Btw: The new US correspondent for the BBC is the old Europe correspondent. Here is his final article on Europe:
BBC - Mark Mardell's Euroblog: A final essay on Europe
I thought this bit was particularly insightful (although I had figured out as much for myself anyway):
Quote:
But the deep roots of the British problem with Europe are in our attitude to World War II. We British don't quite get the horror of this past.
...
Our view of Europe is defined by "the few" and "our finest hour" - heroism that paid off, rather than by shame. The shame of being the defeated bad guys, the shame of conquest and invasion, the shame of collaboration.
Take a Flemish friend of mine. His great-uncle was a member of the resistance, he stashed guns under the floorboards of his uncle's farmhouse, to fight the Nazis. Pretty heroic, huh? Well the Nazis called on him to give himself up to certain death, and because he didn't, my friend's uncle and grandfather were tortured and sent to work camps, where they died a few weeks before the war ended. The rest of the family barely talked to this "hero" until the day he died. And this is just one among thousands, millions of such stories of moral complexity. And it's why Belgians, French, Germans, Italians may not always like the actual EU any more than sceptical Brits, but why, to them, the ideal of a political Europe is something precious.
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