We know it’s the most visceral issue in contemporary British politics. We know it turns redtops into attack dogs and Tory backbenchers puce with rage. The ides of May. So we ought to know that it’s personal. Individual and personal. Europe isn’t just one more tick on some routine policy list. It is history and emotion … even for newspaper editors.

Take me: and one personal route. I grew up in the east Midlands through the 40s and 50s. Sundays featured a grandparents’ vigil at the local Baptist church. Holidays featured Hunstanton and Skegness. Europe? Well, there was always the Hotel de Paris, Cromer. It was a warm, loving family time (scarred by my father’s death and my polio). But there were no far horizons. I look at my grandchildren now – veterans long before they left school of south-east Asia, America, Europe from Norway to Romania; three of them Spanish in Barcelona – and pinch myself. Their worlds began early at Heathrow or El Prat. My world ended at Dover.

So, for me, the lands over the Channel assumed an almost exotic fascination, an escape; and university was a bridge to the future. I did a summer-vac French course in Lausanne; I drove right across to Zagreb a year later with three friends in a 1924 Morris, cheered as we wound through countless village streets. I discovered French and Italian movies, as well as Wajda, Bergman and Buñuel. It was a personal journey, shared by many around me.

I didn’t renounce those years of growing up, the Saturdays on the touchlines watching Barrow Old Boys play Midland Woodworkers, the table-tennis nights at the Baptist youth club. But I was on a voyage of discovery: to tuna fish and tomato baguettes on the road south of Lyon, to the beer halls of Munich and the cafes of St Tropez, to pizzas, lasagne and kebabs: to new experiences that seemed to define a different existence.

And that didn’t stop, 15 or so years later, when I became editor of the Guardian. On the contrary, the learning process accelerated. You were invited to a conference in Rome and saw, for the first time, how Europe instinctively divided north from south as the Italian delegates made long, rhetorical speeches and you sat hunched at the back with the Danes and the Dutch, muttering. You were involved as the fledgling editors of El País in post-Franco Madrid came and asked for help getting started in freedom – and, later, when one berserk colonel tried a Cortes coup and you found yourself standing in front of the El País presses, alongside editors from far and wide, as though defending that freedom.

Of course you couldn’t forget America: the new Atex systems, the fact checkers, the huge staffs and stately stylebooks. There was plenty of necessary immersion there. But Europe, because so politically charged, so full of different cultures and traditions, because so various in its journalism, held a special fascination. Those new Spanish papers – El País and El Mundo – showed the world, and me, what a neat, clear, totally upmarket tabloid could do. La Repubblica in Rome amplified that feisty message. A daily in Lausanne, mixing section sizes on its presses, gave me the idea for the Guardian’s G2 features section.

And there were the people there, too. Juan Luis Cebrián and Pedro Horto Ramirez from El País and El Mundo (which the Guardian helped finance): two brilliant talents and the best of enemies. Hasan Cemal, the dean of upright Turkish editors. Harry Lockefeer, guiding De Volkskrant. Christina Jutterström, a commanding voice in Swedish journalism. Friends.

When I ploughed deep into editing trouble back home – feeling oddly alone as the critics closed in – I joined the International Press Institute and learned how the strength of cross-border solidarity can make even hostile governments stop and think. When Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor, summoned potential collaborators from far and wide to Die Zeit in Hamburg and outlined his dream of a European newspaper that would underpin discussion about ideas and ways forward, I went home and devised Guardian Europe, which – flying solo – strove to fit Helmut’s bill. (Until it and much else fell with the ERM).

Do these lists of people, contacts and initiatives appear a touch obsessive? Maybe, if you strip out the rest of British editing life. But in fact they were just another dimension tacked around the side of a hectic working week. They were just one path to the future.

And now that future is here, either as a road ahead or a cul de sac. After I packed up editing, there was the Guardian Foundation to explore: new demands and new friends in Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Macedonia and more. Plus, in the last five years, a founding role in the European Press Prize network that spans all 47 nations in Council of Europe membership.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The first edition of G2, inspired by a daily paper in Lausanne that printed in two sizes.

Pause for a moment over that prize and that horizon. Journalism reveres the Pulitzer prizes as some kind of editorial Oscars. It was, and is, foolish to think as the European prize as a competitor in that area: so many languages to be translated, so many different styles of writing. Five years of life, backed by major foundations in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Prague and London, can only be a beginning.

But the number of entries increases almost exponentially, up nearly fourfold since launch. The innovation area has already brought us Blendle – a subscription model the New York Times has put on its investment roster – as well as hugely influential news websites such as De Correspondent in Holland and eldiario.es in Spain.

Where do the big scoops start worldwide? Munich and the Süddeutsche Zeitung this year for the Panama Papers. Data journalism picks up speed as it crosses the Atlantic. And entry after entry stakes a claim to the highest quality: not just via word-spinning, but by the toil and bravery involved. 2016’s German collection of refugee-tracking pieces is truly amazing for its punctilious research and eloquent description. Work at the highest level.

