Review of International Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/RIS

Additional services for Review of International Studies:

Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here

Euroscepticism and the culture of the discipline of history

OLIVER J. DADDOW

Review of International Studies / Volume 32 / Issue 02 / April 2006, pp 309 ­ 328DOI: 10.1017/S0260210506007042, Published online: 24 May 2006

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0260210506007042

How to cite this article:OLIVER J. DADDOW (2006). Euroscepticism and the culture of the discipline of history. Review of International Studies, 32, pp 309­328 doi:10.1017/S0260210506007042

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/RIS, IP address: 148.197.97.132 on 22 Nov 2012

Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 309–328 Copyright � British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210506007042

Euroscepticism and the culture of thediscipline of historyOLIVER J. DADDOW*

Abstract. This article explores the uses of history in contemporary Eurosceptic discourse inBritain. It does so in the knowledge that studying an essentially contested concept such asEuroscepticism poses severe methodological problems, and in the first section I situate myarticle in the emerging scholarly literature on the subject. Having explained why I limit myresearch to popular Euroscepticism in the tabloid press, in the second section I criticallyanalyse the rhetorical strategies employed by the Sun and the Daily Mail to garner support fortheir line on Europe, suggesting that the appeal of their discourse resides in its recourse tonational history of the school textbook variety. In the third part I use this finding to argue thatthe discipline of history has been an unwitting accomplice in making Euroscepticism sopopular amongst the British public, press and politicians. This has considerable ramificationsboth for the theoretical study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts to counter itspopularity, and I consider all of these in the conclusion.

You can vote YES – FOR A FUTURE TOGETHEROr NO – FOR A FUTURE ALONEAnd what have they lost? Sovereignty? Rubbish!Are the French a soupçon less French?Are the Germans a sauerkraut less German?Are the Italians a pizza less Italian?OF COURSE THEY ARE NOT!And neither would Britain be any less BritishThe whole history of our nation is a history of absorbing, and profiting by, any Europeaninfluences that blow our way.

The Sun, 4 June 1975.1

Introduction

As Tony Blair is finding out in his efforts to win the British public over to the ideaof a European future, Euroscepticism is big business.2 It is certainly much biggerbusiness than in 1975 when Harold Wilson’s Labour government held a referendum

* The first version of this article was presented to the BISA 29th Annual Conference, University ofWarwick, 21 December 2004. I am grateful to Richard Aldrich, David Allen, Tim Dunne,Christopher Hill, Daniel Keohane and two anonymous readers for RIS for their questions,comments and constructive criticisms.

1 Quoted in Roy Perry, ‘Priorities in Information Policy’, Martyn Bond (ed.), Europe, Parliament andthe Media (London: The Federal Trust for Education and Research, 2003), pp. 63–76, at 68.Emphasis in original.

2 Larry Elliott, ‘Europe is a battle Blair can’t win’, Guardian Unlimited, ⟨http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1201546,00.html⟩. Accessed 23 April 2004.

309

on the UK’s membership of what was then the European Community (EC), the resultbeing a two to one majority in favour of staying in.3 The majority of Britishnewspapers today express opinions about Europe and the European Union that varyfrom apathy to outright hostility,4 representing a sizeable shift in opinion comparedto 1975 when the press had been ‘wholly in favour of a ‘‘yes’’ vote’,5 and a potentreminder that ‘until the 1970s the British press tended to be pro-Community’.6 Thesame might be said of the broadcast media, with both the British BroadcastingCorporation (BBC) and Independent Television News (ITN) being accused byEuropean Union officials of presenting European Union activity in a negativelight.7 Even establishment opinion-forming publications such as the Economist thathave traditionally supported the principle of closer British involvement in asupranational EC/EU, are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the futureprospects for integration and of Britain being able to play a constructive role in theprocess.8

The party political context has altered too. Three decades ago there was a broadcross-party consensus in favour of staying in the EC; today, by contrast, the threemain British political parties and the Labour government are deeply split over thequestion of Britain’s closer involvement with the EU.9 Around them, furthermore,movements such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, founded 1993)and the Referendum Party (founded 1995) have shown themselves adept, in secondorder elections at least, at gathering public support by campaigning on anti-European tickets that stress the political motives behind deeper integration and thethreat these pose to British ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’. Blair’s task is madeharder by a proliferation of individuals and interest groups campaigning againstEurope and the EU using the Internet to spread their message, even if their

3 On the 1975 referendum see David Butler and Uwe W. Kitzinger, The 1975 Referendum (London:Macmillan, 1976); Robert Jowell and Gerald Hoinville (eds.), Britain into Europe: Public Opinionand the EEC, 1961–75 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).

4 Peter J. Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?: Discourse and Motivations of the London-BasedEurosceptic Press’, European Studies, 20 (2004).

5 Brendan Donnelly, ‘The Politics of the Euro’, The Federal Trust for Education and Research,Conference Report, ‘Britain and the Euro: An Economic or Political Question?’, London School ofEconomics, 20 July 2004, 5th page.

6 Sean Greenwood, book review, ‘Britain For and Against Europe: British Politics and EuropeanIntegration (eds.), D. Baker and D. Seawright’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 36:4 (1998),pp. 603–4, at 603.

7 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, pp. 169–70, gives two anonymous examples. One is that of asenior EU Commission official who said in 2000 that he rarely agrees to appear on BBC radiobecause he assumes that the relevant programme item will be given a Eurosceptic slant and that hispresence will be used merely to give it a bogus appearance of balance. The other comes in the formof an official from the European Parliament’s audio-visual department telling him that in March2000 it proved near impossible to persuade ITN to take an interest in the positive aspects ofparliamentary business.

8 Charlemagne, ‘A Golden Age?’, The Economist, 28 February 2004, p. 48. On the pastpro-integrationism and pro-Britain-in-Europe stance of The Economist and the EconomistIntelligence Unit, see Oliver J. Daddow, Britain and Europe since 1945: HistoriographicalPerspectives on Integration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 89–95.

9 Andrew Marr counted ‘five or six serious and genuine single currency sceptics’ in the LabourCabinet holding office prior to the 2001 general election; ‘The Political Battleground’, in MartinRosenbaum (ed.), Britain and Europe: The Choices We Face (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2001), pp. 5–13, at 9.

310 Oliver J. Daddow

popularity and precise impact on public opinion is difficult to gauge.10 There is,finally, less of a clear-cut economic case now for Britain moving closer to thecontinent compared to the 1960s and 1970s when a spate of British declinist literaturereflected a growing consensus amongst academics, political commentators, interestgroups, non-governmental organisations and policymaking elites that the countrywas in need of a new direction, one that eventually helped force the hands ofsuccessive Conservative and Labour governments into applying for membership ofthe EC. For example, the Confederation of British Industry is today nowhere near askeen on Britain joining the single currency as it was on it joining the CommonMarket in the 1960s and 1970s.11

Public opinion pollsters consistently find evidence to support the thesis thatBritain is Europe’s reluctant partner. Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak havestudied all of the European Commission’s Eurobarometer polls for 2003 and foundthat, on average, Britain ranks lowest in terms of national support for Europeanintegration, and by quite some distance, the same finding as in 1992.12 ChristopherAndersen and Braden Smith have used figures for 1995 to 2003 to draw the sameconclusion, ranking Britain, Sweden, Finland and Denmark as the most sceptical ofEuropean member states over this period.13 Taking all this into account, scholars arein broad agreement that, by almost any measurement, ‘what is undoubtedly true isthat Britain is one of the most sceptical members of the EU’.14 Measuring publicopinion is one thing, of course, explaining it quite another. From where do theseattitudes come? Much turns on the definition of Euroscepticism one adopts and thedisciplinary paradigm within which one is working. Political scientists concentrate onseveral interconnected facets of Euroscepticism under the general heading of thedomestic politics of Euroscepticism. They seek to explain how opportunities forparties to express scepticism are opened up at European and national levels, and howparties use Euroscepticism to acquire electoral support. Psephologists and opinionpollsters explore the salience of Europe to voters in local, national and Europeanelections. Media and discourse analysts explore the construction of media discourse

10 The number of such groups flourishing in the global information age may outweigh their impact onvoting behaviour: ‘in the day and age of the Internet ‘‘many’’ is a relative concept. A good numberof these Eurosceptic groups appear only to exist as web pages of single individuals. The establishedorganisations, such as the CIB [Campaign for an Independent Britain] refuse to disclose theirmembership numbers, a likely sign that the British public are not exactly queuing on theirdoorsteps.’ Menno Spiering, ‘British Euroscepticism’, European Studies, 20 (2004), pp. 127–49, at134–5.

