‘I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum,” Clement Attlee said, “which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.” In the spring of 1945 Winston Churchill was still prime minister, leading the wartime coalition, and Attlee, the Labour leader, was his deputy. A general election was overdue, after the parliament, elected 10 years earlier, had artificially prolonged its own life. Now Churchill suggested prolonging it still further, and putting this proposal to the electorate in a then-unheard-of referendum. That brisk rebuff from Attlee settled the matter. In the summer, parliament was dissolved, a general election was held, Labour won in a landslide, and Attlee replaced Churchill at No 10. But his words were not forgotten.

A generation later, the question of a referendum came up again, this time on the United Kingdom’s membership of what was then the European Economic Community. “The late Lord Attlee was right when he said that the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues,” said Margaret Thatcher at that time. She could remember the 1930s, when Hitler had held no fewer than four referendums to consolidate his regime, something that explains the aversion to referendums in the present-day German republic.

By now, David Cameron must be kicking himself for not thinking of Attlee’s reply before he gave his panicky promise to hold a referendum on the EU. It was an epic miscalculation. In 1974, when Harold Wilson returned to office as prime minister of a Labour government, he agreed to hold a referendum the next year on continued membership, as a way of smoothing over the divisions inside his party. He got his wish when a large majority of the British electorate voted to stay.

No doubt, Cameron thought that he would repeat that trick, and heal the wounds of his own party. Instead, he set off a bitter feud within its ranks. But there was more to his mistake than merely failing to foresee that the Brexit wing of the Tories would comprise nearly half his MPs, and a noisy faction of his cabinet, or the degree to which the latest tragic migrant crisis would highlight existing fears about immigration. Cameron unleashed forces of which he had not been properly aware.

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Something far deeper is at stake in this week’s vote. A wave of resentment against the elites is sweeping Europe, and in Britain this summer, as John Harris has written, we have seen a working-class revolt. The referendum is a form of displacement activity. It’s about something other – or much more – than what it is supposed to be about.

Those forces, for which Euroscepticism is a wholly inadequate word, range from crude racism and nativist dislike of immigrants, to humble patriotism and yearning for a maybe imaginary lost age. The referendum turns not so much on the national interest as on a national idea.

As Robert Tombs, the Cambridge historian and author of The English and Their History, recently put it: “The campaign seems hardly about Europe at all, but it’s all about us and the English identity.” Both of the first two British attempts to join the Common Market were vetoed by Charles de Gaulle, and it was he who also said that all his life he had been inspired by “une certaine idée de la France”. Behind our present turmoil lurks a certain idea of Britain, or of England. We are trying to find our identity.

When did it begin, this idea of England, and our “European problem” along with it? The Czech-born American scholar Karl Deutsch sourly defined a nation as “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours”. That has been more true of Anglo-British nationalism than we like to think: it is as much a patchwork of animosity, embroidered history and invented tradition as any other.

Go back into the mists of time to search for what actually happened – and then for how that was turned into national legend. Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55BC would long afterwards lead to the patriotic cult of Queen Boudicca and her heroic rebellion against the Romans. The next conquest by William in 1066 crushed Anglo-Saxon England, but that in turn would produce the idea of “the Norman yoke”, which had supposedly subjugated the English people. From the 17th century on, patriotic historians claimed that despite this Norman oppression, old English law and custom had survived.

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All this helped to create a myth of English uniqueness, not to say of unique English virtue. Yet the fact is that for thousands of years, not only have the British Isles been intimately bound together (Celtic nationalists please note), they have been intimately bound with Europe (English Europhobes please note), and peopled by endless migrations. England takes its name from the Angles, an invading German tribe along with Saxons and Jutes in the fifth century (this continual to and fro between the islands saw Scotland take its own name from the Scotti, an Irish tribe).

For most of the past thousand years, England has been ruled by foreign dynasties – including the present dynasty, which began with the arrival from Germany of the Elector of Hanover, who became George I in 1714. That was vividly reflected in continual commercial and cultural intercourse between Great Britain and the continent. The composer who wrote our finest coronation anthems and our favourite oratorio, was Georg Friedrich Händel from Halle near Leipzig. In some ways we were more “European” in Victorian times than we are now. Simon Rattle may have conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for years, but can one imagine a famous German composer of our day – say Wolfgang Rihm – as a revered guest of the royal family, as Felix Mendelssohn was of Victoria and Albert?

