A Letter about Europe

Dear Frans Timmermans,

Thank you for your letter about Brexit that was published in the Guardian on Boxing Day. I was touched to read it. It’s as if you’d bothered to write to me personally with a generous, kind Christmas message. I’m sure a great many other British people were heartened too. And I don’t simply mean Remainers like me. I imagine fair-minded Brexiters will also have appreciated your affection for our country, your sorrow at this parting of friends, your hope that despite everything we continue to be good colleagues, partners and, yes, family members of this continent of Europe that is our common home.

But I’m only speaking for myself in what follows. As this year draws to a close, I am more than ever aware of my deep personal relationship with continental Europe: of my debt of gratitude for the ways our continent has formed and shaped me, and therefore of an intense sadness at the loosening of the ties that bind us together as Europeans. You’ve told us about your own past that has given you your love for Britain and the British. Let me tell you a little about mine.

The day your letter appeared in the Guardian, 26 December, was my grandmother’s birthday. Omummy, as we called her, would have been 125 or thereabouts - she never admitted to her age, only that she had been born in the early years of Kaiser Wilhelm’s reign. For she was German, born in Cologne, brought up in an assimilated middle class Jewish family in that Rhineland city. She married a fellow liberal Jewish man from downstream Düsseldorf, where he owned a factory that produced quality leather goods. They bought a large nineteenth century house in the Goethestraße and brought up their two children there, my uncle Karl and my mother Dorothea.

I needn’t tell you what befell my family when the Nazis came to power. My mother and uncle were sent to England as teenagers and made their lives here. My grandparents fled to the Netherlands - your own country - and when the Germans occupied it, were hidden underground in Edam by two devout evangelical sisters who looked after them for three long years. Amazingly, they survived. My grandfather died soon afterwards, but my grandmother eventually came to Britain where she lived to a great age. My mother married an Englishman, and my sister and I were born in London where we were brought up.

So in my childhood, three countries featured strongly in my growing awareness of who and what I was - Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. My mother was fluent in all three languages. We spoke a lot of German at home. My grandmother would sit me on her knee at the piano and play Bach, Beethoven and Schubert to me. Leather bound volumes of Goethe and Schiller lined the top shelves of the living room bookcase (as they now line mine). We often visited Germany and the Netherlands, and later on, France and Spain. We didn’t need to discuss “being European”. It was taken for granted that this was what we were. It belonged to our family’s DNA. It was part of our identity.

When the UK joined the European Union in 1973, I don’t recall great family celebrations. It was simply the obvious thing to do to go with the flow of history. Not only for Britain’s economic benefit but (and you’ll understand why this was so important for my family) to guarantee peace across the continent so that my generation wouldn’t have to face the grim ordeals my parents’ and their parents’ generations had undergone.

In the summer of referendum year 2016, my (widowed) mother lay dying in a north London hospital. Many of the nurses who cared for her so well were from EU countries. We talked about the coming vote. “We won’t do anything so stupid as to leave the EU, will we?” she asked me several times. “I so hope not” I replied. “I think the British have more sense than that.” I was wrong. I could tell how painful the Brexit vote was for her. We didn’t speak much about it. She died three weeks later. I’m glad she did not live to see it become a reality as we shall do at the end of January.

Why am I telling you all this? Because you were kind enough to reassure us that you wouldn’t stop seeing Britain as part of the European family of peoples. I can’t tell you how important it was to read those words. For me, with my personal history, being European is a fundamental part of my identity. I can no more contemplate losing my EU passport than I can ceasing to hold a UK one. It’s not simply that to me, all the arguments point to Britain continuing to be a member state - economic, political, historical, cultural, environmental. There’s a sentient dimension too. It’s a matter of the emotions. To me, the EU circle of yellow stars on their deep blue field evokes just as as much a sense of loyalty, belonging and gratitude as the Union Flag does. I recognise myself in these symbols. My past, present and future are bound up in them. They are signs of the family I belong to.

Or were. It’s hard not to feel profoundly dislocated by the Brexit vote and its aftermath. I won’t deny that the last day of January will be difficult. I’m trying to learn how to live with the inevitability of no longer being a European citizen for a while*. There’s no point in being bitter about it or going on rehearsing the reasons why to many of us, Brexit is such a terrible prospect. We thought we’d made the case for remaining, but it turned out that we lost that argument. Perhaps none of us recognised until it was too late that this was always about much more than merely rational argument. What I’ve explained about my family history perhaps tells you why. For it really feels like an imminent amputation. I reckon Brexiters find that an absurdly overblown image. I find it just as baffling that some people can be so matter of fact about it.