11 For more on the growth of support for integration in the CBI during the 1960s see Neil Rollings,‘The Confederation of British Industry and European Integration in the 1960s’, in Oliver J.Daddow (ed.), Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britain’s Second Application to Join theEEC (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 115–32.

12 Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Supporting the Union? Euroscepticism and Domestic Politicsof European Integration’, paper delivered at Comparative Euroscepticism Workshop, Maxwell EUCenter, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, 21–22 May, 2004, p. 23; Stephen Haseler, TheEnglish Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 144.

13 Christopher Andersen and Braden Smith, ‘Mapping Opposition to European Integration’, paperdelivered at Comparative Euroscepticism Workshop, Maxwell EU Center, Maxwell School ofSyracuse University, 21–22 May, 2004, p. 9. They derive four indicators of scepticism from theEurobarometer questions ‘against integration’: Britain 34.5% compared to EU average 22%;‘against EU membership’: Britain 23.18% compared to EU average 13.12%; ‘no benefit frommembership’: Britain 41.53% compared to EU average 31.82%; ‘relieved if scrapped’: Britain24.75% compared to EU average 13%.

14 John Curtice, ‘What We Think We Know’, in Martin Rosenbaum (ed.), Britain and Europe: TheChoices We Face (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 15–20, at 16.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 311

on Europe and the relationship between this coverage and public attitudes to the EU.Cultural and social theorists have not devoted sustained attention to the question ofEuroscepticism, often tacking it on to investigations of the construction of nationalidentity over the longue durée. Here their work overlaps with, and draws upon,historical ideas about the constitution of individual, local, community, regional,national and transnational identities, associating the development of Euroscepticismwith what has gone before in the life of the nation and how the nation as a wholerelates to its past.15

This article draws on work across these disciplines to introduce a fresh approachto understanding the phenomenon of Euroscepticism in Britain. It takes its cue inparticular from recent work on the lessons of history in the fields of intellectualhistory and historical theory. Although it is evident that we can and do make ofhistory what we want, relatively few scholars have yet had the inclination to examinehow the lessons of history become the lessons of history, especially when comparedto the number that have explored the lessons of history themselves.16 A valuableexception is Mikkel Rasmussen who, in 2003, published an article in Review ofInternational Studies on how historians and policymakers first constructed and thenlearnt from the ‘Munich lesson’ of 1938. He was not so interested in charting thesubsequent diplomatic and political uses of that lesson as in how that lesson hasbecome a lesson; how diplomatic events from Versailles to Munich have come toconstitute the received wisdom in ‘the West’ about peacemaking and securitybuilding, even amongst decision-makers who have no direct personal experience ofthe events that led to those settlements. We are forever trapped, he implies, by theconstricting ties of history and the sanctity of the ‘common sense’ lessons wesupposedly learn from it.17 I concur with Rasmussen about the need for moreresearch into the social construction of the past by directing my analysis towards thesuffocating weight of history on Britain’s debates about Europe and the EU.

The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first sets the terms of reference for thearticle by defining the essentially contested concept of Euroscepticism, and byexplaining how I deploy the term in this article. Having set the parameters foranalysis I examine in the second part the overt and covert ideology at work in thediscourse of two leading Eurosceptical newspapers: the Sun and the Daily Mail. Here,I use their reporting on European affairs as case studies with a view to discovering thehistorical stories that lend weight and credence to their reporting of Europeanmatters in Britain. In the third part I examine the interconnectedness betweenEuroscepticism and British national history. The intimate relationship between stateeducation and nation-building has long been recognised by historians and theoristsof national identity alike.18 What I want to do is take this literature in new directions

15 Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), gives Euroscepticism a one-line mention three pages from the end.

16 Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History forDecision-Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986); Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons ofHistory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History(London: Chatto and Windus, 1975); Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

17 Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, ‘The History of a Lesson: Versailles, Munich and the SocialConstruction of the Past’, Review of International Studies, 29:4 (2003), pp. 499–519.

18 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Londonand New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 197–206.

312 Oliver J. Daddow

by arguing that British history, as it was conceived, institutionalised, studied andwritten in the academy in the nineteenth century, may have been an unwittingaccomplice in the rise to prominence of Euroscepticism in the country at large. Thearticle concludes with discussion of the potential impact my analysis has both for theacademic study of Euroscepticism and the political efforts by the Blair government toorientate public opinion towards accepting a European future for Britain.

Euroscepticism: an essentially contested concept

It is important when writing about an emotive and politically charged topic such asEuroscepticism to bear in mind the methodological problems it poses researchers,and therefore to be as rigorous as possible about defining this problematic word soas to prevent confusion arising. It is impossible to give a convincing definition of‘Euroscepticism’ despite its wide usage in contemporary political discourse. The firstreason is that the word is used by (and about, often pejoratively) people in variouscountries and for whatever motive who oppose anything from European integrationper se to the institutional form integration has been taking in the EC and now the EU.The second reason relates to the numerous other competing terms that have arisen assignifiers of opposition to the twin processes of European integration in generaland/or, to steal an invented word from Timothy Garton Ash, things related to‘EU-rope’ in particular.19 As opposition to Europe has grown so has the number ofpotential descriptive devices on offer. In a five-page section on British critics of theeuro published in 2001, Lord Haskins uses euroscepticism interchangeably withterminology such as ‘europhobes’, ‘ultranationalist europhobics’ and ‘euro critics’.20

‘Euro-agnostic’, ‘Euro-realist’ and ‘Euro-pragmatist’ have all entered popular jargonas both individual politicians and political parties jostle to capture their oftenambiguous policies towards European integration in pithy soundbites for popularconsumption.

The endeavour by academics to categorise these myriad and usually woollyattitudes towards Europe demonstrates the very real problems a word like Euroscep-tic can bring its user. The best known and most cited is the work by Paul Taggart andAleks Szczerbiak who identify ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ strains of Euroscepticism, takingEuroscepticism to imply ‘negative evaluations of European integration’.21 PetrKopecký and Cas Mudde try an alternative, distinguishing between ‘specific’ and‘diffuse’ support for integration in the EU on the one hand, and for European

19 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Gamble of Engagement’, in Britain and Europe: The Choices, pp. 39–45.20 Lord Haskins, ‘The Benefits to Business’, in Britain and Europe: The Choices, pp. 49–56, at 51–4.

Stephen Haseler equates ‘eurosceptic’ and ‘europhobic’ in ‘The Case for a Federal Future’, in IanTaylor, Austin Mitchell, Stephen Haseler and Geoffrey Denton, Federal Britain in a FederalEurope? (London: The Federal Trust for Education and Research, 2001), pp. 51–96, at 71.