“Euroscepticism” has its own long history. Six centuries ago, England was viewed by Europe as a not very important satellite of the Holy Roman empire (and Scotland as an even less important satellite of France). That was before the Reformation and the beginning of what would become the greatest seaborne empire ever known, engaged from the start, in pillage, piracy and slavery dressed up in patriotic colours.

Arrogant Protestant Englishry found new vigour in the reign of Elizabeth I, its triumphalism expressed in everything from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to hanging and drawing Catholic priests as traitors at Tyburn, to trampling the Irish. And as it happened, the greatest writer in our language was on hand to give voice to this new mood: “This happy breed of men, this little world / This precious stone set in the silver sea … Against the envy of less happy lands, / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Campaigners for withdrawal from the Common Market in 1975. Britain voted to stay in by a large majority. Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

That all-too-familiar patriotic ode that Shakespeare put into John of Gaunt’s mouth in Richard II was glorious bluster – and Shakespeare’s history plays are the most brilliant agitprop ever written, not to a say fine case of what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister early last century, tellingly called “beautiful national legends”.

However much this may have been invented tradition, it set the national tone for centuries of war and conquest, often dressed up in benevolent guise. In the 18th century, “this England” became “rule Britannia”, a process brilliantly described by the historian Linda Colley in her book Britons. This new British identity, which embraced the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Ulster Protestants (though not of course the Catholic Irish), was forged by war, empire and Protestantism.

Today, since the empire has gone, we no longer fight great wars, and we have ceased to be a Protestant country, one might expect the Britons described by Colley and their Britishness to have dwindled away. To some extent this has happened, as the political fracturing of the United Kingdom demonstrates. But Deutsch’s two conditions for constructing the idea of nationhood were amply fulfilled in the 20th century, when two great wars gave the British fresh opportunity to hate their neighbours and to misunderstand their own history.

In a speech at the University of Zurich in 1946, Churchill admirably said: “There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” And yet coarse Germanophobia could still be found, from Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers, notably the Sunday Express, to AJP Taylor’s history books. (Churchill himself also said privately that he wanted to see Germany “fat but impotent”.) We hear it today at its coarsest when English football fans sing about “Ten German bombers” shot down by plucky British fighters, and then chant, “Fuck off Europe, we’re all voting out.”

Not that myth-making is uniquely British. Many European countries have vivid national legends, not least those stemming from the last war, such as the legend of the French resistance (and of the “German resistance to Hitler”). Our own is of course the Finest Hour of 1940-41, when “we stood alone”, in Churchill’s dubious phrase. It was not pure fiction – the self-sacrificial resolution of that hour really was fine – although we were far from “alone” even then: this precious stone set in the silver sea was sustained by the great material and human resources of the Commonwealth and empire, not to say by Polish and Czech fighter pilots and the Norwegian merchant fleet. As for shooting down bombers, or the other comforting legend that “we won the war”, the fact is that Germany was defeated by the Red Army, and Japan was defeated by the US Navy, as well as a couple of atom bombs.

There was nothing fictional in the belief that the Third Reich had been deeply evil, and that defeating it had been worthwhile. And so, as Tony Judt observed more than 20 years ago in his prescient little book Europe, A Grand Illusion?, Great Britain was the only country in what is now the EU, apart from Finland, to emerge from the war with nothing to be ashamed of. But lack of shame can become foolish vanity.

In the years after the war, the atmosphere was one of subdued contentment, well caught by Sir Michael Howard, a famous historian in the making who was then at Oxford, having returned from the war in which he had fought. As he says in his memoir Captain Professor, the intellectual fashion was supposed to be for Sartre, Heidegger and Kierkegaard, but they were “philosophers of a defeat we had not experienced and a despair that we did not feel”.

And yet that became a problem in itself. Victory in some ways hurt us more than a defeat: we were bolstered with pride, but living beyond our imperial, military, economic, political and emotional means. In the fourth volume of his account of the first world war, published in 1929, Churchill had grandiloquently pronounced: “The conclusion of the Great War raised England to the highest position she has yet attained.” That was dubious then, but he could not possibly have said as much after VE Day. If anything, a British leader might (but would not) have borrowed Emperor Hirohito’s words after Hiroshima, when he announced the Japanese surrender with masterly understatement: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.”

