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> Were those really foreign political institutions when Britain was directly involved in their creation and Thatcher's governments basically wrote much of the r
by tablespoon 4y ago
> Were those really foreign political institutions when Britain was directly involved in their creation and Thatcher's governments basically wrote much of the rules of the free trade area?
Are you talking about the EU? Because its governing institutions would rightly be seen as foreign (or at least not domestic/ours), until Britons' felt national identity becomes European rather than British. That matters more than the legalistic actions taken by some politician or any particular policy.
- pavlov 4y agoThat’s the question. Why did so many of the British never feel the EU is “theirs” even though objectively they were one of the most powerful countries in the Union and were instrumental in designing the rules? It might have made some kind of difference if enough politicians after 1990 would have bothered to explain that to the British public.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Why did so many of the British never feel the EU is “theirs” even though objectively they were one of the most powerful countries in the Union and were instrumental in designing the rules? > It might have made some kind of difference if enough politicians after 1990 would have bothered to explain that to the British public. If I'm understanding it correctly, the UK had ~10% of the EU Parliament seats. Even if that was objectively more than anyone else had, it's still quite a minority. I'm not British, but the all the kinds of things you focus don't seem like they'd be at all significant for one's felt identity, especially when it competes with a long-established felt identity. Felt identity is formed by other things than "we have a large but clearly minority voting bloc" or "some economic policy was strongly influenced by a domestic politician 40 years ago."