Greg Daly
Greg Daly considers how the UK’s Anglican heritage leaves it uneasy in Europe
“I am a European,” wrote Boris Johnson this March, after much vacillation nailing his public colours to the Brexit mast, adding that it is “vital to stress that there is nothing necessarily anti-European or xenophobic in wanting to vote Leave on June 23”.
He was hardly alone in such claims, of course – just as he is not alone in repeating them now. Last year, for instance, UKIP’s Nigel Farage complained to the BBC’s governing bodies about the common usage of the term ‘Europe’ as shorthand for ‘European Union’. They weren’t the same thing, he maintained.
One might suspect that Brexit’s pied pipers doth protest too much, but for anyone who has lived in Britain, assertions that the UK can be European without being part of the European Union will have the same ring as the Anglican line that it’s quite possible to be Catholic without being in communion with the successor of St Peter.
“You mean you’re Roman Catholics,” the refrain goes, “We’re Catholics too.”
In fairness, the conceit that the Church of England is both Catholic and Reformed, albeit with varying views of how the two should be balanced, has – rightly or wrongly – long been central to the Anglican identity.
Cultures
Political cultures reflect broader cultures, and such cultures – as the late Catholic historian Christopher Dawson consistently and convincingly argued – are ultimately religious. Even secularised countries retain the values, expectations, and perspectives of their historically dominant faiths. The UK’s political culture has long been – in effect – Anglican, whereas almost all other countries involved in the European project have historically been shaped by Catholicism or Protestantism.
Catholic countries, as we know only too well, can have a decidedly laid back attitude towards the letter of laws, preferring to abide by general principles and allowing culture and tradition to do the heavy lifting. It’s an approach that clearly has its drawbacks, of course, with its emphasis on families as much as individuals and its willingness to forgive rather than cast out public sinners both having been identified in academic literature as possible factors leading to a correlation between Catholic cultures and social corruption.
Whatever the reason, though, it seems Catholic culture has generally allowed for a broad readiness to go with the European flow and shrug about trivial regulatory quirks rather than getting agitated about them.
On the other hand, as a legacy of the Reformation and its birth in the Printing Revolution, Protestant cultures retain the ingrained habits of placing huge emphasis on the scrutiny of texts and words.
It is perhaps no accident, after all, that the Danish parliament, for example, has for decades had a committee on European affairs that almost weekly meets to examine various EU issues in general, work with other committees on EU-related issues in Denmark, scrutinise and regulate the government’s EU policy, issue opinions to EU institutions and test that the EU’s subsidiarity principle is being applied.
And of course it was Germany’s highest court that took the trouble to clarify the legal reality that the EU institutions have no powers, save those that they are delegated by the member states that remain “masters of the treaties”.
Historically suspicious of Europe’s Catholic states, neither really Catholic nor really Protestant, uneasy with letting things go but unwilling to commit to the grind of examining what Europe’s about far beyond tabloid headlines about bendy bananas and unaccountable bureaucrats, it’s perhaps not surprising that the UK – or, more precisely, England – has after decades of discomfort in the European house found herself standing awkwardly at the European doorway, wondering what lies outside.
We will all be impoverished if she steps through that door.