21 Developed in Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Parties, Positions and Europe: Euroscepticism inthe EU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe’, Sussex European Institute WorkingPaper no. 46 (2001), ⟨http:www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SEI/pdfs/wp46.pdf⟩. First accessed February2003; Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘The Party Politics of Euroscepticism in EU Memberand Candidate States’, Sussex European Institute Working Paper no. 51 (2002),⟨http:www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SEI/pdfs/wp51.pdf⟩. First accessed February 2003. See more recentlyAleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart (eds.), Opposing Europe? The Comparative Party Politics ofEuroscepticism, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 313

integration in general on the other, leading to a 2�2 matrix on which party positionscan be plotted and classified as: Euroenthusiastic, Europragmatistic, Eurosceptic orEuroreject.22 Chris Flood, finally, has developed a six-point spectrum along whichparty positions towards the EU can be classified as ‘rejectionist’ through to‘maximalist’.23 It is not the aim of this article to dissect the strengths and weaknessesof each of the models,24 but two points are well worthy of note before we try to pindown a workable definition to use below. The first is that the Taggart/Szczerbiak‘hard/soft’ taxonomy holds the field in studies of Euroscepticism. This is probablybecause, out of the three, it is the only one concerned exclusively with mapping thephenomenon of opposition to Europe whereas the others identify the positivesentiments as well as the negative. It may also be significant that Taggart andSzczerbiak have published their model, and derivatives thereof, more widely and overa longer period than have the other scholars. For example, Flood’s model has yet tobe published in journal article or book chapter form and has been disseminated so faronly in the form of conference papers.

The second point is that opposition to Europe does not mean the same thing indifferent countries, nor is it expressed in the same way, making sensitivity to the localand national context of Euroscepticism all-important. One might have thought thatin the country that apparently invented the word the problem would not be soacute.25 But Menno Spiering argues that it is a mistake, à la Anthony Forster, toconstrue every expression of doubt in Britain about Europe and its institutions, pastand present, as a statement of Euroscepticism because ‘it renders the concept almostmeaningless’.26 Forster, Spiering infers, is interested in opposition to Europe and thathas manifested itself in ways that do not deserve the retrospective label ‘Euroscep-ticism’.27 He prefers the Stephen George line that British Euroscepticism has come todenote a more extreme position ‘which is hostile to British participation in theEuropean Union’ and which hints seriously at the benefits of withdrawal from theEU.28 David Morgan similarly alludes to a radical British connotation. ‘Groupswhich are labelled Eurosceptic’, he observes, ‘combine those opposed to anyEuropean ‘‘state’’ on a variety of grounds and those who think they see alterna-tives’.29 In the parlance of the political science models introduced above, I believeTaggart and Szczerbiak would label the British Euroscepticism I concentrate on in

22 Petr Kopecký and Cas Mudde, ‘The Two Sides of Euroscepticism: Party Positions on EuropeanIntegration in East Central Europe’, European Union Politics, 3:3 (2002), pp. 297–326.

23 Christopher Flood, ‘Euroscepticism: A Problematic Concept’, paper presented to the UniversityAssociation for European Studies 32nd Annual Conference and 7th Research Conference, Queen’sUniversity Belfast, 2–4 September 2002, pp. 3–7.

24 A more detailed analysis of the political science approaches appears in Charles Lees, ‘FourDimensions of Party-Based Euroscepticism in the Federal Republic’, paper delivered atComparative Euroscepticism Workshop, Maxwell EU Center, Maxwell School of SyracuseUniversity, 21–22 May, 2004, pp. 2–4.

25 According to Robert Harmsen and Menno Spiering, ‘Introduction: Euroscepticism and theEvolution of European Political Debate, European Studies, 20 (2004), pp. 13–35, at 15, the wordentered the British journalistic lexicon via an article in The Times in 1986.

26 Anthony Forster, Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics: Opposition to Europe in theBritish Conservative and Labour Parties since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2002).

27 Spiering, ‘British Euroscepticism’, p. 128.28 Ibid., pp. 128–9.29 David Morgan, ‘Media Coverage of the European Union’, in Martyn Bond (ed.), Europe,

Parliament and the Media (London: The Federal Trust for Education and Research, 2003),pp. 35–54, at 36. In the same collection see Dougall, p. 57, who links Euroscepticism to theanti-Maastricht element on the right of the Conservative Party.

314 Oliver J. Daddow

this article ‘hard Euroscepticism’; Kopecký and Mudde may call it ‘Eurorejectionist’;Flood would probably opt for ‘rejectionist’ or ‘revisionist’, it being at the former,extremer end of his spectrum.

Hidden wiring: the historical images behind the discourse

Eurosceptics in the press consistently use words such as ‘sovereignty’,30 ‘indepen-dence’, ‘superstate’, ‘subsidiarity’, ‘federalism’,31 ‘bureaucrats’ (increasingly ‘Euro-crats’) and phrases such as ‘keep the pound’ in their discourse on why Britain shouldremain aloof from further integration, or withdraw from the EU altogether.32 Like allwords and phrases they are freighted with connotations and loaded with meaningsgathered from various sources. They generate their currency for Eurosceptics bybeing associated with popular tales concerning a variety of themes: British ‘differ-ence’ from the continent; suspicion of the motives of continental leaders and almostunquestioning support for Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US.33 The word‘Brussels’, when woven into Eurosceptic discourse, signifies much more than thegeographical location of the Belgian capital city, denoting instead ‘an easy andremote scapegoat for any mishap, leading to more and more such stories and ajaundiced opinion of EU rules and regulations’;34 in other words, the EuropeanCommission.35 This is just one example of the general problem area I am interestedin: how the words and phrases of British Eurosceptic discourse have becomemeaningful, literally full of meaning, through their being woven together innarratives that tell of ‘the myth of a still largely autonomous great (if not world)power constantly threatened by illegitimate intrusion from ‘‘Brussels’’ which hasbecome part of the political (folk) culture of British EU membership and its reportingin the tabloid press’.36

It has proved impossible here to incorporate my research findings on all thenewspapers whose discourses on Europe I have examined, and I limit myself insteadto showcasing the ‘vigorous and concentrated form’ of Euroscepticism found in theSun and the Daily Mail,37 the brand of nationalist-based Eurosceptic discourse found

30 On its multiple connotations in the British debates about Europe see Haseler, The English Tribe,pp. 92–7.

31 For elaboration of the many connotations of ‘federalism’, see Taylor, Mitchell, Haseler andDenton, Federal Britain, pp. 16–17, 32–3, 55–6, 63, 99–103, 112–13 and 122.

32 For instance John Redwood, ‘Sovereignty and Democracy’, and William Hague, ‘Harmonisationor Flexibility’, both in Britain and Europe: The Choices, pp. 87–95 and 287–92 respectively. Ondisputes over the meaning of ‘sovereignty’ within the Conservative Party see Philip Lynch,‘Nationhood and Identity in Conservative Politics’, in Mark Garnett and Philip Lynch (eds.), TheConservatives in Crisis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 182–97, at 183.

33 Andrew Gamble and Gavin Kelly, ‘Britain and EMU’, in Kenneth Dyson (ed.), European Statesand the Euro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 97–119, at 108–13.

34 Perry, ‘Priorities in Information Policy’, p. 65.35 Norbert Schweiger, ‘The Council, the Media and the Public at Large’, in Martyn Bond (ed.),

Europe, Parliament and the Media (London: The Federal Trust for Education and Research, 2003),pp. 133–55, at 135.

36 Wolfram Kaiser, ‘ ‘‘What Alternative is Open to Us?’’: Britain’, in Wolfram Kaiser and JürgenElvert (eds.), European Union Enlargement: A Comparative History (New York and Abingdon:Routledge, 2004), pp. 9–30, at 25.

