British Intellectuals and the European Idea. Narrating Europe Between History and Politics (1956-1989)

Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project has been a vast subject of scholarly interest, but in the English context this attention has often been restricted to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK reluctant approach to the process of European unification. According to the recent historiography, intellectuals and intellectual public discourse have been an essential condition for forging, shaping and (re)creating the idea of ‘politics’ and ‘identity’ in Britain during the post-WW2 phase. This paper draws attention to the intellectual debate on Europe in Britain from the 1957 to the end of the Cold War. Intellectuals – understood here in the sense of cultural actors engaged in public and/or political debates developed on journals or newspapers – played a major role in fostering this process. Starting from here I intend to consider, on the one hand, how intellectuals narrated Europe as a cultural autonomous subject; on the other, I will deal primarily with the response to the profound transition taking place in the intellectual environment. I will illustrate how British intellectuals pursued new international role for Britain as a champion of freedom and as an example of democracy. In this discourse European history and the European project are central, and the contradictory debate about the role of Britain in Europe is a striking example of how national and European narratives can interact and, eventually, collapse.