The Queen has warned of the dangers of division in Europe at a state banquet in Berlin, urging Britons and Germans not to take the benefits of a peaceful continent for granted.

We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it The Queen in Berlin

Her speech, weaving historical events with present crises, was replete with some subtle and other not so subtle hints that she believed Britain belonged in the European Union – her most public stance yet that she wished to avoid Britain voting to leave in a referendum.

“The United Kingdom has always been closely involved in its continent. Even when our main focus was elsewhere in the world, our people played a key part in Europe,” she told an audience of 700 dignitaries.

David Cameron and foreign minister Philip Hammond, a staunch Eurosceptic, were in attendance. On Thursday, the prime minister will put forward his proposals for EU reform to other European leaders in Brussels.

Speaking directly to her host Joachim Gauck, the 75-year-old German president who was once a civil rights activist in communist East Germany, the Queen said: “In our lives, Mr President, we have seen the worst, but also the best of our continent. We have witnessed how quickly things can change for the better. But we know that we must work hard to maintain the benefits of the postwar world.

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“We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it in the west as well as in the east of our continent.”

As she spoke, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who sat at the Queen’s table in Berlin’s Schloss Bellevue along with her husband Joachim Sauer, nodded vigorously, a gesture that did not go unnoticed among observers.

The Queen’s short, but wide-ranging, speech made references to important events in European history and recalled discussions about the possibility of German neutrality that she had held with German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1958.



She went back as far as Magna Carta, which she said had marked the “long, slow and interrupted process of our country’s evolution into a democracy,” in the 13th century. She linked it to St Paul’s church in Frankfurt, which she will visit on Thursday, where Germany’s first freely elected legislature, the Frankfurt parliament, met in 1848.

Drawing on the biographies of Britons who had emigrated to other parts of Europe and made their mark, she mentioned the Welsh engineer John Hughes, who founded the mining town of Donetsk, now in Ukraine, in the Russian empire of the 19th century, and the 17th-century Scottish publican Richard Cant, who moved his family to Pomerania. “His son moved further east to Memel and his grandson then moved south to Königsberg, where Richard’s great-grandson, Immanuel Kant, was born,” she said.

In her repeated emphasis of the strong collaboration between Britain and Germany, which had “achieved so much” since 1945 and would “continue to do so in the years ahead,” the Queen said the most “enduring reminder” of the cultural cooperation between Germany and Britain was the Reichstag dome, designed by British architect Norman Foster.



Earlier in the day, she had observed the dome from the terrace of Merkel’s chancellery as the chancellor had shown her the Berlin skyline. On Friday, the Queen visits Bergen-Belsen, the former Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany.

In response to the speech, the German president sought to emphasise the important role Britain had played in building democracy in Germany after the war and how grateful Germans were for that. Gauck said that Britain continued to have a vital role to play in Europe and was needed by the EU and that a “constructive dialogue” was necessary to address Britain’s concerns about its membership.

“A quarter of a century after the division of our continent ended, the European Union is facing major challenges,” he said. “We know that we need an effective European Union based on a stable foundation of shared values. A constructive dialogue on the reforms Britain wants to see is therefore essential.”

Germany would support such discussions, he said. “For Britain is a part of Europe. The European Union needs Britain.”

Gauck, who was born in the northern port city of Rostock into a family of sailors, said: “There is a saying in the nautical world: ‘There is but a plank between a sailor and eternity’.” He said that while some planks in the European ship could be improved “to be frank, we in Germany would rather strengthen the planks than tear them out”.

The banquet included trout, lamb and asparagus followed by strawberries and elderflower blossoms and accompanied by an assortment of German wines.

This article was amended on 24 June to correct the title of Konrad Adenauer

