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Euroscepticism and History Education in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Oliver J. Daddow
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Abstract

This article examines the role played by national history in generating and sustaining the popularity of British Eurosceptic arguments. The core argument advanced is that the modernist approach to history prevalent among British historians and the society in which they work has to be considered the key reason for Euroscepticism retaining such a popular appeal in Britain. The overly reverential attitude to recent martial history on the part of the British, and an almost total neglect of the peacetime dimensions of modern European history since 1945, both serve to exaggerate the tendency in the country to fall back on glib images of Britain as a great power with a ‘special relationship’ across the Atlantic and Europe as a hostile ‘other’ to be confronted rather than engaged with constructively.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , 2006 , pp. 64 - 85
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2006

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References

2 The workshop took place on 21–2 May 2004 at the European Union Center at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, New York. Papers were delivered by Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, Leonard Ray, Christopher Andersen and Braden Smith, Oliver Daddow, Robert Dewey, Charles Lees, Craig Parsons, Christopher Flood, Nick Sitter and Nicole Lindstrom.Google Scholar

3 An issue that emerged from the workshop paper by Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Supporting the Union? Euroscepticism and Domestic Politics of Integration’.Google Scholar

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8 Attitudes to Europe obviously influence, and are obviously influenced by, attitudes to America. The American dimension of Euroscepticism will not be considered in this paper, but for a critical deconstruction of the myth of the special relationship as it pertains to the Europe question see Daddow, Oliver J., ‘America, Britain and European Integration: Exposing the Cracks in the “Special Relationship”’, in Agnès Alexandre-Collier (ed.), La ‘Relation Spéciale’ Royaume-Uni/Etats-Unis: Entre mythe et réalité, Nantes, Éditions du Temps, 2002, pp. 66–82.Google Scholar

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28 On Monnet, Camps and the historiographical legacy bequeathed by the ‘founding fathers’ see Daddow, Britain and Europe, pp. 70–6 and 91–5.Google ScholarPubMed

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53 For instance Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2nd edn, London, Granta, 2000.Google Scholar

54 An opinion confirmed in the study of disciplinary cultures by Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories, 2nd edn, Buckingham, Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 2001.Google Scholar

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57 On recent national and European efforts to bring a Europeanist flavour to British education see Daddow, Britain and Europe, pp. 24–5.Google Scholar

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59 Marcussen et al., p. 116.Google Scholar