By 1945, victory or no, half of Europe was in Soviet hands, the decline and fall of the British empire was under way, this blessed plot was a bankrupt debtor, dependent on an American generosity that was not immediately forthcoming. “We threw good housekeeping to the winds. But we saved ourselves, and helped to save the world,” said the economist John Maynard Keynes. Now, as he also said, the British faced “a financial Dunkirk”. The 70 years since have in many ways been a story of the British coming to terms with events – or failing to do so.

The illusions were not confined to the Conservative party. For all its achievements, anyone can see in hindsight that Attlee’s Labour government was far too ambitious, attempting to build a New Jerusalem of universal healthcare and public welfare, while also retaining huge imperial and military commitments. It was the Attlee government, with Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary, that would decide to build a British atomic bomb, would help create the Nato alliance, and would go to war in Korea.

Speaking in the Commons, Bevin insisted that Great Britain was still a great power. In private, he was contradicted by Sir Henry Tizard, scientist, Whitehall middleman, and a patriot whose work ensuring that radar was installed around the coastline by 1940, had been decisive in the Battle of Britain. In 1949, Tizard wrote a remarkable memorandum, concerned with the pointless endeavour to build an “independent” nuclear deterrent. “We persist in regarding ourselves as a Great Power capable of everything and only temporarily handicapped by economic difficulties,” he said. “We are not a Great Power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” Tizard’s wise words might be an epigraph – and an epitaph – for our story since then.

Two years later, Churchill was back at Downing Street, while a young queen was crowned in 1953. Still the mood was one of smug complacency – what did Europe matter? – and the media wrote excitedly about a new Elizabethan age. As Michael Howard again recalled, they spoke truer than they knew: “Once again we were, as we had been then, a power of the second rank, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and punching far beyond our weight in international affairs.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest British businessman and politician Oliver Smedley leaving to demonstrate in Rome as part of his campaign against British membership of the EEC, in 1967. Photograph: John Downing/Getty Images

One of the comical sideshows of the referendum has been the continual invocation of Churchill, by both sides, including a pro-remain letter to the Times that memorably began “As descendants of Marlborough, Wellington and Churchill,” from the present Duke of Wellington and Churchill’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames. Churchill may have been a great national leader at one crucial moment in history, but since, in the course of an enormously long career, he held at one time or another almost every possible opinion on every known question – and was often demonstrably and disastrously wrong, on matters military (Gallipoli), financial (the gold standard), or political (Indian self-government) – it seems odd that he is cited as an oracle of eternal wisdom and truth.

Two particular postwar illusions were Churchill’s own work. In March 1946, at Fulton in Missouri, in his famous “iron curtain” speech, he said that there needed to be “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”, while he also hailed “the abiding power of the British empire and Commonwealth”. These two notions would bedevil the British ever after – Labour just as much as Tories. As Max Hastings has put it, “the notion of a ‘special relationship’ was invented for reasons of political expediency by Winston Churchill, who then became the first of many prime ministers to discover it to be a myth.”

“Every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea,” Churchill shouted at de Gaulle in 1944, “it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose Roosevelt.”

But what did Roosevelt’s heirs think, those who held power in Washington? In December 1962, Dean Acheson, a former secretary of state, delivered the famous speech in which he said, almost as an aside, that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”. He continued, “The attempt to play a separate power role – that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength – this role is about played out.”

It is hard to recapture, or understand, the outrage this statement of the obvious caused in London, where everyone from the House of Commons to Fleet Street screeched angrily that it was a stab in the back. And yet even Acheson could not have guessed how prophetic his words would prove. The British remained haunted by their memories of global might, and the fantasy that Tizard had dismissed of still being a great power. Thatcher’s triumph in the Falklands in 1982 only reinforced this belief.

If hostility to the European Union is often now seen as a rightwing or even reactionary cause – the preserve of Ukip and of Tory zealots – that was not always so. It was Attlee’s Labour government that first rebuffed the movement towards a new Europe. When the European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951 as the germ of what would become the EU, one minister said that “even if desirable, such a scheme could hardly prove to be workable”. Hugh Gaitskell, Attlee’s successor as Labour leader, said that joining the Common Market would be to turn our backs on “a thousand years of history”.

