The UK’s Official EU Narrative: A Trilogy in More Than Three Parts

Tracing the ‘career’ of the official story told by UK governments since 1945, this chapter finds that the UK’s official European narrative has been more changeable than is often suggested by the existing literature. Its course, moreover defies the terms of a simple trilogy, reflecting the eras of pre-membership, membership, and post-membership. Drawing on the work of Michael Moran, this chapter contends that, although the UK’s EU narrative has undergone frequent, often dramatic changes, and that successive governments have held out different conceptions of the UK as nation and state, the assumption of greatness has been a constant. It argues that narrative changes have largely been driven by an adversarial party system, which in the absence of a transformative moment of national trauma in the form of occupation, war defeat, or liberation, has perpetuated a more transactional narrative than elsewhere in Europe.