Citizenship without belonging in Europe

Analysing Britain’s relationship with the European Union has to begin by considering the question of self-government. That the United Kingdom is holding a referendum about membership (and has held one before) indicates that the decision has a considerable significance for our democracy. In that context the question of self-government (or self-determination as it used to be called) is fundamental.

To put the question crudely, does (continued) membership of the EU imperil our claim to govern ourselves? That question raises another, perhaps even more fundamental, question which is already prominent in our debates about the nature of the United Kingdom and the relationship between the four ‘nations’: when, in the context of the European question, we speak of ‘ourselves’ to whom do we prefer?

To express that in the language of political science, what is the political community, the ‘polis’ as Plato called it, to which we belong? Associated with that question is whether the European Union is in that sense one political community; whether the Union has its own ‘polis’, as the notion of EU citizenship implies.

The point is that citizenship – membership of a ‘polis’ – requires more than legal constructs like elected assemblies, courts and citizen rights: it also requires a shared sense of belonging to a community (‘us’) which enables us to affirm that we are governing ourselves rather than being governed by others (‘foreigners’). For such a shared sense of belonging it is essential that there is a substantial sharing of history, culture and memory.

It is surely the case that in the evolution of ‘self-determination’ in the last 100 years the political geography of the European continent has played such a significant part. Though not in the event followed, it was a, maybe even the, key element of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Principles for constructing a peace settlement at the end of WW1. And it featured again in clause 3 of the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which affirmed the ‘right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’ and ‘the wish to see sovereign rights and self-government (emphasis added) restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’.

Interestingly in both instances a European war drew in states and peoples from well beyond geographical Europe and in both instances ‘Europe’ stretched into Asia and what we now call the Middle East, in particular, Russia/USSR and the Ottoman Empire. The political futures of the peoples of these territories were bound up with the political future of ‘Europe’, including Britain. Even if in an unfortunate phrase in the run-up to WW2 our then Prime Minister, referring to a Balkan state, could speak of ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’, we have certainly shared history and memories with these peoples – and painful ones at that.

Prior to the twentieth century, and especially prior to the division of Europe in the Cold War and the descent of the iron curtain, the peoples of Europe shared a rich and extensive culture – literature, the fine arts and music particularly, heavily influenced by a shared Graeco-Roman heritage. We (sic) have also shared the Christian religion, albeit in different forms – and the challenges of the post-industrial, secular culture at the end of twentieth century. Most significantly, the development of the nation-states of the twentieth century had its origins in the Peace of Westphalia which brought to an end the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

However, and key to our current debates, the impact of these continent-wide cultural and historical movements varied substantially from one part of Europe to another: there were shared movements, but different experiences, North, South, East and West. In the decades immediately following WW2 British ‘exceptionalism’ was greatly influenced by the different experience of that war. The deep scars of the experience of defeat, occupation and the Nazi tyranny, which Britain did not share, remain.

As we begin to grapple with the challenges of the referendum, and the combination of both different and shared experiences we would do well to recall the significance of another dimension of recent British history – decolonization and the end of Empire.

The evolution from Empire to Commonwealth was fundamentally a question of self-government. This was unambiguously stated in Chapter X1 of the United Nations Charter with its reference to progress towards ‘a full measure of self-government’ as a ‘sacred trust’. In 1960 the General Assembly in Resolution 1541 spoke of three key options for the process of decolonisation: free association with an independent state; integration into an independent state; or independence. Can those categories be translated into nation-states’ relationship with a cross-national organization such as the European Union?

About the author

Philip Giddings was Head of the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading until his retirement in 2011, with research interests in public administration, Parliament and the Ombudsman. From 1985 to 2015 he was a member of the General Synod, chairing the Mission and Public Affairs Division and its Council from 2003 to 2013 and serving as Chair of the House of Laity from 2010-15.