In the early days of the European project, it might be remembered, there were plenty of objections to it that were far from narrowly nationalistic. In protestant northern Europe there lingered a suspicion, held by, among others, Tage Erlander, the Social Democratic prime minister of Sweden from 1946 to 1969, that the Common Market was a Roman Catholic conspiracy. And on the left there was a further suspicion, that it was a capitalist conspiracy. Since “Europeanism” did have some of its roots in Catholic social teaching, and the form of political Catholicism we know as Christian Democracy (all six foreign ministers who signed the Coal and Steel treaty in 1951 were Christian Democrats), and since the Common Market was plainly a bastion against Marxist socialism, these suspicions were not absurd.

A fear of popery might have appealed to some Tories. But if anything, in the early days, Tories were more likely to be cosmopolitan and Europhile than Labour. One of Churchill’s former acolytes, Robert Boothby, was an enthusiast for the United Europe movement, and in 1949 became a delegate to the Council of Europe. The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, which now so enrages Tory Europhobes since it was incorporated into British law by the 1998 Human Rights Act, was largely drafted by English lawyers, and Conservatives at that – notably David Maxwell Fyfe, a later home secretary and lord chancellor. And when the British belatedly repented their haughty disdain for the European project, and applied to join, it was under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government.

In the end, it was Edward Heath’s Conservative government that “took us into Europe” in 1973. And when the first referendum was held in 1975, one of the keenest of campaigners for staying in the Common Market was Thatcher, the newly elected Conservative leader. She can be seen in photographs looking rather fetching in a pullover patterned with the flags of the European nations. “The paramount case for being in,” she said, is “the political case for peace and security.” Her language has been reiterated this year by Cameron and George Osborne, with less success.

During her time in office, Thatcher grew hostile to what she saw as an increasing centralising tendency by the Brussels Eurocracy under Jacques Delors; hence her “No! No! No!” to his exalted idea of a United States of Europe. By the end, Europe had driven her slightly mad – it has that effect on people – and contributed to her downfall. But her soul marched on. An embittered faction of Thatcherites who had never accepted her overthrow fomented trouble against John Major’s government, with a prolonged rebellion against parliamentary ratification of the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which turned the European Community into the European Union, without notably uniting Europe in any emotional sense.

Plenty of those reading this may tend to view “Europe” in a benevolent light. But any honest remainer must admit that there is a very strong case against “actually existing Europe”. The European Union is dysfunctional, corrupt, and afflicted by a kind of corporate folie de grandeur. Part of the tragedy of our predicament is that the wrong people have been making a critique of “Europe”. There were always honourable radical or liberal reasons for opposing European integration and centralism – as exemplified by Maastricht.

It was with Maastricht, the meeting and then the treaty of the same name, that the first steps were taken to admit the former Soviet bloc territories well before they had caught up with western Europe economically, which was arguably a mistake, and to create the single currency, which was unarguably an enormous mistake, and one for which tens of millions of young people in southern Europe are now paying an awful price.

The only special relationship Washington is interested in is one in which London provides a link to Brussels and Berlin

If the EU is to survive, it needs drastic reform, and demanding such reform is what could be called the true Eurosceptic position. But reform can only be achieved from inside. The Europhobes’ problem is that, with all their instinctive antipathy to Europe, they have no practical alternative to offer, except nostalgic national legends.

Some Europhobes, of course, believe that we can turn away from Europe because we will always have the “special relationship” with the US. They seem not to have grasped the supreme irony of their position. While happy to prostrate themselves before the United States – to see those 1,000 years of history ending with England as a client state of Washington and the British Army serving as the American foreign legion – they have failed to notice how keen American politicians have been that we should remain in the EU. The only “special relationship” Washington is interested in is one in which London provides a link to Brussels and Berlin. Not only has the Commonwealth long since ceased to have any political meaning, what Gerhard Schröder called “the special relationship so special that only the English know it exists” means nothing to Americans even when they pay polite lip service to it.

Looking back at this melancholy story, it is hard to doubt that intelligent Euroscepticism in the true sense has been in too-short supply. De Gaulle offered some, when he spoke of a “Europe des patries”, a close confederation of sovereign states, rather than an impossible “United States of Europe”.

If nothing else, this squalid campaign has surely made Attlee’s and Thatcher’s point about referendums playing into the hands of demagogues. When every possible point has been made against the follies and failures of the EU, that cannot begin to match the Europhobes’ vast edifice of illusion, part of a pattern that stretches back years or centuries. We have long since ceased to be a great power; must we at last cease to be a great country? Or maybe John of Gaunt had it right: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

Main illustration by Christophe Gowans

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