More than water separates Britain from the European mainland. Historical experience does too.

Almost all of the continental European nations have suffered - within living memory - the humiliations and privations of military defeat, foreign military occupation, and fascist or communist dictatorship.

For them, the European process has been a means to turn the page on that dark past. It's been about democracy, national and individual freedom. It's been about national redemption.

That has never been so for the UK. The British did not see foreign flags flying above their national citadels, nor foreign troops marching down the avenues of their biggest cities.

The British did not seek European integration as a way to entrench a battered democratic tradition, or to redeem a shameful chapter in their history.

When the original six first formed the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, the then British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, is said to have remarked that its members “consist of six countries, four of whom we had to rescue from the other two”.

In 1956, when those same six met at Messina in Italy to start negotiations to form the first European Economic Community, Britain was invited to join them. There is still a document in the National Archive at Kew on which the then Foreign Secretary, Harold MacMillan, has scribbled a note in the margin: “Tell them I'm busy with Cyprus.”

Modern Britain has been shaped by its European membership.

After the Empire fell apart, Britain embraced the economic opportunities that Europe's recovery after WW2 presented, but it has never loved the political obligations that came along with those opportunities and which, for many of the European partners, were the main purpose.

The English Channel has been a barrier that has shaped the destiny of Britain. And it remains a border separating two quite different ways of thinking about the EU, and what the EU is for.