Nearly 60 years ago, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan launched Britain's bid to join what was then called the European Community, now the European Union. He saw no alternative but to go in with the Europeans, fearing otherwise Britain would be diminished, its global influence weakened.
Macmillan worried U.S. trade and investment inevitably would be drawn increasingly toward Europe and away from Britain, and that his country would lose major economic benefits by not being a member of the emerging bloc.
It took more than a decade for Britain to join the EC and nearly a quarter of that time to exit the bloc.
The initial applications, encouraged by U.S. administrations, were blocked by France's imperious Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who argued Britain wasn't European enough. And he told Macmillan that Britain was too obsessed with America and its Commonwealth of former colonies. The French leader feared once inside the bloc, Britain would prove disruptive and paralyze an inevitable advance toward greater European political unity.
Dubbed by the frustrated British establishment the "impossible ally," de Gaulle, who was as disparaging of the British as he was sniffy of the Americans, dashed the hopes of an exhausted Macmillan. The British prime minister saw EC membership as a crucial part of his so-called "grand design" to revive Britain's flagging economic and political fortunes and to avoid being squeezed by larger powers as it searched for a post-imperial role for itself.
By the time Britain did join — in 1973, under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson — Macmillan had long retired, denied what he had hoped would be the great prize of his premiership. And de Gaulle was three years in the grave.
But the same set of economic and geopolitical challenges that persuaded Macmillan, and his successors in Downing Street, of the necessity of joining the bloc will face the country after it exits— a remarkable and daunting echo from the past.
Macmillan feared the rise and assertiveness of China and Russia, the loss of the British colonies and how that would impact the floundering British economy and reduce its clout. He worried that the European bloc, then just six members but now 27 with a combined economic activity last year of $18.7 trillion, would easily dominate the offshore British Isles.
"The economic consequences to Britain may be grave," he wrote in a memorandum. "However bold a face it may suit us to put on the situation, exclusion from the strongest economic group in the civilized world must injure us," he wrote. Added to his fears was the predictability of Britain's relations with the United States, which had interests of its own, and "the uncertainty of American policies towards us — treated now as just another country, now as an ally in a special and unique category."
Fast forward to now, and despite the "bold" face being offered by Britain's Boris Johnson, who predicts great Brexit benefits for a buccaneering "global Britain," the country's dilemmas aren't dissimilar from those identified more than half a century ago by Macmillan, say historians.
Brexit poses the same questions Macmillan was asking himself in 1961 as he drafted his "grand design," shrugging off as he did so, and later disguising from the British public, the cost that would be incurred in terms of the dilution of sovereignty, if Britain joined the bloc.
How can post-imperial Britain remain a player on the world stage? How can it avoid being squeezed between the U.S. on the one hand and the Europeans on the other?
How can it boost its economy when historically it suffers low productivity and a shortage of skills in its native workforce? How can it attract foreign investment, if shut out of Europe's single market and denied tariff-free access?
"Brexit may well leave Britain marooned in its long-feared predicament: subject to the whims of larger powers," according to Luke Reader, a historian with Ohio's Case Western Reserve University. Britain has placed itself in "a geopolitical pickle" in a period of rising protectionism, he maintains. "It is reasserting itself as a nation-state at precisely the moment in which the world is reorganizing itself into powerful multi-national alliances and trading blocs," he wrote in a commentary for opinion-site The Conversation.