The White Cliffs of Dover on the coast of the United Kingdom
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
Photographer: Jason Alden / Bloomberg
The memorial to the 1948 Gatow Air Disaster is easily overlooked in a city with more than a large proportion of 20th-century ghosts. A simple memorial plaque in the Westend district of Berlin commemorates the mid-air crash that claimed the lives of 15 people during the early days of the Cold War.
The stone entry may be inconspicuous, but the location in the St. George’s Anglican Church reflects a long – standing British presence in the German capital, and the events that mark it are a window into the United Kingdom’s most important role in shaping the European war after the war.
With Brexit now really, the UK may discover that it is not that simple to cast a European identity that is so anchored in history and geography. Indeed, the reality – and a political culture that is constantly plagued by questions about the relationship with its European neighbors – seems doomed to bind Britain to the continent for years to come, despite all the government’s efforts to re-brand the nation as the world champion of international free trade.
The remains of the Soviet Yak fighter jet that collided with a Vickers plane near Gatow Airport, Berlin on April 5, 1948.
Photographer: Henry Burroughs / AP Photo
After Prime Minister Boris Johnson entered into a trade agreement with the European Union on Christmas Eve, it said it was time to move on. The UK needs to ‘leave behind old, dried-out, tired, super-mastication arguments’ and ‘keep Brexit done’, he told the House of Commons on December 30 when he repealed the agreement with the law.
Given Britain’s post – war history, that finality could be wishful thinking. According to the pro-Brexit camp, he has degenerated the European dimension of the country’s past, according to Helene von Bismarck, a historian of Britain’s role in international relations of the 20th century.
It offers a very selective view of British history, ‘she said. “This whole idea that we are now free to return to who we really are – history does not really substantiate that.”
Britain’s role in post – war Germany gives a sense of the extent of the continental ties. Berlin in 1948 was a city at the forefront when a Vickers plane from London via Hamburg was involved in a collision with a Soviet Yak fighter in April as it approached the British airport at RAF Gatow, and all 14 passengers and crew as well as the Soviet pilot. Each blamed the other for an international incident that contributed to the rapid deterioration of east-west relations.
Within two months, London was the site for a declaration of allied plans to create a West German state, which angered Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who ordered Berlin to be cut off from the rest of Germany. It was the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who convinced the Americans to take the lead in air transport in stock and breaking the blockade, historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book ‘Post War’. The continent would be divided until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The mainland was divided until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Photographer: Gerard Malie / AFP / Getty Images
Washington and Moscow were perhaps the most important players in the Cold War, but Britain was at the heart of the events that forged the new European reality – even though the United Kingdom would not have attributed its fate to the continent until the 1970s by joining the forerunner. of the region’s defining political project, the EU.
In February last year, a few days after the UK approved the outcome of the 2016 referendum and officially left the EU, Johnson used a speech on the future of Britain after Brexit to say that the UK “after decades of hibernation resurrected “and is ready to resume its historic role as the world’s leading proponent of free trade.
Recent research by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests that the UK will not be able to air Europe so easily. A majority of UK government policy makers, think tanks, academia and the private sector regard the country’s future role in world politics as a close connection with the EU, a think tank survey found. Leading an ’emerging Commonwealth’ of countries was considered the least realistic outcome, preferred by less than 2% of respondents.
While the Brexit agreement The study, which was sealed on 24 December, describes the extent of future ties, and the study shows that there is room for a return to closer cooperation – especially in areas such as climate change, EU-UK migration and foreign policy – as London preferred.
Both sides better not to let it go. In a parallel study, Ireland was found to be the only one of the 27 members of the EU to regard British relations as a top priority. In general, the United Kingdom has less priority for the members of the bloc than China, Russia, the USA – or even the Western Balkans.
“There is a certain fatigue and I think it has an impact on the willingness to engage,” said Jana Puglierin, head of the ECFR’s Berlin office and director of the research project. “The countries that were traditionally close to the UK have moved on.”
This is probably not a luxury offered by the United Kingdom, which has been traumatized by questions of European integration since the war. As early as 1950, when the plans for the European Coal and Steel Community were driven, Britain refused to participate due to the suspicion of continental influence in its affairs.
It was also an economic decision: in 1947, the British economy looked much better than that of its neighbors, aided by trade with the empire. But by the end of 1951, West German exports were fueling a ‘European economic renaissance’, the historian Judt wrote.
Edward Heath, middle, at a ‘Keep Britain in Europe’ press conference in London, on 13 May 1975.
Source: AP Photos
By 1955, Britain had signed an association agreement, and in 1961 it applied to become a full member of the then European Economic Community – French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed it.
The United Kingdom under the Conservative government of Edward Heath was finally admitted to the EEC on 1 January 1973. But what followed was 47 years of wrangling that eventually led to the EU leaving on 31 January.
Accession was quickly followed by a referendum on membership, called for by a Labor government plagued by party battles across Europe. In the 1980s, the conservatives under Margaret Thatcher became increasingly Eurosceptic and Europe played a major role in her downfall in 1990. Her successor, John Major, during his time in Downing Street no. 10 struggled to control his cabinet.
Prime Minister David Cameron tried to exploit the boiling point by allowing another referendum on EU membership. The vote to leave costs him his job and that of his successor, Theresa May.
Johnson said in February that all disputes “had deteriorated in the past”. “We have the opportunity, we have the newly recaptured powers, we know where we want to go, and that’s the world in,” he said. Its aim is to forge a ‘Global Britain’.
Boris Johnson outlines the government’s negotiating position with the European Union after Brexit on 3 February.
Photographer: Frank Augstein – WPA Pool / Getty Images
The UK’s dilemma is that it runs the risk of being on the wrong side of history by doing so alone in a time of great power competition between the US and China that is unlikely to change under a Joe Biden government. not.
Making his back look at a half-century-old economic and political alliance with Europe seems increasingly risky, especially as President Donald Trump of Brexit leaves the White House and Commonwealth countries Australia and India work with Japan to meet the challenge. better off from China.
The EU, meanwhile, has its own leadership challenges, according to Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent in England. With the British right to forge trade agreements with non-EU partners, the two parties will “increasingly move in different directions”, he told Bloomberg Television.
History suggests that the roads are destined to walk together again. Even Johnson acknowledges that the UK is a European power “through irrevocable facts of history and geography and language and culture and instinct and sentiment”, just not “according to treaty or law.”
Back in 1948, Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labor Government faced a historic decision on the country’s future ties with the mainland, preferring to sever previous British thinking in favor of its commitment to Europe.
Once again, it was Bevin, his foreign secretary, who committed the country to ‘involvement with its continental neighbors in a common defense strategy, a’ Western European Union ‘, due to the fact that British security needs no longer that could not be separated from the continent, ”Judt wrote.
The union became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed in April 1949 by the USA, Canada and ten European countries, and is still the basis of trans-Atlantic relations today.
The following year, the foundation stone for the St. George Church in the British sector of Berlin, instead of an older English chapel destroyed in a war bomb attack. The memorial plaque for the victims of Gatow was later added.
For Puglierin at the European Council on Foreign Relations, policy areas of mutual interest hold the promise of future co-operation between the UK and the EU, despite the current British government’s desire to cut loose. “Not everything is lost,” she said.