37 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, p. 151.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 315

on the right of the Conservative Party, especially since 1997.38 It is worth dwelling fora moment on how the methodology I have employed has shaped my findings, theproblem of selection bias being particularly pertinent in this regard.39 Despite theReview of International Studies generously giving its contributors the luxury of nearlytwice the amount of words to play with compared to other journals in politicalscience and international relations, the most glaring point is that I have not had thespace here to include analysis of the discourse of other Eurosceptical newspaperssuch as The Times (Rupert Murdoch’s broadsheet stablemate to the Sun), the DailyTelegraph, and the Daily Express, which tends to be schizophrenic on the subject.Nor have I been able to include analysis of the various Eurosceptical comments onoffer in supposedly Europhile newspapers such as the Guardian. The three mainreasons for setting these boundaries all pertain to the goal of the article. First of all,I have not set out to write a history of Eurosceptic discourse as it has unfolded in allBritish newspapers, although I believe such a study would be most illuminating, if notthe definitive word on the subject.40 Secondly, I am not seeking to explain whynewspapers take the line they do on Europe, à la Anderson and Weymouth, but tounderstand what kind of history is being used to inform their reporting. For me thequestion is not ‘why Euroscepticism in the press?’ but ‘why this brand of history?’and this does not require the same attention to newspapers across the board. Finally,I do not believe that including analysis of broadsheet commentaries on Europe wouldcritically alter the argument I pursue in the article. While they are certainlycompelling and illuminating discourses, often incorporating subtler mechanisms ofpersuasion and less vivid figures of speech, their framing techniques (British nationalhistory rather than European history) are broadly the same as those used by writersin the Sun and the Daily Mail. I would therefore direct readers interested in thebroadsheets to studies that have had the time to examine their discourses ofEuroscepticism in more depth than I can manage here.41

So, what is the brand of Euroscepticism on offer in the Sun and the Daily Mail?It is Euroscepticism expressed in terms of a nationalism that paints Europe,Europeans, the EU and proposed developments in European integration as hostile tothe future interests of the country.42 At the heart of this scepticism lies the judgementthat Britain is not European ‘in its history and culture’; rather it should continue, as

38 Philip Lynch, ‘The Conservatives and Europe, 1997–2001’, in Garnett and Lynch (eds.), TheConservatives in Crisis, pp. 146–63, at 155. Haseler, The English Tribe, p. 142, observes that in 1994,Norman Lamont, Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major, became the first senior politicianin Britain to raise the possibility of Britain withdrawing from the EU. His bitter experiences withthe European Exchange Rate Mechanism in the 1990s are detailed in his memoirs, In Office(London: Little, Brown, 1999).

39 Ian Lustick, ‘History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and theProblem of Selection Bias’, American Political Science Review, 90:3 (1996), pp. 605–18.

40 Patrick Finney eloquently restates the case against the possibility of definitive histories in‘Introduction: What is International History?’, in Patrick Finney (ed.), International History(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–35.

41 Daddow, Britain and Europe, pp. 2–5; Peter J. Anderson and Anthony Weymouth, Insulting thePublic?: The British Press and the European Union (London and New York: Addison WesleyLongman, 1999), pp. 65–76.

42 The question of which ‘nationalism’ Eurosceptics are defending – English or British – is certainlyinteresting but not one I have the time to pursue in this article. It is important to be aware,however, that the defence of ‘British’ interests is routinely couched in terms of ‘English’ identitypolitics. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity and, on Conservative Party handling ofthe issue, Lynch, ‘Nationhood and Identity’, p. 186. The problems of theorising ‘nation’ and‘nationalism’ are taken up in Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 3–5.

316 Oliver J. Daddow

it has in the past, to look across the Atlantic for its security and prosperity.43 Bylinking Euroscepticism to nationalist discourse I hope to show that popularEuroscepticism in Britain is at the hardest end of Taggart and Szczerbiak’s hardEuroscepticism. Otherwise, we have to include as Eurosceptics writers such as theeconomist James Forder who professes enthusiasm for the European project as awhole but who is opposed to British membership of the euro on economic grounds.If the euro causes economic instability and unemployment it will, he contends, leadto acrimony, resentment and hostility to integrationist policies in other areas. ‘Thatis why, from the beginning of this debate, I have felt that the economics of the euroshould make those who hope for political integration and for Britain to be at theheart of Europe its firmest and most determined opponents. I count myself amongthem.’44 Forder’s argument is in line with that of Timothy Garton Ash who is equallysympathetic to the European cause but who has come to the conclusion that it maybe best for Britain to leave the EU so as not to let its laggardly attitude hold backthe integration process any further.45 Both Forder and Garton Ash profess a levelof encouragement for political integration that is entirely lacking in popularEuroscepticism and for that reason I would not put them in the same bracket.Popular British Euroscepticism has a radical edge identified by George and others,and does not concern the processes and policy competences of the EU itself. In factthe word Euroscepticism in its popular guise may be considered an oxymoron; thatis, it does not really pertain to developments in the EU at all, but to British history,national identity and place in the world.

I now draw upon the work of Peter Anderson and Anthony Weymouth whoidentify the most prominent Eurosceptic newspapers and establish that there are twotypes of bias at work on their discourse. The first is overt political or commercial bias,that which sets out to be openly persuasive. The second is covert bias, ‘that which isimplied or presumed to be part of the shared ‘‘lifeworld’’ in the media discourse’; theunspoken ideology that allows author to connect with reader.46 Covert, historically-informed bias regularly appears in Sun commentary on European affairs, its reporterstelling a simple story about Britain’s European policy. The continent acts out its roleof the threatening Other across the Channel with those ‘lesser breeds’,47 the Frenchand the Germans, playing the roles of untrustworthy Machiavellian villains leadingits machinations against Britain. Compared to the trustworthy Americans, Andersonfinds the Sun depicting the EU as ‘a corrupt and untrustworthy interventionistpredator, driven by a Franco–German plot to damage British economic interests,British security and British sovereignty’.48

A succinct illustration of the Sun’s brand of Eurosceptic discourse is an article byRichard Littlejohn, who took up arms against Blair in the wake of the PrimeMinister’s Warsaw speech on EU enlargement in May 2003.49 His piece, ‘How dare

43 Morgan, ‘Media Coverage’, p. 37. See also Haseler, The English Tribe, pp. 1–2, 29–33 and 55.44 James Forder, ‘The Economic Costs of Membership’, in Britain and Europe: The Choices, pp. 73–8,

at 73.45 Guardian, 31 October 2002, p. 21.46 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, p. 153.47 Geoffrey Denton, ‘The Federalist Vision’, in Taylor, Mitchell, Haseler and Denton, Federal Britain,

pp. 99–153, at 112.48 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, p. 154.49 For the full text of his speech see ⟨http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page3787.asp⟩, accessed 10

October 2003.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 317

Tony Blair call us unpatriotic’, was themed around his perception that Blair hadequated ‘anti-Europeanism’ with a lack of pride in nation (it matters not whether thiswas actually what Blair meant – the point is that Littlejohn read it as such). ForLittlejohn this was an affront, a ‘monstrous slander’ to the people Blair represents. ‘Isimply don’t understand why anyone goes into politics to destroy their own countryand hand it over to foreigners’. In the emotive words of Labour leader HughGaitskell, delivered over forty years ago to describe his opposition to the CommonMarket and trotted out time and again in support of the Eurosceptic case,50

Littlejohn chastises Blair for hating ‘this country’ and for being ‘hell-bent ondestroying 1,000 years of history’, in stark contrast to the patriotism of wanting to‘defend our borders, pass our own laws and run our own economy’. His fairy-taledescription of the non-choice for the British people in a possible referendum on theEuropean Constitution51 reads as follows: ‘Certainly, given the option, most Britishpeople would rather live in a free, benign kingdom nominally ruled by a kindly oldgranny than in a federal superstate run by foreigners, with their tidy minds, armedwith their railway timetables and oppressive ‘‘human rights’’ laws’. He even writeshistory backwards by imagining what Blair might have done in 1939: ‘Presumably[he] would have thought the patriotic thing to do would be to hand over the keys toHitler’.52

Content analysis of Littlejohn’s polemic shows a high number of references towords, phrases and images associated with hard Euroscepticism in Britain. Thenumber of appearances of each are as follows: ‘Brussels’: one; ‘independent nation’:one; ‘superstate’: one; ‘sovereignty’: two; Germany/Germans: two; France/French:three; ‘foreigners’: three; British monarchy: four; patriotism: ten. The five historicalreferences are of special interest, comprising as they do allusions to the Second WorldWar and Hitler, Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years of British history’, to the ‘disgracefulGrocer [Edward] Heath’ who took Britain into the EEC in 1973, the coronation in1953 and September 11th, 2001. Littlejohn is ransacking history and playing to hisperceived audience, the ‘more than half of us who want to get out of Europealtogether’, by evoking moments of national pride such as World War II and theCoronation to support his case against Blair’s vision for Britain.