I’ll always remember Elena Kostyuchenko, a tiny Russian in her mid-20s, winning the writing palm for her amazing exploits on the Ukraine border. Were Russian soldiers active within Ukraine? A tale of fervent Moscow denial. Then how was the soldier husband of a grieving young widow killed in action? Where was his body? Why were the authorities full of outright hostility? Gallant Elena took the widow’s arm. She found her the husband, hidden in a morgue. She published, in Novaya Gazeta, this first proof positive of Putin involvement. She blew official mendacity to smithereens.

Which, over and over again, is the trademark of east European journalism. It was impossible to read this year’s investigative entries without your jaw dropping over a Moldovan inquiry into the illicit trade in anabolic steroids (made in Moldova, fast-forwarded to you by the Moldovan post office). As for Serbia, and the Serbian Centre for Investigative Journalism, there’s a whole batch of exemplary delving turning over the stones of community life. You can’t find a more consistent dedication to cleaning up a grubby world.

And here, among so much first-class digging, is a deeper truth: one that, for me, reaches right to the heart of Brexit.

Our world is full of communities – heart surgeons who meet in Cape Town or Chicago to discuss new techniques, lawyers in conference from Boston to Brussels. These communities of professionals transcend national boundaries. Their disciplines define their borders. And if that applies to doctors or barristers then it applies many times over to the humble tradespeople of journalism.

Our job is not to deliver tiny fragments of reportage carved out of a wider picture. Our job is to add context to events, to see and show how one thing fits with another. Our job, in short, is to help understanding.

Far, far easier said than done, of course. Journalists come from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of experience. You don’t have to mingle with Westminster lobby correspondents very long without scenting a strong corporate antipathy to Brussels and Strasbourg, for instance. Why should these alien institutions get in the way of my fantastically important job, chronicling the greatest democracy on earth? Time and again, hidden or manifest influences shape the role. The Telegraph didn’t send Boris Johnson to Brussels to do some rigorous “I am a camera” stint. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t cherish total independence of mind when he appoints a new editor for the Sun. But this does not mean that the role itself – the fundamental job of understanding – is redundant.

Now, of course, there are many different variations on the theme: “Understanding the European Union” is a symphony, not a gavotte. Yet logic and history still impose duties.

There ought to be some grasp of how and why the EU works. (At least sufficient, once in a while, to avoid the classic mistake of dumping the Convention on human rights and attendant court in Brussels’s lap). There ought to some comprehension of the forces that drive ever-closer union. There ought to be some effort to see how countries, overrun time and again in war, have a different order of priorities for partnership. Economics? Pounds sterling, euros, profits and losses? Naturally. But don’t for a second think that this is all you need to know.

When I read the journalism of Spain, Germany, Norway, even Moldova, I hear a common voice. One that puts itself at odds with the rich, powerful and corrupt. There’s a belief in the people who matter most, the readers. There’s an anger on behalf of the oppressed. There is also, often enough, a proud resistance to anyone – prime ministers or owners – telling reporters what to do.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Preston in his first year as editor of the Guardian, 1975.

It’s the authentic voice of British journalism too, operating just a few hundred miles from our door. Yet how many editors and correspondents in the UK stop to listen? Long ago the great training ground for British editors was America: the Daily Mail was rebuilt by David English and cemented by Paul Dacre, both US correspondents in their time. The FT uses New York as its global training ground. Murdoch is an American citizen who fills his Dow Jones with Brits and Australians. And, of course, the great media companies of Silicon Valley now overshadow every scene. The future seems American.

But is that a definitive reason for pulling up the anchor off Land’s End and heading away, as though Calais, and all that lies beyond it, didn’t exist? It’s easy to make the bland assumption. The weight of Netflix, Amazon and the rest can feel irresistible. But it’s not where history – British history – truly lies. It’s not where the great wars we religiously commemorate happened. It’s not where our most immediate rivalries grow – or where our most obvious trade and political ties exist. It’s not what my predecessor in the Guardian chair thought as he fashioned Die Welt from the ashes of defeat. It’s not where we are. Nor, when you look at its underlying assumptions about the safety nets of society, is it where we want to be.

Europe may seem a forbidding home base: too many tongues, too many impenetrable backstories, too many damned complications and bits of bureaucracy. But it is who we are and where we are – especially if our job, as journalists, is finding the ties that bind and define us. That’s why the result of this referendum has been so damned hard to swallow. It deals in roots, not convenient refuges. It pretends – as the stories from Syria and Iraq and Libya sweep in – that we’re somehow elsewhere. It seeks to paint us as something we’re not: would-be masters of understanding who don’t realise that, like our rulers in Whitehall, we understand very little.

And when I attempt to explain it all to my Spanish grandchildren and see the confusion on their faces I at least understand one thing. It’s personal.

This is an edited extract from a new book, Brexit, Trump and the Media, edited by John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, Raymond Snoddy and Richard Tait. Published by Abramis Academic Publishing