But your generous letter shows us that even after Brexit, we British can, indeed should, go on thinking of ourselves as Europeans. And to be fair to some of my Brexiter friends, this is something they have been saying too. It’s reassuring that on the European mainland, you and many others regard us in this way. Thank you. It means a great deal. I feel profoundly sad that it’s come to this parting of friends. But in case no-one else thinks of saying it, thank you for all the ways in which our decades of EU membership have enriched this country since the 1970s.

So happy new year! And here’s to our continued friendship and collaboration with the other nations of our European homeland in the decade that lies ahead.

With best wishes
Michael

*PS Just to clarify: I’m not entertaining hopes that the UK will rejoin the EU in my lifetime. There are lost causes that even I am learning to accept. I simply mean that I intend to apply for dual German citizenship on the grounds of my mother having been stripped of her German nationality and rendered stateless through her exile by the Nazis. I’m not making any assumptions, but I’ve now been sent the application forms by the German Embassy. They have been extremely helpful in my contacts with them so far.

Am I Being Unpatriotic?

Dear Michael, I begin to feel that your negativity is bordering on the unpatriotic! Don't you think that our leaders deserve our support?

That was an intriguing tweet to receive yesterday, not as a personal message but publicly. She (it was from someone I know) was responding to a tweet I'd posted that contained a link to an article in The Guardian. It was lamenting our political leaders' lack of imagination and sense of history in their handling of the Brexit negotiations, specifically the matter of the Irish border.

In the two years I've been blogging about the EU, I've been accused of many things: being intemperate, ignorant, theologically inept (yes!), and over-confident about being a Remainer. But this is the first time my patriotism has been called into question (though it's a common jibe from people who should know better that Europhiles collectively are not acting patriotically).

So let's go there. First, we need to disentangle patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism means a love of and loyalty to your homeland. In Roman thought, you owe your homeland that much simply because it bore you and nurtured you. It's an act of piety (pietas) to acknowledge your debt to the people and institutions that have formed you. This is not at all the same as saying that your homeland is better than anyone else's. It's simply yours. It's part of your identity as a human being. That's why it's precious to you. At its best, patriotism is a virtue that is liberal, humane, peaceable and beneficent.

Nationalism is different. "Hard" nationalisms survive and flourish because of an innate conviction that somehow, your nation is superior to others. This can be on the grounds of almost anything you care to name, your proud history for example, or your race, religion, intellectual enlightenment, military prowess or wealth. "Soft" nationalisms are more subtle, and not always conscious. But they are expressed by aims and behaviours such as pursuing political or economic purposes that benefit your own nation in preference to, or at the expense of, others. This tends to foster national autonomy and self-determination, where the good of a nation state is no longer understood in the setting of the wider human family. It's hard not to think that agressive flag-waving, hostility to immigrants and rigorous border controls encourage a kind of national egoism that owes more to a romantic notion of "blood and soil" than to a rational idea of what it means to be good citizens.ii

I've often written about my late mother's side of our family. She was a German Jewess who escaped from the Third Reich before the war and was welcomed as a refugee in the UK. She settled here permanently, married my (gentile) father and wanted nothing else than to live out her days in domestic tranquility. She absorbed British ways, learned to speak English free of any German accent, brought her children up to love this country as the civilised, generous nation she had found it to be when she needed rescuing. She became, I think it's fair to say, a patriotic British citizen (she would never have said "English") and encouraged us to be the same. But her keenly attuned antennae abhorred the slightest whiff of self-regarding nationalism. She was a citizen of the world and of her continent, and for this reason was appalled that her adopted country opted to leave the EU just before she died.

For me, this is the nub of Brexit. What was the patriotic thing to do when we voted in last year's Referendum? Part of the answer is surely, to think about what would be in our country's best interests, what would enable it to flourish in the future. I'm sure that most people voted in that way, whether they were Brexiters or Remainers.