Michael Portillo, writing in the Daily Mail two years earlier, brought the samecharge against Blair, writing that his European policy showed the premier to have‘little interest in history’,53 as if seeking a European future for the country is anunpatriotic betrayal of the past, the significance of which is self-evident.54 It is thiskind of argument that leads Anderson and Weymouth to judge that Daily Mailcommentary on European politics is strikingly similar to that found in the Sun. ‘Likethe Sun, the Daily Mail’s discourse on the EU was found [in the survey period

50 On Gaitskell’s opposition to the Common Market, and his Empire mentality, see Brian Brivati,Hugh Gaitskell (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1997), pp. 404–31 and Haseler, The English Tribe,pp. 53 and 131.

51 This article was written before the results of the 2005 French and Dutch referendums on theConstitution were known. Clearly, they significantly diminish the chances of there even being areferendum in Britain.

52 Richard Littlejohn, ‘How dare Tony Blair call us unpatriotic’, ⟨http://www/thesun.co.uk/article/0,,43–2003251106,00.html⟩, accessed 10 October 2003.

53 Daily Mail, 31 December 2001, p. 22.54 For a critique of this view of the ‘unpatriotism’ of being an enthusiast for integration see Charles

Kennedy, ‘An End to Vacillation’: Britain and Europe: The Choices, 293–7, at 293, and Haseler,The English Tribe, p. 151.

318 Oliver J. Daddow

2000–2002] to be characterised by a world full of Franco–German plots, threats toBritain’s sovereignty and security by an advancing European superstate, allegedlyuntrustworthy European partners and a preference for the USA over the EU’. Inmediating the EU to its readers, both newspapers ‘freely engaged in omission andmisrepresentation’ leaving them ‘poorly served, no matter what their point of view on‘‘Brussels’’ ’.55 On the whole Anderson finds that withdrawal from the EU has notbeen the editorial policy of any of the sceptical newspapers in Britain, but the DailyMail does more than air the possibility through articles by individual journalists. Thisposition was evident in a feverish article by Andrew Alexander that appeared in theDaily Mail during the European Council meeting in December 2000, one thatreflected the Conservative Party’s objections to the outcome of the Nice meeting. Onbalance, he argued, the time might be right to withdraw from the EU. ‘The Nicesummit is merely serving to underline our incompatibility with the structure and theaims of the Union, with the certainty of more differences to come’. He went on toclaim that Britain does not depend on the EU economically, politically or strategi-cally. ‘As a genuinely independent nation we would be entirely at liberty to make ourown rules’.56

Three years later the paper was taking the same line. It was delighted with theChancellor’s verdict on 9 June 2003 that the British economy had not yet passed theTreasury’s five tests for membership of the euro; ‘nothing Gordon Brown said hasthreatened this proud symbol of Britain’s independence and national wealth. Thepound has endured for a millennium, built an empire, and, above all, united ourpeople.’57 The newspaper’s pride in the part the pound has played in integrating thenation and building the Empire is typical of the way in which the British story is toldin the Eurosceptic press, and ‘emblematic of a tendency on the part of the press tomerge isolationist British pride with a fear that European integration threatensthis’.58 Mixing discussion of the incompatibility between British and Europeaninterests with a consistent seam of scare stories about the EU and the euro,59 thehuman interest angle beloved of British investigative reporting on how the EU affects‘our daily lives’,60 the Daily Mail and the Sun select a limited set of historical factswhich they organise for their readers into stories with a singularly recognisableplotline, centring on a nation continually ‘at war’ with mainland Europe.

The historical backdrop to both tabloid and broadsheet Euroscepticism is the‘island story’ every British citizen supposedly knows, one that tells of irredeemabledifferences between Britain and the continent; one that adapts Shakespeare’s tale ofa ‘sceptr’d isle set in a silver sea’ fighting off the pernicious effects of continental

55 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, p. 156.56 Daily Mail, 9 December 2000, pp. 12–13.57 ‘Why the pound is quids in’, Daily Mail, 10 June 2003, p. 14.58 Gertrude Hardt-Mautner, quoted in George Wilkes and Dominic Wring, ‘The British Press and

Integration’, in David Baker and David Seawright (eds.), Britain For and Against Europe: BritishPolitics and the Question of European Integration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 185–205, at197–8.

59 In the article on the merits of the pound cited above the Daily Mail informs us that, unlike theeuro, the pound is not bad for your health. ‘According to a study by dermatologists at theUniversity of Zurich, euro coins can trigger skin allergies because they release up to 320 times theamount of nickel allowed under EU safety rules.’.

60 Dougall, ‘British Press Coverage’, p. 55. See also Olivier Basnée, ‘The (Non-) Coverage of theEuropean Parliament’, in Martyn Bond (ed.), Europe, Parliament and the Media (London: TheFederal Trust for Education and Research, 2003), pp. 77–105, at 92.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 319

intrusions into British affairs.61 This is the kind of commonsense history everyoneknows even if they are not historians, the kind parodied in Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066And All That,62 the kind that tells us all we need to know about Europe from Britain’smartial past; its encounters with the Spanish Armada, at the battle of Trafalgar, withNapoleon at Waterloo,63 after the let-down of Munich in 1938 and against Hitler’sGermany during the Second World War. Aggressive national patriotism of this kindhas even been linked directly to the ‘English disease’ of football hooliganism in the1970s and 1980s. The voiceover at the beginning of a May 2005 documentary aboutfootball hooliganism and English national identity made the fascinating point that‘For many, these aggressive displays of identity would become the football equivalentof Euroscepticism’, while one interviewee, singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, ruefullysurmised that ‘I think that these people must get their worldview from the openingcredits of ‘‘Dad’s Army’’ . . . It does say something about English culture, I think,that we cling to the past in that sense. We don’t have new and modern ways to expresswho we think we are.’64 (It is interesting to note that the Littlejohn article I referredto above was supported by a cartoon in which Blair is chastising the characters from‘Dad’s Army’ for being ‘patriotic’). Indeed, events in 1939–45 are so regularly calledto mind in popular British discussions about Europe that one commentator haswritten ‘Our attitude towards Germany remains at the heart of our fear of Europe’.65

While this might hold for recent decades, Linda Colley reminds us of the crucial partmilitary encounters with the French, ‘the traditional enemy across the Channel’,played in constructing senses of Britishness in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies.66 The particular sources of angst about the continental Other are, however,less significant than the fact that continental Europe continues to play that role forthe British, and Colley makes the telling point, (ironically?) using Euroscepticallanguage, that ‘the agonies that some British politicians and voters so plainlyexperience in coming to terms with Brussels and its dictates show just how rooted theperception of Continental Europe as Other still is’.67

On the evidence presented in this section it seems fair to assert that Europe/EUdebates in Britain are, in their popular form, continuously being refracted throughthe lenses of British national history, and a particular reading of the national storyat that. Popular Euroscepticism, ironically, is not so much the expression of anattitude towards developments in the EU as the repetitive articulation of a story that

61 Haseler, The English Tribe, pp. 14–15. Arthur Bryant eulogises Shakespeare in Set in a Silver Sea:A History of Britain and the British People (London: Book Club Associates edition, 1985).

62 W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960).63 A good example of a linkage often made between the EU and Napoleon’s efforts to dominate the

continent, thwarted by the British at Waterloo, can be found in the Cover story of the Sun, 30March 2004, continued on p. 2: ‘Waterloon: Blair will surrender to EU on anniversary of battlevictory’.

