Perry Andersons third essay on the European project, The Breakaway, traces the history of the UKs involvement, from non-participant to rejected supplicant to member for 47 years and then to fractious departure.
The UK was an uninterested spectator as six European states formed the European Coal and Steel Community, the 1950s ancestor of the European Union. Neither was it involved when the Treaty of Rome in 1957 created the European Economic Community (EEC), superseding the Coal and Steel Community.
Later, national economic decline and foreign policy upheavals such as the Suez crisis and decolonisation led the two prime ministers named Harold Macmillan and Wilson to each seek membership of the Common Market, the European free-trade zone. The French president, Charles de Gaulle, vetoed both bids. Only when Georges Pompidou succeeded de Gaulle did a Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, manage to break the logjam, joining the six founding member states in the EEC alongside Denmark and Ireland in 1973.
Forty or so of Heaths own MPs opposed joining, but a band of 69 pro-European MPs within the otherwise hostile parliamentary Labour Party outnumbered them, giving Heath a majority of 17 for passage of the European Communities Bill in 1972. Perhaps the narrowness of that margin dissuaded him from fulfilling his pledge not to join the EEC without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He rejected the idea of a referendum implied in that formulation and avoided mentioning the inescapable fact that the UK had sacrificed a degree of sovereignty in conceding the supremacy of European law a condition of EEC membership.
It was Wilson, returned to power, who says Anderson went through the motions of renegotiating the terms secured by Heath and then in 1975 mounted a referendum. On a turnout of 64%, the majority in favour of Wilsons deal was more than 2:1.
When Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 general election, she launched a campaign to cut the UKs disproportionate contribution to the EEC budget, and managed to recoup two-thirds. The Single European Act of 1987, a major revision of the Treaty of Rome, carried her personal stamp, having been steered through by her nominated commissioner. The countrys position in Europe seemed both distinctive and secure.
However, Thatcher having broken with her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, over his attempts to make sterling shadow the EECs Exchange Rate Mechanism was determined to resist the drive within Brussels and Frankfurt for the mechanism to be upgraded to a full-blown single currency. This opposition forced the resignation of her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who in turn lit the fuse that led to her own departure from Downing Street.
Her preferred candidate, John Major, won the succession and negotiated a British opt-out from the euro. But even in doing so, and to the dismay of many of his backbenchers, he signed up to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, which created the European Union. The anti-Maastricht Tories, seeing the Danes reject the treaty in a referendum, called for just such a vote at home supported, as it happens, by the Liberal Democrats. Majors position was fatally undermined when the UK was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism after a run on the pound on Black Wednesday later in 1992.
Under intense pressure from Brussels, Denmark held a second referendum, overturning the first. Major finally persuaded the British parliament to ratify Maastricht even so, but his authority over his own party was broken, and the humiliating exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism had so tarnished the Tory brand that Tony Blair comfortably won the 1997 election.
Majors three successors as Tory leader, all opponents of Maastricht, all trailed behind Blair in voter preference. Instead, Blairs most formidable opponent proved to be his chancellor, Gordon Brown, whose dogged resistance thwarted all the prime ministers designs to join the single currency.
What Brown had not seen coming when in due course he himself became prime minister in 2007 was the financial crisis the following year. He was duly dislodged in 2010, with the first pro-Europe leader of the Conservatives since Major David Cameron heading the largest party within a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the most ardent pro-Europeans in Parliament.
However, this victory was shadowed by the previous years European elections, where the upstart UK Independence Party beat Labour into second place. Pressure from UKIPs electoral successes and from his own malcontents on the back benches was generating a momentum that Cameron thought he could control, but could not.
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