From Refugees to Referendums: Setting Up Brexit

Hello and welcome to the final part of the story of European union, in which we finally see the European Union come to pass — and run into trouble.

The transition begins with Jacques Delors, a pragmatic idealist in the mould of Jean Monnet, orchestrating Europe’s great leap forward. As the Berlin Wall comes down (and so does Margaret Thatcher), the balance of power shifts from France to a reunited Germany. In 1992, the 12 member states sign the Maastricht Treaty, which turns the EEC into the EU and sets a timetable for a common currency, the euro.

This is the peak of European confidence and ambition. As the EU takes on the challenges of assimilating Eastern Europe and achieving monetary union, inertia sets in and Euroscepticism emerges as a political force. The failure to agree a constitution is nothing compared to the eurozone crisis beginning in 2009. The crisis is ethical as well as financial, pitting German bankers against the Greek people and making the EU seem, for the first time, cruelly doctrinaire. Delors wails that it is “killing Europe”.

Eurozone drama and anti-immigrant populism make 2016 an ominous year for the UK to vote on whether to remain in the EU. The “Yes!” of 1975 becomes an angry “No!” And yet the chaos of Brexit shows other restive nations what there is to lose. Perhaps it is existential danger, from Trump and Putin’s anti-European nationalism to populism and the pandemic, that makes the project feel essential despite everything. Perhaps the EU is remembering what it stands against, and therefore what it is for.

Did the end of the Cold War actually make life harder for the European project? Why, after 1992, did the EU add members but lose momentum? What weaknesses were exposed by the eurozone crisis? How did the question of membership come to consume and derange British politics? Did it take the shock of Brexit to finally inspire mass Europhilia in Britain? Is Europe rediscovering its purpose in hard times? And why is the remarkable, hard-won achievement of European unity so easy to take for granted?

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Reading list

• Anonymous – ‘Europe: Then It Will Live...’, Time (6 October 1961)

• Roderick Beaton – Europe: A New History (2026)

• Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi – Crusade of Pan-Europe: Autobiography of a Man and a Movement (1943)

• W.B. Curry – The Case for Federal Union (1939)

• House of Commons – Schuman Plan debate (27 June 1950)

• Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1991)

• Morgan Jones – No Second Chances: The Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second EU Referendum (2026)

• Tony Judt – A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (1996)

• Tony Judt – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

• Tom McTague – Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025)

• Jean Monnet – Memoirs (1978)

• George Orwell – ‘Toward European Unity’ (1947)

• Fintan O’Toole – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018)

• Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli – The Ventotene Manifesto (1941)

• Robert Saunders – Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018)

• Martin Sustrik – ‘Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat’, LessWrong (20 March 2021)

• Simon Usherwood and John Pinder – The European Union: A Very Short Introduction: Fourth Edition (2018)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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