to wriggle out of their own commitments, ending, at least for now, with Sunak’s deal (his only significant achievement in two years at the top).
But it makes up for that with a significant amount of detail about how the EU was set up in the first place, and the UK’s role outside and inside the process, a story which is centred on France and its relationship with Germany and to a lesser extent the UK, and therefore tends to be neglected by British commentators. He also goes in detail into the economic history of Ireland and why EU membership became fundamental to the Irish state. I think that both of these elements are possibly educational for readers who consumed only the mainstream (ie non-Irish) Anglophone media during the process while it was happening.
He doesn’t waste much time on David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU, but looks in some detail at the referendum result (which he feels was overdetermined; I tend to agree), and then does his best to explain Theresa May’s negotiation process. I still find it difficult to believe how pathetic the UK’s approach was in those early stages; May was ill-served by her treacherous and stupid ministers, Johnson and Davis, but the failure to come up with a detailed plan for the UK was her fault and her responsibility.
Anyway, the book itself as an important antidote to the UK perspective that Brexit was a purely British political story, in particular presenting the Irish view in its European context. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my bookshelves. Next on that pile is All American Boys, by Walter Cunningham.
