ABSTRACT

The 2016 EU Referendum has renewed the focus of historians and social scientists on Britain’s historical relationship with Europe as they aim to develop a better understanding of ‘the road to Brexit’. The development of Euroscepticism in Britain has often been approached from an elite perspective, with a focus on the conflicting ideas and arguments between politicians, political parties, and the media. This article builds on existing studies by focusing on popular attitudes to Europe during the early 1980s. We analyse responses to a ‘special directive’ issued by the Mass Observation Project in the autumn of 1982 to mark the ten-year anniversary of Britain joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Reading this previously overlooked material for categories, storylines, and other cultural resources, we identify four key grievances MO panellists shared as common-sense evaluations of Britain’s membership of the EEC. We argue these grievances constituted a wider folk theory of Euroscepticism circulating in British society six years prior to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech and subsequent debates about further integration in the early 1990s. In developing this argument, we contribute a better understanding of the content and origins of popular Euroscepticism in the 1980s.

摘要

2016 年的欧盟公投让历史学家和社会科学家重新关注英国与欧洲的历史关系，因为他们旨在更好地了解“脱欧之路”。欧洲怀疑主义在英国的发展通常是从精英的角度来看待的，重点是政客、政党和媒体之间的冲突思想和争论。本文以现有研究为基础，重点关注 1980 年代初期对欧洲的流行态度。我们分析了对 1982 年秋季为纪念英国加入欧洲经济共同体 (EEC) 十周年而发布的大规模观测项目“特别指令”的回应。阅读这个以前被忽视的类别、故事情节和其他文化资源的材料，我们确定了 MO 小组成员分享的四个主要不满，作为对英国欧洲经济共同体成员资格的常识性评估。我们认为，在玛格丽特·撒切尔 (Margaret Thatcher) 的布鲁日演讲以及随后在 1990 年代初期关于进一步融合的辩论之前六年，这些不满构成了更广泛的欧洲怀疑主义民间理论。在发展这一论点时，我们有助于更好地理解 1980 年代流行的欧洲怀疑主义的内容和起源。