Re: Once Again the EU Fail to Deliver
Originally Posted by
Judd
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EU Poem.
In 1967, de Gaulle said “non” again, justifying his veto with the declaration that “to allow England [meaning the UK] in would mean assenting to a lot of pretence, which would be there to hide the destruction of a structure that was built at the cost of so much pain and in the midst of so much hope”.
More than half a century later, some see de Gaulle’s views on British distinctness from continental Europe – and ergo the inappropriateness of the UK’s membership in what was then the EEC – as clairvoyance. The view would chime with that of Brexiteers, a fair few of whom see the European project as ill-suited to their country because of what they see as fundamental cultural and political differences with the continent.
That didn’t stop the British historian from amusing himself by imagining what de Gaulle would have thought of Brexit: “to use a term he famously deployed a few years later, he would have called the conversation a 'chie-en-lit'” – a phrase indelibly associated with the General, which he used to denounce the 1968 student protests; strictly speaking it means “masquerade” but it also unmistakably sounds like “s*** in bed”. *
“De Gaulle would have told the EU to just get on with it and not worry about Britain’s obstinacy and – as he would see it – non-European nature,” Fenby concluded.