But patriotism (precisely because it is not nationalism) doesn't restrict that question only to "what's best for Britain" (to quote the tiresome rhetoric of David Cameron when he tried to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU). It asks how the welfare of our nation sits alongside the welfare of all the nations and of the world as a whole. It plays with the conjecture that what's best for Britain in the long run will also turn out to be best not only for Europe but for the worldwide human family. What if we even entertained the thought that we should start at the other end of the question, so to speak, and begin by asking what's best for others, especially those a lot less privileged than we are? I want to say that that option, too, is a patriotic one because it sees flourishing as mutual. We only prosper in any profound sense when everyone else does as well. It's what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. That Golden Rule should have been right at the heart of the Referendum debate. It grieved me that it wasn't.

So I see patriotism as inextricably linked to our belonging, our citizenship, not only in a national sense but in a global one. Patriotism is certainly not less than loving your country (and why not also your region, your locality, the city, town or village where you live?). If wherever we call "home" is important to us, then we should love it and everyone else whose home it also is. But belonging has concentric circles. I love my European homeland and am proud to carry a passport that announces me to be an EU citizen as well as a British one. I love the planet I have been born on, so broken and divided and carrying infinite burdens of pain, yet for all that still full of beauty and goodness, so rich in the diversity of its peoples with whom it's a joyful mystery of life that we share this globe together. Theresa May was quite wrong to say that if you are a citizen of everywhere, "a citizen of the world", you are a citizen of nowhere. Patriotism means we can be glad and grateful to be citizens of many different "somewheres", all of which we can be loyal to and love, whether it's the world we live in, the nation of our origins, or the particular place that we call "home".

This is why I believe that my vote to remain in the EU was profoundly patriotic. A patriotism for today means that we must continue to strive for a peaceable commonwealth of nations and peoples that transcends national boundaries, in which our own flourishing is part of everyone else's. So was it "bordering on the unpatriotic" to question the leadership of those who are trying to negotiate a Brexit settlement with the EU? I don't think so. A grown-up democracy doesn't blindly follow its leaders, least of all when it fears it may be heading for disaster. Yes, there is a loyalty to democratic choices that is required of all citizens, whether it is the outcome of a referendum or the government we have elected.

But it can never be an uncritical loyalty. To go on questioning, exploring, doubting, challenging, being open to change in the light of new evidence or arguments - these are both the privileges and duties of all of us in a democratic society. When it comes to Brexit, the national conversation was not suddenly closed off on 23 June 2016. On the contrary, each new step forward requires that conversation to be shifted and reconfigured in the light of altered circumstances or newly understood realities. It's patriotic to want the best out of each iteration. And it would be patriotic as well as democratic if, in the light of circumstances, we decided as a nation to change our minds about Brexit. (The "will of the people" refrain trotted out by some of our elected members including many who voted Remain doesn't advance intelligent discourse in any way that I can see.)

So you can call me a member of Her Majesty's loyal "Brexit Opposition" if you like. A twenty-first century recusant even, as Tony Dickinson suggested in response to the first version of this blog. For I believe that it's not only allowable but positively necessary to monitor how such a major decision is being worked out in practice, interrogate it closely, scrutinise the performance of those who are steering it so that we can hold them to account. If I say that I just don't believe that the case has been made for Brexit, and that this year has felt like a catalogue of mistakes, unintended consequences and muddled aims, is that unpatriotic? Not if it's said out of a genuine care for the welfare of my nation. On the contrary, maybe it's those who won't engage any further in the Brexit conversation who don't care enough about what happens to our nation.

I don't accuse the good person (whose tweet started this whole thing off) of not caring. Far from it. But I did think I needed to explain myself and defend what I want to describe as a liberal global patriotism. In these times, we have to learn to construe patriotism in the largest, most international way we can. Our world is simply too small for any of us to imagine that supposedly sacrosanct national borders can still define the limits of our concern. We urgently need to cultivate a good patriotism if all life on the planet is going to be respected and conserved. Nations and peoples need to act together to solve the world’s problems. In partnerships, we can achieve vastly more than we ever can on our own.

As I see it, Brexit is propelling the nation in completely the wrong direction, towards isolationism and disintegration. That’s dangerous. It’s not unpatriotic to say so.

