A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop: Summary & Key Insights

The story properly begins in postwar Europe, when the devastation of two world wars led continental leaders to construct a new framework of cooperation. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951, was the first tentative structure of integration—designed to make war materially impossible by locking key industries under a supranational authority. Britain supported the project rhetorically but declined to join. Its reasoning was both strategic and emotional. The British elite regarded itself as a world power, its gaze cast beyond Europe. The Commonwealth and the special relationship with the United States seemed more natural extensions of its identity than participation in a continental experiment led by France and Germany. Economic historians have often pointed out that Britain’s global trade patterns still reflected imperial linkages far more than intra-European exchange. Thus, when the European Economic Community (EEC) was formally launched in 1957, Britain stood outside, preferring to sponsor a looser arrangement—the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Yet as the EEC economies began to grow faster, it became impossible to ignore that Britain was falling behind. What the country had perceived as independence began to look increasingly like isolation.

By the early 1960s, British policymakers realized that their earlier calculations were flawed. Economic pragmatism forced a reconsideration. Twice, under Harold Macmillan and later Harold Wilson, Britain applied to join the EEC. Both attempts were rejected by France, chiefly due to Charles de Gaulle’s conviction that Britain was too close to the United States and insufficiently ‘European.’ The rejections were humiliating but revealing—they underscored how Britain’s ambivalence appeared from the outside. When at last Britain gained entry in 1973 under Edward Heath, it did so not out of love but necessity. The accession was justified largely in economic terms: access to European markets, shared prosperity, modernization for British industry. Yet even at this moment of entry, opposition was evident. A substantial portion of public and political opinion felt uneasy about sovereignty being transferred to European institutions. Two years later, the 1975 referendum confirmed membership but revealed persistent divisions. Campaigners presented Europe either as a pragmatic partnership or a bureaucratic threat to British democracy. I saw this early referendum as foreshadowing 2016—the same vocabulary of control, identity, and autonomy already echoed across decades.