In 2009, the Czech artist David Černý unveiled “Entropa”, a satirical model-kit depiction of all 27 EU member states, to mark the Czech presidency of the EU. France was depicted by a protest banner, a nod to its reputation as a land of perpetual strikes. Germany appeared as a motorway grid reminiscent of a swastika, and Denmark as Lego bricks. In the space where the UK should have been, there was an empty void.

The UK had always behaved as if it was half-in, half-out of the EU. But the irony is that Britain was never truly absent. Behind the façade of reluctance lay a deep involvement in EU politics and integration, and a record of shaping the EU more than most other member states.

Britain in the EU might have earned the reputation of being “an awkward partner” – a phrase coined by Stephen George in his 1990 book of the same name – but it was in many ways Janus-faced: one face, often seen in public, was the awkward, angry one, while the other, private face was constructive, engaging and leading.

It left as the country with arguably the best membership deal any member state has ever had, and one of the strongest records of winning in Brussels. The tragedy of Brexit is that almost nobody in Britain seemed to realise it, and nor did much of the rest of Europe. What the UK had lacked was a way to tell this story, to fill the gap in the model, in a proud rather than reluctant way.

An awkward partner?

The idea of Britain as an awkward partner in the EU rests on real facts and events. Britain came late to European integration, joining the EEC in 1973 after two vetoes from French president Charles de Gaulle, and struggled to adapt to a union set up to serve the founding members.

Weak public enthusiasm, a sceptical media, a “special relationship” with the United States, and Westminster’s adversarial majoritarian politics made it difficult for its leaders to promote pro-Europeanism at home or engage with the consensus culture of Brussels.

By the 1990s the “awkward partner” reputation seemed fixed, with governments treating membership as a transactional accounting exercise and not an affair of the heart, with opt-outs from the euro and Schengen, disputes over the budget, and clashes such as David Cameron’s 2011 veto only deepening the impression of awkwardness.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 seemed to turn the awkwardness dial up to eleven. Britain, the vote seemed to say, had never belonged, and Brexit appeared to confirm President de Gaulle’s warning that Britain did not belong in the EU.

Not the only one

There’s no denying the awkward partner history is a compelling one. But the empty gap in Entropa also tells of the absence of a history of Britain as a good European. Indeed, Britain was not the only awkward partner. George’s title points to this, something he discussed in a 1995 debate. He used the indefinite article “an” not the definite article “the”.

Every member state has at some point been awkward, sometimes more so than the UK. France brought the entire project closer to the verge of collapse than at any time during the “empty chair crisis” of 1965, when President de Gaulle boycotted the EU. Countries such as Denmark, Ireland and France have rejected EU treaties in referendums. The prospect of such votes happening again mean few want to attempt a new EU treaty.

Some Central and Eastern European states have been threatened with having their membership suspended because of rule-of-law disputes. Britain had a stellar record of abiding by EU law, whether or not the laws were ones the UK supported. As a Greek economist asked me in 2017, “why didn’t the UK just ignore the laws it didn’t like?” Perhaps such attitudes help explain why Greece, and others such as Italy, brought the Eurozone to the verge of collapse. Germany’s approach to the Eurozone crisis left many people in places such as Greece feeling that it was not just awkward but arrogant and imperious.

Similarly, Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States can distract from the fact that most EU member states claim something special about their relations with the United States. European states have been content to live under the security protection afforded by the US, but Britain was one of the few to do so while pulling its weight on defence. Some EU member states have spent so little on defence (Ireland, for example, spends 0.2% of its GDP on defence) that they have not even tried to hide their free riding.

Britain’s constructive engagement

Britain’s record within the EU also reveals a history of constructive engagement. Britain was central to the creation and expansion of the Single Market, without which European integration would be unrecognisable.

Margaret Thatcher, remembered now as a Eurosceptic icon, was the midwife of the Single Market. Her 1988 Bruges speech warning against a European superstate might have inspired British Eurosceptics. What isn’t appreciated is that politicians across the EU, on both left and the right, have shared some of her unease about centralising power in Brussels.

Britain was also one of the strongest advocates of EU enlargement, especially to Central and Eastern Europe. UK governments saw enlargement as both a moral duty of advancing post-Cold War democracy, and a pragmatic strategy to widen the EU and dilute pressures for deeper integration.

Similarly, the UK pressed for reform of the EU budget, challenging entrenched agricultural interests and pushing for money to be spent on research, competitiveness and modernisation. The budget rebate Thatcher negotiated in the early 1980s has often been seen as a sign of Britain’s awkwardness, but it formed part of wider necessary changes that brought fairness and efficiency to the budget, a change welcomed across the EU.

British influence extended to areas such as climate change and animal welfare, where the UK championed ambitious EU policies. The key to these British successes in Brussels was the professionalism of British officials, who were known for their detailed analysis, legal and financial precision, and pragmatic negotiating. The UK was also home to some of the most respected analysis and debates about the EU.

The House of Lords’ EU committees provided scrutiny of EU affairs unmatched in any other member state. The FT and The Economist have long been required reading of any Eurocrat or official in any EU member state capital. Britain also played an outsized role in shaping the EU’s external relations thanks to its global diplomatic network, its advocacy for transatlantic relations and its engagement in foreign and security policy coordination.

The tragedy of Brexit

There is no denying, however, that Entropa points to a British absence. To depict the UK as a void was, in one sense, an accurate reflection of its missing emotional commitment and ambivalent identity.

Unlike other member states, the British never embedded EU symbols into daily life. EU flags were scarce, EU citizenship rarely appreciated and politicians were reluctant to speak in defence of the EU. At the same time, Entropa distorted reality. Britain was not absent from the European project. It was present, though in ways that were often invisible to the public, and especially the British public.

Here then is the tragedy of Brexit. The country with arguably the best membership deal of any EU state, and which played a leading role in EU politics, was also the one whose own citizens were least aware of how successful it was. And the rest of the EU, too, often failed to grasp what Britain contributed. By 2020 the symbolic absence became a political fact when Brexit made real the void that Černý had imagined. 

Recovering the history of Britain as a good European matters today because any future debate about Britain’s relationship with the EU, including debates about rejoining, will be distorted by fears of awkwardness unless both sides learn to see Britain’s membership for what it really was.

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This post first appeared on the LSE’s EUROPP blog. Dr Tim Oliver is the Director of the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs at Loughborough University’s London school. He is a former LSE Dahrendorf Fellow. He is the author of Understanding Brexit (2018), Europe’s Brexit (2018) and Understanding the UK and the EU (forthcoming 2026).