64 The point was repeatedly made in this programme that stereotypical conceptions of history ‘whichseem to come from another era’ were a big factor in causing the English to view their trips to thecontinent in militaristic terms. BBC Four, ‘Timeshift’ documentary, broadcast 31 May 2005.

65 Haseler, ‘The Case for a Federal Future’, p. 59.66 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale

University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 5, 17, 24–5, 33–6, 78–9, 86–90, 99, 172, 198, 215–17, 240, 250–3,285–9, 305–8, 310–13, 322, 358 and 368–71 (this quote from p. 312). For a contrasting approachidentifying the closeness of Franco-British relations (at the aristocratic level) in the eighteenthcentury, centring on the European Enlightenment, cultural and intellectual cosmopolitanism andthe work of Voltaire, see Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, pp. 1–18.

67 Ibid., p. 6.

320 Oliver J. Daddow

sets Britain perpetually against a continental Other. What is missing, critically, is ‘adiscourse which tempers historicism with the representation of how the othereconomies of the other member states, the working of European institutions, anddemocracy itself within the EU, are faring.’68 How have politicians, the public andnewspaper editors and journalists learnt this particular historical lesson and why dothey continue to teach it? And why this story, not another one, identifying Britain’sinternationalist past? Gerald Newman suggests we begin our search for answersin the English historiographical tradition in which ‘the delusion’ of ProtestantEngland’s exceptionalism, uniqueness and separateness from Catholic continentalEurope has came to stand for the British national story.69 In this spirit the nextsection explores the culture of the discipline that seems to inform so muchcontemporary discourse about Europe.

History in Euroscepticism; Euroscepticism in history?

It is intensely difficult to trace with any degree of precision a direct line of descentfrom Victorian historiography to Eurosceptic discourse in the popular press today.However, it is clear from the above that themes and images from nationalist historyin the nineteenth century continue to feature prominently in early twenty-first centurydiscussions about Britain’s role in Europe.70 I want to argue in this final section thatin our efforts to explain the lineage of this discourse it is crucial that we examine thepart played by history education in shaping national identity construction, and thatit will be fruitful to take this research in two complementary directions. First of allwe need to consider what I label the ‘overt’ bias towards patriotic/nationalist historyin university, public school and state school history syllabi from the nineteenthcentury onwards. This form of bias has already received attention in the literature onBritishness and Englishness, if not always with Euroscepticism directly in mind.71

Secondly, I suggest we concentrate more than hitherto on the implications ofthinking about and doing history the positivist way, about the ideology inherent inthe methodological and epistemological foundations of history when it was institu-tionalised as a distinct discipline in the leading universities across Western Europeand North America in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This ‘covert’ biasis harder to discover and has received relatively little attention in the literature onhistory and national identity; it is more the province of historical theory. But it isnecessary to explore covert bias because of the ‘silent and hidden mechanisms ofideological power in our current social formations’ that, by weighing us down withhistory, destine us for a future that, arguably, is merely a replication of the now andthe past. Perhaps the longevity of nationalist discourse about Europe in Britain is, in

68 Anderson and Weymouth, Insulting the Public?, p. 91.69 Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, preface pp. 21–3.70 ‘As an historian I regard the abandonment of our sovereignty as being as dangerous as it is

needless’, proclaims Count Nicolai Tolstoy, UK Independence Candidate for the Wantageconstituency, in his campaign leaflet for the 2005 General Election.

71 On the centricity of the nation-state in early professional historiography, and on the associatedprimacy of political and diplomatic history, see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2nd edn.(London: Granta Books, 2000), pp. 161–4.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 321

fact, a case-study in what Keith Jenkins identifies as the tendency for historicallyconscious policymaking elites and societies to endlessly repeat what historians tell ushas gone before.72

Let us turn firstly to overt bias against things European in British historyeducation, in terms of the thematic content of that education. It was the firstgeneration of professional historians in the nineteenth century that shaped ‘the formin which [the Whig story of British liberty, progress and exceptionalism] enteredschool textbooks and turned it into a central element of the English tradition’.73 It didso on the back of the new discipline’s claims to be able to teach us something aboutthe present using the facts of the past. History, construed as diplomatic history withall the methodological and epistemological commitments implied by that focus on thenation-state as the unit of analysis,74 was to act as a source of moral lessons tostudents and simultaneously as a source of wisdom and practical advice forpolicymakers;75 ‘a school of statesmanship . . . the school of public feeling andpatriotism’ was how J. R. Seeley put it in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor ofModern History at Cambridge in 1869.76 His call was heeded by his fellow historians,and in the first third of the twentieth century school textbooks reflected the patrioticand in some cases jingoistic history they produced. Philip Dodd calls the ancientuniversities ‘custodians of the national culture’ but they were arguably more activethan this in propagating national myths, becoming in Eric Hobsbawm’s words the‘most conscious champions’ of nationalism in the nineteenth century.77 Takingnational trends in historiography more generally, Gerald Newman concurs. ‘Morehistory-writing tends to the perpetuation of national beliefs than to their dissection’;in fact it is an integral part of ‘those very myths which hold nations together.’78

By the early postwar years books that sold in large numbers both popularly andamong political elites were taking a vividly patriotic line on Britain’s past. Wellknown historians such as Arthur Bryant, who went on to campaign for a ‘no’ votein the 1975 referendum,79 and George Macauley Trevelyan penned stories explainingEnglish exceptionalism with reference to its separation from the continent, ‘a countryof unique flexibility and stability, that had only found its true destiny when it turnedaway from continental Europe’.80 A. J. P. Taylor’s wartime aside that ‘What is wrong

72 Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London: Routledge, 2003),pp. 17–18.

73 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 203.74 Finney, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6. Thus, notes Nigel Gould-Davies, we can argue that much

diplomatic history is ‘underwritten by an implicit Realism’, implying that history was realist beforethe International Relations Realists were realist. See his ‘Ideology’, in Finney (ed.), InternationalHistory, pp. 105–35, at 112.

75 Beverley Southgate, Why Bother with History? (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000); Georg G.Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the PostmodernChallenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), p. 2.

76 Quoted in Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 219.77 Quoted in Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 71 and Haseler, The English Tribe, p. 41. On public

and state school education and the spread of Englishness see the latter, pp. 41–5.78 Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 51.79 Forster, Euroscepticism, p. 51. On Bryant’s involvement in the production of and promotion of a

romantic sense of Englishness, see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: ReaktionBooks, 1998), pp. 120–1.

80 Anne Deighton, ‘The Past in the Present: British Imperial Memories and European Question’, inJan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of thePast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 100–120, at 103. See also Kumar, TheMaking of English National Identity, p. 216.

