HY250      One Unit
Britain, Brussels, Bruges & Brexit: Reassessing Four Decades of UK EC/EU Membership

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Britain was a member state of the EC/EU for four decades.  At one level, this period was one of almost continuous rows between the UK and its European partners, over the EC/EU budget, its policies, its membership and its evolution.  The label ‘awkward partner’, first used in the Foreign Office in the early 1980s to describe the UK’s role within the Community, was thus largely merited.  But while not wholly inaccurate, the label also misses some of the much more constructive and transformative aspects of Britain’s experience within the EC/EU.  British influence in Brussels altered the European Community/Union significantly, in what it did, how it worked and who joined it.  But it also shaped the UK too, affecting the country’s economy and trading patterns, its political, judicial and civil service systems, its demographic make-up, and even its way of life.  This course will therefore seek to move beyond the simple succession of rows and disagreements between British governments and their continental counterparts and arrive at a rather more complete view of the British experience of membership.  In the process this will help explain not just why the UK’s membership remained contested and fragile, always vulnerable to the sort of challenge that would ultimately result in Brexit, but also why this same membership became central to the lives and prosperity of a significant number of Britons, thereby ensuring that its premature end would be a deeply disruptive and divisive experience.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
1 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6 of the AT and the WT.

A combined revision lecture/class will be offered.

One formative essay in the Autumn Term from a list of questions.  One practice timed essay (mock exam) early in the Spring Term.

Stephen Wall, Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford, 2020); Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Macmillan, 1998); Kevin O’Rourke, A Short History of Brexit from Brentry to Backstop (Pelican, 2019); Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Oxford, 2018); Andrew Adonis, Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe (Biteback, 2018), David Reynolds, Island Stories: Britain and its History in the Age of Brexit (William Collins, 2019); Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class (William Collins, 2016); Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism (Cambridge, 2016); Nick Crowson, The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945: At the Heart of Europe? (Routledge, 2007); Stephen George, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford, 1990).

Exam (75%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period

Essay (25%, 3000 words) in January