Essay on "United Kingdom and the European Union"

r />

Britain has always been a rather uncomfortable partner in the Eurozone. Despite the "tangible evidence on the trade-enhancing effects of a single currency," touted by Germany and France, it resisted giving up the pound (Islam 2003). "There were several reasons for Britain's reputation for "awkwardness," in joining the EU, most notably "domestic political constraints on the positions that British Governments could adopt" (George, 1998, p.225). Britons today still proclaim themselves British first and European either second -- or not at all European in their attitudes and financial philosophy. Britons have long prided their nation on being distinct from so-called Continental European culture. Moreover, there are "real problems for the British economy in adjusting to membership" especially the problems of Britain's reluctant contributions to the common budget of the EU and "an awkwardness on the part of British negotiators in handling the terminology of political debate that had developed among the original members" (George, 1998, p.225). The rhetoric of European commonality left many leading British political figures scrambling "to look first to the United States for partnership" rather than across the English Channel (George, 1998, p.225).

Today, the controversy over Greece has polarized some of the single currency's most stalwart supporters: the "episode has heated up the long culture clash between the European Union's traditional drivers: federal Germany with its Prussian attachment to rules and an instinctive frugality rooted in past economic traumas, and republican France with its tradition of state intervention and a more Mediterranean attitude toward public debt….If there is no political structure in place to safeguard the euro -- a weakness exposed in the current debt crisis…it was because Germany and France could never agree on one" (Bennhold 2010). Even supporters of the euro, in other words, have profoundly different cultural attitudes towards how the EU should be managed, as well as differ as to members' responsibilities regarding taking care of weaker states to stabilize the currency. This is particularly true regarding states that have not lived… READ MORE