322 Oliver J. Daddow

with Germany is that there is too much of it’ found, notes Robert Colls, a new voiceamongst Eurosceptics in the 1980s.81 Anne Deighton credits these historians withcreating the intellectual milieu within which postwar opposition to Europe in Britainflourished and took hold of the policymaking establishment,82 its key proponentshaving been socialised like the public at large into having what Kaiser calls ‘contemptfor continental European political and cultural traditions’ derived from ‘theimagined ‘‘otherness’’ of ‘‘the Europeans’’ and the idea of British singularity’.83 IfDeighton is right to posit a causal connection between British historiography andEuroscepticism (even if we might disagree with the anachronism of calling policy-makers in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s ‘Eurosceptic’), it seems we are on firm groundin tracing a line between Euroscepticism and the tradition of British diplomatichistory that has given it its intellectual basis and credibility, not to mention the Whiginterpretation of English literature that went with it.84

If celebrating the nation has overtly supported Euroscepticism, it is possibleto argue that it has also done so covertly, through the epistemological andmethodological foundations the early professional historians bequeathed thediscipline. While it is undoubtedly the case, as Richard Evans is at pains to pointout, that the discipline today cannot be compared either in terms of its structure,academic paraphernalia and apparatus, or functioning, to the discipline institution-alised by Leopold von Ranke, Seeley and their peers, the early professional historianshave had more than a passing influence on professional and public thinkingabout history. Their ideas continue to influence discussions on the nature of historyeven in the so-called ‘postmodern’ era and all have prominent places in the fabric ofhistory education and in its public presentation.85 For example, textbooks onhistorical methods aimed at school students and undergraduates openly state theirpreference for the Rankean methodological principles of source criticism anddocumentary-based evidence gathering over more theoretically inclined approachesto the study of the past, especially ones smacking of continental theory in generaland ‘postmodern’ theory in particular.86 Eurosceptic discourse makes powerfuluse of these assumptions about historical practice and its results that we take forgranted, practices and results riven with a silent conservative ideology. A disciplineconstructed on this positivist basis has managed to expunge much of the discussionabout the epistemology of history to its fringes, leading to an almost total dearth ofhealthy scepticism within the discipline about the flimsy foundations of historicalknowledge, exposed both by statements on the unreflective and uncritical attitudeby historians towards the theoretical foundations of their own work and by the all

81 Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 147.82 Deighton, ‘The Past in the Present’, p. 101.83 Kaiser, ‘ ‘‘What Alternative is Open to Us?’’ ’, p. 11.84 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 342–73.85 Oliver J. Daddow, ‘The Ideology of Apathy: Historians and Postmodernism’, Rethinking History,

8:3 (September 2004), pp. 417–37.86 See, for instance, Jeremy Black and Donald M. MacRaild, Studying History, 2nd edn.

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) and Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources:An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).T. G. Otte restates these classic principles of reconstructionist history in ‘Diplomacy andDecision-Making’, in Finney (ed.), International History, pp. 35–57, at 41–2.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 323

too often vitriolic reactions to theoretically inclined investigations of the historicalenterprise.87

Given the logocentrism of history (the assumption that historians are rationalindividuals on a voyage of discovery) and the concomitant perception that it is adiscipline that can produce reliable and empirically testable knowledge about thepast, it is little surprise that politicians and media commentators regularly use historyin support of their arguments about Europe as if history is a given, something weknow, a certainty. The word ‘history’ has in fact come to stand for a body ofknowledge we read to get our bearings in life through the representation of the ‘truth’about what the past was like. In fact the positivist, nationalist history that wasproduced by, and in turn helped further, this belief is just one way of telling the past,one reading of it, one historiographical representation amongst many, though verylittle of that uncertainty comes through in the historical telling. The whole point ofhistory done the positivist way is that it sacrifices uncertainty at the altars ofcontinuity and narrative coherence, the need to put everything into a neat story witha beginning, middle and end. ‘Crooked’ stories do not go down well in the discipline,whereas ‘straight’ ones most certainly do.88

The easy transmission of nineteenth century historical ideas around the Britishpolitical establishment, in its schools and in much public presentation of historypresents real problems for the Europeanists who try to prise open passionately heldassumptions about Britain’s purportedly unique past. So far they have not been upto the challenge. Their efforts are worth exploring, however, because they reinforcejust how hegemonic the Eurosceptical reading of Britain’s past has become. The firsttactic has been to attempt to convince the British of their internationalist past. Thishas been a theme of New Labour’s attempts to modernise Britain’s identity since1997 ‘by recognising that Britishness is a plural identity that embraces local andnational allegiances’ and that as a ‘plural rather than ethnic identity, British culturehad been enriched by immigration’.89 Chancellor Gordon Brown took this tack in1999: ‘In the 1980s a very narrow view of Britishness was popularised by MargaretThatcher, a Britain built on self-interested individualism, mistrust of foreigners andan unchanging constitution. I believe this was based on a misreading of our past. Ourhistory shows Britain to be outward-looking and open. It is not true that Britishhistory is defined by mistrust of foreigners. The past shows Britain to have beeninternationalist and engaged.’90 Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parlia-ment Nick Clegg follows suit by recommending that Britain begin to accept itself asa ‘European nation from head to toe. That for a large trading nation with a longtradition of international engagement and influence, our standing in the world isentirely dependent upon our standing in Europe.’91 It is commonplace to findproponents of Britain taking a more active part in the EU to back their argumentsby showing the ‘porous’ nature of the British nation, its historical openness in

87 For instance Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics andSocial Theorists are Murdering our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

88 Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (London: TheUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

89 Lynch, ‘Nationhood and Identity’, pp. 185 and 194.90 In interview with Steve Richards of the New Statesman and Society, quoted in Kumar, The Making

of English National Identity, p. 241.91 Nick Clegg, ‘Restating the Case’, in Britain and Europe: The Choices, pp. 271–7, at 276.

324 Oliver J. Daddow

cultural terms to trends in continental European philosophy, political thought, artand architecture and science and technology.92

Much of the evidence that could be used in support of this story can be discoveredin works of cultural history and the invention of British identity, for instanceKumar’s The Making of English National Identity and Colley’s Britons. They trace thecontinual confusion that has arisen between ‘English’ and ‘British’ and shows howthe latter has regularly been used in place of the former, obfuscating any sustaineddebate about the component parts of a specifically English national identity. Moreimportantly for our purposes here, they knock away the foundations of argumentsabout England/Britain being isolated from the continent for time immemorial(Gaitskell’s ‘thousand years’) and replace it with a story about the development ofEnglish/British identity that, where it is identifiable at all as a distinct construct, isinextricably European. Haseler pointedly remarks that the English came originallyfrom Germany in the fifth century: from Jutland, the ‘Anglen’ in Denmark andLower Saxony.93 For Kumar, ‘In virtually every respect England from the eleventhto the thirteenth century was a part of Europe, to an even greater extent than it wasat the time of Roman Britain’ he writes of the three centuries following the NormanConquest.94 For Colley, ‘contrary to the received wisdom, the British are not aninsular people in the conventional sense – far from it. For most of their early modernand modern history they have had more contact with more parts of the world thanalmost any other nation – it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form ofaggressive military and commercial enterprise.’95 They systematically show theEuropeanist and internationalist preoccupations of the key figures and great eventsthat star in the supposedly ‘English’ story: literary figures such as Chaucer,Shakespeare and Milton, sovereigns such as Queen Elizabeth I and the Tudors,military leaders such as Lord Nelson, and ‘moments of Englishness’ inspired by suchoccasions as the Great Exhibition of 1851.96

The second tactic, sporadically used by politicians to undermine the Euroscepticcase, has been to tackle head-on Britain’s recent relations with Europe by publicisingthe argument that by staying out of European initiatives such as the euro Britain isagain ‘missing the European’ bus. The proponents of this interpretation of the pasthave drawn on developments in British, European and global history since 1945 totell a new story about Britain and Europe and to inform the public of developmentsin contemporary history which they do not know as much about, certainly whencompared to developments in the more distant past: kings and queens, wars andconquests, Hitler and Stalin and so forth. Blair took this approach in a speechto mark the opening of the European Research Institute at the University ofBirmingham. Drawing on postwar developments in European integration he arguedthat ‘[t]he history of our engagement with Europe is one of opportunities missed inthe name of illusions – and Britain suffering as a result’. He went on to chart the

92 Haseler, ‘The Case for a Federal Future’, p. 93. See also Ian Taylor MP, ‘Seen from theConservative Camp’, in Taylor, Mitchell, Haseler and Denton, Federal Britain, pp. 11–21, at 18.

