Britain's drift from Europe: The Stone Raft?

In “A Jangada de Pedra” (The Stone Raft) the Portuguese writer José Saramago imagines Iberia literally breaking off from the rest of Europe. The earth trembles, the Pyrenees split and the peninsula floats across the open Atlantic. The novel dramatizes Spanish and Portuguese insecurities about their place in “Europe”, a term that they—like Britons—tend to use in the third person.

Talk of such an option betrays the real difficulty: Westminster struggles to understand the vast political project creaking into life across the English Channel. For Britain, the relationship with the EU is transactional. For those nations at the core of Europe, a sense of shared destiny oils the wheels of compromise. The French-German partnership, reaffirmed today in Berlin, rests on intense, regular deal making, a habit honed through cohabitation and coalition-building in domestic politics. It transcends ideological differences (such as those between Angela Merkel and François Hollande) in a way that befuddles Britons. The next burst of political and economic integration, likely to begin in earnest after September’s German election, will advance it much further.

Hence the bafflement amongst Britain’s neighbours. The notion of outright, near-unilateral demands—a “shopping list” is the term used by the London press—is about as far removed from the agenda in Paris, Berlin and Brussels as it is possible to be. Yet it lies at the heart of Mr Cameron’s plan to keep Britain in the EU. Small wonder, then, that the plan looks shaky

In parts of London tonight a slight smell of rotten eggs hangs in the air; evidence of a fire at a chemical factory in Rouen, in northern France, earlier today. Evidence, too, that the “continent”—still—lies a few dozen miles off the south coast of England. Politically, though, Britain increasingly resembles a stone raft. The content of yesterday’s speech may decide whether the institutional partnerships that tether it to the mainland will still be there in five years.

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