Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

British imperial memories and Europe 107
with the European Union is haunted by the hankering for a lost empire.
Euroscepticism has built been on the scepticism of a nation unwilling to
own up to the present.’ 16
In the Labour Party, many who opposed supranational integration also
emphasised the inheritance of Britain’s traditional internationalism and
its global reach. This was best transmitted through the post-imperial
Commonwealth, and one of the most articulate proponents of this view
was Douglas Jay, who wrote and debated extensively against British membership
of the European Communities during the 1960s. He went on to
be a leading campaigner for the ‘No’ vote in the 1975 referendum, having
suggested as early as 1968 that a referendum might be held on Britain’s
membership. ‘Britain’s whole future’, he wrote in 1968, in a Penguin
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depends on our preserving and strengthening our world links and our close relations,
political and economic, with very many countries in all continents and of
various political allegiances, colours and creeds. Neither economically, politically,
culturally nor sentimentally are we a merely European power – if indeed ‘Europe’
can be said to exist as anything more than a stretch of land from the Urals to the
Atlantic coast. The British public just does not feel itself more closely allied to
Poles or Spaniards than to the people of Australia or New Zealand.
Membership of the EC might look superficially like a step to a more
united Europe and a move towards world organisation and a wider international
outlook for Britain, but, actually, ‘it would reduce our influence’.
The political kinship of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was
something of the greatest value and overwhelmingly worth preserving,
and Britain’s influence in the world would be far greater if it could act
as a bridge between the old and new Commonwealth in the interest of
democratic institutions and racial harmony, rather than simply pursuing
the aim of ‘the merging of independent countries in one continent’. Indeed,
‘if the federalists had their way, the UK would cease, I suppose to
be a member of the UN; while Ghana, Nigeria, Romania and Formosa
[Taiwan] would still belong.’ 17
alliance, and ‘could become the foundation for a full unity of the democratized world’,
281. The present Echelon signals intelligence network of more than 120 satellites is based
on cooperation between the five larger English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon powers. This has
caused considerable hostility from EU partners who are excluded: European Parliament
Civil Liberties Committee, September 1998; Le Monde, 23 February 2000. See also Max
Beloff, Britain and the European Union: Dialogue of the Deaf (London: Macmillan, 1996).
16 Philip Stevens, Financial Times, 25 April 1998. Euroscepticism should here be interpreted
as negative opinions about both the viability, and the desirability, of the continental
European supranational integrative enterprise, either with or without the participation
of the United Kingdom itself.
17 Douglas Jay, After the Common Market: A Better Alternative for Britain (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 13, 102, 125.