93 Haseler, The English Tribe, pp. 9–11.94 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 52.95 Colley, Britons, p. 8; Haseler, The English Tribe, pp. 112–15.96 Ibid., pp. 57, 117–9, 128–9, 93–103, p. 187, pp. 192–3 respectively. For a reinterpretation of the

bizarre yet widespread reading of the Norman Conquest as a moment in the invention of theEnglish, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 201 and Newman, The Rise of EnglishNationalism, p. 14.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 325

succession of integrative schemes Britain refused to involve itself with in the 1950s,and London’s gradual but reluctant admission in the 1960s that it needed to be partof the integration process, rather than marginalised from it. He ended with theclarion call that ‘Britain’s future is in Europe’.97 Advocates of federalist modes ofgovernance in both Britain and the EU read Britain’s past relations with Europe inthe same way by telling a story of Britain missing out economically and strategicallyby not being ‘in’ Europe’s integrative schemes from the beginning.98 Blair may not bea federalist even in its watered-down form, but in telling this alternative story he isusing federalist rhetoric that has a long heritage in Britain, albeit one confined toscholarly circles and the margins of news reporting and political debates on thegovernance of Britain and the EU.99

The problem with this attempt, like the first, is that it too confronts a tradition ofBritish history rooted in the nineteenth century where the Europeans are presented asmendacious and European schemes are portrayed as hostile to British traditions.History appears to have come to stand for reality in many people’s minds, rather thanthe exercise in literary representation it is, and Europeanists are finding it corre-spondingly difficult to inject a badly needed shot of uncertainty into the stories theBritish tell themselves about their past as a means of destabilising the historicalfoundations of Eurosceptic discourse. As we have seen, it is all too easy forproponents of the orthodoxy, such as Portillo and Littlejohn, to accuse thosepresenting what could be labelled a ‘revisionist’ version of Britain’s national past ofbeing unpatriotic or having an unhealthy disregard for history. As Hugo Youngremarks at the start of his book on Britain and Europe since 1945, ‘Tampering withthis blessed plot [of the scepter’d isle] was seen for decades as a kind of sacrilegewhich, even if the sophisticates among the political class could accept it, the peoplewould never tolerate.’100 Talking about post-1945 developments simply will not strikea chord with the British public if one accepts the view that the core themes andpedagogy of British national history inform their understanding of what it is to beBritish and European. The ‘facts’ of post-1945 British-European history (about thesteps in European integration through the 1950s, through the European Coal andSteel Community, the abortive European Defence Community and the EuropeanEconomic Community) form the backdrop to the ‘missed bus’ discourse but thosefacts are not widely known in Britain. Even less do they constitute a persuasivealternative to Eurosceptic discourse.

Conclusion: playing ‘the history game’

Three principal conclusions emerge from the preceding analysis. The first two pertainto the academic study of Euroscepticism; the other is policy-oriented. First to thetheory. The simplest conclusion I offer is that it is increasingly difficult to talk without

97 ⟨http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1673.asp⟩. First accessed January 2004.98 Denton, ‘The Federalist Vision’, pp. 151–2.99 On the federalist heritage of ‘missed opportunities’ discourse about Britain and Europe, notably the

role of the Federal Trust for Education and Research, see Daddow, Britain and Europe, pp. 86–90.100 Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1998), p. 1.

326 Oliver J. Daddow

severe qualification of a transnational phenomenon of Euroscepticism. Nationalcontexts remain all-important for understanding and explaining the phenomenonbecause it is a word that does not pass untrammelled across national borders. Theabsence of a cohesive European party system and the dearth of pan-European issuesaround which public and media opinion can coalesce are both reflected in poorturnouts at European elections. The absence of a widely watched pan-Europeantelevision channel or a widely read dedicated European newspaper adds fuel to theimpression that the EU will continue for the foreseeable future to be mediated toEuropean publics through strictly national lenses. It still, to my mind, makes sense topay attention to the national political and societal contexts of Euroscepticism.Comparative work on the subject is valuable but the two strands of research need tooperate in parallel, with information generated in the one strand constantlyinforming, and being informed by, data generated in the other. Delving into thenational arenas for contestation over Europe on a comparative basis should enhanceboth our understanding of Euroscepticism and our ability to explain its appeal anduses in discourses on Europe both in and outside EU member states. That there is nosingle comprehensive definition of Euroscepticism makes it all the more potent a toolof political discourse because it can be as meaningful or meaningless as we want it tobe, a classic means of clouding the issues and detracting attention from theideological agendas advanced by adopting Eurosceptical positions in contemporarypolitics. However, the fact that Euroscepticism is an essentially contested conceptshould not deter us either from trying to define it or from studying it. The fact thatsomething does not exist in reality (whatever that is) does not mean it is notmeaningful, or that it has no power and influence over our lives. As Spieringconcludes, it does not matter if Britain is different from the continent or not, whatmatters ‘is that the idea of British differentness is widely accepted. It forms part ofreceived opinion, and as such it is real just as reactions are real. ‘‘Imaginedcommunities’’ they may be, but people live and die by them.’101

My second conclusion is that in Britain the term Euroscepticism maintains adistinctly radical edge; the hint of withdrawal from the EU always seems to be thelogical conclusion of the newspaper articles I have examined above. How far this isthe case in other countries is certainly an interesting question but not one I cananswer here. What can be established with more certainty is that it will be vital forscholars to try and understand and explain the phenomenon of Euroscepticism on aninterdisciplinary basis. Political scientists, historians, economists, philosophers,psychologists, cultural theorists, media analysts, discourse analysts and linguists all,potentially, have light to shed on the political structures and societal contexts withinwhich Euroscepticism (and its national variants) is produced and received. These inturn should inform, and be informed by, the study of the European context withinwhich nominally Eurosceptical parties, pressure and interest groups make knowntheir opposition and canvass support for their arguments.

My third conclusion is policy-oriented and pertains to the various strategies thathave been and are being used by politicians in Britain and at European level to tryand counter the appeal of Eurosceptic discourse. These strategies seem to bepredicated on the assumption that to win British hearts and minds the governmentmust win the intellectual battle for history as well as showing the British people that

101 Spiering, ‘British Euroscepticism’, p. 146.

Euroscepticism and the discipline of history 327

it is in the nation’s economic interest to join such ventures as the single currency, andthey may well be right on that count. But Euroscepticism is more than a product ofmyopic nationalism or the ‘wrong’ historical stories being told. It is both wider anddeeper than that. It is wider because Euroscepticism makes commercial sense, not justintellectual sense. How else do we explain the outpouring of ‘pro-European’sentiment by the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph before and after the 1975referendum on British membership of the Common Market and their oppositeopinions today? Having explored the commercial interests lying behind the produc-tion of Eurosceptic discourse in the Sun, Times, Express and Telegraph at the turn ofthe century, Anderson argues that only in the case of the latter can we say that itsdiscourse was the product of belief – Conrad Black’s well known views on Americaover Europe and the benefits of Britain joining NAFTA.102 In the others it was theproduct of ‘economic considerations’. Eurosceptic discourse in those papers is beingused to increase reader numbers, a form of ‘hypocrisy’ whereby readers of theEurosceptic press ‘are being sold a nationalist line on the European Union by paperswhich are not most fundamentally driven by a belief in the nationalism that is beingespoused’.103 This, he says, is a cause for concern in the context of democraticaccountability in Britain. In the context of this article it can be seen how basiccommercial decisions dictate the narrative focus in news reporting, seriously preclud-ing the kind of informed debate about Europe so often being called for by politicalparties across the spectrum in Britain. Blair or his successor may well win areferendum on the euro question, but this will be more to do with timing,management, and the machinations of party politics than the fact that he has won thehistory game. Haseler’s 1996 judgement that ‘British sensibility will expand toencompass continental European history as part of its own’104 is, it seems, still wildlyoptimistic.

102 Conrad Black, ‘The Atlantic Community’, in Britain and Europe: The Choices (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 255–62.

103 Anderson, ‘A Flag of Convenience?’, p. 169. On the manifold commercial considerations of Pressoutlets, see Roger Fowler, ‘Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press’ (London:Routledge, 1991), pp. 19–25.

104 Haseler, The English Tribe, p. 185.

328 Oliver J. Daddow