Losing the narrative: the United Kingdom and the European Union as imagined communities
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | William Wallace |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117817707396 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817707396
International Relations
2017, Vol. 31(2) 192 –209
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817707396
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Losing the narrative: the
United Kingdom and the
European Union as imagined
communities
William Wallace
London School of Economics
Abstract
The United Kingdom’s awkward relationship with the countries on the European continent
reflects the ambiguity of its national identity, wavering between European engagement and the
English-speaking peoples, as much as differences over economic interests. The founding narrative
of West European integration, after the Second World War, has also weakened with generational
change, the end of the Cold War and eastern enlargement. Developing persuasive new narratives
both for the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) are necessary but difficult tasks for
continuing cooperation.
Keywords
Anglosphere, European integration, globalisation, imagined communities, national identity, UK
foreign policy
Foreign policy is in many ways a transactional process, built around the rational calcula-
tion of national interests, and the delicate – though sometimes also violent – manoeu-
vring among multiple actors with different strengths and weaknesses. Domestic politics,
however, set limits to the rational calculations of statesmen and diplomats: national
pride, myths of history and identity, concerns about sovereignty and foreign interference,
sway politicians’ responses and public reactions. International politics are, therefore,
shaped by emotion and imagination as well as by interests and calculation: by claims
about a country’s ‘place in the world’, ‘independence’, ‘sovereignty’, even ‘honour’.
The tension between rational interests and emotional attitudes is fundamental to under-
standing foreign policy and International Relations (IR). Governing ideas and concepts,
Corresponding author:
William Wallace, London School of Economics, London, UK.
Email: wallacew@parliament.uk
707396IRE0010.1177/0047117817707396International RelationsWallace
research-article2017
Article
Wallace 193
dominant narratives of historical development and current friends and enemies shape the
way in which foreign policy actors define their national interests and the success or fail-
ure of their efforts to gain popular consent.
The outcome of the UK Referendum on European Union (EU) membership, in June
2016, reflected this relationship between emotion and interest. Eurosceptic arguments
about the disadvantages of continuing membership touched on the costs of the UK con-
tribution to the EU budget, and the claimed burden of EU regulations from which British
industry suffered, but their strongest arguments focused on the loss of parliamentary
sovereignty, the supremacy of EU law over English common law and the unacceptability
– after British victory in two world wars – of what they perceived to be rule from the
European continent. The Conservative government’s renegotiation objectives, in early
2016, concentrated on economic and financial issues and the partly economic, partly
emotional issue of free movement of people and the scale of net immigration of other EU
countries. Wary of deepening divisions within the Conservative Party about British sov-
ereignty, history and identity, David Cameron did not challenge his domestic audience
on these underlying emotional issues, nor did he seek to create symbolic events with
leaders of other European states to remind British voters of shared elements in their
history.1
In the Coalition Agreement of 2010 between the Conservatives and the Liberal
Democrats, the Conservatives insisted on including a commitment to examine the ‘bal-
ance of competences’ between the United Kingdom and the EU, across a wide range of
sectors – in the expectation that the evidence submitted by interested parties and experts
would provide the basis for the Conservatives’ planned renegotiation with the European
Commission and other member governments. William Hague as foreign secretary
declared at the launch of this exercise that it would be ‘the most extensive analysis of the
impact of UK membership of the EU ever undertaken’.2 Four years later, after several
thousand submissions from companies, think tanks, business organisations, the Faculty
of Advocates, the Law Society and many others, supplemented by seminars and stake-
holder meetings in London and other major cities, the overwhelming response in almost
all sectors was that the current balance of competences suited the United Kingdom fairly
well. Thirty-two reports were published, at 6-monthly intervals from 2012 to 2014, on
fields that ranged from civil justice to transport regulation and from police cooperation
to environmental policy.3
The response of No. 10 to each group of papers published, after careful review – and
sometimes hard negotiations – by Liberal Democrat and Conservative ministers, was to
seek to bury them by arranging for their release the day after Parliament rose for the sum-
mer, or for Christmas. The accumulated evidence could have been used by Conservative
pragmatists to face down their Eurosceptic colleagues; but a prime minister who had
described Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe as ‘transactional’ rather than
deeply rooted nevertheless hesitated to use evidence to counter deep Eurosceptic convic-
tion. He had, after all, no alternative narrative of Britain’s place in the world to theirs;
indeed, he largely shared their narrative. He had publicly declared on more than one
occasion that his favourite children’s book was Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story,4
written at the height of Britain’s imperial self-confidence at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century. Furthermore, with so many within his own party and in the right-wing media
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