Introduction

Abstract

Despite the hard facts of geography and thirty years’ membership of the European Union (EU), the ‘question of Europe’ continues to loom large in Britain. Whatever is specifically at issue — political, socio-economic or cultural; major or trivial — the question of Britain’s whole relationship to continental Europe, and, therefore, its wider geo-political alliances and its position in the world generally is never far from the surface. Irrespective of what is on the table the whole baggage of ‘Britishness’ is invariably there beneath. In this way, current debate and decision making draws continually on the historical and cultural roots of national identity. Inevitably at the same time is being asked what it means to be ‘European’, what Britain and the other countries of the western peninsula of Asia might have in common, what unites them. While the cultural heritage of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution might be suggested, transcending these is the jagged but unbroken line of tradition leading back through Medieval Europe as ‘Christendom’ to the Roman Empire of Constantine; of a continent sharing the same faith and unified by the authority of a universal Church.