Europeans who Live in Britain. Europeans who Love Britain

Last night I went to a meeting with nationals of other European Union countries who are living in our part of Northumberland. We gathered in a café at Hexham's independent cinema. Others in the room were looking forward to the evening presentation - Hidden Figures, maybe, or Fences. There was the happy atmosphere of expected enjoyment.

But our gathering was not for entertainment. On the night before The Queen was due to sign off the legislation paving the way for Article 50 to be invoked and the Brexit process triggered, this group of fifteen or so was contemplating what their destiny could be after the United Kingdom had left the EU. For as we all know, the UK government has failed to offer any undertakings to non-UK citizens of EU nations about remaining in this country once Brexit is a reality.

In this fascinating, articulate group of people many nationalities are represented: German, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Greek, French, Swedish and Italian. They had lived in the UK for many years, decades even. Some were retired, some in employment. They were entirely indigenised. Their English was fluent. Their children had known no other life but in Britain. They paid taxes and social security in the UK. They owned property and had put down roots here. Most had long since ceased to feel they belonged anywhere else. Some had all but forgotten what it was like to live elsewhere.

You'll realise why I felt that my presence at this gathering was under somewhat false pretences. I am not facing their anxieties. I don't have to fear for the future of my family's or my own life in Britain. But I do know something about what it means and even how it feels when your future is not secure and you don't feel safe. Regular readers of this blog know that my late mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to Britain in the late 1930s. Her parents escaped with their lives because they had been taken in and cared for underground in German-occupied Holland. Books of German poetry, 19th century Jewish prayer books, some pieces of china, a seventeenth century map of Edam on in our entrance hall and an old Dutch cupboard in the living room symbolise that story and help keep it alive as it recedes in time from the present.

I'd been invited to attend as a known champion of the EU in Tynedale. A few knew about Christians for Europe which I co-convened during the Referendum campaign (and where a still active Twitter feed @Xians4EU can be viewed if you are not on Twitter yourself). A couple of other people from continental Europe had acquired UK citizenship. But most had not. They had assumed that in a United Kingdom that was an EU member state, there was no need to worry about national citizenship because now, after a terribly destructive war, we were at last Europeans together. Why shouldn't they make that assumption?

I heard a lot that helped me to empathise with the predicament of these good people. "We love Britain. It's our home. We belong here. We've worked here for years. We contribute to its wellbeing. We make a vital contribution to our locality here in Northumberland. We do not want to live anywhere else. We are all Europeans now - or thought we were." In all this, there was a striking lack of bitterness or self-pity. Yes, there was a lot of anxiety, together with puzzlement and hurt that their host country had not offered any undertakings about staying in Britain after Brexit when it could so easily have done so.

Indeed, I think it was the not-knowing that was the worst thing. Some said that British friends and neighbours had tried to reassure them by telling them that they wouldn't have to leave, even if they would have to wait to be told. Nobody said they had experienced hostility from locals; indeed they spoke of the warmth and friendliness of Northumberland people. (As a southerner blown in from London, I could identify with this.) But wonderful though this all is, anyone can see why it isn't enough.

Listening to the members of this group, I couldn't but feel a sense not only of profound sympathy but of shame. Many of them spoke about what it was like to contemplate being treated as "bargaining chips" in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations. They believed it would not have cost the UK much to take the generous, moral high ground and offer unconditional undertakings to long-standing European citizens from other countries who have made their home in these islands. They spoke about Britain's famous traditions of welcome to people from overseas (not simply continental Europe of course).

I didn't think I should say too much as a native Brit, but I did want to tell them that many of us, even some Brexiters I'd spoken to, were completely on their side. We understood their fears. We wanted to do all we could to help. And many of us were, I also said, ashamed that our country had treated them so badly, not just because of all they were contributing to the UK but, more basic even than that, because they are our fellow human beings and as the Hebrew Bible says, we have a responsibility to care for the stranger in our midst. Only they aren't strangers any more. They are our friends. And that makes it all the more shaming.

I understand the arguments about UK expats who live in mainland EU countries. A number of them have become friends through our regular visits to France. They too are anxious about their future after Brexit. I sympathise very much with them too, not least with those who have lived long enough outside Britain not to have qualified to vote in the Referendum (a particularly mean attitude on the part of the government, I thought). But two wrongs don't make a right. I believe that if the UK had behaved in a principled way and given the undertakings our fellow-European friends needed, it would have created a more propitious environment within which to negotiate a good Brexit deal. Generosity begets generosity: the other 27 EU nations might just have felt more inclined to behave generously towards Britain as a result.  This country badly needs friends abroad right now. So it would have been an act of enlightened self-interest to say to my conversation-partners last night, "Yes, of course you must stay in Britain. This is your home, and we wouldn't have it any other way".

