Angela Merkel welcomes Alexis Tsipras to a bilateral meeting, March 2015. Demotix/S.Struck. All rights reserved.I am a member of a small nationality: the English Europeans. Like any attractive nationality this is one of becoming as well as tradition and allegiance – a patriotism of change, not a hunched, defensive chauvinism. It means looking forward to being more English and more European as my country becomes simultaneously more attractively and less aggressively English and more profoundly and freely European; as, in other words, both sides of my nationality enhance each other to strengthen my liberty and expand my democracy in a globalizing world.
It is a privileged nationality that has come about thanks to the creation of the EU. It means I can understand and identify with Greeks who at one and the same time want to be both more Greek and more European. Like them I experience myself as belonging to a country and continent harnessed together in a single vehicle. It is not an experience shared by most of my fellow countrymen. They are English-Britains, who even when ‘pro-European’ mostly regard the EU in an instrumental way. They experience their nationality as already fulfilled without further need for definition. For them any European claims on their identity feel like a subtraction of their nationality, more of a threat than an enhancement.
The argument with my own countrymen is not going well. Sorry, that is a classic British understatement: it is going badly. What is going even worse is the EU itself; its policy towards Greece has been atrocious and is turning the Union from a framework that strengthened the nations of Europe into one that threatens them.
