On the day after the death of HM Queen Elizabeth II, my wife and I were walking through a small coastal town in Wales called the Mumbles (Welsh: Mwmbwls). We were on a walking holiday on the Gower peninsula, and this was to be our last long coastal walk.
The Gower is designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty. Indeed, it was the first place in Britain to be so designated – and it deserves that status. In early September, however, it was outstandingly quiet as well as outstandingly beautiful. Most tourists had already departed, “back to school”. The academic year at the School, as the LSE is often informally called, starts a little later than schools, so my wife and I could walk the coast without seeing many, hardly any, other human beings.
However, the Mumbles, which was the beginning of the end of our final walking route, has life beyond tourism. We were among people for the first time in a week. At mid-day on the 9th of September, as we walked out of the town, a single church bell began tolling – very slowly. I have often thought that Britain puts on its most impressive face in times of national celebration. The utter simplicity of the slow tolling bell was differently impressive, and awfully poignant. A quiet national grief became palpable, with relative strangers sharing with each other the passing of the nation’s most shared familiar stranger. Where decisions on accession and succession have nothing to do with popular voting, the incumbent has the chance to be, for each in the all, a singular representation of the whole as a whole. For many in that whole, the death of the Queen will have been felt singularly too, strangely personally. The voting minority in this whole who do not feel in this way touched (or expected not to be) might want to reflect on the singular virtue of a social whole whose singular representative is not elected by a voting majority, and hence against the will of a minority.
What might we reflect on in the European Institute? The Queen’s reign lasted far longer than our own modest 30-year history. Indeed, it spans the post-War history of the emerging institutions of European union – or nearly all of it. Looking back a little before she became Queen, we might begin with a famous speech from a British Prime Minister who would, in 1952, become her first Prime Minister. In 1946, when the horror of war was still alive to everyone, Winston Churchill, gave a speech at Zurich University that called for the formation of “a kind of United States of Europe”. Churchill was no longer Britain’s Prime Minister, and not yet its Prime Minister for a second time, but his voice still carried weight in post-War Europe. His call to overcome “that series of frightful nationalistic quarrels”, for Europeans of the future “in so many ancient states and nations” to be spared the tragedy of “tearing each other to pieces”, his call to build a political body in Europe “under which it can dwell in peace”, was enthusiastically received and quite rapidly taken up. On the other hand, when Churchill conjured up this new “grouping” of nations, he did not at that time think Britain would be part of it. The “coherent natural grouping” of nations from the “mighty continent” would be a partner with what he called another “natural grouping in the Western Hemisphere”: “we British have our own Commonwealth of Nations”. Along with the UK, the members of the Commonwealth at this time were the semi-independent polities that had Dominion status, and in 1946, white governments, within the British Empire. In 1946 these were Canada, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland, and the Union of South Africa. It is sometimes said that when Germany has been in question for Germany, Europe has always been in view too. When Europe has been in view for Britain, it is the history and memory of Empire that has loomed largest over its horizon.
As the institutional forerunners of the EU began to take shape, it seems that Churchill began to look more favourably on the idea of Britain joining the European group. Perhaps the “natural grouping” of the Commonwealth started looking considerably less “natural” to him when the organisation of countries that were formerly part of the Empire started to include quite so many countries of the (rapidly diminishing) Empire not ruled by white people. In any case, he was unquestionably in favour of Britain joining the EEC later in his long life, which is no great advert for it. On the other hand, the post-Empire development of the Commonwealth of Nations had no greater champion than HM Queen Elizabeth II. Her reign, in one sense, simply coincided with decolonisation and the end of Empire, but these were developments that increasingly marked her reign, and were ultimately embraced by it. Multiculturalism in Britain, another legacy of Empire, is sometimes disparaged. But the ideals of respect and tolerance of people from diverse heritages and cultures, the cosmopolitan hope that an international community can be a community of friends, was a cultural development that Britain made a significant contribution to in its second Elizabethan age – with the Queen, literally and also, in time, figuratively, at the head of that development in Britain.
As the Empire receded as a political reality, Britain moved, as Churchill moved, closer to Europe. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech to the European parliament in 2005 is a watershed in this new post-War history. Like all of his Elizabethan Prime-ministerial predecessors, Blair’s speech about the future of Europe was not free of Imperial references. Nevertheless, the attempt was made there to mark a decisive break from the post-War British understanding of both itself and of Europe in that regard. Blair did not represent the Europe that “had dominated the world, colonised large parts of it, fought wars against each other for world supremacy” as something one might recall without more ado, still less without apology: if there was a time when European leaders had done so, he said, “those days were gone”. Moreover, he did not speak up for “the idea of Europe, united and working together”, as Churchill had, from the outside, but firmly from the inside, as “a passionate pro-European”, confidently affirming his commitment to “Europe as a political project”. Perhaps HM Queen Elizabeth II shared Blair’s enthusiasm for Britain in Europe. In a desperately ill-conceived bid by Prime Minister David Cameron to quell the divisions over Europe within his own party in a national way, a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU was held in 2016. The constitutional Monarch did not intervene in the debates, at least not explicitly or openly or publicly. But it is hard not to think there was some kind of silent protest in play when, at the state opening of parliament in June 2017, as she laid out the government’s intention to deliver the eight bills necessary for Brexit, she wore a hat that bore a strong resemblance to, of all things, the European Union flag.