Brexit - Historical relationship between UK & Europe - Financial Times

When historians get sucked into a political controversy, it is often a sign that a country is going through an identity crisis. In Germany in the 1960s, an academic argument about whether the country had been responsible for the first world war provoked a ferocious public debate — because of its implication that Nazism was not a solitary aberration in German history. The bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 provoked a sharp division between French historians about the true meaning of the events of 1789 — with the left celebrating the revolution as a triumph of liberty and the right emphasising the way in which it had descended into terror and despotism.
Disputes between historians of Britain have not tended to be so obviously political. Generations of undergraduates have enjoyed, or snoozed through, arguments about the standard of living in the industrial revolution (better or worse?); or the “strange death of liberal England” (organised labour or the first world war?) — and such debates sometimes did pit Marxist historians against conservatives. But these arguments generally remained some way removed from the rough-and-tumble of daily politics.

So it is perhaps a sign that Britain is now much less sure of its national identity that the country’s historical profession has got sucked into a heated argument about the most vexed political issue of the moment: Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe.
With Britain’s referendum on EU membership just weeks away, David Cameron has appealed to British history to make the case for the UK staying inside the EU. In a speech at the British Museum earlier this week, the prime minister argued that, “From Caesar’s legions to the wars of the Spanish succession, from Napoleonic wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . Britain has always been a European power.”
In his efforts to ground his arguments in British history, the prime minister was tapping into a debate that has already been rumbling in the country’s universities. The trigger for the dispute was the formation of a group called “Historians for Britain”, chaired by David Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge. In a letter released ahead of Cameron’s attempted renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s EU membership, the Historians for Britain argued that the UK should stay only in a “radically reformed European Union” that reflected “the distinctive character of the United Kingdom, rooted in its largely uninterrupted history since the Middle Ages”.
The declaration from Historians for Britain was signed by a sizeable group of academics and authors across the UK. It swiftly provoked a blistering response from a much larger group of historians, based in universities all over Britain, including Cambridge. An article for History Today, headlined “Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated”, laid into the idea of Britain’s “largely uninterrupted history” — arguing that “such continuity would indeed be spectacular, but it is illusory. Britain’s past is neither so exalted nor so unique.”
The tone of the initial letters was reasonably polite. But subsequent contributions were not so restrained. Neil Gregor, professor of modern history at Southampton, who helped to draft the response to Historians for Britain, later fulminated in a blog post that “it is difficult to know where to start when engaging with a narrative that, as any Lower Second Class undergraduate can tell you, the profession abandoned decades ago.”
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One place to start, it strikes me, is by trying to break down the argument into its component parts and then talking to historians on both sides of the debate. I swiftly discovered that my journalistic tendency to refer to the two camps as “pro-” and “anti-EU” drew pained responses. Both sides are keen to insist that their view of history is not distorted by anything as vulgar as political prejudice. Nonetheless, signature of either letter is probably a reliable predictor of a vote to either Leave or Remain in the EU.