But we didn't say that, despite the best efforts of some in Parliament. And to that extent, Britain has shown itself to be a less kind, less generous and less fair nation than I thought it was. With less heart, you become less great. This is why I am ashamed. Aren't you?

So I'm going to show solidarity. I'm sure many others will do the same. We must change this situation, and give back to our friends with whom we share this continent, our brothers and sisters, the future they want in our midst and have a right to expect.

So How Would Brexit Affect You?

I've tried in these blogs about the EU referendum to turn the question round, as I believe Christians should. What matters isn't just 'what's in it for us, what's in it for me?' but "what's in it for everyone else in the EU and what do we bring to the Union as our contribution to this family of nations?" It's a corporate implication of the second great commandment of the Torah quoted by Jesus: "love your neighbour as yourself".

But we wouldn't be human if we didn't wonder what our personal lives would be like if Brexit became a fact on 24 June. I won't pretend that it wouldn't be a personal nightmare to wake up and learn that this country had decided to walk away from the European Union. It would be a case of joining the hapless sailors at the start of The Tempest and crying "To prayers! To prayers!" But by then it would be too late to do much about it. 

I can't say how this "tempest" would affect the nation or me personally as far as the economy is concerned. Nobody can, though it doesn't stop a lot of people trying. But there is one thing that would change for me pretty decisively. And that is, that I would lose my European citizenship. I would no longer carry a passport that proclaimed "European Union" as well as "United Kingdom". I would no longer be able to pass through the green EU channel at customs. I wouldn't be able to carry an EHIC health card across Europe. There would be other losses too, real as well a symbolic.

But the loss of citizenship is a really big issue for me. To be an EU citizen has been part of my identity for most of my lifetime. It's a prized part of who I am, born of a German Jewish mother whose own parents were sheltered in Holland during the Nazi era, married to a woman with Irish heritage, owning a property in France. I feel completely at ease in continental Europe. It's my homeland, this dust whom Europe "bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam" (if you'll forgive a rather shameless borrowing of Rupert Brooke's famous poem). It's where I am connected and have always belonged. 

So what happens when, if, my precious European citizenship and the identity it confers is shorn from me? Can it be retrieved in any way other than a landscape of the mind, a land of lost content, a place of yesterday rather than today and tomorrow?

I hope and pray that it doesn't come to this. Because half in my mind is the idea that anything to do with my citizenship is a basic human right which should never involuntarily be removed. So here's my question.

Might it be possible for us dismembered, forcibly exiled Europhiles to be reattached to the EU in some other way? I'm thinking: might other EU member states make provision for British people who do not want to be deprived of their European citizenship? I'm thinking of a special kind of dual citizenship we might call UK Plus whereby we could elect also to become honorary citizens of Germany, France, Ireland (Scotland one day?), any member state that valued its own links with British people and didn't want to sever ties any more than many of us do. And might the European Parliament pass some enabling legislation to make this possible? 

As a European at home in North East England, I don't want to emigrate. I don't want to say farewell to these islands that I love, where my family and friends are, where so much of my life has been lived and where I have been fortunate enough to be happy. Britain has been good to my family and to me. But so has Europe. I don't want, I really do not want to be cast adrift from the mainland, collapse into a complacent island mentality that imagines that it can pretend to a nostalgically imagined, and in the end futile, self-sufficiency. I don't want my grandchildren to grow up on such an island and with such a defensive attitude to the wider world. And it's their future we should be thinking about, not just our own. My children and grandchildren were born as Europeans. It's their birthright. It mustn't be stolen from them.  

I've not seen this question discussed anywhere though I have today written to a national daily paper about it. But I very much want to lay down a marker that once given, it is not acceptable to be deprived of our hard-won citizenship. I shall accept that Brexit is the will of the British, if it turns out that way. The people will have spoken. But minorities have rights too. Their voices need to heard. And I very much doubt that there aren't others who will echo these thoughts and can perhaps suggest where they might be taken for discussion. 

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